The festal tea had begun, and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite to
her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's wife. Poor Mrs.
Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered the room on the arm of Mr.
Mayhew, the incumbent of the neighbouring valley of Shanmoor, that the
first _coup d'oeil_ was good. The flowers had been arranged in the
afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again; a
pleasing odour of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and
fern; and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses and
bright faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full of an
incessant play of crisp and delicate colour.
But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with a little
sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of an eye-glass
at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a large and jewelled
hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled round the table,
lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited consciousness, on
every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_ should have been and was
not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to
restrain herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew,
giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the meal
which did but confirm her neighbour--a grim, uncommunicative person--in
his own devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had
fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Dr.
Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately
an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an
invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some other
opening into the great world should be discovered for him.
Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white
dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was
like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon, her
slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious
glances at the Thornburghs' guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she
thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'
As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so
often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems
brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times,
he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow, with her still unsoftened angles and
movements, was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain
sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes'
conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk. As to
Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.
She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her side,
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and
perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The hollows in the
cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead
somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face,
though still quite young, and expressing a perfect physical health, had
the look of having been polished and refined away to its foundations.
There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on it, and not a vestige of
Rose's peach-like bloom. Her profile, as he saw it now, had the
firmness, the clear whiteness, of a profile on a Greek gem.
She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk! Robert, who, out
of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, had an abundant
compassion for and understanding of such beings as young Mayhew, watched
her with a pleased amusement, wondering how she did it. What? Had she
got him on carpentering, engineering--discovered his weak point?
Water-wheels, inventors, steam-engines--and the lumpish lad all in a
glow, talking away nineteen to the dozen. What tact, what kindness in
her gray-blue eyes!
But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly well aware that
she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, an Oxford man, and a
member, besides, of a well-known Sussex county family. She was a large
and commanding person, clad in black _moire_ silk. She wore a velvet
diadem, Honiton lace lappets, and a variety of chains, beads, and
bangles bestrewn about her that made a tinkling as she moved. Fixing her
neighbour with a bland majesty of eye, she inquired of him if he were
'any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere?' Robert replied that Sir Mowbray
Elsmere was his father's cousin, and the patron of the living to which
he had just been appointed. Mrs. Seaton then graciously informed him
that long ago--'when I was a girl in my native Hampshire'--her family
and Sir Mowbray Elsmere had been on intimate terms. Her father had been
devoted to Sir Mowbray. 'And I,' she added, with an evident though lofty
desire to please, 'retain an inherited respect, sir, for your name.'
Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the rector's wife
had made an impression. His general conception of his relative and
patron Sir Mowbray--who had been for many years the family black
sheep--was, indeed, so far removed from any notions of 'respect,' that
he had some difficulty in keeping his countenance under the lady's look
and pose. He would have been still more entertained had he known the
nature of the intimacy to which she referred. Mrs. Seaton's father, in
his capacity of solicitor in a small country town, had acted as
electioneering agent for Sir Mowbray (then plain Mr.) Elsmere on two
occasions--in 18--, when his client had been triumphantly returned at a
bye-election; and two years later, when a repetition of the tactics, so
successful in the previous contest, led to a petition, and to the
disappearance of the heir to the Elsmere property from parliamentary
life.
Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton did not
enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and proceeding in a more
neutral tone than before, she proceeded to put him through a catechism
on Oxford, alternately cross-examining him and expounding to him her own
views and her husband's on the functions of Universities. She and the
Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly occupied in
ruining the young men's health by over-examination, and poisoning their
minds by free-thinking opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the
mothers of England would refuse to send their sons to these ancient but
deadly resorts. She looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though
defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his polite
best to be serious.
But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find Miss Leyburn's
eyes upon him. And undeniably there was a spark of laughter in them,
quenched, as soon as his glance crossed hers, under long lashes. How
that spark had lit up the grave, pale face! He longed to provoke it
again, to cross over to her and say, 'What amused you? Do you think me
very young and simple? Tell me about these people.'
But, instead, he made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was soon engaged in
giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, an experience which
generally ended by the appearance of certain truculent elements in one
of the mildest of men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl neighbour
and ask her what people meant by calling the Lakes rainy.
'I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky here has been
without a cloud, and your rivers are running dry.'
'And you have mastered our climate in twenty-four hours, like the
tourists--isn't it?--that do the Irish question in three weeks?'
'Not the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,' he thought to himself,
amused, 'and yet what a child it looks.'
He threw himself into a war of words with her, and enjoyed it extremely.
