Catherine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out her
resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was
painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without a scene, without a
definite proposal and a definite rejection. It was no use letting things
drift. Something brusque and marked there must be. She quietly made her
dispositions.
It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before
she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless
night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it,
whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her
one supreme moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she
knew in the neighborhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of them,
too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed indeed?
All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride in her own
spiritual strength. ‘It was not mine,’ she would have said with perfect
sincerity, ‘but God’s.’ Still, whatever its source, it had been there at
command, and the reflection carried with it a sad sense of security.
It was as though a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate
himself on being bullet-proof.
To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the thought
that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again probably many times. The period
of his original invitation had been warmly extended by the Thornburghs.
She believed he meant to stay another week or ten days in the valley.
But in the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to
any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped on
her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those of some
old sepulchral monument.
The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the barometer with
abnormal interest. The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining,
and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption
of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to
picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar’s wife.
She was all sighs and flightiness. She ‘supposed they could go,’ and
‘didn’t, see what good it would do them;’ she had twenty different
views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the
best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult
that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household,
and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way. T hen she pursued him
into the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to
convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously, with many sighs, her
cap much askew. Robert could, have kissed her, curls and all, one moment
for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her
committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an
extraordinary person it was!
Off he went, however, with his _Spectator_ under his arm, whistling.
Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open window, and tore the
flannel across she was preparing for a mothers’ meeting, with a noise
like the rattle of musketry. Whistling! She would like to know what
grounds he had for it, indeed! She always knew--she always said--and she
would go on saying--that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid.
Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the lightest heart.
By way of keeping all his anticipations within the bounds of strict
reason, he told himself that it was impossible he should see ‘her’ in
the morning. She was always busy in the morning.
He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a shrine. That was
her window, that upper casement with the little Banksia rose twining
round it. One night, when he and the vicar had been out late on the
hills, he had seen a light streaming from it across the valley, and
had thought how the mistress of the maiden solitude within shone ‘in a
naughty world.’
In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about the garden.
She at once informed him, with much languid plaintiveness, that
Catherine had gone to Whinborough for the day, and would not be able to
join the picnic.
Elsmere stood still.
‘_Gone!_’ he cried. ‘But it was all arranged with her yesterday!’ Mrs.
Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was evidently much put out.
‘So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere’--and the gentle widow dropped
her voice as though communicating a secret--‘when Catherine’s once made
up her mind, you may as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She
asked me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh--will you please?--that she found
it was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of
business, and she must go.’
‘_Mrs. Thornburqh!_’ And not a word for him, for him to whom she had
given her promise? She had gone to Whinborough to avoid him, and she had
gone in the brusquest way, that it might be unmistakable.
The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his long
coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. Leyburn was making
to him about the picnic. Was the wretched thing to come off after all?
He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But Mrs. Thornburgh
managed that for him. When he got back he told the vicar in the hall of
Miss Leyburn’s flight in the fewest possible words, and then his long
legs vanished up the stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room
shut behind him. A few minutes afterward Mrs. Thornburgh’s shrill voice
was heard in the hall, calling to the servant.
‘Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.’
And a minute after the vicar came up to his door.
‘Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain; better put it
off.’
To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. The vicar
slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to have established
herself for the morning in his sanctum, though the parish accounts were
clamoring to be done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by
immemorial usage.
But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite to him with one
hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him if _he_ knew what was to be
done with young women nowadays, because _she_ didn’t.
The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a subject,
recommended patience, declared that it might all be a mistake, and tried
hard to absorb himself in the consideration of _2s. 8d. plus 2s. 11d.
minus 9d_.
‘And I suppose, William,’ said his wife to hint at last, with withering
sarcasm, ‘that you’d sit by and see Catherine break that young man’s
heart, and send him back to big mother no better than he came here, in
spite of all the beef-tea and jelly Sarah and I have been putting into
him, and never lift a finger; you’d see his life _blasted_ and you’d do
nothing--nothing, I suppose.’
