About four o’clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked
in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh’s ‘high tea,’
that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her spectacles on her nose,
a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper
on her lap. The neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an
intermittent pretence of reading; but in reality the energies of her
house-wifely mind were taken up with quite other things. The vicar’s
wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest. All
her _solid_ preparations for the evening were over, and in her own mind
she decided that with them there was no possible fault to be found.
The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish
and fastidious, breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no
plumper chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were
to be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And so
with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the hostess
felt no anxieties.
But a ‘tea’ in the north-country depends for distinction, not on its
solids or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural hostess earns her
reputation, not by a discriminating eye for butcher’s-meat, but by her
inventiveness in cakes and custards. And it was just here, with regard
to this ‘bubble reputation,’ that the vicar’s wife of Long Whindale was
particularly sensitive. Was she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of
the Rector of Whinborough--odious woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent
on her to do well, nay to do brilliantly, in the eyes of this local
magnate? And how was it possible to do brilliantly in this matter with
a cook whose recipes were hopelessly old-fashioned, and who had an
exasperating belief in the sufficiency of buttered ‘whigs’ and home-made
marmalade for all requirements?
Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. Thornburgh had gone prowling about the
neighboring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain newly
arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with the most airy
and appetizing trifles--of a make and coloring quite metropolitan. She
had flattened her gray curls against the window for one deliberative
moment; had then rushed in; and as soon as the carrier’s cart of Long
Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting, should have arrived,
bearing with it the produce of that adventure, Mrs. Thornburgh would
be a proud woman, prepared to meet a legion of rectors’ wives without
flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects a woman at peace with herself
and the world. In the country, where every household should be
self-contained, a certain discredit attaches in every well-regulated
mind to ‘getting things in.’ Mrs. Thornburgh was also nervous at the
thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually out of the weekly
money. For ‘William’ was to know nothing of the matter, except so far as
a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes
might inform him. But after all, in this as in everything else, one must
suffer to be distinguished.
The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have described,
and Mrs. Thornburgh’s newspaper dropped unheeded to her feet. The
vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new gray-stone
building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what had once been
the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive dwelling
house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after sundry augmentations,
amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. The modern house, though it
only contained sufficient accommodation for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one
guest and two maids, would have seemed palatial to those rustic clerics
of the past from whose ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its
spiritual sustenance in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to
another race--a race sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole
of life in very close contact and very homely intercourse with their
mother earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few
years before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and
who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had
only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what
these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange social status and
unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there were one or two old men
still lingering in the dale who could have told him a great deal about
them, whose memory went back to the days when the relative social
importance of the dale parsons was exactly expressed by the
characteristic Westmoreland saying: ‘Ef ye’ll nobbut send us a gude
schulemeaster, a verra’ moderate parson ‘ull dea!’ and whose slow minds,
therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate sense of difference
as they saw him pass along the road, and recalled the incumbent of their
childhood, dropping in for his ‘crack’ and his glass of ‘yale’ at this
or that farm-house on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his
sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands like any other peasant of
the dale.
Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors of
this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland valleys
have dropped into their quiet, unremembered graves, and new men of other
ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long
Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasized by the
disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone floors,
their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest or dresser, and their
encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in favor of an upgrowth of
new trim mansions designed to meet the needs, not of peasants, but of
gentlefolks.
And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of
transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century has
worried its will even in the remotest corners of the Cambrian country,
and soon not a vestige of the homely worshipping-places of an earlier
day will remain. Across the road, in front of the Long Whindale
parsonage, for instance, rose a freshly built church, also peaked and
gabled, with a spire and two bells and a painted east window, and Heaven
knows what novelties besides. The primitive whitewashed structure it
replaced had lasted long, and in the course of many generations time had
clothed its moss-grown walls, its slated porch, and tombstones worn with
rain in a certain beauty of congruity and association, linking it with
the purple distances of the fells, and the brawling river bending round
the gray enclosure. But finally, after a period of quiet and gradual
decay, the ruin of Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and hurrying
ruin that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the roof
came dropping on the farmers heads, and the oak benches beneath
offered gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully learnt by the
substantial persons who sat on them, lest they should be overtaken by
undignified disaster; when the rain poured in on the Communion Table
and the wind raged through innumerable mortarless chinks, even the
slowly-moving folk of the valley came to the conclusion that ‘summat
‘ull hev to be deun.’ And by the help of the Bishop and Queen Anne’s
Bounty, and what not, aided by just as many half-crowns as the valley
found itself unable to defend against the encroachments of a new and
‘moiderin’ parson, ‘summat’ was done, whereof the results--namely, the
new church, vicarage, and school-house--were now conspicuous.