Her brilliant colouring, her gestures as fresh and untamed as the
movements of the leaping river outside, the mixture in her of girlish
pertness and ignorance with the promise of a remarkable general
capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs.
Thornburgh--much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the
pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the
superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign
cooks--watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and
more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased her. Why
should people always talk of Catherine; Mrs. Thornburgh stood in awe of
Catherine and had given her up in despair. It was the other two whose
fortunes, as possibly directed by her, filled her maternal heart with
sympathetic emotion.
Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude shock. What on
earth was the vicar doing? After they had got through better than any
one could have hoped, thanks to a discreet silence and Sarah's
makeshifts, there was the master of the house pouring the whole tale of
his wife's aspirations and disappointment into Mrs. Seaton's ear! If it
were ever allowable to rush upon your husband at table and stop his
mouth with a dinner napkin, Mrs. Thornburgh could at this moment have
performed such a feat. She nodded and coughed and fidgeted in vain!
The vicar's confidences were the result of a fit of nervous
exasperation. Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an account of 'our
charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleckwood was a distant
cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the neighbourhood,
not, however, a very respectable magnate. Mr. Thornburgh had heard
accounts of Lupton Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least half a dozen
different occasions. Privately he believed them all to refer to one
visit, an event of immemorial antiquity periodically brought up to date
by Mrs. Seaton's imagination. But the vicar was a timid man, without the
courage of his opinions, and in his eagerness to stop the flow of his
neighbour's eloquence he could think of no better device, or more
suitable rival subject, than to plunge into the story of the drunken
carrier, and the pastry still reposing on the counter at Randall's.
He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife's horrified
countenance embarrassed him. But anything was better than Lord
Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him with the slightest smile on her
formidable lip. The story was pleasing to her.
'At least, my dear sir,' she said when he paused, nodding her diademed
head with stately emphasis, 'Mrs. Thornburgh's inconvenience may have
one good result. You can now make an example of the carrier. It is our
special business, as my husband always says, who are in authority, to
bring their low vices home to these people.'
The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What ineptitude had he been guilty of
now! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood he might have started Mrs. Seaton
on teetotalism. Now if there was one topic on which this awe-inspiring
woman was more awe-inspiring than another it was on the topic of
teetotalism. The vicar had already felt himself a criminal as he drank
his modest glass of claret under her eye.
'Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,' said Dr. Baker, from the
other end of the table. 'But there are plenty of worse things in these
valleys. Besides, what person in his senses would think of trying to
disestablish John Backhouse? He and his queer brother are as much a
feature of the valley as High Fell. We have too few originals left to be
so very particular about trifles.'
'Trifles?' repeated Mrs. Seaton in a deep voice, throwing up her eyes.
But she would not venture an argument with Dr. Baker. He had all the
cheery self-confidence of the old established local doctor, who knows
himself to be a power, and neither Mrs. Seaton nor her restless
intriguing little husband had ever yet succeeded in putting him down.
'You must see these two old characters,' said Dr. Baker to Elsmere
across the table. 'They are relics of a Westmoreland which will soon
have disappeared. Old John, who is going on for seventy, is as tough an
old dalesman as ever you saw. He doesn't measure his cups, but he would
scorn to be floored by them. I don't believe he does drink much, but if
he does there is probably no amount of whisky that he couldn't carry.
Jim, the other brother, is about five years older. He is a kind of
softie--all alive on one side of his brain, and a noodle on the other. A
single glass of rum and water puts him under the table. And as he never
can refuse this glass, and as the temptation generally seizes him when
they are on their rounds, he is always getting John into disgrace. John
swears at him and slangs him. No use. Jim sits still, looks--well,
nohow. I never saw an old creature with a more singular gift of denuding
his face of all expression. John vows he shall go to the "house"; he has
no legal share in the business; the house and the horse and cart are
John's. Next day you see them on the cart again just as usual. In
reality neither brother can do without the other. And three days after,
the play begins again.'
'An improving spectacle for the valley,' said Mrs. Seaton drily.
'Oh, my dear madam,' said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders, 'we can't
all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a drunkard, he has got a heart of his
own somewhere, and can nurse a dying niece like a woman. Miss Leyburn
can tell us something about that.'
And he turned round to his neighbour with a complete change of
expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate
respect. Catherine coloured as if she did not like being addressed on
the subject, and just nodded a little with gentle affirmative eyes.
'A strange case,' said Dr. Baker, again looking at Elsmere. 'It is a
family that is original and old-world even in its ways of dying. I have
been a doctor in these parts for five-and-twenty years. I have seen what
you may call old Westmoreland die out--costume, dialect, superstitions.