And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye.
‘Of course,’ cried the vicar, roused; ‘I should think so. What good
did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? Take care of
yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn’t care for him, you can’t make her.’
The vicar’s wife rose the upturned corners of her mouth saying
unutterable things.
‘Doesn’t care for him!’ she echoed, in a tone which implied that her
husband’s headpiece was past praying for.
‘Yes, doesn’t care for him!’ said the vicar, nettled. ‘What else should
make her give him a snub like this?’
Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious
expression stole into her eyes.
‘Oh, the Lord only knows!’ she said, with a hasty freedom of speech
which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable, as she shut the
door after her.
However, if the Higher Powers alone knew, Mrs. Thornburgh was convinced
that she could make a very shrewd guess at the causes of Catherine’s
behavior. In her opinion it was all pure ‘cussedness.’ Catherine Leyburn
had always conducted her life on principles entirely different from
those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat
bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make yourself
and other people uncomfortable. ‘Yet this was what this perverse young
woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had fallen
in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact
plain to her in the most chivalrous, devoted ways. Catherine encourages
him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three weeks more gay
and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever been known
to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly
awaiting the natural _dénouement_, goes off to spend the day that
should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan
asylums;--leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look
ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her--none at all.
It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but must
needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and go
into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what to
be at.
Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere
had been talking in the garden, she had been discreetly waiting in the
back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off
she followed him with eager, sympathetic eyes.
‘Poor fellow!’ she said to herself, but this time with the little tone
of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good
looks, never shrinks from assuming toward an elder male, especially a
male in love with someone else. ‘I wonder whether he thinks he knows
anything about Catherine.’
But her own feeling, to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it
had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering
curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white
face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this
brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the
loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere
during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly
absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh
in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither
Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the
Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in
fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better
known to her than anyone else.
‘Oh, of course it’s our salvation in this world and the next that’s
in the way,’ thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the
garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. ‘I wish
to goodness Catherine wouldn’t think so much about mine, at any rate.
I hate,’ added this incorrigible young person, ‘I hate being the third
part of a “moral obstacle” against my will. I declare I don’t believe we
should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a
wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh, dear, I wish she’d let me
do something for her; I wish she’d ask me to black her boots for her,
or put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse
still, and I’d do it and welcome!’
It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. But there
was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, and that was Mrs.
Leyburn’s unconsciousness.
‘Mamma, is too good,’ thought the girl, with a little ripple of
laughter. ‘She takes it as a matter of course that all the world
should admire us, and she’d scorn to believe that anybody did it from
interested motives.’
Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted to her daughters
to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. Of course the most
eligible persons would be only too thankful to marry them when the
moment came. Meanwhile her devotion was in no need of the confirming
testimony of lovers. It was sufficient in itself and kept her mind
gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred to her to
notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special attention to anyone
in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naïveté that it
was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and
consideration, and she was of opinion that ‘poor Richard’s views’ of
the degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen
this particular specimen.
Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, while Agnes
drove with her mother. On the way home she overtook Elsmere returning
from an errand for the vicar.
‘It is not so bad,’ she said to him, laughing, pointing to the sky; ‘we
really might have gone.’
‘Oh, it would have been cheerless,’ he said, simply. His look of
depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sympathy, a wild
wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she could just have shown
him Catherine as she looked last night! Why couldn’t she talk it out
with him? Absurd conventions! She had half a mind to try.
But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her young
half-childish audacity.
‘Catherine will have a good day for all her business,’ she said,
carelessly.
He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge yesterday
she could not stand it--she must give him hint how the land lay.
‘I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. Elsmere, what
do you think of Aunt Ellen?’
Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young girl’s
beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun.
‘A most estimable person,’ he said. ‘Are you on good terms with her,
Miss Rose?’
