hom Elsmere had originally known as a clever
workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant
from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave
his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a
special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and had
become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark
of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills
with a mixture of savage humour and clear-eyed despair. In general
outlook he was much akin to the author of the _City of Dreadful Night_,
whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him
with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that
he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours,
startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly
Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew
how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle
in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances
felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself
and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman
willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained
any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere,
struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck,
began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that
virtue had gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life
had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength
and comfort.

His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more and more the
instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore more and more difficult
to leave. The thoughts of God, the image of Jesus, which were active and
fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually passing from the one into
the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once
nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women
his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble
prostration of the soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly
describe. With an ever-increasing detachment of mind from the objects of
self and sense, he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand.
'Accomplish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and
life; 'us