Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine
we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar’s
study afterward, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase
of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was
now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his
reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was
intangible. ‘_We are not here only to be happy_,’ she had said to him,
with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.
The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of
her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere’s mind with a tormenting,
torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her
evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was
his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them,
all would be well?
As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment.
No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be
Catherine Leyburn’s lover, could regard it as a binding obligation
upon her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three
persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary
need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather
braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.
But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter! He
realized with despair the brooding, scrupulous force of moral passion to
which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father’s nature working
in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the
world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a
lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realized to their
pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the
processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds!
Robert’s heart sank before the memory of that frail, indomitable look,
that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him
farewell. And yet, surely--surely under the willingness of the spirit
there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely,
now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white--trembling: her hand
had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh, why had
he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her personality
produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not boldly caught
her to himself and, with all the eloquence of a passionate
nature, trampled on her scruples, marched through her doubts,
convinced--reasoned her into a blessed submission?
‘And I will do it yet!’ he cried, leaping to his feet with a sudden
access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile looking out into the
rainy evening, all the keen, irregular face, and thin, pliant form
hardening into the intensity of resolve, which had so often carried the
young tutor through an Oxford difficulty, breaking, down antagonism and
compelling consent.
At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the household he
was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got out of him that he had
been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, but for all her ingenuities of
cross-examination she got nothing more. Afterward, when he and the
vicar were smoking together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two
should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater.
‘I want to go away,’ he said, with a hand on the vicar’s shoulder, ‘_and
I want to come back_.’ The deliberation of the last words was not to
be mistaken. The vicar emitted a contented puff, looked the young man
straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk
to Patterdale viâ High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by
Hawes-water.
To Mrs. Thornburgh, Robert announced that he must leave them on the
following Saturday, June 24.
‘You have given me a good time, cousin Emma,’ he said to her, with a
bright friendliness which dumfounded her. A good time, indeed! with
everything begun and nothing finished: with two households thrown into
perturbation for a delusion, and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for
want of a little common sense and plain speaking, which _one_ person
at least in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been
ignored and browbeaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, in
his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the privacy of
the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife so exasperated. To
think what might have been--what she might have done for the race, but
for the whims of two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons,
that would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people to
manage them for them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret of
Elsmere’s remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself certain
counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into
well-simulated slumber. However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious
that some time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of
him peremptorily, ‘When do you get back, William?’ To the best of his
memory, the vicar had sleepily murmured, ‘Thursday;’ and had then heard,
echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, ‘He goes Saturday--one
clear day!’
The ‘following morning was gloomy but fine, and after breakfast the
vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the
High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate
farewell to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech
in the garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly
stepped on northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.
Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appearance in
the school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in a new set of
covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah’s love affairs, which were
always passing through some traffic phase or other, and into which
Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into
Catherine Leyburn’s. Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then and
found her not disposed to talk to them on the great event of the
day, Elsmere’s absence and approaching departure. They cautiously
communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of the
preceding afternoon; and Rose gave vent to one fiery onslaught on the
‘moral obstacle’ theory, during which Mrs. Thornburgh sat studying her
with small attentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side. But
for once in her life the vicar’s wife was not communicative in return.
That the situation should have driven even Mrs. Thornburgh to finesse
was a surprising testimony to its gravity. What between her sudden
taciturnity and Catherine’s pale silence, the girls’ sense of expectancy
was roused to its highest pitch.
‘They come back to-morrow night,’ said Rose, thoughtfully, ‘and he goes
Saturday--10.20 from Whinborough--one day for the Fifth Act! By the way,
why did Mrs. Thornburgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home?’
She _had_ asked them, however; and with a pleasing sense of conspiracy
they complied.
It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs. Thornburgh, finding the
Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged way into the hall, and
after an unanswered knock at the drawing-room door, opened it and peered
in to see who might be there.
‘May I come in?’
Mrs. Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the window absorbed
in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her more than she could
manage. Her card was mislaid, the girls were none of them at hand, and
she felt as helpless as she commonly did when left alone.
‘Oh, do come in, please! So glad to see you. Have you been nearly blown
away?’
For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous northwest wind was still
rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were swaying and
groaning under the force of its onslaught.
‘Well, it is stormy,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, stepping in and undoing all
the various safety-pins and elastics which had held her dress high above
the mud. ‘Are the girls out?’