‘Oh dear, no!’ she said, with a little face. ‘I’m not a Leyburn; I wear
aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has “special leadings of the spirit”
to the effect that the violin is a soul-destroying instrument. Oh,
dear!’--and the girl’s mouth twisted--‘it’s alarming to think, if
Catherine hadn’t been Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might, have
been!’
She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she caught the
sudden change of expression in his face.
‘Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her--one can see that,’ he
said, evidently speaking with some difficulty.
‘Strength! Oh, yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,’ cried Rose, and
then was silent a moment. ‘You know, Mr. Elsmere,’ she went on at last,
obeying some inward impulse--‘or perhaps you don’t know--that at home we
are all Catherine’s creatures. She does exactly what she likes with us.
When my father died she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was eight. We came
here to live--we were not very rich, of course, and mamma wasn’t strong.
Well, she did everything: she taught us--we have scarcely had any
teacher but her since then; she did most of the housekeeping; and you
can see for yourself what she does for the neighbors and poor folk. She
is never ill, she is never idle, she always knows her own mind. We owe
everything we are, almost everything we have, to her. Her nursing has
kept mamma alive through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says he
never knew any business affairs better managed than ours, and Catherine
manages them. The one thing she never takes any care or thought for
is herself. What we should do without her I can’t imagine; and yet
sometimes I think if it goes on much longer none of us three will have
any character of our own left. After all, you know, it may be good for
the weak people to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only
believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong people _needn’t_
be always trampling on themselves--if they only knew----’
She stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. Her eyes
were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under a strange mixture
of feelings--sympathy, reverence, and a passionate inner admiration
struggling with rebellion and protest.
They had reached the gate of the Vicarage. Elsmere stopped and looked at
his companion with a singular lightening of expression. He saw perfectly
that the young impetuous creature understood him, that she felt his
cause was not prospering and that she wanted to help him. He saw that
what she meant by this picture of their common life was, that no one
need expect Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey; that she wanted to
impress on him in her eager way that such lives as her sister’s were
not to be gathered at a touch, without difficulty, from the branch that
bears them. She was exhorting him to courage--nay he caught more than
exhortation--a sort of secret message from her bright, excited looks
and incoherent speech--that made his heart leap. But pride and delicacy
forbade him to put his feelings into words.
‘You don’t hope to persuade me that your sister reckons you among the
weak persons of the world?’ he said, laughing, his hand on the gate.
Rose could have blessed him for thus turning the conversation. What on
earth could she have said next?
She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with Bob.
Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering meditatively over the
cloudy fells. After all he was only where he was before the blessed
madness, the upflooding hope, nay, almost certainty, of yesterday. His
attack had been for the moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose’s manner
that Catherine’s action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning
nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying to
persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be ominous. Well,
then, at worst, when they met they would meet on a different footing,
with a sense of something critical between them. Oh, if he did but know
a little more clearly how he stood! He spent a noonday hour on a gray
rock on the side of the fell, between Whindale and Marrisdale, studying
the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the bit of white road. The
minutes passed in a kind of trance of memory. Oh, that soft, childlike
movement to him, after his speech about her father! that heavenly
yielding and self-forgetfulness which shone in her every look and
movement as she stood balancing on the stepping-stones! If after all she
should prove cruel to him, would he not have a legitimate grievance, a
heavy charge to fling against her maiden gentleness? He trampled on the
notion. Let her do with him as she would, she would be his saint always,
unquestioned, unarraigned.
But with such a memory in his mind it was impossible that any man, least
of all a man of Elsmere’s temperament, could be very hopeless. Oh, yes,
he had been rash, foolhardy. Do such divine creatures stoop to mortal
men as easily as he had dreamt? He recognizes all the difficulties, he
enters into the force of all the ties that bind her--or imagines that he
does. But he is a man and her lover’; and if she loves him, in the
end love will conquer--must conquer. For his more modern sense, deeply
Christianized as it is, assumes almost without argument the sacredness
of passion and its claim--wherein a vast difference between himself and
that solitary wrestler in Marrisdale.
