CHAPTER X.

Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with

regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing

a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the victim of a fate sordid and

common enough, yet not without its elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen

months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely

old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in

which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no

doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away. She had been then

strong and well favored, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed

beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such

as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom

of all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong

wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame.

Neither were to be found in sufficient measure within her home. Her

father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other, up to

a certain point, the natural instincts of kinship. On her uncle, whom

she regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers.

She was, indeed, the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the

wool with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on

his curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For the rest, they had

no neighbors with whom the girl could fraternize, and Whinborough was

too far off to provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after

emotion and excitement.

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse

attractions of a young farmer in the neighboring valley of Shanmoor. He

was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains

of heart and conscience might have been interfused with the original

composition had been long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly

flung herself into his power on one or two occasions, from a mixture of

motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly ennui, awoke one day to

find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. She had realized

her doom for the first time in its entirety on the Midsummer Day

preceding that we are now describing. On that day, she had walked over

to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her

betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage. He had laughed at

her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those

torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know. And on her

way back she had seen the ghost or ‘bogle’ of Deep Crag; the ghost had

spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having

received what she at once recognized as her death sentence.

What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd-boy bent on a

practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks?

What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer by, wafted down

to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm

enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain,

those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who

can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend

of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the

tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end

of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor

every Midsummer Night with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed

into Mary’s mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind

her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists.

To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by

the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive

the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along

with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen

her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.

A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighborhood.

The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her,

and all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy

taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering

and girding at his elder brother; the noodle’s eyes wandered and

glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat

dangling his spindle less from the shaft of the carrier’s cart; his

absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less

buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as

before. John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was

heard of his daughter.

At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, Coming back from the

Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm kitchen, while John

Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the other farmhouses of the

hamlet about some disputed payment. The old man came in cold and weary,

and the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire--they paid

a neighbor to do the housework, as far as the care of her own seven

children would let her--suddenly revived in his slippery mind the

memory of his niece, who, with all her faults, had had the makings of a

housewife, and for whom, in spite of her flouts and jeers, he had always

cherished a secret admiration. As he came in he noticed that the door to

the left hand, leading into what Westmoreland folk call the ‘house’ or

sitting-room of the farm, was open. The room had hardly been used since

Mary’s flight, and the few pieces of black oak and shining mahogany

which adorned it had long ago fallen from their pristine polish. The

geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the

summer before, had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay

heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective

efforts of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the

place for months past by common consent, and the door into it was hardly

ever opened.

Now, however, it stood ajar, and old Jim going up to shut it, and

looking in, was struck dumb with astonishment. For there on a wooden

rocking chair, which had been her mothers favorite seat, sat Mary

Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, her eyes staring into

the parlor grate. Her clothes, her face, her attitude of cowering chill

and mortal fatigue, produced an impression which struck through the old

man’s dull senses, and made him tremble so that his hand dropped from

the handle of the door. The slight sound roused Mary, and she turned

toward him. She said nothing for a few seconds, her hollow black eyes

fixed upon him; then with a ghastly smile, and a voice so hoarse as to

be scarcely audible,

‘Weel, aa’ve coom back. Ye’d maybe not expect me?’

There was a sound behind on the cobbles outside the kitchen door.

‘Yur feyther!’ cried Jim between his teeth. ‘Gang up-stairs wi’ ye.’

And he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a staircase to the upper

story.

She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, and then

stayed where she was, gaunt, pale, fever-eyed, the wreck and ghost of

her old self.

The steps neared. There was a rough voice in the kitchen, a surprised

exclamation, and her father had pushed past his brother into the room.

John Backhouse no sooner saw his daughter than his dull weather-beaten

face flamed into violence. With an oath he raised the heavy whip he held

in his hand and flung himself toward her.

‘Naw, ye’ll not du’at!’ cried Jim, throwing himself with all his feeble

strength on to his brother’s arm. John swore and struggled, but the old

man stuck like a limpet.

‘You let ‘un aleann’ said Mary, drawing her tattered shawl over her

breast. ‘If he aims to kill me, aa’ll not say naa. But lie needn’t

moider hisself! There’s them abuve as ha’ taken care o’ that!’

She sank again into her chair, as though her limbs could not support

her, and her eyes closed in utter indifference of a fatigue which had

made even fear impossible.

The father’s arm dropped; he stood there sullenly looking at her. Jim,

thinking she had fainted, went up to her, took a glass of water out of

which she had already been drinking from the mahogany table, and held it

to her lips. She drank a little, and then with a desperate effort raised

herself, and clutching the arm of the chair, faced her father.

