The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and
persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing
class at the school, closed the school door behind her with a sigh of
relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood.
'How abominably they sang this morning!' she said to herself with
curving lip. 'Talk of the natural north-country gift for music! What
ridiculous fictions people set up! Dear me, what clouds! Perhaps we
shan't get our walk to Shanmoor after all, and if we don't, and
if--if--' her cheek flushed with a sudden excitement--'if Mr. Elsmere
doesn't propose, Mrs. Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes
and I can do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if _something_ doesn't
come off to-day, she'll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and
asking _Catherine_ her intentions, which would ruin everything.'
Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was
freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the
summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged
curtain was already lowering.
'It will hold up yet awhile,' she thought, 'and if it rains later we can
get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.'
And she walked on homewards meditating, her thin fingers clasped before
her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the
little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty many-coloured turmoil
about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which
was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full
of artistic odds and ends--her fiddle, of course, and piles of music,
her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a
number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still
ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood
photographs of musicians and friends--the spoils of her visits to
Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points
in the girl's memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd
medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She
had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighbourhood, and paid for it
with her own money. There a group of unfinished headlong sketches of the
most fiercely impressionist description--the work and the gift of a knot
of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little
Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her heart's
content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the present
day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young
artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when they come
home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival
art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north.
Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond
enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard;
at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad
enough to befriend his dead brother's children, who wanted nothing of
him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their
good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which he
touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it
pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose
went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired
artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged
her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the
pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris and Italy, and
set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone
apparently of all artists was destined never to know.
For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what
she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what,
thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free,
reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and
found Burwood waiting for her--Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely
valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For
Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her
it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the
most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most
determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world,' with all its
indefensible delights, to a cold other-world with its torturing
inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester
or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving
through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere as
they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute
surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to
chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair.
And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the verge
of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in
resisting, but resist she must by the law of her nature.
Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon her
violin, and rushed through a Brahms's 'Liebeslied,' her eyes dancing,
her whole light form thrilling with the joy of it; and then with a
sudden revulsion she stopped playing, and threw herself down listlessly
by the open window. Close by against the wall was a little
looking-glass, by which she often arranged her ruffled locks; she
glanced at it now, it showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping
lips, and eyes darkened with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen.
'It is come to a pretty pass,' she said to herself, 'that I should be
able to think of nothing but schemes for getting Catherine married and
out of my way! Considering what she is and what I am, and how she has
slaved for us all her life, I seem to have descended pretty low. Heigh
ho!'
And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her hand. She was
half acting, acting to herself. Life was not really quite unbearable,
and she knew it. But it relieved her to overdo it.
'I wonder how much chance there is,' she mused presently. 'Mr. Elsmere
will soon be ridiculous. Why, _I_ saw him gather up those violets she
threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don't believe she
has realised the situation a bit. At least, if she has, she is as unlike
other mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does----'
She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie
jumped up on the window-sill, with her usual stealthy _aplomb_, and
rubbed herself against the girl's face.
'Oh, Chattie!' cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, 'if
Catherine 'll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be happy ever
afterwards, and set me free to live my own life a bit, I'll be so good,
you won't know me, Chattie. And you shall have a new collar, my beauty,
and cream till you die of it!'
And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a scarlet anemone
from a bunch on the table, stood opposite Chattie, who stood slowly
waving her magnificent tail from side to side, and glaring as though it
were not at all to her taste to be hustled and bustled in this way.
'Now, Chattie, listen! Will she?'
A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie's nose.
'Won't she? Will she? Won't she? Will---- Tiresome flower, why did
Nature give it such a beggarly few petals? If I'd had a daisy it would
have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz; and let's forget this wicked
world!'
And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss waltz,
dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her pretty feet
twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks blazed with a double
intoxication--the intoxication of movement, and the intoxication of
sound--the cat meanwhile following her with little mincing perplexed
steps, as though not knowing what to make of her.