Meanwhile he kept all his hopes and fears to himself. Mrs. Thornburgh
was dying to talk to him; but though his mobile, boyish temperament made
it impossible for him to disguise his change of mood, there was in him a
certain natural Dignity which life greatly developed, but which made
it always possible for him to hold his own against curiosity and
indiscretion. Mrs. Thornburgh had to hold her peace. As for the vicar,
he developed what were for him a surprising number of new topics of
conversation, and in the late afternoon took Elsmere a run up the
fells to the nearest fragment of the Roman road which runs, with such
magnificent disregard of the humors of Mother Earth, over the very top
of High Street toward Penrith and Carlisle.
Next day it looked as though after many waverings, the characteristic
Westmoreland weather had descended upon them in good earnest. From early
morn till late evening the valley was wrapped in damp clouds or moving
rain, which swept down from the west through the great basin of the
hills, and rolled along the course of the river, wrapping trees and
fells and houses in the same misty, cheerless drizzle. Under the outward
pall of rain, indeed, the valley was renewing its summer youth; the
river was swelling with an impetuous music through all its dwindled
channels; the crags flung out white waterfalls again, which the heat had
almost dried away; and by noon the whole green hollow was vocal with the
sounds of water--water flashing and foaming in the river, water leaping
downward from the rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and
sycamores and the slate-eaves of the houses.
Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish system of
Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner of the study, where
he and the vicar protected each other against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good
woman would open the door once and again in the morning and put her head
through in search of prey; but on being confronted with two studious
men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give
vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere
was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might
be doing that morning. Judging a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous
Southern standard, he found himself glorying in the weather. She could
not wander far from him to-day.
After the early dinner he escaped, just as the vicar’s wife was devising
an excuse on which to convey both him and herself to Burwood, and
sallied forth with a mackintosh for a rush down the Whinborough road. It
was still raining, but the clouds showed a momentary lightening, and
a few gleams of watery sunshine brought out every now and then that
sparkle on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and atmosphere
which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator forget the petulant
abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere passed Burwood with a thrill. Should
he or should he not present himself? Let him push on a bit and think.
So on he swung, measuring his tall frame against the gusts, spirits and
masculine energy rising higher with every step. At last the passion of
his mood had wrestled itself out with the weather, and he turned back
once more determined to seek and find her, to face his fortunes like a
man. The warm rain beating from the west struck on his uplifted face. He
welcomed it as a friend. Rain and storm had opened to him the gates of a
spiritual citadel. What could ever wholly close it against him any more?
He felt so strong, so confident! Patience and courage!
Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of steam wavering
through it, and all around it and below it the rolling rain-clouds.
Suddenly, between him and that enchanter’s vision he saw a dark slim
figure against the mists, walking before him along the road. It was
Catherine--Catherine just emerged from a footpath across the fields,
battling with wind and rain, and quite unconscious of any spectator. Oh,
what a sudden thrill was that! What a leaping together of joy and dread,
which sent the blood to his heart! Alone--they two alone again-in
the wild Westmoreland mists--and half a mile at least of winding road
between them and Burwood. He flew after her, dreading, and yet longing
for the moment when he should meet her eyes. Fortune had suddenly given
this hour into his hands; he felt it open upon him like that mystic
valley in the clouds.
Catherine heard the hurrying steps behind her and turned. There was an
evident start when she caught sight of her pursuer--a quick change of
expression. She wore a close-fitting waterproof dress and cap. Her hair
was loosened, her cheek freshened by the storm. He came up with her; he
took her hand, his eyes dancing with the joy he could not hide.
‘What are you made of, I wonder?’ he said, gayly. ‘Nothing, certainly,
that minds weather.’
‘No Westmoreland native thinks of staying at home for this,’ she said,
with her quiet smile, moving on beside him as she spoke.