‘Ye’ll not hev to wait lang. Doan’t ye fash yersel. Maybe it ull comfort

ye to knaw summat! Lasst Midsummer Day aa was on t’ Shanmoor road, i’ t’

gloaming. An’ aa saw theer t’ bogle,--thee knaws, t’ bogle o’ Bleacliff

Tarn; an’ she turned hersel, an’ she spoak to me!’

She uttered the last words with a grim emphasis, dwelling on each, the

whole life of the wasted face concentrated in the terrible black eyes,

which gazed past the two figures within their immediate range into

a vacancy peopled with horror. Then a film came over, them, the grip

relaxed, and she fell back with a lurch of the rocking-chair in a dead

swoon.

With the help of the neighbor from next door, Jim got her up-stairs into

the room that had been hers. She awoke from her swoon only to fall into

the torpid sleep of exhaustion, which lasted for twelve hours.

‘Keep her oot o’ ma way,’ said the father with an oath to Jim, ‘or aa’ll

not answer nayther for her nor me!’

She needed no telling. She soon crept down-stairs again, and went to the

task of house-cleaning. The two men lived in the kitchen as before; when

they were at home she ate and sat in the parlor alone. Jim watched

her as far as his dull brain was capable of watching, and he dimly

understood that she was dying. Both men, indeed, felt a sort of

superstitious awe of her, she was so changed, so unearthly. As for the

story of the ghost, the old popular superstitions are almost dead in

the Cumbrian mountains, and the shrewd north-country peasant is in many

places quite as scornfully ready to sacrifice his ghosts to the Time

Spirit as any ‘bold bad’ haunter of scientific associations could wish

him to be. But in a few of the remoter valleys they still linger, though

beneath the surface. Either of the Backhouses, or Mary in her days of

health, would have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger

to suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff

Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had beard in childhood, on

stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds

of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of

consciousness. In Mary’s imagination the ideas and images connected with

it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with

a living pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller,

blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks

passed on, and the days lengthened toward midsummer, a sort of brooding

horror seemed to settle on the house.

Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or

twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her

extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a

hot cinder. But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad,

strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state,

she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former

stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out

between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of

frame.

A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was

phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking

the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of

consumption, had rather assumed the color of the events from which the

disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind

and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots

as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs

was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as

possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every

night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room,

she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had

still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed

with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but

rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be

carried to her grave.

At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the yard, saw her

carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. Something stirred within

him, and he went up to her and forcibly took it from her. Their looks

met, and her poor mad eyes gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward

toward the house she crept after him, passing him into the parlor, where

she sank down breathless on the settle where she had been sleeping for

the last few nights, rather than face climbing the stairs. For the first

time he followed her, watching her gasping struggle for breath, in spite

of her impatient motion to him to go. After a few seconds he left her,

took his hat, went out, saddled his horse, and rode off to Whinborough.

He got Dr. Baker to promise to come over on the morrow, and on his way

back he called and requested to see Catherine Leyburn. He stammeringly

asked her to come and visit his daughter who was ill and lonesome; and

when she consented gladly, he went on his way feeling a load off his

mind. What he had just done had been due to an undefined, but still

vehement prompting of conscience. It did not make it any the less

probable that the girl would die on or before Midsummer Day; but,

supposing her story were true, it absolved him from any charge of

assistance to the designs of those grisly powers in whose clutch she

was.

When the doctor came next morning a change for the worse had taken

place, and she was too feeble actively to resent his appearance. She lay

there on the settle, every now and then making superhuman efforts to get

up, which generally ended in a swoon. She refused to take any medicine,

she would hardly take any food, and to the doctor’s questions she

returned no answer whatever. In the same way, when Catherine came, she

would be absolutely silent, looking at her with glittering, feverish

eyes, but taking no notice at all, whether she read or talked, or simply

sat quietly beside her.

After the silent period, as the days went on, and Midsummer Day drew

nearer, there supervened a period of intermittent delirium. In the

evenings, especially when her temperature rose, she became talkative

and incoherent and Catherine would sometimes tremble as she caught the

sentences which, little by little, built up the girl’s bidden tragedy

before her eyes. London streets, London lights, London darkness, the

agony of an endless wandering, the little clinging puny life, which

could never be stilled or satisfied, biting cold, intolerable pain, the

cheerless workhouse order, and, finally, the arms without a burden, the

breast without a child--these were the sharp fragments of experience,

so common so terrible to the end of time, which rose on the troubled

surface of Mary Backhouse’s delirium, and smote the tender heart of the

listener.

