'Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from
outside through the dining-room window; 'and tell mamma.'
It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert
Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent
foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed
that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer. Early
in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the colour out of
the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous
gray-blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches and the
birches and the hawthorns were already sobered by a longer acquaintance
with life and Phoebus.
Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when in its proper
place served her, apparently, both as hat and as parasol. She seemed to
have been running races with a fine collie, who lay at her feet panting,
but studying her with his bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off
again at the first indication that his playmate had recovered her wind.
Chattie was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a model of
treacherous beauty.
'Chattie, you fiend, come here!' cried Rose, holding out a hand to her;
'if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must have looked like you at this
moment.'
'I won't have Chattie put upon,' said Agnes, establishing herself at the
other side of the little tea-table; 'she has done you no harm. Come to
me, beastie. _I_ won't compare you to disagreeable old maids.'
The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking; then with a
sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes's lap and curled herself up
there.
'Nothing but cupboard love,' said Rose scornfully, in answer to Agnes's
laugh; 'she knows you will give her bread and butter and I won't, out of
a double regard for my skirts and her morals. Oh, dear me! Miss Barks
was quite seraphic last night; she never made a single remark about my
clothes, and she didn't even say to me as she generally does, with an
air of compassion, that she "_quite_ understands how hard it must be to
keep in tune."'
'The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,' said Agnes. 'I just
love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear her instructing other people in
their own particular trades. She didn't get much change out of him.'
Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with one hand on her
heart, said in a stage whisper, with a dramatic glance round the garden,
'My heart is whole. How is yours?'
'_Intact_,' said Agnes calmly, 'as that French bric-a-brac man in the
Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he is very nice.'
'Oh, charming! But when my destiny arrives'--and Rose, returning to her
tea, swept her little hand with a teaspoon in it eloquently round--'he
won't have his hair cut close. I must have luxuriant locks, and I will
take _no_ excuse! _Une chevelure de poete_, the eye of an eagle, the
moustache of a hero, the hand of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him,
the temper of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the world
besides, except for me; and for me he will be heaven.'
She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a little flush
of something half real on her cheek.
'No doubt,' said Agnes drily. 'But you can't wonder if under the
circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.'
'Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose discontentedly; 'Catherine likes
everybody--of a certain sort--and everybody likes Catherine.'
'Does that mean, Miss Hasty,' said her sister, 'that you have made up
your mind Catherine will never marry?'
'Marry!' cried Rose. 'You might as well talk of marrying Westminster
Abbey.'
Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose's fun had a decided lack of
sweetness. 'After all,' she said demurely, 'St. Elizabeth married.'
'Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were
"her Royal Highness" it would be her duty to marry, which would just
make _all_ the difference. Duty! I hate the word.'
And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the
collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking
and dignified protest against his mistress's follies.
Agnes again studied her sister. 'What's the matter with you, Rose?'
'The usual thing, my dear,' replied Rose curtly, 'only more so. I had a
letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter, you know, of those
nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me to
go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man,
Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter. I
haven't said a word about it--what's the use? I know all Catherine's
arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to
live in Whindale; I am not somebody else and needn't earn my bread; and
art is not religion; and----'
'Wheels!' exclaimed Agnes. 'Catherine, I suppose, home from
Whinborough.'
Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the
wall which shut them off from the road.
'Catherine, and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot's pace, and the
unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course--Mr. Elsmere. He will
come in to tea, so I'll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us
to-day.'
When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert
Elsmere were coming up the drive. Something had given Catherine more
colour than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the young
clergyman her mother's eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter.
'After all, she is as handsome as Rose,' she said to herself--'though it
_is_ quite a different style.'
Rose, who was always tea-maker, dispensed her wares; Catherine took her
favourite low seat beside her mother, clasping Mrs. Leyburn's thin
mittened hand awhile tenderly in her own; Robert and Agnes set up a
lively gossip on the subject of the Thornburghs' guests, in which Rose
joined, while Catherine looked smiling on. She seemed apart from the
rest, Robert thought; not, clearly, by her own will, but by virtue of a
difference of temperament which could not but make itself felt. Yet once
as Rose passed her, Robert saw her stretch out her hand and touch her
sister caressingly, with a bright upward look and smile as though she
would say, 'Is all well? have you had a good time this afternoon,
Roeschen?' Clearly the strong contemplative nature was not strong enough
to dispense with any of the little wants and cravings of human
affection. Compared to the main impression she was making on him, her
suppliant attitude at her mother's feet and her caress of her sister
were like flowers breaking through the stern March soil and changing the
whole spirit of the fields.