'Rose, you madcap!' cried Agnes, opening the door.
'Not at all, my dear,' said Rose calmly, stopping to take breath.
'Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and
see!'
The weather held up in a gray grudging sort of way, and Mrs. Thornburgh
especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with the
expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be
driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others would
be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be
happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in
it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage 'man' in a most
delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not
confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had
given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his
secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the
neighbourhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest
chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue
could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing
that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might
be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and
playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so
worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh's state is easier imagined than
described.
The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together.
Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the
way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so it did not disquiet
him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a
lovely gaiety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the
others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the
towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.
And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised
to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on
a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice
this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she
held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even _she_ had
been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of
a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for
the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale,
and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And
then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression,
blown away by the winds,--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly
presence, a keen responsive eye?
Elsmere, indeed, was gaiety itself. He kept up an incessant war with
Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar's expense,
which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way;
he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form,
and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the
girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted
himself on Whindale.
'How fine all this black purple is!' he cried, as they topped the ridge,
and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by
line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in
the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. 'I had grown quite
tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.'
'Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?' said Catherine, with a little
mocking wonder. 'How wanton, how prodigal!'
'Does it deserve a Nemesis?' he said, laughing. 'Drowning from now till
I depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On
this enchanted soil all things are welcome!'
She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute to
the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his
stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a
little way off laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange
new pulse leapt up in Catherine.
'The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 'I think we
ought to be going on.'
And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till
they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have
tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and
Mrs. Thornburgh's gray curls shaking at the window.
'William!' she shouted, 'bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr.
Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the
visitors' book!'
While the girls went in Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the
bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The
low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right,
the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its
greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his
left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a
little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great
slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighbourhood,
and a tiny towered church--the scene on the Sabbath of Mr. Mayhew's
ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind
the inn masses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into
a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing.
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general, the
colour was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and
purple background. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily,
trying to fix it there for ever.
Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread
in a light upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of
the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors' book. The scrambling,
chattering meal passed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs.
Thornburgh's small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face,
as though to say, 'What--_no_ news yet? Nothing happened?' As for
Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest
moments of existence, he remembered little afterwards but the scene: the
peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer
season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a
stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose's golden head and heavy amber
necklace, and the figure at the vicar's right, in a gown of a little
dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.
When tea was over they lounged out on the bridge. There was to be no
long lingering, however. The clouds were deepening, the rain could not
be far off. But if they started soon they could probably reach home
before it came down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet,
mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down
through a fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into
the clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one elbow,
and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and Catherine were
standing in front of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful
light slipping between two great rain-clouds.
'How well that hat and dress become your sister!' he said, the words
breaking, as it were, from his lips.
'Do you think Catherine pretty?' said Rose with an excellent pretence of
innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it harmlessly at a
water-wagtail balancing on a stone below.
He flushed. 'Pretty! You might as well apply the word to your mountains,
to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak!'
'Yes,' thought Rose, 'she is not unlike that high cold peak!' But her
girlish sympathy conquered her; it was very exciting, and she liked
Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face overspread with a quite
irrepressible smile. He reddened still more, then they stared into each
other's eyes, and without a word more understood each other perfectly.
Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque _bon camarade_
gesture. He pressed it warmly in his.
'That was nice of you!' he cried. 'Very nice of you! Friends then?'
She nodded, and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the vicar disturbed
them.
Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony carriage,
watching Mrs. Thornburgh's preparations.
'You're sure you don't mind driving home alone?' she said in a troubled
voice. 'Mayn't I go with you?'
'My dear, certainly not! As if I wasn't accustomed to going about alone
at my time of life! No, no, my dear, you go and have your walk; you'll
get home before the rain. Ready, James.'
The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his charge so
anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out of his hand and gave a
flick to the pony, who swerved and started off in a way which would have
made his mistress clamorously nervous under any other circumstances.
Catherine stood looking after her.