Then in the mornings she would lie suspicious and silent, watching

Catherine’s face with the long gaze of exhaustion, as though trying to

find out from it whether her secret had escaped her. The doctor, who had

gathered the story of the ‘bogle’ from Catherine, to whom Jim had told

it, briefly and reluctantly, and with an absolute reservation of his own

views on the matter, recommended that if possible they should try and

deceive her as to the date of the day and month. Mere nervous excitement

might, he thought, be enough to kill her when the actual day, and hour

came round. But all their attempts were useless. Nothing distracted the

intense sleepless attention with which the darkened mind kept always in

view that one absorbing expectation. Words fell from her at night, which

seemed to show that she expected a summons--a voice along the fell,

calling her spirit into the dark. And then would come the shriek, the

struggle to get loose, the choked waking, the wandering, horror-stricken

eyes, subsiding by degrees into the old silent watch.

On the morning of the 23d, when Robert, sitting at his work, was looking

at Burwood through the window in the flattering belief that Catherine

was the captive of the weather, she had spent an hour or more with Mary

Backhouse, and the austere influences of the visit had perhaps had more

share than she knew in determining her own mood that day. The world

seemed such dross, the pretences of personal happiness so hollow and

delusive, after such a sight! The girl lay dying fast, with a look of

extraordinary attentiveness in her face, hearing every noise, every

footfall, and, as it seemed to Catherine, in a mood of inward joy.

She took, moreover, some notice of her visitor. As a rough tomboy of

fourteen, she had shown Catherine, who had taught her in the school

sometimes and had especially won her regard on one occasion by a present

of some article of dress, a good many uncouth signs of affection. On

the morning in question Catherine fancied she saw something of the old

childish expression once or twice. At any rate, there was no doubt her

presence was soothing, as she read in her low vibrating voice, or sat

silently stroking the emaciated hand, raising it every now and then to

her lips with a rush of that intense pitifulness which was to her the

most natural of all moods.

The doctor, whom she met there, said that this state of calm was very

possibly only transitory. The night had been passed in a succession of

paroxysms, and they were almost sure to return upon her, especially

as he could get her to swallow none of the sedatives which might have

carried her in unconsciousness past the fatal moment. She would

have none of them; he thought that she was determined to allow of no

encroachments on the troubled remnants of intelligence still left to

her; so the only thing to be done was to wait and see the result. ‘I

will come tomorrow,’ said Catherine briefly; ‘for the day certainly,

longer if necessary.’ She had long ago established her claim to be

treated seriously as a nurse, and Dr. Baker made no objection. ‘_If_ she

lives so long,’ he said dubiously. ‘The Backhouses and Mrs. Irwin (the

neighbor) shall be close at hand. I will come in the afternoon and try

to get her to take an opiate; but I can’t give it to her by force, and

there is not the smallest chance of her consenting to it.’

All through Catherine’s own struggle and pain during these two days

the image of the dying girl had lain at her heart. It served her as the

crucifix serves the Romanist; as she pressed it into her thought, it

recovered from time to time the failing forces of the will. Need life be

empty because self was left unsatisfied? Now, as she neared the hamlet,

the quality of her nature reasserted itself. The personal want tugging

at her senses, the personal soreness, the cry of resentful love, were

silenced. What place had they in the presence of this lonely agony of

death, this mystery, this opening beyond? The old heroic mood revived in

her. Her step grew swifter, her carriage more erect, and as she entered

the farm kitchen she felt herself once more ready in spirit for what lay

before her.

From the next room there came a succession of husky sibilant sounds, as

though someone were whispering hurriedly and continuously.

After her subdued greeting, she looked inquiringly at Jim.

‘She’s in a taaking way,’ said Jim, who looked more attenuated and

his face more like a pink and white parchment than ever. ‘She’s been

knacking an’ taaking a long while. She woau’t know ye. Luke ye,’ he

continued, dropping his voice as he opened the ‘house’ door for her; ‘ef

you want ayder ov oos, you just call oot--sharp! Mrs. Irwin, she’ll stay

in wi’ ye--she’s not afeeard!’

The superstitious excitement which the looks and gestures of the old

man expressed, touched Catherine’s imagination, and she entered the room

with an inward shiver.

Mary Backhouse lay raised high on her pillows, talking to herself or

to imaginary other persons, with eyes wide open but vacant, and

senses conscious of nothing but the dream-world in which the mind was

wandering. Catherine sat softly down beside her, unnoticed, thankful for

the chances of disease. If this delirium lasted till the ghost-hour--the

time of twilight, that is to say, which would begin about half-past

eight, and the duration of which would depend on the cloudiness of the

evening--was over; or, better still, till midnight were past; the strain

on the girl’s agonized senses might be relieved, and death come at last

in softer, kinder guise.