Presently he said something of Oxford, and mentioned Merton. Instantly
Mrs. Leyburn fell upon him. Had he ever seen Mr. S---- who had been a
Fellow there, and Rose's godfather?
'I don't acknowledge him,' said Rose, pouting. 'Other people's
godfathers give them mugs and corals. Mine never gave me anything but a
Concordance.'
Robert laughed, and proved to their satisfaction that Mr. S---- had been
extinct before his day. But could they ask him any other questions? Mrs.
Leyburn became quite animated, and, diving into her memory, produced a
number of fragmentary reminiscences of her husband's Queen's friends,
asking him for information about each and all of them. The young man
disentangled all her questions, racked his brains to answer, and showed
all through a quick friendliness, a charming deference as of youth to
age, which confirmed the liking of the whole party for him. Then the
mention of an associate of Richard Leyburn's youth, who had been one of
the Tractarian leaders, led him into talk of Oxford changes and the
influences of the present. He drew for them the famous High Church
preacher of the moment, described the great spectacle of his Bampton
Lectures, by which Oxford had been recently thrilled, and gave a
dramatic account of a sermon on evolution preached by the hermit-veteran
Pusey, as though by another Elias returning to the world to deliver a
last warning message to men. Catherine listened absorbed, her deep eyes
fixed upon him. And though all he said was pitched in a vivacious
narrative key and addressed as much to the others as to her, inwardly it
seemed to him that his one object all through was to touch and keep her
attention.
Then, in answer to inquiries about himself, he fell to describing St.
Anselm's with enthusiasm,--its growth, its Provost, its effectiveness as
a great educational machine, the impression it had made on Oxford and
the country. This led him naturally to talk of Mr. Grey, then, next to
the Provost, the most prominent figure in the college; and once
embarked on this theme he became more eloquent and interesting than
ever. The circle of women listened to him as to a voice from the large
world. He made them feel the beat of the great currents of English life
and thought; he seemed to bring the stir and rush of our central English
society into the deep quiet of their valley. Even the bright-haired
Rose, idly swinging her pretty foot, with a head full of dreams and
discontent, was beguiled, and for the moment seemed to lose her restless
self in listening.
He told an exciting story of a bad election riot in Oxford which had
been quelled at considerable personal risk by Mr. Grey, who had gained
his influence in the town by a devotion of years to the policy of
breaking down as far as possible the old venomous feud between city and
university.
When he paused, Mrs. Leyburn said, vaguely, 'Did you say he was a canon
of somewhere?'
'Oh no,' said Robert, smiling, 'he is not a clergyman.'
'But you said he preached,' said Agnes.
'Yes--but lay sermons--addresses. He is not one of us even, according to
your standard and mine.'
'A Nonconformist?' sighed Mrs. Leyburn. 'Oh, I know they have let in
everybody now.'
'Well, if you like,' said Robert. 'What I meant was that his opinions
are not orthodox. He could not be a clergyman, but he is one of the
noblest of men!'
He spoke with affectionate warmth. Then suddenly Catherine's eyes met
his, and he felt an involuntary start. A veil had fallen over them; her
sweet moved sympathy was gone; she seemed to have shrunk into herself.
She turned to Mrs. Leyburn. 'Mother, do you know, I have all sorts of
messages from Aunt Ellen'--and in an under-voice she began to give Mrs.
Leyburn the news of her afternoon expedition.
Rose and Agnes soon plunged young Elsmere into another stream of talk.
But he kept his feeling of perplexity. His experience of other women
seemed to give him nothing to go upon with regard to Miss Leyburn.
Presently Catherine got up and drew her plain little black cape round
her again.
'My dear!' remonstrated Mrs. Leyburn. 'Where are you off to now?'
'To the Backhouses, mother,' she said in a low voice; 'I have not been
there for two days. I must go this evening.'
Mrs. Leyburn said no more. Catherine's 'musts' were never disputed. She
moved towards Elsmere with outstretched hand. But he also sprang up.