At least, as to dialect, the people have become bi-lingual. I sometimes
think they talk it to each other as much as ever, but some of them won't
talk it to you and me at all. And as to superstitions, the only ghost
story I know that still has some hold on popular belief is the one which
attaches to this mountain here, High Fell, at the end of this valley.'
He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to penetrate even modern
provincial society, that no man may tell a ghost story without leave.
Rose threw a merry glance at him. They two were very old friends. Dr.
Baker had pulled out her first teeth and given her a sixpence afterwards
for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten; the sixpence lived on
gratefully in a child's warm memory.
'Tell it,' she said; 'we give you leave. We won't interrupt you unless
you put in too many inventions.'
'You invite me to break the first law of story-telling, Miss Rose,' said
the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is bound to leave a
story better than he found it. However, I couldn't tell it if I would. I
don't know what makes the poor ghost walk; and if you do, I shall say
you invent. But at any rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the
side of High Fell at midnight every Midsummer day. If you see her and
she passes you in silence, why you only get a fright for your pains. But
if she speaks to you, you die within the year. Old John Backhouse is a
widower with one daughter. This girl saw the ghost last Midsummer day,
and Miss Leyburn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the
next; but with very small prospect of success.'
'What is the girl dying of?--fright?' asked Mrs. Seaton harshly.
'Oh no!' said the doctor hastily, 'not precisely. A sad story; better
not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time of her death
seems likely to be determined by the strength of her own and other
people's belief in the ghost's summons.'
Mrs. Seaton's grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. She put up her
eye-glass and looked at Catherine. 'An unpleasant household, I should
imagine,' she said shortly, 'for a young lady to visit.'
Doctor Baker looked at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame came into
his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a
quick-tempered mercurial sort of man.
'I presume that one's guardian angel may have to follow one sometimes
into unpleasant quarters,' he said hotly. 'If this girl lives, it will
be Miss Leyburn's doing; if she dies, saved and comforted, instead of
lost in this world and the next, it will be Miss Leyburn's doing too.
Ah, my dear young lady, let me alone! You tie my tongue always, and I
won't have it.'
And the doctor turned his weather-beaten elderly face upon her with a
look which was half defiance and half apology. She, on her side, had
flushed painfully, laying her white finger-tips imploringly on his arm.
Mrs. Seaton turned away with a little dry cough, so did her spectacled
sister at the other end of the table. Mrs. Leyburn, on the other hand,
sat in a little ecstasy, looking at Catherine and Dr. Baker, something
glistening in her eyes. Robert Elsmere alone showed presence of mind.
Bending across to Dr. Baker, he asked him a sudden question as to the
history of a certain strange green mound or barrow that rose out of a
flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his
whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance, and replied. Thenceforward
he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the traces of Norse
settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till the ladies left
the dining-room.
As Catherine Leyburn went out Elsmere stood holding the door open. She
could not help raising her eyes upon him, eyes full of a half-timid,
half-grateful friendliness. His own returned her look with interest.
'"A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a new-born
thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She had not yet said a
direct word to him, and yet he was curiously convinced that here was one
of the most interesting persons, and one of the persons most interesting
to _him_, that he had ever met. What mingled delicacy and strength in
the hand that had lain beside her on the dinner-table--what potential
depths of feeling in the full dark-fringed eye!
Half an hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing-room, he found
Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French window that looked out on
the lawn, and on the dim rocky face of the fell. Adeline Baker, a
stooping red-armed maiden, with a pretty face, set off, as she imagined,
by a vast amount of cheap finery, was sitting beside her, studying her
with a timid adoration. The doctor's daughter regarded Catherine
Leyburn, who during the last five years had made herself almost as
distinct a figure in the popular imagination of a few Westmoreland
valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall miners, as a being of a totally
different order from herself. She was glued to the side of her idol, but
her shy and awkward tongue could find hardly anything to say to her.
Catherine, however, talked away, gently stroking the while the girl's
rough hand which lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and bliss of its
owner, who was outraged by the contrast between her own ungainly member
and Miss Leyburn's delicate fingers.
Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply avenging
herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might have received at
tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with a face that seemed to be
perpetually peering forward, light colourless hair surmounted by a cap
adorned with artificial nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes armed with
spectacles, was having her way with Mrs. Leyburn, inquiring into the
household arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining power which
made the mild widow as pulp before her.