‘Has she been long like this?’ she asked softly of the neighbor who sat

quietly knitting by the evening light.

The woman looked up and thought.

‘Ay!’ she said. ‘Aa came in at tea-time, an’ she’s been maistly taakin’

ivver sence!’

The incoherent whisperings and restless movements, which obliged

Catherine constantly to replace the coverings over the poor wasted and

fevered body, went on for sometime. Catherine noticed presently, with a

little thrill, that the light was beginning to change. The weather was

growing darker and stormier; the wind shook the house in gusts; and the

farther shoulder of High Fell, seen in distorted outline through the

casemented window, was almost hidden by the trailing rain clouds. The

mournful western light coming from behind the house struck the river

here and there; almost everything else was gray and dark. A mountain

ash, just outside the window, brushed the panes every now and then; and

in the silence, every surrounding sound--the rare movements in the next

room, the voices of quarrelling children round the door of a neighboring

house, the far-off barking of dogs--made itself distinctly audible.

Suddenly Catherine, sunk in painful reverie, noticed that the mutterings

from the bed had ceased for some little time. She turned her chair, and

was startled to find those weird eyes fixed with recognition on herself.

There was a curious, malign intensity, a curious triumph in them.

‘It must be--eight o’clock’--said the gasping voice--‘_eight

o’clock_;’ and the tone became a whisper, as though the idea thus

half involuntarily revealed had been drawn jealously back into the

strongholds of consciousness.

‘Mary,’ said Catherine, falling on her knees beside the bed, and taking

one of the restless hands forcibly into her own--‘can’t you put this

thought away from you? We are not the playthings of evil spirits--we

are the children of God! We are in His hands. No evil thing can harm us

against His will.’

It was the first time for many days she had spoken openly of the thought

which was in the mind of all, and her whole pleading soul was in

her pale, beautiful face. There was no response in the sick girl’s

countenance, and again that look of triumph, of sinister exultation.

They had tried to cheat her into sleeping, and living, and in spite of

them, at the supreme moment, every sense was awake and expectant. To

what was the materialized peasant imagination looking forward? To an

actual call, an actual following, to the free mountain-side, the rush

of the wind, the phantom figure floating on before her, bearing her into

the heart of the storm? Dread was gone, pain was gone; there was only

rapt excitement and fierce anticipation.

‘Mary,’ said Catherine again, mistaking her mood for one of tense

defiance and despair, ‘Mary, if I were to go out now and leave Mrs.

Irwin with you, and if I were to go up all the way to the top of

Shanmoss and back again, and if I could tell you there was nothing

there, nothing!--If I were to stay out till the dark has come--it will

be here in half an hour--and you could be quite sure when you saw me

again, that there was nothing near you but the dear old hills, and the

power of God, could you believe me and try and rest and sleep?’

Mary looked at her intently. If Catherine could have seen clearly in

the dim light she would have caught something of the cunning of madness

slipping into the dying woman’s expression. While she waited for the

answer, there was a noise in the kitchen outside an opening of the outer

door, and a voice. Catherine’s heart stood still. She had to make a

superhuman effort to keep her attention fixed on Mary.

‘Go!’ said the hoarse whisper close beside her, and the girl lifted

her wasted hand, and pushed her visitor from her. ‘Go!’ it repeated

insistently, with a sort of wild beseeching then, brokenly, the gasping

breath interrupting: ‘There’s naw fear--naw fear--fur the likes o’ you!’

Catherine rose.

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said gently, but her hand shook as she pushed her

chair back; ‘God is everywhere, Mary.’

She put on her hat and cloak, said something in Mrs. Irwin’s ear, and

stooped to kiss the brow which to the shuddering sense under her will

seemed already cold and moist with the sweats of death. Mary watched her

go; Mrs. Irwin, with the air of one bewildered, drew her chair nearer to

the settle; and the light of the fire, shooting and dancing through the

June twilight, threw such fantastic shadows over the face on the pillow

that all expression was lost. What was moving in the crazed mind?

Satisfaction, perhaps, at having got rid of one witness, one gaoler,

one of the various antagonistic forces surrounding her? She had a dim,

frenzied notion she should have to fight for her liberty when the call

came, and she lay tense and rigid, waiting--the images of insanity

whirling through her brain, while the light slowly, slowly waned.

Catherine opened the door to the kitchen. The two carriers were standing

there, and Robert Elsmere also stood with his back to her, talking to

them in an undertone.