'I, too, must be going,' he said; 'I have paid you an unconscionable
visit. If you are going past the vicarage, Miss Leyburn, may I escort
you so far?'
She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Agnes, whose eye
fell on her sister during the pause, was struck with a passing sense of
something out of the common. She could hardly have defined her
impression, but Catherine seemed more alive to the outer world, more
like other people, less nun-like, than usual.
When they had left the garden together, as they had come into it, and
Mrs. Leyburn, complaining of chilliness, had retreated to the
drawing-room, Rose laid a quick hand on her sister's arm.
'You say Catherine likes him? Owl! what is a great deal more certain is
that he likes her.'
'Well,' said Agnes calmly,--'well, I await your remarks.'
'Poor fellow! said Rose grimly, and removed her hand.
Meanwhile Elsmere and Catherine walked along the valley road towards the
Vicarage. He thought, uneasily, she was a little more reserved with him
than she had been in those pleasant moments after he had overtaken her
in the pony-carriage; but still she was always kind, always courteous.
And what a white hand it was, hanging ungloved against her dress! what a
beautiful dignity and freedom, as of mountain winds and mountain
streams, in every movement!
'You are bound for High Ghyll?' he said to her as they neared the
vicarage gate. Is it not a long way for you? You have been at a meeting
already, your sister said, and teaching this morning!'
He looked down on her with a charming diffidence as though aware that
their acquaintance was very young, and yet with a warm eagerness of
feeling piercing through. As she paused under his eye the slightest
flush rose to Catherine's cheek. Then she looked up with a smile. It was
amusing to be taken care of by this tall stranger!
'It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,' she said, 'but I couldn't be tired
if I tried.'
Elsmere grasped her hand.
'You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking example,' he said,
letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of his own renunciation was
still keen in him. She lingered a moment, could find nothing to say,
threw him a look all shy sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone.
In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden stiffening in
his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed him. He and the vicar
were sitting smoking in the study after dinner, and the ingenious young
man managed to shift the conversation on to the Leyburns, as he had
managed to shift it once or twice before that day, flattering himself,
of course, on each occasion that his manoeuvres were beyond detection.
The vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, detected them
all, and with a sense of appropriation in the matter, not at all unmixed
with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., kept the ball rolling merrily.
'Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,' said Robert,
_a propos_ of some remark of the vicar's as to the assistance she was to
him in the school.
'Ah, she is her father's daughter,' said the vicar genially. He had his
oldest coat on, his favourite pipe between his lips, and a bit of
domestic carpentering on his knee at which he was fiddling away; and,
being perfectly happy, was also perfectly amiable. 'Richard Leyburn was
a fanatic--as mild as you please, but immovable.'
'What line?'
'Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me Madame Guyon's Life
once to read. I didn't appreciate it. I told him that for all her
religion she seemed to me to have a deal of the vixen in her. He could
hardly get over it: it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was
very like her, except that, in my opinion, his nature was sweeter. He
was a fatalist--saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And
such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and
all his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was
seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with a
start, as though you belonged to another world than the one he was
walking in.'
'And his eldest daughter was much with him?'
'The apple of his eye. She understood him. He could talk his soul out to
her. The others, of course, were children; and his wife--well, his wife
was just what you see her now, poor thing. He must have married her when
she was very young and very pretty. She was a squire's daughter
somewhere near the school of which he was master--a good family, I
believe--she'll tell you so, in a ladylike way. He was always fidgety
about her health. He loved her, I suppose, or had loved her. But it was
Catherine who had his mind; Catherine who was his friend. She adored
him. I believe there was always a sort of pity in her heart for him too.
But at any rate he made her and trained her. He poured all his ideas and
convictions into her.'
'Which were strong?'
'Uncommonly. For all his gentle, ethereal look, you could neither bend
nor break him. I don't believe anybody but Richard Leyburn could have
gone through Oxford at the height of the Oxford Movement, and, so to
speak, have known nothing about it, while living all the time for
religion. He had a great deal in common with the Quakers, as I said; a
great deal in common with the Wesleyans; but he was very loyal to the
Church all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. George Herbert
was his favourite poet. He used to carry his poems about with him on the
mountains, and an expurgated _Christian Year_--the only thing he ever
took from the High Churchmen--which he had made for himself, and which
he and Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a bigot at all.