This radical change, however, had not been the work of Mr. Thornburgh,
but of his predecessor, a much more pushing and enterprising man, whose
successful efforts to improve the church accommodation in Long Whindale
had moved such deep and lasting astonishment in the mind of a somewhat
lethargic bishop, that promotion had been readily found for him. Mr.
Thornburgh was neither capable of the sturdy begging which had raised
the church, nor was he likely on other lines to reach preferment. He and
his wife, who possessed much more salience of character than he, were
accepted in the dale as belonging to the established order of things.
Nobody wished them any harm, and the few people they had specially
befriended, naturally, thought well of them.
But the old intimacy of relation which had once subsisted between the
clergyman of Long Whindale and his parishioners was wholly gone. They
had sunk in the scale; the parson had risen. The old statesmen or
peasant proprietors of the valley had for the most part succumbed to
various destructive influences, some social, some economical, added to a
certain amount of corrosion from within; and their place had been taken
by leaseholders, less drunken perhaps, and better educated, but also
far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in the rude dignity of their
predecessors.
And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place of the
dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and Parsonage had got
themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income raised, had let off
his glebe to a neighboring farmer, kept two maids, and drank claret
when he drank anything. His flock were friendly enough, and paid their
commuted tithes without grumbling. But between them and a perfectly
well-meaning but rather dull man, who stood on his dignity and wore a
black coat all the week, there was no real community. Rejoice in it
as we may, in this final passage of Parson Primrose to social regions
beyond the ken of Farmer Flamborough, there are some elements of loss as
there are in all changes.
Wheels on the road! Mrs. Thornburgh woke up with a start, and stumbling
over newspaper and _couvre-pied_, hurried across the lawn as fast as
her short, squat figure would allow, gray curls and cap-strings flying
behind her. She heard a colloquy in the distance in broad Westmoreland
dialect, and as she turned the corner of the house she nearly ran into
her tall cook, Sarah, whose impassive and saturnine countenance bore
traces of unusual excitement.
‘Missis, there’s naw cakes. They’re all left behind on t’ counter at
Randall’s. Mr. Backhouse says as how he told old Jim to go fur ‘em, and
he niver went, and Mr. Backbouse he niver found oot till he’d got past
t’ bridge, and than it wur too late to go back.’
Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh pink
color slowly deserting her face as she realized the enormity of the
catastrophe. And was it possible that there was the faintest twinkle of
grim satisfaction on the face of that elderly minx, Sarah?
Mrs. Thornburgh, however, did, not stay to explore the recesses of
Sarah’s mind, but ran with little pattering, undignified steps across
the front garden and down the steps to where Mr. Backhouse, the carrier,
stood, bracing himself for self-defense.
‘Ya may weel fret, mum,’ said Mr. Backhouse, interrupting the flood of
her reproaches, with the comparative _sang-froid_ of one who knew that,
after all, he was the only carrier on the road, and that the vicarage
was five miles from the necessaries of life; ‘it’s a bad job, and I’s
not goin’ to say it isn’t. But; ya jest look ‘ere, mum, what’s a man to
du wi’ a daft thingamy like _that_, as caan’t teak a plain order, and
spiles a poor man’s business as caan’t help hissel’?’
And Mr. Backhouse pointed with withering scorn to a small, shrunken
old man, who sat dangling his legs on the shaft of the cart, and
whose countenance wore a singular expression of mingled meekness and
composure, as his partner flourished an indignant finger toward him.
‘Jim,’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh reproachfully, ‘I did think you would have
taken more pains about my order!’
‘Yis, mum,’ said the old man, placidly, ‘ya might ‘a’ thowt it. I’s reet
sorry, but ya caan’t help these things _sum_times--an’ it’s naw gud
hollerin’ ower ‘em like a mad bull. Aa tuke yur bit paper to Randall’s
and aa laft it wi’ ‘em to mek up, an’ than, aa weel, aa went to a frind,
an’ ee _may_ hev giv’ me a glass of yale, aa doon’t say ee _dud_--but ee
may, I ween’t sweer. Hawsomiver, aa niver thowt naw mair aboot it, nor
mair did John, so _ee_ needn’t taak--till we wur jest two mile from
‘ere. An’ ee’s a gon’ on sence! My! an’ a larroping the poor beast like
onything.’
Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this audacious recital.
As for John, he looked on, surveying his brother’s philosophical
demeanor at first with speechless wrath, and then with an inscrutable
mixture of expressions, in which, however, any one accustomed to his
weather-beaten countenance would have probably read a hidden admiration.
‘Weel, aa niver!’ he exclaimed, when Jim’s explanatory remarks had
come to an end, swinging himself up on to his seat and gathering up the
reins. ‘Yur a boald ‘un to tell the missus theer to hur feeace as how
ya wur’ tossicatit whan yur owt ta been duing yur larful business. Aa’ve
doon wi’ yer. Aa aims to please ma coostomers, an’ aa caan’t abide sek
wark. Yur like an oald kneyfe, I can mak’ nowt o’ ya’, nowder back nor
edge.’
Mrs. Thornburgh wrung her fat short hands in despair, making little
incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him about to depart, of
which John at last gathered the main purport to be that she wished him
to go back to Whinborough for her precious parcel.
He shook his head compassionately over the preposterous state of mind
betrayed by such a demand, and with a fresh burst of abuse of his
brother, and an assurance to the vicar’s wife that he meant to ‘gie that
oald man nawtice when he got haum; he wasn’t goan to hev his bisness
spiled for nowt by an oald ijiot wi’ a hed as full o’ yale as a
hayrick’s full o’ mice,’ he raised his whip and the clattering vehicle
moved forward; Jim meanwhile preserving through all his brother’s wrath
and Mrs. Thornburgh’s wailings the same mild and even countenance, the
meditative and friendly aspect of the philosopher letting the world go
‘as e’en it will.’
So Mrs. Thornburgh was left gasping, watching the progress of the
lumbering cart along the bit of road leading to the hamlet at the head
of the valley, with so limp and crestfallen an aspect that even the
gaunt and secretly jubilant Sarah was moved to pity.
‘Why, missis, we’ll do very well. I’ll hev some scones in t’oven in naw
time, an’ theer’s finger biscuits, an’ wi’ buttered toast an’ sum
o’ t’best jams, if they don’t hev enuf to eat they ought to.’ Then,
dropping her voice, she asked with a hurried change of tone, ‘Did ye ask
un’ hoo his daater is?’
Mrs. Thornburgh started. Her pastoral conscience was smitten. She opened
the gate and waved violently after the cart. John pulled his horse
up, and with a few quick steps she brought herself within speaking, or
rather shouting, distance.
‘How’s your daughter to-day, John?’
The old man’s face peering round the oilcloth hood of the cart was
darkened by a sudden cloud as he caught the words. His stern lips
closed. He muttered something inaudible to Mrs. Thornburgh and whipped
up his horse again. The cart started off, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left
staring into the receding eyes of ‘Jim the Noodle,’ who, from his
seat on the near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had passed from
benevolence into a preternatural solemnity.
‘He’s sparin’ ov ‘is speach, is John Backhouse,’ said Sarah grimly,
as her mistress returned to her. ‘Maybe ee’s aboot reet. It’s a bad
business au’ ee’ll not mend it wi’ taakin.’
Mrs. Thornburgh, however, could not apply herself to the case of Mary
Backhouse. At any other moment it would have excited in her breast
the shuddering interest, which, owing to certain peculiar attendant
circumstances, it, awakened in every other woman in Long Whindale. But
her mind--such are the limitations of even clergymen’s wives--was now
absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings seemed to hang limp
with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly into the kitchen,
and gave what attention she could to, those second-best arrangements so
depressing to the idealist temper.
Poor soul! All the charm and glitter of her little social adventure was
gone. When she once more emerged upon the lawn, and languidly readjusted
her spectacles, she was weighed down by the thought that in two hours
Mrs. Seaton would be upon her. Nothing of this kind ever happened to
Mrs. Seaton. The universe obeyed her nod. No carrier conveying goods to
her august door ever got drunk or failed to deliver his consignment. The
thing was inconceivable. Mrs. Thornburgh was well aware of it.