When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round hastily. She
herself had opened that door into the garden. A garden on a warm summer
night offers opportunities no schemer should neglect. Agnes and Rose
were chattering and laughing on the gravel path just outside it, their
white girlish figures showing temptingly against the dusky background of
garden and fell. It somewhat disappointed the vicar's wife to see her
tall guest take a chair and draw it beside Catherine--while Adeline
Baker awkwardly got up and disappeared into the garden.
Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong had been his
sense of attraction at tea; but like the rest of us he could find
nothing more telling to start with than a remark about the weather.
Catherine in her reply asked him if he were quite recovered from the
attack of low fever he was understood to have been suffering from.
'Oh yes,' he said brightly, 'I am very nearly as fit as I ever was, and
more eager than I ever was to get to work. The idling of it is the worst
part of illness. However, in a month from now I must be at my living,
and I can only hope it will give me enough to do.'
Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. What an eager
face it was! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be the note of the whole man,
of the quick eyes and mouth, the flexible hands and energetic movements.
Even the straight, stubbly hair, its owner's passing torment, standing
up round the high open brow, seemed to help the general impression of
alertness and vigour.
'Your mother, I hear, is already there?' said Catherine.
'Yes. My poor mother!' and the young man smiled half sadly. 'It is a
curious situation for both of us. This living which has just been
bestowed on me is my father's old living. It is in the gift of my
cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. My great-uncle'--he drew himself together
suddenly. 'But I don't know why I should imagine that these things
interest other people,' he said, with a little quick, almost comical,
accent of self-rebuke.
'Please go on,' cried Catherine hastily. The voice and manner were
singularly pleasant to her; she wished he would not interrupt himself
for nothing.
'Really? Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished me to have
it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time, took orders; but I
wanted something more stirring than a country parish. One has dreams of
many things. But one's dreams come to nothing. I got ill at Oxford. The
doctors forbade the town work. The old incumbent who had held the living
since my father's death died precisely at that moment. I felt myself
booked, and gave in to various friends; but it is second best.'
She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though his
talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past.
'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. Her cheek
was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual animation; and
her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save a small
old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a pair of hair
bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the nobleness and
simplicity of a Romney picture.
'_You_ do not find it so, I imagine,' he replied, bending forward to her
with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her to talk to
him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally compared her to
Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the dark red flowers in
her white lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than
Rose's.
However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which she
turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive confiding
nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the
moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighbourhood,
the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at
least as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength,
individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not
at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then,
indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an absence
of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary
south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.
'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said to him
once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told
him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to
him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life,
her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments
on her favourite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to
enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural
magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known
line of Shelley's she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him
deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and
knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The
thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now
wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she
was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!
Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.
'Were you ever there?' he asked her.
'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have only a
confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great
building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'
'Did your father often go back?'
'No; never towards the latter part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little; 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'
She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was
a little difficult. Then his face and clerical dress seemed somehow to
reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.
'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw
when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford
was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men
who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to
him.'
Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the
beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in
twenty years transformed the University.
'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little longer.
There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has
spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward
swell of a religious revival.'
Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to her
heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her seemed to
satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.
'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, hesitating;
'but I don't know whether father would have liked that much better.'
The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself suddenly.
Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, and afraid lest
she might have said something discourteous.
'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it is a
mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has brought about
the new state of things. Some of the factors in the change were hardly
Christian at all, by name, but they have all helped to make men think,
to stir their hearts, to win them back to the old ways.'
His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently the
matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt a deep and
loving interest. His young boyish face had grown grave; there was a
striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which suddenly
roused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of
distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things of
life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a
beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full of soul.
The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their
conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind them
Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candles and music-stools,
preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed
vicar of Shanmoor, and the room seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton's
strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted itself, and her face
settled again into the slight rigidity of expression characteristic of
it. She rose and prepared to move farther into the room.
'We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder.
And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn. He had a
momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive, sympathetic, felt
in the woman the presence of a strength, a self-sufficingness which was
not all attractive. His vanity, if he had cherished any during their
conversation, was not flattered by its close. But as he leant against
the window-frame waiting for the music to begin, he could hardly keep
his eyes from her. He was a man who, by force of temperament, made
friends readily with women, though except for a passing fancy or two he
had never been in love; and his sense of difficulty with regard to this
stiffly-mannered, deep-eyed country girl brought with it an unusual
stimulus and excitement.
Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with
bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her. Mr.
Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He was a
powerful swarthy man, who said little and was generally alarming to the
ladies of the neighbourhood. To propitiate him, they asked him to bring
his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss
Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who
regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower's name and
position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with all his
taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend himself.