He turned at the sound behind him, and his start brought a sudden rush

to Catherine’s check. Her face, as the candle-light struck it amid the

shadows of the doorways was like an angelic vision to him--the heavenly

calm of it just exquisitely broken by the wonder, the shock, of his

presence.

‘You here?’ he cried coming up to her, and taking her hand--what secret

instinct guided him?--close in both of his. ‘I never dreamt of it--so

late. My cousin sent me over--she wished for news.’

She smiled involuntarily. It seemed to her she had expected this in some

sort all along. But her self-possession was complete.

‘The excited state may be over in a short time now,’ she answered him

in a quiet whisper; ‘but at present it is at its height. It seemed

to please her’--and withdrawing her hand she turned to John

Backhouse--‘when I suggested that I should walk up to Shanmoss and back.

I said I would come back to her in half an hour or so, when the daylight

was quite gone, and prove to her there was nothing on the path.’

A hand caught her arm. It was Mrs. Irwin, holding the door close with

the other hand.

‘Miss Leyburn--Miss Catherine! Yur not gawin’ oot--not gawin’ oop _that_

path?’ The woman was fond of Catherine, and looked deadly frightened.

‘Yes, I am, Mrs. Irwin--but I shall be back very soon. Don’t leave

her; go back.’ And Catherine motioned her back with a little peremptory

gesture.

‘Doan’t ye let ‘ur, sir,’ said the woman excitedly to Robert. ‘One’s

eneuf oneut aa’m thinking.’ And she pointed with a meaning gesture to

the room behind her.

Robert looked at Catherine, who was moving toward the outer door.

‘I’ll go with her,’ he said hastily, his face lighting up. ‘There is

nothing whatever to be afraid of, only don’t leave your patient.’

Catherine trembled as she heard the words, but she made no sign, and

the two men and the women watched their departure with blank uneasy

wonderment. A second later they were on the fell-side climbing a rough

stony path, which in places was almost a watercourse, and which wound up

the fell toward a tract of level swampy moss or heath, beyond which lay

the descent to Shanmoor. Daylight was almost gone; the stormy yellow

west was being fast swallowed up in cloud; below them as they climbed

lay the dark group of houses, with a light twinkling here and there. All

about them were black mountain forms; a desolate tempestuous wind drove

a gusty rain into their faces; a little beck roared beside them, and

in the distance from the black gulf of the valley the swollen river

thundered.

Elsmere looked down on his companion with an indescribable exultation,

a passionate sense of possession which could hardly restrain itself. He

had come back that morning with a mind clearly made up. Catherine had

been blind indeed when she supposed that any plan of his or hers would

have been allowed to stand in the way of that last wrestle with her, of

which he had planned all the methods, rehearsed all the arguments.

But when he reached the Vicarage he was greeted with the news of her

absence. She was inaccessible it appeared for the day. No matter! The

vicar and he settled in the fewest possible words that he should stay

till Monday, Mrs. Thornburgh meanwhile looking on, saying what civility

demanded, and surprisingly little else. Then in the evening Mrs.

Thornburgh had asked of him, with a manner of admirable indifference,

whether he felt inclined for an evening walk to High Ghyll to inquire

after Mary Backhouse. The request fell in excellently with a lover’s

restlessness, and Robert assented at once. The vicar saw him go with

puzzled brows and a quick look at his wife, whose head was bent close

over her worsted work.

It never occurred to Elsmere--or if it did occur, he pooh-poohed the

notion--that he should find Catherine still at her post far from home on

this dark stormy evening. But in the glow of joy which her presence had

brought him he was still capable of all sorts of delicate perceptions

and reasonings. His quick imagination carried him through the scene from

which she had just momentarily escaped. He had understood the

exaltation of her look and tone. If love spoke at all, ringed with such

surroundings, it must be with its most inward and spiritual voice, as

those speak who feel ‘the Eternities’ about them.

But the darkness hid her from him so well that he had to feel out the

situation for himself. He could not trace it in her face.

‘We must go right up to the top of the pass,’ she said to him as he held

a gate open for her which led them into a piece of larch plantation on

the mountain-side. ‘The ghost is supposed to walk along this bit of

road above the houses, till it reaches the heath on the top, and then

it turns toward Bleacliff Tarn, which lies higher up to the right, under

High Fell.’

‘Do you imagine your report will have any effect?’

‘At any rate,’ she said, sighing, ‘it seemed to me that it might

divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of her own summons.

Anything is better than the torture of that one fixed idea as she lies

there.’

‘What is that?’ said Robert, startled a little by some ghostly sounds

in front of them. The little wood was almost dark, and he could see

nothing.