Should William be informed? Mrs. Thornburgh had a rooted belief in the
brutality of husbands in all domestic crises, and would have preferred
not to inform him. But she had also a dismal certainty that the
secret would burn a hole in her till it was confessed--bill and all.
Besides--frightful thought!--would they have to eat up all those
_meringues_ next day?
Her reflections at last became so depressing that, with a natural
epicurean instinct, she tried violently to turn her mind away from them.
Luckily she was assisted by a sudden perception of the roof and chimneys
of Burwood, the Leyburns’ house, peeping above the trees to the left. At
sight of them a smile overspread her plump and gently wrinkled face. She
fell gradually into a train of thought, as feminine as that in which she
had been just indulging, but infinitely more pleasing.
For, with regard to the Leyburns, at this present moment Mrs. Thornburgh
felt herself in the great position of tutelary divinity or guardian
angel. At least if divinities and guardian angels do not concern
themselves with the questions to which Mrs. Thornburgh’s mind was now
addressed, it would clearly have been the opinion of the vicar’s wife
that they ought to do so.
‘Who else is there to look after these girls, I should like to know,’
Mrs. Thornburgh inquired of herself, ‘if I don’t do it? As if girls
married themselves! People may talk of their independence nowadays
as much as they like--it always has to be done for them, one way or
another. Mrs. Leyburn, poor lackadaisical thing! is no good whatever.
No more is Catherine. They both behave as if husbands tumbled into your
mouth for the asking. Catherine’s too good for this world--but if she
doesn’t do it, I must. Why, that girl Rose is a beauty--if they didn’t
let her wear those ridiculous mustard-colored things, and do her hair
fit to frighten the crows! Agnes too--so ladylike and well mannered;
she’d do credit to any man. Well, we shall see, we shall see!’
And Mrs. Thornburgh gently shook her gray curls from side to side,
while, her eyes, fixed on the open spare room window, shone with
meaning.
‘So eligible, too--private means, no encumbrances, and as good as gold.’
She sat lost a moment in a pleasing dream.
‘Shall I bring oot the tea to you theer, mum?’ called Sarah gruffly,
from the garden door. ‘Master and Mr. Elsmere are just coomin’ down t’
field by t’ stepping-stones.’ Mrs. Thornburgh signalled assent and
the tea-table was brought. Afternoon tea was by no means a regular
institution at the vicarage of Long Whindale, and Sarah never supplied
it without signs of protest. But when a guest was in the house Mrs.
Thornburgh insisted upon it; her obstinacy in the matter, like her
dreams of cakes and confections, being part of her determination to move
with the times, in spite the station to which Providence had assigned
her.
A minute afterward the vicar, a thick-set gray-haired man of sixty,
accompanied by a tall younger man in clerical dress, emerged upon the
lawn.
‘Welcome sight!’ cried Mr. Thornburgh; ‘Robert and I have been coveting
that tea for the last hour. You guessed very well, Emma, to have it just
ready for us.’
‘Oh, that was Sarah. She saw you coming down to the stepping-stones,’
replied his wife, pleased, however, by any talk of appreciation from her
mankind, however small. ‘Robert, I hope you haven’t been walked off your
legs?’
‘What, in this air, cousin Emma? I could walk from sunrise to sundown.
Let no one call me an invalid any more. Henceforth I am a Hercules.’
And he threw himself on the rug which Mrs. Thornburgh’s motherly
providence had spread on the grass for him, with a smile and a look of
supreme physical contentment, which did indeed almost efface the signs
of recent illness in the ruddy boyish face.
Mrs. Thornburgh studied him; her eye caught first of all by the stubble
of reddish hair which as he shook off his hat stood up straight and
stiff all over his head with an odd wildness and aggressiveness. She
involuntarily thought, basing her inward comment on a complexity of
reasons--‘Dear me, what a pity; it spoils his appearance!’
‘I apologize, I apologize, cousin Emma, once for all,’ said the
young, man, surprising her glance, and despairingly smoothing down his
recalcitrant locks. ‘Let us hope that mountain air will quicken the pace
of it before it is necessary for me to present a dignified appearance at
‘Murewell.’
He looked up at her with a merry flash in his gray eyes, and her old
face brightened visibly as she realized afresh that in spite of the
grotesqueness of his cropped hair, her guest was a most attractive
creature. Not that he could boast much in the way of regular good looks:
the mouth was large, the nose of no particular outline, and in general
the cutting of the face, though strong and characteristic, had a
bluntness and _naïveté_ like a vigorous unfinished sketch. This
bluntness of line, however, was balanced by a great delicacy of
tint--the pink and white complexion of a girl, indeed--enhanced by the
bright reddish hair, and quick gray eyes.