‘Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school; and Rose, I think, is
practising.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a chair close by
her friend, ‘I wanted to find you alone.’
Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, was flushed
and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped nervously on her lap, and
there was about her such an air of forcibly restrained excitement, that
Mrs. Leyburn’s mild eyes gazed at her with some astonishment. The two
women were a curious contrast: Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we
know, to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether it
were curls or cap-strings or conversation; Mrs. Leyburn tall and well
proportioned, well dressed, with the same graceful ways and languid
pretty manners as had first attracted her husband’s attention thirty
years before. She was fond of Mrs. Thornburgh, but there was something
in the ebullient energies of the vicar’s wife which always gave her a
sense of bustle and fatigue.
‘I am sure you will be sorry to hear,’ began her visitor, that Mr.
Elsmere is going.’
‘Going?’ said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. ‘Why, I thought he
was going to stay with you another ten days at least.’
‘So did I--so did he,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, and then pausing
with a most effective air of sudden gravity and ‘recollection.’
‘Then why--what’s the matter?’ asked Mrs. Leyburn, wondering.
Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a minute, and Mrs. Leyburn began to
feel a little nervous, her visitor’s eyes were fixed upon her with so
much meaning. Urged by a sudden impulse, she bent forward; so did Mrs.
Thornburgh, and their two elderly heads nearly touched.
‘The young man is in love!’ said the vicar’s wife in a stage whisper,
drawing back after a pause, to see the effect of her announcement.
‘Oh! with whom?’ asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look brightening. She liked a
love affair as much as ever.
Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door was shut and
all safe--she felt herself a criminal, but the sense of guilt had an
exhilarating rather than a depressing affect upon her.
‘Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you anything?’
‘No!’ said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and wider. She never
guessed anything; there was no need, with three daughters to think for
her, and give her the benefit of their young brains. ‘No,’ she said
again. ‘I can’t imagine what you mean.’
Mrs. Thornburgh felt a rush of inward contempt for so much obtuseness.
‘Well, then, _he is in love with Catherine!_’ she said abruptly, laying
her hand on Mrs. Leyburn’s knee, and watching the effect.
‘With Catherine!’ stammered Mrs. Leyburn; ‘_with Catherine!_’
The idea was amazing to her. She took up her knitting with trembling
fingers, and went on with it mechanically a second or two. Then laying
it down--‘Are you quite sure? has he told you?’
‘No, but one has eyes,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh hastily. ‘William and I
have seen it from the very first day. And we are both certain that on
Tuesday she made him understand in some way or other that she wouldn’t
marry him, and that is why he went off to Ullswater, and why he made up
his mind to go south before his time is up.’
‘Tuesday?’ cried Mrs. Leyburn. ‘In that walk, do you mean, when
Catherine looked so tired afterward? You think he proposed in that
walk?’
She was in a maze of bewilderment and excitement.
‘Something like it--but if he did, she said “No;” and what I want to
know is _why_ she said “No.”’
‘Why, of course, because she didn’t care for him!’ exclaimed Mrs.
Leyburn, opening her blue eyes wider and wider. ‘Catherine’s not like
most girls; she would always know what she felt, and would never keep a
man in suspense.’
‘Well, I don’t somehow believe,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh boldly, ‘that she
doesn’t care for him. He is just the young man Catherine might care for.
You can see that yourself.’
Mrs. Leyburn once more laid down her knitting and stared at her visitor.
Mrs. Thornburgh, after all her meditations, had no very precise idea as
to _why_ she was at that moment in the Burwood living-room bombarding
Mrs. Leyburn in this fashion. All she knew was that she had sallied
forth determined somehow to upset the situation, just as one gives
a shake purposely to a bundle of spillikins on the chance of more
favorable openings. Mrs. Leyburn’s mind was just now playing the part of
spillikins, and the vicar’s wife was shaking it viciously, though with
occasional qualms as to the lawfulness of the process.
‘You think Catherine does care for him?’ resumed Mrs. Leyburn
tremulously.
‘Well isn’t he just the kind of man one would suppose Catherine would
like?’ repeated Mrs. Thornburgh, persuasively: ‘he is a clergyman, and
she likes serious people; and he’s sensible and nice and well-mannered.