'Now, then, right about face and quick march!' exclaimed the vicar.
'We've got to race that cloud over the Pike. It'll be up with us in no
time.'
Off they started, and were soon climbing the slippery green slopes, or
crushing through the fern of the fell they had descended earlier in the
afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the
vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over
its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very
close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.
'You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully
into his pocket-book; 'but it is worth while to be crushed by any one
who can give so much ground for their knowledge. How you do know your
mountains--from their peasants to their plants!'
'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among
them,' she said, smiling.
'Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?'
'Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the
winter. And our winter is often not as hard as yours down south.'
'Do you go on with that night-school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?' he
said, with another note in his voice.
Catherine looked at him and coloured. 'Rose has been telling tales,' she
said. 'I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the
family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always
take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the
ground, and Bob is always with me; aren't you, Bob?'
And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her,
blinking with a proudly confidential air as though to remind her that
there were a good many such secrets between them.
'I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, the
hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing about you, the
black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream, perhaps,
running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good
angels going with you.'
She flushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her
strangely.
'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and
very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elsmere; the
rain has beaten us!'
He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out
in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side
gleamed green and vivid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging
out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in
the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness;
children with their petticoats over their heads ran homewards along the
road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading
broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it
came, and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was
beating in their faces.
'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help
you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'
He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackintosh. The vicar
in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair,
then hurried after the others, evidently with the view of performing
for them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.
Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless
silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides.
He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form and his big
umbrella as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of
the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over
which the rain streams were running, that his heart filled with the
shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder
and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that
face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and
the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their
valley life?
Suddenly he heard an exclamation, and saw her run on in front of him.
What was the matter? Then he noticed for the first time that Rose, far
ahead, was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain
had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was Catherine
stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's
determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before
she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by some shaft
from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it.
'Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?'
'Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said briefly. 'She has a very thin
dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.'
'You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once.
She laughed in his face.
'As if I should do anything of the sort!'
'You must,' he said, quietly stripping it off. 'Do you think that you
are always to be allowed to go through the world taking thought of other
people and allowing no one to take thought for you?'
He held it out to her.
'No, no! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong yet. And I have
often told you that nothing hurts me.'
He hung it deliberately over his arm. 'Very well, then, there it stays!'
And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the point of
laughter.
'Mr. Elsmere, be sensible!' she said presently, her look changing to one
of real distress. 'I should never forgive myself if you got a chill
after your illness!'
'You will not be called upon,' he said in the most matter-of-fact tone.
'Men's coats are made to keep out weather,' and he pointed to his own,
closely buttoned up. 'Your dress--I can't help being disrespectful under
the circumstances--will be wet through in ten minutes.'
Another silence. Then he overtook her.
'Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her.
There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain splashed on
the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest,
most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he
joined.
'Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!'
But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man,
as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth's 'Louisa,'
and the poet's cry of longing.
And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration
he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something--what was
it?--drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of
her mingled with his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon.
They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side of the pass.
To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten
and dark, the river issuing from the heart of it like an angry voice.
'What a change!' he said, coming up with her as the path widened. 'How
impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was
lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises,
watching the white butterflies on the turf, and reading "Laodamia"!'
'"Laodamia"!' she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 'Is it one
of those you like best?'
'Yes,' he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the
umbrella. 'How superb it is--the roll, the majesty of it; the severe
chastened beauty of the main feeling, the individual lines!'
And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.
'It was my father's favourite of all,' she said, in the low vibrating
voice of memory. 'He said the last verse to me the day before he died.'
Robert recalled it--
'Yet tears to human suffering are due,
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone
As fondly we believe.'
Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?
'Was he happy in his school life?' he asked gently. 'Was teaching what
he liked?'
'Oh yes--only--' Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though
drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never
knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always
believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was
always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest,
purest, most devoted----'
She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was
startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the
few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her
father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the
child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now
after this lapse of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous,
despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had
gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by religion?--was that
the sting?