He would have had the Church make peace with the Dissenters; he was all
for upsetting tests so far as Nonconformity was concerned. But he drew
the most rigid line between belief and unbelief. He would not have dined
at the same table with a Unitarian if he could have helped it. I
remember a furious article of his in the _Record_ against admitting
Unitarians to the Universities or allowing them to sit in Parliament.
England is a Christian State, he said; they are not Christians; they
have no right in her except on sufferance. Well, I suppose he was about
right,' said the vicar with a sigh. 'We are all so half-hearted
nowadays.'
'Not he,' cried Robert hotly. 'Who are we that because a man differs
from us in opinion we are to shut him out from the education of
political and civil duty? But never mind, Cousin William. Go on.'
'There's no more that I remember, except that of course Catherine took
all these ideas from him. He wouldn't let his children know any
unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. He impressed it upon
them as their special sacred duty, in a time of wicked enmity to
religion, to cherish the faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife
and daughters to live on here after his death that they might be less in
danger spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have more
opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was also
some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children for the
godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach himself for
having in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he
might have helped to raise.'
'Well, but,' said Robert, 'all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don't
see the father in the two younger girls.'
'Ah, there is Catherine's difficulty,' said the vicar, shrugging his
shoulders. 'Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father's
death! She came down to see me in the dining-room about some arrangement
for the funeral. She was only sixteen, so pale and thin with nursing. I
said something about the comfort she had been to her father. She took my
hand and burst into tears. "He was so good!" she said; "I loved him so!
Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others!" And that's been
her one thought since then--that, next to following the narrow road.'
The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally happened to him
whenever he was beguiled into much speech about Catherine Leyburn. There
must have been something great somewhere in the insignificant elderly
man. A meaner soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with
her inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his
own, in his own domain.
'I should like to know the secret of the little musician's
independence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of blood at
all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'
'Oh, I don't know that! There's more than you think, or Catherine
wouldn't have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she
gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.'
'And why shouldn't she?'
'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you're not, to
remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course
nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would
no more have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her
family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling
than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard
him take a text out of the _Imitation_ and lecture Rose when she was
quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to
give her music-lessons. "Woe to them"--yes, that was it--"that inquire
many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving
me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that
brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs.
Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow,
and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I daresay, poor man, it
was one of the acts towards his children that tormented his mind in his
last hour.'
'She has certainly had her way about practising it: she plays superbly.'
'Oh yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is Rose. I see a
touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then there is the
beauty and refinement of her mother's side of the family. Lately she has
got quite out of hand. She went to stay with some relations they have in
Manchester, got drawn into the musical set there, took to these funny
gowns, and now she and Catherine are always half at war. Poor Catherine
said to me the other day, with tears in her eyes, that she knew Rose
thought her as hard as iron. "But what can I do?" she said. "I promised
papa." She makes herself miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little
wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this
humdrum place, and she may kick over the traces.'
'She's pretty enough for anything and anybody,' said Robert.
The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man's critical and
meditative look reassured him.
The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for
a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the
frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the vicarage garden. It was
Mrs. Thornburgh's accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood
inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for
them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.
'My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should
have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from
Randall's. I've had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking
back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if
we'd had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears----'
The vicar's wife paused. Her square short figure was between the two
girls; she had on arm of each, and she looked significantly from one to
another, her gray curls flapping across her face as she did so.
'Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,' cried Rose. 'You make us quite nervous.'
'How do you like Mr. Elsmere?' she inquired solemnly.
'Very much,' said both in chorus.
Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose's smiling frankness with a little sigh.
Things were going grandly, but she could imagine a disposition of
affairs which would have given her personally more pleasure.
'_How--would--you--like_--him for a brother-in-law?' she inquired,
beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose's arm, and
bringing out the last words with a rush.
Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose's eye, but she answered for them both
demurely.
'We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.'
'Explain!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh. 'I should think it explains itself. At
least if you'd been in this house the last twenty-four hours you'd think
so. Since the moment when he first met her, it's been "Miss Leyburn,"
"Miss Leyburn," all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye
from the beginning.'
Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was
pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness
backwards or forwards.
'He went to see you yesterday, didn't he--yes, I know he did--and he
overtook her in the pony-carriage--the vicar saw them from across the
valley--and he brought her back from your house, and then he kept
William up till nearly twelve talking of her. And now he wants a picnic.