‘Only a horse trotting on in front of us,’ said Catherine; ‘our voices

frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on the fell again directly.’

And as they quitted the trees, a dark bulky form to the left suddenly

lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered down the slope.

A cluster of white-stemmed birches just ahead of them, caught whatever

light was still left in the atmosphere, their feathery tops bending and

swaying against the sky.

‘How easily, with a mind attuned, one could people this whole path with

ghosts!’ said Robert. ‘Look at those stems, and that line of stream

coming down to the right, and listen to the wind among the fern.’

For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up which the blast

was tearing its tempestuous way.

Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaustion,

which had been banished like everything else--doubt, humiliation,

bitterness--by the one fact of his presence, came back on her.

‘There is something, rather awful in this dark and storm,’ she said, and

paused.

‘Would you have faced it alone?’ he asked, his voice thrilling her with

a hundred different meanings. ‘I am glad I prevented it.’

‘I have no fear of the mountains,’ she said, trembling ‘I know them, and

they me.’

‘But you are tired--your voice is tired--and the walk might have been

more of an effort than you thought it. Do you never think of yourself?’

‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Catherine, trying to smile, and could find nothing

else to say. They walked on a few moments in silence, splashes of rain

breaking in their faces. Robert’s inward excitement was growing fast.

Suddenly Catherine’s pulse stood still. She felt her hand lifted, drawn

within his arm, covered close with his warm, trembling clasp.

‘Catherine, let it stay there. Listen one moment. You gave me a hard

lesson yesterday, too hard--I cannot learn it--I am bold--I claim you.

Be my wife. Help me through this difficult world. I have loved you from

the first moment. Come to me. Be kind to me.’

She could hardly see his face, but she could feel the passion in his

voice and touch. Her Cheek seemed to droop against his arm. He felt her

tottering.

‘Let me sit down,’ she said; and after one moment of dizzy silence he

guided her to a rock, sinking down himself beside her, longing, but

not daring, to shelter her under his broad Inverness cloak against the

storm.

‘I told you,’ she said, almost whispering, ‘that I was bound, tied to

others.’

‘I do not admit your plea,’ he said passionately; ‘no, not for a moment.

For two days have I been tramping over the mountains thinking it out for

yourself and me. Catherine, your mother has no son, she would find one

in me. I have no sisters--give me yours. I will cherish them as any

brother could. Come and enrich my life; you shall still fill and shelter

theirs. I dare not think what my future might be without you to guide,

to inspire, to bless--dare not--lest with a word you should plunge me

into an outer darkness I cannot face.’

He caught her unresisting hand, and raised it to his lips.

‘Is there no sacredness,’ he said, brokenly, ‘in the fate that has

brought us together-out of all the world--here in this lonely valley?

Come to me, Catherine. You shall never fail the old ties, I promise you;

and new hands shall cling to you--new voices shall call you blessed.’

Catherine could hardly breathe. Every word had been like balm upon a

wound--like a ray of intense light in the gloom about them. Oh, where

was this softness bearing her--this emptiness of all will, of all

individual power? She hid her eyes with her other hand, struggling to

recall that far away moment in Marrisdale. But the mind refused to

work. Consciousness seemed to retain nothing but the warm grasp of his

hand--the tones of his voice.

He saw her struggle, and pressed on remorselessly.

‘Speak to me--say one little kind word. Oh, you cannot send me away

miserable and empty!’

She turned to him, and laid her trembling free hand on his arm. He

clasped them both with rapture.

‘Give me a little time.’

‘No, no,’ he said, and it almost seemed to her that he was smiling:

‘time for you to escape me again my wild mountain bird; time for you to

think yourself and me into all sorts of moral mists! No, you shall not

have it. Here--alone with God and the dark--bless me or undo me. Send

me out to the work of life maimed and sorrowful, or send me out your

knight, your possession, pledged--’

But his voice failed him. What a note of youth, of imagination, of

impulsive eagerness there was through it all! The more slowly moving,

inarticulate nature was swept away by it. There was but one object clear

to her in the whole world of thought or sense, everything else had sunk

out of sight--drowned in a luminous mist.

He rose and stood before her as he delivered his ultimatum, his tall

form drawn up to its full height. In the east, across the valley, above

the farther buttress of High Fell, there was a clearer strip of sky,

visible for a moment among the moving storm-clouds, and a dim haloed

moon shone out in it. Far away a white-walled cottage glimmered against

the fell: the pools at their feet shone in the weird, passing light.

She lifted her head, and looked at him, still irresolute. Then she too

rose, and helplessly, like someone impelled by a will not her own, she

silently held out to him two white, trembling hands.