He looked down upon her with an indescribable mixture of feelings. No
stiffness, no coldness in her manner--only the even gentleness which
always marked her out from others. He felt as though yesterday were
blotted out, and would not for worlds have recalled it to her or
reproached her with it. Let it be as though they were but carrying on
the scene of the stepping-stones.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the west; ‘have you been watching that
magical break in the clouds?’
Her eyes followed his to the delicate picture hung high among the moving
mists.
‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, her face kindling, ‘that is one of our loveliest
effects, and one of the rarest. You are lucky to have seen it.’
‘I am conceited enough,’ he said, joyously, ‘to feel as if some
enchanter were at work up there drawing pictures on the mists for my
special benefit. How welcome the rain is! As I am afraid you have heard
me say before, what new charm it gives to your valley!’
There was something in the buoyancy and force of his mood that seemed to
make Catherine shrink into herself. She would not pursue the subject of
Westmoreland. She asked with a little stiffness whether he had good news
from Mrs. Elsmere.
‘Oh, yes. As usual, she is doing everything for me,’ he said, smiling.
‘It is disgraceful that I should be idling here while she is struggling
with carpenters and paperers, and puzzling out the decorations of the
drawing-room. She writes to me in a fury about the word “artistic.” She
declares even the little upholsterer at Churton hurls it at her every
other minute, and that if it weren’t for me she would select everything
as frankly, primevally hideous as she could find, just to spite him. As
it is, he has so warped her judgment that she has left the sitting-room
papers till I arrive. For the drawing-room she avows a passionate
preference for one all cabbage-roses and no stalks; but she admits that
it may be exasperation. She wants your sister, clearly, to advise her.
By the way,’ and his voice changed, ‘the vicar told me last night that
Miss Rose is going to Manchester for the winter to study. He heard
it from Miss Agnes, I think. The news interested me greatly after our
conversation.’
He looked at her with the most winning interrogative eyes. His whole
manner implied that everything which touched and concerned her touched
and concerned him; and, moreover, that she had given him in some sort a
right to share her thoughts and difficulties. Catherine struggled with
herself.
‘I trust it may answer,’ she said, in a low voice.
But she would say no more, and he felt rebuffed. His buoyancy began to
desert him.
‘It must be a great trial to Mrs. Elsmere,’ she said presently with an
effort, once more steering away from herself and her concerns, ‘this
going back to her old home.’
‘It is. My father’s long struggle for life in that house is a very
painful memory. I wished her to put it off till I could go with her, but
she declared she would rather get over the first week or two by herself.
How I should like you to know my mother, Miss Leyburn!
At this she could not help meeting his glance and smile, and answering
them, though with a kind of constraint most unlike her.
‘I hope I may some day see Mrs. Elsmere,’ she said.
‘It is one of my strongest wishes,’ he answered, hurriedly, ‘to bring
you together.’
The words were simple enough; the tone was full of emotion. He was fast
losing control of himself. She felt it through every nerve, and a sort
of wild dread seized her of what he might say next. Oh, she must prevent
it!
‘Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she not?’ she
said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday tones.
He controlled himself with a mighty effort.
‘Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the world so long. We
have never been able to do without each other.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful to you?’ said Catherine, after a little electric
pause--and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the
beginning of their conversation--‘how little the majority of sons and
daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to
live their own lives? The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to
throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them--decently, of
course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the long
years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.’
He looked at her quickly--a troubled, questioning look.
‘It is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly
understood their problem. The real difficulty for father and mother is
not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when
the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and
governed should become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I
have been lucky.’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking with
a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, ‘and so are the greater
debtors! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, least of all for
the child who has had years of understanding love to look back upon, if
it puts its own claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when
there is age and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is
still urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger,
than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the
cost.’
The voice was low, but it had the clear, vibrating ring of steel.
Robert’s face had darkened visibly.