Oh, it's as plain as a pike-staff. And, my dears, _nothing_ to be said
against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he's a penny. A nice living, only
his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever stepped.'
Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls,
who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat,
looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting
her have her budget out.
'And now, of course,' she resumed, taking breath, and chilled a little
by their silence, 'now, of course, I want to know about Catherine?' She
regarded them with anxious interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly
shook her head.
'What!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, 'oh,
you can't know anything in two days.'
'That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening; 'we can't know anything in
two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes
to anybody, till the last minute.'
Mrs. Thornburgh's face fell. 'It's very difficult when people will be so
reserved,' she said dolefully.
The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out of it.
'At any rate we can bring them together,' she broke out, brightening
again. 'We can have picnics, you know, and teas, and all that--and
watch. Now listen.'
And the vicar's wife sketched out a programme of festivities for the
next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive head, which took
the sisters' breath away. Rose bit her lip to keep in her laughter.
Agnes with vast self-possession took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She
pointed out firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine
impracticable as fuss. 'In vain is the net spread,' etc. She preached
from the text with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs.
Thornburgh.
'Well, _what_ am I to do, my dears?' she said at last helplessly. 'Look
at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it's only to amuse
Robert.'
Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence and
a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes,
having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give
her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one
picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they
would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy
of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they departed
to their early dinner, leaving the vicars wife decidedly less
self-confident than they found her.
'The first matrimonial excitement of the family,' cried Agnes as they
walked home. 'So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been
besieged!'
'It will be all moonshine,' Rose replied decisively. 'Mr. Elsmere may
lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the
clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air
of an angel, to give him his _coup de grace_. As I said before--poor
fellow!'
Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the
whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she
understood that there was a soreness at the bottom of Rose's heart that
was always showing itself in unexpected connections.
There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for assisting
Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her expeditions, but
without them Robert Elsmere would have been still man enough to see
Catherine Leyburn every day. He loitered about the roads along which she
must needs pass to do her many offices of charity; he offered the vicar
to take a class in the school, and was naively exultant that the vicar
curiously happened to fix an hour when he must needs see Miss Leyburn
going or coming on the same errand; he dropped into Burwood on any
conceivable pretext, till Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect
for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted
that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his pastoral
services in one or two of the cases of sickness or poverty under their
care. Catherine, with a little more reserve than usual, took him one day
to the Tysons', and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was
likely to live on paralysed for some time, under the weight, moreover,
of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson kept her
talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new
aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while
his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's
face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and
tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he
said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He
had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and
the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering
Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped out
while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.
As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The sensitive
soul often reproached itself afterwards for having juggled in the
matter. Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gaiety for
her sisters sometimes? Her mother could not undertake it, and was always
plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a short
week or two Catherine did her best to be young, and climbed the mountain
grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of
perfect health, trembling afterwards at night as she knelt by her window
to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had
always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice
during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her,
and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away.
But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her
perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case--the little
arts and manoeuvres of those about her. It did not strike her that
Mrs. Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the
vicar's wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted
effusion; or that Agnes and Rose, when they were in the wild heart of
the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a
picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both
of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell to
her. Nor did she ever analyse what would have been the attraction of
those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding
step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when Nature
throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would
fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might
be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through
a golden darkness.
Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learnt with
wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two
households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides,
were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most
stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more
strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether
to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living--reading up
the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighbourhood,
plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick
brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far
as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his
disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being
whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would
come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in
hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour
out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and
suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling
out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so
much of her own life to any one; her consciousness of it sometimes
filled her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading, as
it were, for her own advantage on the sacred things of God. But he would
have it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew
the stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften!
With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-bye!
And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as
he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she
could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the
juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even
picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author
of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank
from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his
future relations towards a personality so marked, and so important to
every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was
plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or
her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.
But it was when he turned to larger things--to books, movements, leaders
of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed. Why would
he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established order in
the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he
talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to
be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right belief
were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation?
When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn
silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome
speech and his clergyman's dress.
And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He was
merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation;
whereas she, the child of a mystic--solitary, intense, and deeply
reflective from her earliest youth--was still thinking and speaking in
the language of her father's generation.