'Oh, I can understand!' he said reverently--'I can understand. I have
come across it once or twice, that fierce self-judgment of the good. It
is the most stirring and humbling thing in life.' Then his voice
dropped. 'And after the last conflict--the last "quailing breath"--the
last onslaughts of doubt or fear--think of the Vision waiting--the
Eternal Comfort--
'"Oh, my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night!"'
The words fell from the softened voice like noble music.
There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eyes to his. They swam in
tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were radiance itself. It
seemed to him as though she came closer to him like a child to an elder
who has soothed and satisfied an inward smart.
They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the swollen river
which roared below them. On the opposite bank two umbrellas were
vanishing through the field gate into the road, but the vicar had turned
and was waiting for them. They could see his becloaked figure leaning on
his stick through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the
tumbling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds
seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the valley.
The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first and held out
his hand to her. When they started she would have refused his help with
scorn. Now, after a moment's hesitation she yielded, and he felt her
dear weight on him as he guided her carefully from stone to stone. In
reality it is both difficult and risky to be helped over
stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way
through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her
lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone
to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in
his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his;
and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that
delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown
water, was never seen in Westmoreland wilds before.
'It is clearing,' he cried, with ready optimism, as they reached the
bank. 'We shall get our picnic to-morrow after all--we _must_ get it!
Promise me it shall be fine--and you will be there!'
The vicar was only fifty yards away waiting for them against the field
gate. But Robert held her eagerly, imperiously,--and it seemed to her,
her head was still dizzy with the water.
'Promise!' he repeated, his voice dropping.
She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising for
Westmoreland weather. She could only say faintly 'Yes!' and so release
her hand.
'You _are_ pretty wet!' said the vicar, looking from one to the other
with a curiosity which Robert's quick sense divined at once was directed
to something else than the mere condition of their garments. But
Catherine noticed nothing; she walked on wrestling blindly with she knew
not what till they reached the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs.
Thornburgh, the light drizzle into which the rain had declined beating
unheeded on her curls and ample shoulders. She stared at Robert's
drenched condition, but he gave her no time to make remarks.
'Don't take it off,' he said with a laughing wave of the hand to
Catherine; 'I will come for it to-morrow morning.'
And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be prudent to
get himself into something less spongelike than his present attire as
quickly as possible.
The vicar followed him.
'Don't keep Catherine, my dear. There's nothing to tell. Nobody's the
worse.'
Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate she went through it
on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both her hands on Catherine's
shoulders, and looked her straight in the eyes. The vicar's anxious hint
was useless. She could contain herself no longer. She had watched them
from the vicarage come down the fell together, had seen them cross the
stepping stones, lingeringly, hand in hand.
'My dear Catherine!' she cried, effusively kissing Catherine's glowing
cheek under the shelter of the laurustinus that made a bower of the
gate. 'My _dear_ Catherine!'
Catherine gazed at her in astonishment. Mrs. Thornburgh's eyes were all
alive, and swarming with questions. If it had been Rose she would have
let them out in one fell flight. But Catherine's personality kept her in
awe. And after a second, as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on
Catherine's face, and an expression of half-frightened apology dawned in
Mrs. Thornburgh's.
Catherine drew herself away. 'Will you please give Mr. Elsmere his
mackintosh?' she said, taking it off; 'I shan't want it this little
way.'
And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh's arm she turned away, walking quickly
round the bend of the road.
Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved slowly back to the
house in a state of complete collapse.
'I always knew'--she said with a groan--'I always knew it would never go
right if it was Catherine! _Why_ was it Catherine?'
And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vindictive query.
Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush leaving a sudden
pallor behind it, was twisting her hands before her in a kind of agony.
'What have I been doing?' she said to herself. 'What have I been doing?'
At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She saw the girls in
their own room--Agnes was standing behind, Rose had evidently rushed
forward to see Catherine come in, and now retreated as suddenly when she
saw her sister look up.