And then he can talk about books, just like her father used--I’m sure
William thinks he knows everything! He isn’t as nice-looking as he might
be just now, but then that’s his hair and his fever, poor man. And
then he isn’t hanging about. He’s got a living, and there’d be the poor
people all ready, and everything else Catherine likes. And now I’ll just
ask you--did you ever see Catherine more--more--_lively_--well, I know
that’s not just the word, but you know what I mean--than she has been
the last fortnight?’
But Mrs. Leyburn only shook her head helplessly. She did not know in the
least what Mrs. Thornburgh meant. She never thought Catherine doleful,
and she agreed that certainly ‘lively’ was not the word.
‘Girls get so frightfully particular nowadays,’ continued the vicar’s
wife, with reflective candor. ‘Why, when William fell in love with me,
I just fell in love with him--at once--because he did. And if it hadn’t
been William, but somebody else, it would have been the same. I don’t
believe girls have got hearts like pebbles--if the man’s nice, of
course!’
Mrs. leyburn listened to this summary of matrimonial philosophy with the
same yielding, flurried attention as she was always disposed to give to
the last speaker.
‘But,’ she said, still in a maze, ‘if she did care for him, why should
she send him away?’
‘_Because she won’t have him!_’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, energetically,
leaning over the arm of her chair that she might bring herself nearer to
her companion.
The fatuity of the answer left Mrs. Leyburn staring.
‘Because she won’t have him, my dear Mrs. Leyburn! And--and--I’m sure
nothing would make me interfere like this if I weren’t so fond of you
all, and if William and I didn’t know for certain that there never was a
better young man born! And then I was just sure you’d be the last person
in the world, if you knew, to stand in young people’s way!’
‘_I!_’ cried poor Mrs. Leyburn--‘I stand in the way!’ She was getting
tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself a brute.
‘Well,’ she said, plunging on desperately, ‘I have been thinking over
it night and day. I’ve been watching him, and I’ve been talking to the
girls, and I’ve been putting two and two together, and I’m just about
sure that there might be a chance for Robert, if only Catherine didn’t
feel that you and the girls couldn’t get on without her!’
Mrs. Leyburn took up her knitting again with agitated fingers. She
was so long in answering, that Mrs. Thornburgh sat and thought with
trepidation of all sorts of unpleasant consequences which might result
from this audacious move of hers.
‘I don’t know how we _should_ get on,’ cried Mrs. Leyburn at last, with
a sort of suppressed sob, while something very like a tear fell on the
stocking she held.
Mrs. Thornburgh was still more frightened, and rushed into a flood
of apologetic speech. Very likely she was wrong perhaps it was all a
mistake, she was afraid she had done harm, and so on. Mrs. Leyburn took
very little heed, but at last she said, looking up and applying a soft
handkerchief gently to her eyes--
‘Is his mother nice? Where’s his living? Would he want to be married
soon?’
The voice was weak and tearful, but there was in it unmistakable
eagerness to be informed. Mrs. Thornburgh, overjoyed, let loose upon her
a flood of particulars, painted the virtues and talents of Mrs. Elsmere,
described Robert’s Oxford career, with an admirable sense for effect,
and a truly feminine capacity for murdering every university detail,
drew pictures of the Murewell living, and rectory, of which Robert had
photographs with him, threw in adroit information about the young man’s
private means, and in general showed what may be made of a woman’s mind
under the stimulus of one of the occupations most proper to it. Mrs.
Leyburn brightened visibly as the flood proceeded. Alas, poor Catherine!
How little room there is for the heroic in this trivial everyday life of
ours!
Catherine a bride, Catherine a wife and mother, dim visions of a white
soft morsel in which Catherine’s eyes and smile should live again--all
these thoughts went trembling and flashing through Mrs. Leyburn’s mind
as she listened to Mrs. Thornburgh. There is so much of the artist in
the maternal mind, of the artist who longs to see the work of his hand
in fresh combinations and under all points of view. Catherine, in the
heat of her own self-surrender, had perhaps forgotten that her mother
too had a heart!
‘Yes, it all sounds very well’ said Mrs. Leyburn at last, sighing, ‘but,
you know, Catherine isn’t easy to manage.’
‘Could you talk to her--find out a little?’