But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these
points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, conscious that here
was the one profound difference between them, it was clear to him that
insensibly she had moved further than she knew from her father's
standpoint. Even among these solitudes, far from men and literature, she
had unconsciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he
penetrated deeper into the nature he found it honeycombed, as it were,
here and there, with beautiful unexpected softnesses and diffidences.
Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homewards under a cloudy
evening sky, he came upon the great problem of her life--Rose and Rose's
art. He drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill. She
had laid it bare, and was blushing to think how she had asked his
counsel, almost before she knew where their talk was leading. How was it
lawful for the Christian to spend the few short years of the earthly
combat in any pursuit, however noble and exquisite, which merely aimed
at the gratification of the senses, and implied in the pursuer the
emphasising rather than the surrender of self?
He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, tried to lift
her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious world, dwelling on the
function of pure beauty in life, and on the influence of beauty on
character, pointing out the value to the race of all individual
development, and pressing home on her the natural religious question:
How are the artistic aptitudes to be explained unless the Great Designer
meant them to have a use and function in His world? She replied
doubtfully that she had always supposed they were lawful for recreation,
and like any other trade for bread-winning, but----
Then he told her much that he knew about the humanising effect of music
on the poor. He described to her the efforts of a London society, of
which he was a subscribing member, to popularise the best music among
the lowest class; he dwelt almost with passion on the difference
between the joy to be got out of such things and the common brutalising
joys of the workman. And you could not have art without artists. In this
again he was only talking the commonplaces of his day. But to her they
were not commonplaces at all. She looked at him from time to time, her
great eyes lightening and deepening as it seemed with every fresh thrust
of his.
'I am grateful to you,' she said at last with an involuntary outburst,
'I am _very_ grateful to you!'
And she gave a long sigh as if some burden she had long borne in patient
silence had been loosened a little, if only by the fact of speech about
it. She was not convinced exactly. She was too strong a nature to
relinquish a principle without a period of meditative struggle in which
conscience should have all its dues. But her tone made his heart leap.
He felt in it a momentary self-surrender that, coming from a creature of
so rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of power, and yet
at the same time with a strange humility beyond words.
A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little scene. An
aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came to see them. She was
their father's youngest sister, and the wife of a man who had made some
money as a builder in Whinborough. When Robert came in he found her
sitting on the sofa having tea, a large homely-looking woman with gray
hair, a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had unfastened her
bonnet strings, and a clean white handkerchief lay spread out on her
lap. When Elsmere was introduced to her, she got up, and said with some
effusiveness, and a distinct Westmoreland accent--
'Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,' while she enclosed
his fingers in a capacious hand.
Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sitting near her,
and Catherine, the only member of the party who showed no sign of
embarrassment when Robert entered, was superintending her aunt's tea and
talking busily the while.
Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and Rose, who were
chattering together a little artificially and of set purpose as it
seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be ignored. She talked too loud
not to be overheard, and Agnes inwardly noted that as soon as Robert
Elsmere appeared she talked louder than before. He gathered presently
that she was an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in describing
to Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic exploits of her eldest
son, who had recently obtained his first circuit as a Wesleyan minister.
He was shrewd enough, too, to guess, after a minute or two, that his
presence and probably his obnoxious clerical dress gave additional zest
to the recital.
'Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin' marvellous,' he heard
her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, 'some-thin' marvellous. The Lord
has blessed him indeed! It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's
meetin's, or sermons, or parlour work, or just faithful dealin's with
souls one by one. Satan has no cliverer foe than Edward. He never shuts
his eyes; as Edward says himself, it's like trackin' for game is huntin'
for souls. Why, the other day he was walkin' out from Coventry to a
service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit of grass by the
roadside, mendin' his cart. And he stopped did Edward, and gave him the
Word _strong_. The man seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm.
"No harm!" says Edward, "when you're just doin' the devil's work every
nail you put in, and hammerin' away, mon, at your own damnation." But
here's his letter.' And while Rose turned away to a far window to hide
an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag,
took out a treasured paper, and read with the emphasis and the unction
peculiar to a certain type of revivalism--
'"Poor sinner! He was much put about. I left him, praying the Lord my
shaft might rankle in him; ay, might fester and burn in him till he
found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed very dark and destitute--no
respect for the Word or its ministers. A bit farther I met a boy
carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went on,
taking, without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag.
Glorious work! If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways
for God, sin will skulk yet."'