The figure was also a little out of drawing, so to speak; it was tall
and loosely-jointed. The general impression was one of agility and
power. But if you looked closer you saw that the shoulders were narrow,
the arms inordinately long, and the extremities too small for the
general height. Robert Elsmere’s hand was the hand of a woman, and few
people ever exchanged a first greeting with its very tall owner without
a little shock of surprise.
Mr. Thornburgh and his guest had visited a few houses in the course
of their walk, and the vicar plunged for a minute or two into some
conversation about local matters with his wife. But Mrs. Thornburgh,
it was soon evident; was giving him but a scatterbrained attention. Her
secret was working in her ample breast. Very soon she could contain it
no longer, and breaking in upon her husband’s parish news, she tumbled
it all out pell-mell with a mixture of discomfiture and defiance
infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, but she also could
not bear to give William an advantage.
William certainly took his advantage. He did what his wife in her
irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. He first stared,
then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as soon as he had recovered
breath, into a series of unfeeling comments which drove Mrs. Thornburgh
to desperation.
‘If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain folks can do
perfectly well without’--et cetera, et cetera--the husband’s point of
view can be imagined. Mrs. Thornburgh could have shaken her good man,
especially as there was nothing new to her in his remarks; she had known
to a T beforehand exactly what he would say. She took up her knitting
in a great hurry, the needles clicking angrily, her gray curls quivering
under the energy of her hands and arms, while she launched at her
husband various retorts as to his lack of consideration for her efforts
and her inconvenience, which were only very slightly modified by the
presence of a stranger.
Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face discreetly turned
away, an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of his mouth.
Everything was fresh and piquant up here in this remote corner of the
north country, whether the mountain air or the windblown streams, or the
manners and customs of the inhabitants. His cousin’s wife, in spite of
her ambitious conventionalities, was really the child of Nature to a
refreshing degree. One does not see these types, he said to himself,
in the cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. She was like a bit of
a bygone world--Miss Austen’s or Miss Ferrier’s--unearthed for his
amusement. He could not for the life of him help taking the scenes of
this remote rural existence, which was quite new to him, as though they
were the scenes of some comedy of manners.
Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the passage of arms
between himself and his spouse was becoming just a little indecorous.
He got up with a ‘hem!’ intended to put an end to it, and deposited his
cup.
‘Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of your
determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn’t you just ask the
Leyburns and let us enjoy ourselves?’
With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little maid whom
Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the evening’s
festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper basket. His wife
looked after him with eyes that spoke unutterable things.
‘You would never think,’ she said in an agitated voice to Young Elsmere,
‘that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to every invitation, that
he entirely agreed with me that one _must_ be civil to Mrs. Seaton,
considering that she can make anybody’s life a burden to them about here
that isn’t; but it’s no use.’
And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her face full
of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere restrained a
strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead to distract and
console her. He expressed sympathy with her difficulties, he talked
to her about her party, he got from her the names and histories of the
guests. How Miss Austenish it sounded; the managing rector’s wife, her
still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighboring clergyman
who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just
out--‘Very pretty’ sighed ‘Mrs. Thornburgh, who was now depressed all
round, ‘but all flounces and frills and nothing to say’--and last of
all those three sisters, the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different
level, and whom he had heard mentioned so often since his arrival by
both husband and wife.
‘Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,’ he said presently. ‘You and cousin
William seem to have a great affection for them. Do they live near?’
‘Oh, quite close,’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh brightening at last, and like
a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the more ardently to
take up another. ‘There is the house,’ and she pointed out Burwood among
its trees. Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon him she fell into a
more or less incoherent account of her favorites. She laid on hot colors
thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.
‘A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!’ he said
laughing. ‘What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a widow and
three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement surely, though
you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in England.’
‘Oh, as to lovely valleys,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, ‘I think it
very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a
carrier that gets drunk, too! Why you know they belong here. They’re
real Westmoreland people.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the common farmers
about. Only his land was his own and theirs isn’t.’
‘He was one of the last of the statesmen,’ interposed Mr.