‘But, surely,’ he cried, goaded by a now stinging sense of revolt and
pain-’surely the child may make a fatal mistake if it imagines that its
own happiness counts for nothing in the parents’ eyes. What parent but
must suffer from the starving of the child’s nature? What have mother
and father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the
child’s life? Their longing is that it should fulfil itself in all
directions. New ties, new affections, on the child’s part mean the
enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to
make it the jailer and burden of the younger!’
He spoke with heat and anger, with a sense of dashing himself against an
obstacle, and a dumb despairing certainty, rising at the heart of him.
‘Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,’ she answered, her breath
coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism
in it; ‘but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out
the plain duty. The parent wants the child’s help and care, the child is
bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties,
it belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be
forgotten and put aside.’
‘So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past?’ he cried,
quivering under the blow she was dealing him.
‘No, not all life,’ she said, struggling hard to preserve her perfect
calm of manner: he could not know that she was trembling from head to
foot. ‘There are many for whom it is easy and right to choose their own
way; their happiness robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has
been laid from their childhood a charge perhaps--and her voice faltered
at last--‘impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern, possess
their lives; which it would be baseness, treason, to betray. We are not
here only to be happy.’
And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her
lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after
phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him.
The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him
singularly. He realized through every nerve that what she had just said
to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last
parting. And now he could not tell, or, rather, blindly could not see,
whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest rose in him,
not so much against her words as against her self-control. The man in
him rose up against the woman’s unlooked-for, unwelcome strength.
But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity to avert
from them both were bursting from him, they were checked by a sudden
physical difficulty. A bit of road was under water. A little beck,
swollen by the rain, had overflowed, and for a few yards distance the
water stood about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had
splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly
since then. He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a
way to the other side.
‘You must climb the bank,’ he said, ‘and get through into the field.’
She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way
through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding back some young
hazel saplings and breaking others, made an opening for her through
which she scrambled with bent head; then, stretching out his hand to
her, he made her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other
side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on
his cheek.
‘You talk of baseness and treason,’ he began, passionately, conscious of
a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her light weight upon his
arm.
‘Life is not so simple. It is so easy to sacrifice others with one’s
self, to slay all claims in honor of one, instead of knitting the new
ones to the old. Is life to be allowed no natural expansion? Have you
forgotten that, in refusing the new bond for the old bond’s sake, the
child may be simply wronging the parents, depriving them of another
affection, another support, which ought to have been theirs?’
His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that she grew
suddenly white, and he grasped her more firmly still. She reached the
level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, and for a moment their
eyes met, her pale face raised to his. It seemed an age, so much was
said in that look. There was appeal on her side, passion on his. Plainly
she implored him to say no more, to spare her and himself.
‘In some cases,’ she said, and her voice sounded strained and hoarse
to both of them, ‘one cannot risk the old bond. On dare not trust one’s
self--or circumstance. The responsibility is too great; one can but
follow the beaten path, cling to the one thread. But don’t let us talk
of it anymore. We must make for that gate, Mr. Elsmere. It will bring us
out on the road again close by home.’
He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. He was struck
again with that sense of a will firmer and more tenacious than his own,
which had visited him in a slight passing way on the first evening they
ever met, and now filled him with a kind of despair. As they pushed
silently along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang
that the stepping-stones lay just below them. The gleam of sun had died
away, the aërial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a fresh storm of
rain brought back the color to Catherine’s cheek. On their left hand
was the roaring of the river, on their right they could already hear the
wind moaning and tearing through the trees which sheltered Burwood.
The nature which an hour ago had seemed to him so full of stimulus and
exhilaration, had taken to itself a note of gloom and mourning; for he
was at the age when Nature is the mere docile responsive mirror of the
spirit, when all her forces and powers are made for us, and are only
there to play chorus to our story.
They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. She paused
at the foot of it.
‘You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?’
Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. ‘Your pardon, your
friendship,’ it cried, with the usual futility of all good women under
the circumstances. But as he met it for one passionate instant, he
recognized fully that there was not a trace of yielding in it. At the
bottom of the softness there was the iron of resolution.