A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put it back into
her bag.
'There's your true minister,' she said, with a large judicial utterance
as she closed the snap. 'Wherever he goes Edward must have souls!'
And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman in the
window.
'He must have very hard work with so much walking and preaching,' said
Catherine gently.
Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd little scene
with other eyes.
'His work is just wearin' him out,' said the mother fervently; 'but a
minister doesn't think of that. Wherever he goes there are sinners
saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nuneaton. At family prayer
alone there were five saved. And at the prayer-meetin's on the Sabbath
such outpourin's of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells me,
just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,' she added, turning
suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation,
'with the labours of our Wesleyan ministers?'
'No,' said Robert, with his pleasant smile, 'not personally. But I have
the greatest respect for them as a body of devoted men.'
The look of battle faded from the woman's face. It was not an
unpleasant face. He even saw strange reminiscences of Catherine in it at
times.
'You're aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take any credit to
themselves--it's grace, sir, all grace.'
'Aunt Ellen,' said Catherine, while a sudden light broke over her face;
'I just want you to take Edward a little story from me. Ministers are
good things, but God can do without them.'
And she laid her hand on her aunt's knee with a smile in which there was
the slightest touch of affectionate satire.
'I was up among the fells the other day,' she went on; 'I met an elderly
man cutting wood in a plantation, and I stopped and asked him how he
was. "Ah, miss," he said, "verra weel, verra weel. And yet it was nobbut
Friday morning lasst, I cam oop here, awfu' bad in my sperrits like. For
my wife she's sick, an' a' dwinnelt away, and I'm gettin' auld, and
can't wark as I'd used to, and it did luke to me as thoo there was
naethin' afore us nobbut t' Union. And t' mist war low on t' fells, and
I sat oonder t' wall, wettish and broodin' like. And theer--all ov a
soodent the Lord found me! Yes, puir Reuben Judge, as dawn't matter to
naebody, the Lord found un. It war leyke as thoo His feeace cam
a-glisterin' an' a-shinin' through t' mist. An' iver sence then, miss,
aa've jest felt as thoo aa could a' cut an' stackt all t' wood on t'
fell in naw time at a'!" And he waved his hand round the mountain side
which was covered with plantation. And all the way along the path for
ever so long I could hear him singing, chopping away, and quavering out,
"Rock of Ages."'
She paused, her delicate face, with just a little quiver in the lip,
turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hidden fire had leapt
suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, the attitude, was simplicity and
unconsciousness itself. Robert had never heard her say anything so
intimate before. Nor had he ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She
had transmuted the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous prose;
she had turned it into purest poetry. Only the noblest souls have such
an alchemy as this at command, thought the watcher on the other side of
the room with a passionate reverence.
'I wasn't thinkin' of narrowin' the Lord down to ministers,' said Mrs.
Fleming, with a certain loftiness. 'We all know He can do without us
puir worms.'
Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to go. Much of
her apparel had slipped away from her in the fervours of revivalist
anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves and reticule--officiously
helped by the younger girls--Robert crossed over to Catherine.
'You lifted us on to your own high places!' he said, bending down to
her; 'I shall carry your story with me through the fells.'
She looked up, and as she met his warm moved look a little glow and
tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted expression. He broke
the spell; she sank from the poet into the embarrassed woman.
'You must see my old man,' she said, with an effort; 'he is worth a
library of sermons. I must introduce him to you.'
He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could only stand
impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming's disappearance, that he might
somehow appropriate her eldest niece. But alas! when she went, Catherine
went out with her, and reappeared no more, though he waited some time.
He walked home in a whirl of feeling; on the way he stopped, and leaning
over a gate which led into one of the river-fields gave himself up to
the mounting tumult within. Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos of
hope and memory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost
manhood.
'In her and her only is my heart's desire! She and she only if she will,
and God will, shall be my wife!'
He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the evening beauty
of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change--
'Tears
Were in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.'
He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never felt
before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he had sprung
suddenly into maturity--entered at last into the full human heritage.
But the very intensity and solemnity of his own feeling gave him a rare
clear-sightedness. He realised that he had no certainty of success,
scarcely even an entirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they
not together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? Would they
not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after? Were not time and
opportunity all his own? How kind her looks are even now! Courage! And
through that maidenly kindness his own passion shall send the last,
transmuting glow.