Catherine understood it all in an instant. 'They, too, are on the
watch,' she thought to herself bitterly. The strong reticent nature was
outraged by the perception that she had been for days the unconscious
actor in a drama of which her sisters and Mrs. Thornburgh had been the
silent and intelligent spectators.
She came down presently from her room very white and quiet, admitted
that she was tired, and said nothing to anybody. Agnes and Rose noticed
the change at once, whispered to each other when they found an
opportunity, and foreboded ill.
After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out of the
little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the house leading on
to the fell. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung low and
threatening, and the close air was saturated with moisture. As she
gained the bare fell, sounds of water met her on all sides. The river
cried hoarsely to her from below, the becks in the little ghylls were
full and thunderous; and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a
new-born rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to vanish with
the night. Catherine's soul went out to welcome the gray damp of the
hills. She knew them best in this mood. They were thus most her own.
She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the ridge. Behind
her lay the valley, and on its further side the fells she had crossed in
the afternoon. Before her spread a long green vale, compared to which
Whindale with its white road, its church, and parsonage, and scattered
houses, was the great world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a
single house. As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of human
life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the long June twilight;
the blackish walls ran down and up again, dividing the green hollow with
melancholy uniformity. Here and there was a sheepfold, suggesting the
bleakness of winter nights; and here and there a rough stone barn for
storing fodder. And beyond the vale, eastwards and northwards, Catherine
looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and
storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and inkiest over
the high points of the Ullswater mountains.
When she was once below the pass, man and his world were shut out. The
girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was absolutely alone. She
descended till she reached a point where a little stream had been turned
into a stone trough for cattle. Above it stood a gnarled and solitary
thorn. Catherine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was a
seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father; she had
thought and prayed there as girl and woman; she had wrestled there often
with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual temptations
which were all her pure youth had known, till the inner light had dawned
again, and the humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the
shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and the clouds, the
white stoles and 'sleeping wings' of ministering spirits.
But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with what fierce
suddenness had it come upon her! She looked back over the day with
bewilderment. She could see dimly that the Catherine who had started on
that Shanmoor walk had been full of vague misgivings other than those
concerned with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense
of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the
way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and Robert Elsmere
apart.
And then; beyond the departure from Shanmoor she seemed to lose the
thread of her own history. Memory was drowned in a feeling to which the
resisting soul as yet would give no name. She laid her head on her knees
trembling. She heard again the sweet imperious tones with which he broke
down her opposition about the cloak; she felt again the grasp of his
steadying hand on hers.
But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted thus. She raised
her head again, scourging herself in shame and self-reproach,
recapturing the empire of the soul with a strong effort. She set herself
to a stern analysis of the whole situation. Clearly Mrs. Thornburgh and
her sisters had been aware for some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had
been showing a peculiar interest in her. _Their_ eyes had been open. She
realised now with hot cheeks how many meetings and _tete-a-tetes_ had
been managed for her and Elsmere, and how complacently she had fallen
into Mrs. Thornburgh's snares.
'Have I encouraged him?' she asked herself sternly.
'Yes,' cried the smarting conscience.
'Can I marry him?'
'No,' said conscience again; 'not without deserting your post, not
without betraying your trust.'
What post? What trust? Ah, conscience was ready enough with the answer.
Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of sixteen, prematurely old
and thoughtful, she had sat beside her father's deathbed, while her
delicate hysterical mother, in a state of utter collapse, was kept away
from him by the doctors? She could see the drawn face, the restless
melancholy eyes. 'Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They
will look to you. Support them.' And she could see in imagination her
own young face pressed against the pillows. 'Yes, father,
always--always!'--'Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower
than ever. I die'--and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn
breath by which the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about
many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others.
Bring them safe to the day of account.'--'Yes, father, with God's help.
Oh, with God's help!'
That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were
spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks
back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long
dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her
relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the
spirit of her father's life and beliefs.
Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that
her work is done, her promise kept?