‘Catherine--my angel--my wife!’

There was something in the pale, virginal grace of look and form which

kept his young passion in awe. But he bent his head again over those

yielded hands, kissing them with dizzy, unspeakable joy.

* * * * * * * * * * *

About twenty minutes later Catherine and Robert, having hurried back

with all speed from the top of Shanmoss, reached the farmhouse door.

She knocked. No one answered. She tried the lock; it yielded, and

they entered. No one in the kitchen. She looked disturbed and

conscience-sticken.

‘Oh!’ she cried to him, under her breath; ‘have we been too long?’ And

hurrying into the inner room she left him waiting.

Inside was a mournful sight. The two men and Mrs. Irwin stood close

round the settle, but as she came nearer, Catherine saw Mary Backhouse

lying panting on her pillows, her breath coming in loud gasps, her

dress and all the coverings of the bed showing signs of disorder and

confusion, her black hair tossed about her.

‘It’s bin awfa’ work sence you left, miss,’ whispered Mrs. Irwin to

Catherine excitedly, as she joined them. ‘She thowt she heerd soombody

fleytin’ and callin’--it was t’ wind came skirlin’ round t’ place, an’

she aw’ but thrown hirsel’ oot ‘o’ t’ bed, an’ aa shooted for Tim, and

they came, and they and I--it’s bin as much as we could a’ du to hod

‘er.’

‘Luke! Steady!’ exclaimed Jim. ‘She’ll try it again.’

For the hands were moving restlessly from side to side, and the face was

working again. There was one more desperate effort to rise, which the

two men checked--gently enough, but effectually--and then the exhaustion

seemed complete. The lids fell, and the struggle for breath was pitiful.

Catherine flew for some drugs which the doctor had left, and shown her

how to use. After some twenty minutes they seemed to give relief, and

the great haunted eyes opened once more.

Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Mary drank

mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. When Catherine

put down the glass the eyes followed her with a question which the lips

had no power to frame.

‘Leave her now a little,’ said Catherine to the others. ‘The fewer

people and the more air the better. And please let the door be open: the

room is too hot.’

They went out silently, and Catherine sank down beside the bed. Her

heart went out in unspeakable longing toward the poor human wreck before

her. For her there was no morrow possible, no dawn of other and softer

skies. All was over: life was lived, and all its heavenly capabilities

missed forever. Catherine felt her own joy hurt her, and her tears fell

fast.

‘Mary,’ she said, laying her face close beside the chill face on the

pillow, ‘Mary, I went out: I climbed all the path as far as Shanmoss.

There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must tell you! Can I make you

understand? I want you to feel that it is only God and love that are

real. Oh, think of them! He would not let you be hurt and terrified in

your pain, poor Mary. He loves you. He is waiting to comfort you--to set

you free from pain forever: and He has sent you a sign by me.’... She

lifted her head from the pillow, trembling and hesitating. Still that

feverish, questioning gaze on the face beneath her, as it lay in deep

shadow cast by a light on the windowsill some paces away.

‘You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the thought of which

has been tormenting and torturing you. You thought God would let a dark

lost spirit trouble you and take you away from Him--you, His child,

whom He made and whom He loves! And listen! While you thought you

were sending me out to face the evil thing, you were really my kind

angel--God’s messenger--sending me to meet the joy of my whole life!

‘There was some one waiting here just now,’ she went on hurriedly,

breathing her sobbing words into Mary’s ear. ‘Some one who has loved me,

and whom I love. But I had made him sad, and myself; then when you sent

me out he came too, we walked up that path, you remember beyond the

larchwood, up to the top, where the stream goes under the road. And

there he spoke to me, and I couldn’t help it any more. And I promised to

love him and be his wife. And if it hadn’t been for you, Mary, it would

never have happened. God had put it into your hand, this joy, and I

bless you for it! Oh, and Mary--Mary--it is only for a little little

while this life of ours! Nothing matters--not our worst sin and

sorrow--but God, and our love to Him. I shall meet you some day--I pray

I may--in His sight and all will be well, the pain all forgotten--all!’

She raised herself again and looked down with yearning passionate pity

on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer of heart to heart! There were

tears forming under the heavy lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed

and soft. Slowly the feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an

intense, expectant silence.

There was a faint breathing from the lips, she stooped, and caught it.

‘Kiss me!’ said the whisper, and she laid her soft fresh lips to the

parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her head again Mary still

held her hand; Catherine softly stretched out hers for the opiate Dr.