‘No, no; not now,’ he said involuntarily; and she never forgot the
painful struggle of the face; ‘good-by.’ He touched her hand without
another word, and was gone.
She toiled up to the gate with difficulty; the gray rain-washed road,
the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes.
In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her with a start.
‘My dear Cathie! you have been walking yourself to death. You look like
a ghost. Come and have some tea at once.’
And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine submitted with all
her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at her sister’s onslaught. But
she would not let Agnes put her down on the sofa. She stood with her
hand on the back of a chair.
‘The weather is very close and exhausting,’ she said, gently lifting
her hand to her hat. But the hand dropped, and she sank heavily into the
chair.
‘Cathie, you are faint,’ cried Agnes, running to her.
Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which none but she
would have been capable, mastered the physical weakness.
‘I have been a long way, dear,’ she said, as though in apology, ‘and
there is no air. Yes, I will go up-stairs and lie down a minute or two.
‘Oh no, don’t come, I will be down for tea directly.’
And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, her face the
color of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes stood dumfounded. Never in
her life before had she seen Catherine betray any such signs of physical
exhaustion.
Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, and rushing up
to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders.
‘He has proposed to her, and she has said no!’
‘He? What, Mr. Elsmere? How on earth can you know?’
‘I saw them from up-stairs come to the bottom of the lane. Then he
rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It’s as plain as the
nose on your face.’
Agnes sat down bewildered.
‘It is hard on him’ she said at last.
‘Yes, it is _very_ hard on him!’ cried Rose, pacing the room, her long
thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, ‘for she loves him!’
‘Rose!’
‘She does, my dear, she does,’ cried the girl, frowning. I know it in a
hundred ways.’
Agnes ruminated.
‘And it’s all because of us?’ she said at last reflectively.
‘Of course! I put it to you, Agnes’--and Rose stood still with a tragic
air--‘I put it to you, whether it isn’t too bad that three unoffending
women should have such a role as this assigned them against their will!’
The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her head in the
sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless laughter. Rose meanwhile
stood in the window, her thin form drawing up to its full height, angry
with Agnes, and enraged with all the world.
‘It’s absurd, it’s insulting,’ she exclaimed. ‘I should imagine that you
and I Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to look after mamma, put
out the stores, say our prayers, and prevent each other from running
away with adventurers! I won’t be always in leading-strings. I won’t
acknowledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in
order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.’
And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, a passion
of manifold protest in the girlish looks.
‘It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one’s own case,’ replied Agnes
calmly, recovering herself. ‘Suppose you tell Catherine some of these
home-truths?’
Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and fell, head
drooping, into a moody silence, Agnes watched her with a kind of
triumph. When it came to the point, she knew perfectly well that there
was not a will among them that could measure itself with any chance of
success against that lofty, but unwavering will of Catherine’s. Rose was
violent, and there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she
preferred not to dash her head against stone walls.
‘Well, then, if you won’t say them to Catherine, say them to mamma,’ she
suggested presently, but half ironically.
‘Mamma is no good,’ cried Rose angrily; ‘why do you bring her in?
Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.’
Long after everyone else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was
asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy northwest
wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low chair, her
head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her
knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand hung down
beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her cheeks. It
was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew why she wept,
she only knew that there was something within her which must have its
way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the
self against the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it? It
was as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral world
whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she knew; and now
the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and strange lights,
strange voices, strange colors were breaking through. All the sayings
of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for years, tonight for
the first time seem to her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but
sayings of fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and
thought. We recite so glibly, ‘He that loseth his life shall save it;’
and when we come to any of the common crises of experience which are the
source and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This
girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can
be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm,
simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid
deeps of the soul are breaking up.
To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.
Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of
mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?
Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles
compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they
haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be
counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.
‘Why, why am I so weak?’ she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew
not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from
which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.