Thornburgh--who, having rescued his sermon from Jane’s tender mercies,
and put out his modest claret and sherry for the evening, had strolled
out again and found himself impelled as usual to put some precision into
his wife’s statements--‘one of the small freeholders who have almost
disappeared here as elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns always seems to
me typical of many things.’
Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first picked
up his wife’s ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was loftily
accepted--launched into a narrative which way be here somewhat
condensed.
The Leyburns’ grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was
the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. ‘The people about here’
said the vicar, ‘say he drank away an acre a year. He had some fifty
acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.’
Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons and
daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters, were brutal
and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead, it was reported
that, having on one occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm
man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife
whom he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden
shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his gray hair
streaming with blood; after which she had calmly put the horse into the
cart, and driven off to fetch the doctor to both her parents. But among
this grim and earthy crew, there was one exception, a ‘hop out of kin,’
of whom all the rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard,
who showed such a persistent tendency to ‘book-larnin’, ‘and such a
persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing
was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the
grammar school at Whinborough. From the moment the boy got a footing
in the school he hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local
bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or
failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which
carried him triumphantly to Queen’s College.
His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary
to pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not have
dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and
drink.
From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class
list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the
same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen’s, his
ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country
grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till,
in the very last year of his father’s life, the eldest son, who had
a shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest applied to
‘Dick’ for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The
money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick’s wife and
children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were
a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one
of themselves.
‘Then came the old man’s death,’ said Mr. Thornburgh. ‘It happened the
year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I
never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. It was kept
up in the old style. Three of Leyburn’s sons were there: two of them
farmers like himself, one a clerk, from Manchester, a daughter married
to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under
the table before supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn wrote
to ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But I was new to the
place,’ said the vicar, flushing a little, ‘and they belonged to a race
that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man
among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he
had all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of
someone that “had lost somethin’ when he was nobbut a lad, and had
gone seekin’ it iver sence.” He was formidable to me; but between us we
couldn’t keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had
gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an
August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in.
“I haven’t breathed this air for five-and-twenty years;” he said. “I
thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there,
it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel after all that I have the
fells in my blood.” He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy
creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish
ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.’
‘Yet one would think,’ said Robert, opening his eyes, ‘that he had made
a very considerable success of it!’
‘Well, I don’t know how it was,’ said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. ‘Anyhow, next day he went peering about
the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And
George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him
without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last
offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it
was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn’t bargain. “I shall bring my wife
and children here in the holidays,” he said, “and the money will
set George up in California.” So he paid through the nose, and got
possession of the old house, in which I should think he had passed
about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There’s no
accounting for tastes.’
‘And then the next summer they all came down,’ interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud
to. ‘Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her
everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain
too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don’t care
what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the
blues to look at.’
‘It was so strange,’ said the vicar meditatively, ‘to see them in that
house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days--the
savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately
brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where old Leyburn
used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a
white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had belabored
him when he was a boy at the village school--it was queer.’
‘A curious little bit of social history,’ said Elsmere. ‘Well, and then
he died and the family lived on?’
‘Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the
most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in
these valleys,’ said the vicar smiling. ‘I don’t count for much,
she counts for a great deal. I can’t get the people to tell me their
secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and
her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they
take it from her when they won’t take it from us. Perhaps it is the
feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of
Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whiskey-drinking stock
should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine
Leyburn.’
The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling.
His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.
‘You always talk,’ she said, ‘as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.’
‘Oh, the other two are very well,’ said the vicar, but in a different
tone.
Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the
young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point
where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye
commanded the whole of upper end of the valley--a bare desolate recess
filled evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and purple
crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell marked the
course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater district.
Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled babbling
river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted imperceptibly
into the browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most of the scene,
except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut out the sun,
was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on the farm-houses, the
heckberry trees along the river and the road, emphasized the golden rays
which were flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green cup.
Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit-trees in blossom;
the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young man from the warmer
south there was still a bracing quality in the soft western breeze which
blew about him.
He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature going out
to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace of the scene. Lines
of Wordsworth were on his lips; the little well-worn volume was in his
pocket, but he did not need to bring it out; and his voice had all a
poet’s intensity of emphasis as he strolled along, reciting under his
breath--
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless; with adoration!
Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Burwood, lying
beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its
protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious
association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one white
life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the idea of her
seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry
and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to see her.