Oh, no--no! she cries to herself with vehemence. Her mother depends on
her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are
at the opening of life,--Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all
experience to come. And Rose---- Ah! at the thought of Rose, Catherine's
heart sinks deeper and deeper--she feels a culprit before her father's
memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of
the child? Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and
here is Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father's
wishes, from the galling pressure of the family tradition!
No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical,
moment. How can she leave it? Impossible.
What claim can she put against these supreme claims--of her promise, her
mother's and sisters' need?
_His_ claim? Oh, no--no! She admits with soreness and humiliation
unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened
the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the
inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of
her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But
it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest
school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights
of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them. Catherine Leyburn
knew of no supreme right but the right of God to the obedience of man.
Oh, and besides--besides--it is impossible that he should care so very
much. The time is so short--there is so little in her, comparatively, to
attract a man of such resource, such attainments, such access to the
best things of life.
She cannot--in a kind of terror--she _will_ not, believe in her own
love-worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting wound.
Then her _own_ claim? Has she any claim, has the poor bounding heart
that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this strenuous
debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?
She locks her hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the
worst struggle is _here_, the quickest agony _here_. But she does not
waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of
her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal
craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.
'_Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth
from all earthly comfort._'
'_If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of all
created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with
greater abundance of grace._'
'_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is
withdrawn from thee._'
'_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy
Creator...._'
She presses the sentence she has so often meditated in her long solitary
walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of George
Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally--
'Thy Saviour sentenced joy!'
Ay, sentenced it for ever--the personal craving, the selfish need, that
must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night
Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her
young new-born joy at the feet of the Master.
She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of
bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity.
Then there was a curious little epilogue.
'It is all over,' she said to herself tenderly. 'But he has taught me so
much--he has been so good to me--he is so good! Let me take to my heart
some counsel--some word of his, and obey it sacredly--silently--for
these days' sake.'
Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose.
How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling
it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he with
his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on
the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? 'I have tried to
stifle her passion,' she thought, 'to push it out of the way as a
hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step
in the ladder--to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh,
let me take his word for it--be ruled by him in this one thing, once!'
She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had
thrown herself at Elsmere's feet, that her cheek was pressed against
that young brown hand of his. How long the moment lasted she never knew.
When at last she rose stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the
lingering northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on the
moors; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly
white; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted valley and the
scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the
dale; they moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied them a
troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who
were bearing it away to burial.
As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale side of the fell
a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had talked to her only that
morning of Rose and Rose's desire, and she had received the news with
her habitual silence.
The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had gone upstairs.
Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn discovered that she looked
worn out, and she was sent off to bed. She went along the passage
quickly to Rose's room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was
inside, crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and
went in.
Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing-gown over her
shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all about her. She was
swaying backwards and forwards dreamily singing, and she started up when
she saw Catherine.
'Roeschen,' said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor of
heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden hair and the
half-covered shoulders, 'you never told me of that letter from
Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, Roeschen, I would never let you
have your way? Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong--I think I
have been wrong; you shall do what you will, Roeschen. If you want to go,
I will ask mother.'
Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. She was struck
dumb by this sudden breaking down of Catherine's long resistance. And
what a strange white Catherine! What did it mean? Catherine withdrew her
arms with a little sigh and moved away.
'I just came to tell you that, Roeschen,' she said, 'but I am very tired
and must not stay.'
Catherine 'very tired'! Rose thought the skies must be falling.
'Cathie!' she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained the door.
'Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty, odious little wretch.
But oh, tell me, what is the matter?'
And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate
strength.
The elder sister struggled to release herself.
'Let me go, Rose,' she said in a low voice. 'Oh, you _must_ let me go!'
And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes as though
trying to drive away the mist from them.
'Good-night! Sleep well.'
And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. Rose stood
staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a flood of many
feelings--remorse, love, fear, sympathy--threw herself face downwards on
her bed and burst into a passion of tears.