'Has it begun?' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and turning
he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's cheeks flushed
by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head.
She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some
powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of
her wrists and the vicarage piano.
The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to fly
down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and the
mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs.
Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton
motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against the
wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth
expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.
It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which
flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning,
the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very fast,
which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing
performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the
resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line
with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder
grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules
performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped
her little foot.
'Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, 'three bars this: will no one
stop her!'
But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a
sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the
room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was
to end, and who was to be victor.
Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have been in any doubt as to that!
Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute nearly half a page behind
was left shrilly hanging in mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an
object of derision to gods and men.
'Ah! I took it a little fast!' said the lady, triumphantly looking up at
the discomfited clergyman.
'Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window curtain beside
him, that she might have her laugh in safety. 'Do they play like that in
Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?'
But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl--
'Rose! Rose! Don't go out again! It is your turn next!'
Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering
something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical power,
supposed that she felt it an indignity to be asked to play in such
company.
Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. Leyburn, a
summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, as it brought him once
more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn's eldest daughter.
'Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere?' asked Mrs. Leyburn in her little
mincing voice, making room for his chair beside them. 'If you are, I am
sure my youngest daughter's playing will please you.'
Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some pleasant answer,
divined that the reserved and stately daughter must be often troubled by
the mother's expansiveness.
Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to listen. Mrs. Seaton was
severely turning over a photograph book. In her opinion the violin was
an unbecoming instrument for young women. Miss Barks sat upright with
the studiously neutral expression which befits the artist asked to
listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the
other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him,
good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for
Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after
routing out from her music a couple of _Fantasie-Stuecke_, which she had
wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to
the 'rubbish' played by the preceding performers. She stood with her
lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black
coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot advanced, the
ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and arm, beautifully formed,
but still wanting the roundness of womanhood, raised high for action,
the lightly poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a
bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future
brilliance and empire.
Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial maiden learned
to play with this intelligence, this force, this delicate command of her
instrument? He was not a musician, and therefore could not gauge her
exactly, but he was more or less familiar with music and its standards,
as all people become nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society,
and he knew enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was
remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident was this,
when from the humorous piece with which the sisters led off--a dance of
clowns, but clowns of Arcady--they slid into a delicate rippling _chant
d'amour_, the long drawn notes of the violin rising and falling on the
piano accompaniment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did a
_fillette_, unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much
eloquence--only from the natural dreams of a girl's heart as to 'the
lovers waiting in the hidden years'?
But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the
room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure
beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an
impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look, which had piqued his
curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr.
Baker.
'Excellent!' cried Elsmere. 'How in the name of fortune, Miss Leyburn,
if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on so far in this remote
place?'
'She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we have there,'
said Catherine quietly; 'I believe she has been very well taught.'
'But surely,' he said warmly, 'it is more than teaching--more even than
talent--there is something like genius in it?'
She did not answer very readily.
'I don't know,' she said at last. 'Every one says it is very good.'
He would have been repelled by her irresponsiveness but that her last
words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, as though the
subject were connected with an inner debate not yet solved which
troubled her. He was puzzled, but certainly not repelled.
Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons went first, and
the other guests lingered awhile afterwards to enjoy the sense of
freedom left by their departure. But at last the Mayhews, father and
son, set off on foot to walk home over the moonlit mountains; the doctor
tucked himself and his daughter into his high gig, and drove off with a
sweeping ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps teasing him to
the last; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort the Miss Leyburns and
their mother home.
Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar's incredulous ears that
never--never as long as she lived--would she have Mrs. Seaton inside her
doors again.
'Her manners--' cried the vicar's wife, fuming--'her manners would
disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none--positively none!'
Then suddenly her round comfortable face brightened and broadened out
into a beaming smile--
'But, after all, William, say what you will--and you always do say
the most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success.
I know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him
_looking_--_looking_ at that little minx Rose while she was playing as
if he couldn't take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be
sure!'
The vicar, who had been standing with his back to the fireplace and his
hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks first of all with
lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half
compassionate, which made her start in her chair.
'Rose?' he said impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?'
It was very rarely indeed that on her own ground, so to speak, the vicar
ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh looked
at him in amazement.
'Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, 'that you didn't notice
that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn,
he had practically no attention for anybody else?'
Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening--and
her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to
ejaculate--
'Catherine!' she said feebly. 'Catherine! how absurd!'
But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of [the] window
after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that night
an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely
indispensable, more of a personage.