‘Well, not to-day; I shall hardly see her. Doesn’t it seem to you
that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine’s she hasn’t time for
thinking about the young men? Why, she’s as full of business all day
long as an egg’s full of meat. Well, it was my poor Richard’s doing--it
was his doing, bless him! I am not going to say anything against it but
it was different--once.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, thoughtfully. ‘One had plenty of
time, when you and I were young, to sit at home and think what one was
going to wear, and how one would look, and whether he had been paying
attention to any one else; and if he had, why; and all that. And now the
young women are so superior. But the marrying has got to be done somehow
all the same. What is she doing to-day?’
‘Oh, she’ll be busy all to-day and to-morrow; I hardly expect to see her
till Saturday.’
Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay.
‘Why, what is the matter now?’ she cried in her most aggrieved tones.
‘My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one would think we had the cholera in the parish.
Catherine just spoils the people.’
‘Don’t you remember,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her turn, and
drawing herself up a little, ‘that to-morrow is Midsummer Day, and that
Mary Backhouse is as bad as she can be?’
‘Mary Backhouse! Why I had forgotten all about her!’ cried the vicar’s
wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pensively eyeing the carpet
awhile.
Then she got what particulars she could out of Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine,
it appeared, was at this moment at High Ghyll, was not to return till
late and would be with the dying girl through the greater part of the
following day, returning for an hour or two’s rest in the afternoon, and
staying in the evening till the twilight, in which the ghost always made
her appearances, should have passed into night.
Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind working the
while at railway speed on the facts presented to her.
‘How do you get her home tomorrow night?’ she asked, with sudden
animation.
‘Oh, we send our man Richard at ten. He takes a lantern if it’s dark.’
Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures were all alive again
with energy and hope. She had given her shake to Mrs. Leyburn’s mind.
Much good might it do! But, after all, she had the poorest opinion of
the widow’s capacities as an ally.
She and her companion said a few more excited, affectionate, and
apologetic things to one another, and then she departed.
Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an hour later in a
state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Leyburn kept her own counsel,
having resolved for once, with a timid and yet delicious excitement, to
act as the head of the family.
Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans on her own account.
‘Ten o’clock-moonlight,’ said that contriving person to herself going
home--‘at least if the clouds hold up--that’ll do--couldn’t be better.’
To any person familiar with her character the signs of some unusual
preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn during this Thursday
evening. Catherine noticed them at once when she got back from High
Ghyll about eight o’clock, and wondered first of all what was
the matter; and then, with more emphasis, why the trouble was not
immediately communicated to her. It had never entered into her head to
take her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she
could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate
nervous mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was at
system in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect
contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there was good
news, it was presented in its most sugared form to Mrs. Leyburn; but the
moment any element of pain and difficulty cropped up in the common life,
it was pounced upon and appropriated by Catherine, aided and abetted by
the girls, and Mrs. Leyburn knew no more about it than an unweaned babe.
So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct of a Perth
dyer with regard to her mother’s best gray poplin, when one of the
greatest surprises of her life burst upon her.
She was in Mrs. Leyburn’s bedroom that night, helping to put away her
mother’s things as her custom was. She had just taken off the widow’s
cap, caressing as she did so the brown hair underneath, which was still
soft and plentiful, when Mrs. Leyburn turned upon her. ‘Catherine!’ she
said in an agitated voice, laying a thin hand on her daughter’s arm.
‘Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you!’
Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother’s side and put her arms round
her waist.
‘Yes mother darling,’ she said, half smiling.
‘Oh, Catherine! If--if--you like Mr. Elsmere--don’t mind--don’t
think--about us, dear. We can manage--we can manage, dear!’
The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn’s face is indescribable.
She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, her beautiful brows
drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn, looked up at her with a pathetic mixture
of helplessness, alarm, entreaty.
‘Mother, who hag been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?’ demanded
Catherine.
‘Oh, never mind, dear, never mind,’ said the widow hastily; ‘I should
have seen it myself--oh, I know I should; but I’m a bad mother,
Catherine!’ and she caught her daughter’s dress and drew her toward her.
_Do_ you care for him?’
Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid her head on her
mother’s hands.
‘I want nothing,’ she said presently in a low voice of intense
emotion--‘I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my life--I ask
for nothing more. I am abundantly--content.’
Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. The brown hair,
escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still pretty neck, a pink
spot of excitement was on each gently hollowed cheek; she looked almost
younger than her pale daughter.
‘But--he is very nice,’ she said timidly. ‘And he has a good living.
Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman’s wife.’
‘I ought to be, and I am your daughter,’ said Catherine smiling, a
little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand.
Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps in
imagination she saw the vicar’s wife. ‘I think--I think,’ she said very
seriously, ‘I should like it.’
Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as though she
had felt a blow.
‘Mother!’ she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet still trying
to smile, ‘do you want to send me away?’
‘No-no!’ cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. ‘But if a nice man wants you to
marry him, Catherine? Your father would have liked him--oh! I know your
father would have liked him. And his manners to me are so pretty, I
shouldn’t mind being _his_ mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother,
you know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.’
She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imaginations--the
pallor, the latent storm of Catherine’s look--exciting her more and
more.
Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother’s hand again.
‘Dear little mother--dear, kind little mother! You are an angel--you
always are. But I think, if you’ll keep me, I’ll stay.’
And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Leyburn’s knee.
But _do_ you--‘_do_ you love him, Catherine?’
‘I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.’
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Mrs. Leyburn, as though addressing a third person,
the tears, in her mild eyes, ‘she won’t; and she _would_ like it--and so
should I!’
Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing.
‘And I count for nothing to you, mother!’--her deep voice quivering;
‘you could put me aside--you and the girls, and live as though I had
never been!’
‘But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, Catherine!’ cried
Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pettishness. ‘People have to do
without their daughters. There’s Agnes--I often think, as it is, you
might let her do more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it
might be a good thing--a very good thing if there were a man to take her
in hand!’
‘And you, mother, without me?’ cried poor Catherine, choked.
‘Oh, I should come and see you,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening. ‘They
say it _is_ such a nice house, Catherine, and such pretty country, and
I’m sure I should like his mother, though she _is_ Irish!’
It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn’s life. In it the
heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling ironic touch
of circumstance laid upon it made it look even in her own eyes almost
ridiculous. What had she been living for, praying for, all these years?
She threw herself down by the widow’s side, her face working with a
passion that terrified Mrs. Leyburn.
‘Oh, mother, say you would miss me--say you would miss me if I went!’
Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women clung to each
other, weeping. Catherine’s sore heart was soothed a little by her
mother’s tears, and by the broken words of endearment that were lavished
on her. But through it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire
in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. It was the cheapening--the vulgarizing,
so to speak, of her whole existence.
In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall various items
of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her
mother, and one of which startled her.
‘He comes back tonight, my dear--and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and,
Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. Poor young man!’
And Mrs. Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as
woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.
‘Don’t talk about it any more, mother,’ Catherine implored. ‘You
won’t sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornbourgh than I am
already.’
Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and
Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which
the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left
her at last to sleep.
‘And I don’t know much more than when I began!’ sighed the perplexed
widow to herself, ‘Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!’
Catherine’s night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle
was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent
generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take
it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for
sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile
half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two
estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific
spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more
desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.
As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar
and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing
of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious
timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere’s name to any one on the
Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in
the afternoon from the Backhouses’ absorbed apparently in the state of
the dying girl, took a couple of hours rest, and hurried off again. She
passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.
‘She is gone!’ said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking
after her sister’s retreating figure, ‘It is all over! They can’t meet
now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.’
The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the
window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine’s
coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling--to fling a
hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.
The stormy light of the afternoon was fading toward sunset. Catherine
walked on fast toward the group of houses at the head of the valley, in
one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with
Mrs. Thornburgh’s housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically,
but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of
one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her
self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the
wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve,
extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed
to her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious
over-estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like one
ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepening her discomfiture
at every step. How rich her life had always been in the conviction of
usefulness--nay, indispensableness! Her mother’s persuasions had dashed
it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her her
past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and
cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light.
And he? Still near her for a few short hours! Every pulse in her had
thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered him. But she will
see him no more. And she is glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have
discovered how cheaply they held her--those dear ones of hers for whom
she had lived till now! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity
what she had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured,
half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is gone she
will recover something of that moral equilibrium which has been, so
shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she
has no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years crumbling
beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self-control.
As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less tempestuous.
The great wall of High Fell, toward which she was walking, seemed to
shelter her from its worst violence. But the hurrying clouds, the gleams
of lurid light which every now and then penetrated into the valley from
the west, across the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river
answering the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken shadow that
covered the group of houses and trees toward which she was walking, all
served to heighten the nervous depression which had taken hold of her.
As she neared the bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond
which northward all was stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in
front of her the gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great
copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself by
both hands, try and realize her mission afresh, and the scene which lay
before her.