Baker had left; it was swallowed without resistance, and a quiet to

which the invalid had been a stranger for days stole little by little

over the wasted frame. The grasp of the fingers relaxed, the labored

breath came more gently, and in a few more minutes she slept. Twilight

was long over. The ghost-hour was passed, and the moon outside was

slowly gaining a wider empire in the clearing heavens.

It was a little after ten o’clock that Rose drew aside the curtain at

Burwood and looked out.

‘There is the lantern,’ she said to Agnes, ‘just by the vicarage. How

the night has cleared!’

She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. Mrs. Leyburn was

sitting by the bit of fire that was generally lit for her benefit in the

evenings, her white shawl dropping gracefully about her, a copy of the

_Cornhill_ on her lap. But she was not reading, she was meditating, and

the girls thought her out of spirits. The hall door opened.

‘There is some one with Catherine!’ cried Rose starting up. Agnes

suspended her letter.

‘Perhaps the vicar,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh.

A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the door-way stood Elsmere.

Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the little stairs behind him.

Elsmere’s look was enough for the two girls. They understood in

an instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact with love is

intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though the romance be not

hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat bewildered.

Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand.

‘Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn?’ he said, his boyish looks

aglow, his voice unsteady. ‘Will you let me be a son to you?’

Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked up at him

helplessly.

‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, where is Catherine?’

‘I brought her home,’ he said gently, ‘She is mine, if you will it. Give

her to me again!’

Mrs. Leyburn’s face worked pitifully. The rectory and the wedding dress,

which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts since her last sight

of Catherine, sank out of them altogether.

‘She has been everything in the world to us, Mr. Elsmere.’

‘I know she has,’ he said simply. ‘She shall be everything in the world

to you still. I have had hard work to persuade her. There will be no

chance for me if you don’t help me.’

Another breathless pause, Then Mrs. Leyburn timidly drew him to her, and

he stooped his tall head and kissed her like a son.

‘Oh, I must go to Catherine!’ she said hurrying away, her pretty

withered cheeks wet with tears.

Then the girls threw themselves on Elsmere. The talk was all animation

and excitement for the moment, not a tragic touch in it. It was as well

perhaps that Catherine was not there to hear!

‘I give you fair warning,’ said Rose, as she bade him good-night, ‘that

I don’t know how to behave to a brother. And I am equally sure that Mrs.

Thornburgh doesn’t know how to behave to _fiancé_.’

Robert threw up his hands in mock terror at the name and departed.

‘We are abandoned,’ cried Rose, flitting herself into the chair

again--then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness--‘and we

are free! Oh, I hope she will be happy!’

And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she would drown her

first words in her last.

‘Madcap!’ cried Agnes struggling. ‘Leave me at least a little breath to

wish Catherine joy!’

And they both fled up-stairs.

There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs.

Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation down-stairs she could

not persuade herself to go to bed. She first knocked up Sarah and

communicated the news; then she sat down before a pier-glass in her own

room studying the person who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband.

‘My doing from beginning to end,’ she cried with a triumph beyond words.

‘William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as

much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be

sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There’s no one but

Providence could have foreseen it-they’re so different. And after all

it’s _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?’

BOOK II. SURREY.

CHAPTER XI.

Farewell to the mountains!

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run

its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern

nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant,

and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest

places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely

more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may

wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless

of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies,

where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they

please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded

by his neighborhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in

these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature

lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented,

a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into

scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow

in color, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of

the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness

but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt, petulant

child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man’s

grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks and she will

be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing,

capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all

the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which

is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we

next meet with Robert and Catherine ELsmere. The rectory of Murewell

occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped

through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the

south, and climbed away on the north toward the long chalk ridge of the

Hog’s Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor

state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch

of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs

climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern

side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down toward the

village at its foot--a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks,

the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red wars, and

the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the

floweriness and the gayety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow

and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village-roofs and

gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed

brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths

of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over

the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house,

now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the

squire of the clay had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should

exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished

the rectory: so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany

doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in

which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.

Altogether a quiet, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it

commanded a world of loveliness. All around it--north, south, and

west--there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood

and grassy common, in which the few work-a-day patches of hedge and

ploughed land seemed engulphed and lost. Close under the rectory

windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe,

the largest and fruitfulest of the neighborhood. At the present moment

it was just ready for the reaper--the golden ears had clearly but a

few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark

summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue

pointed bill, which seemed to be there only to attract and make a centre

for the sunsets.

As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of

wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing

experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford.

It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the

senior members of the University were already in residence, and the

stagnation of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up; so was Mr.

Grey, and many another old friend of Robert’s. The bride and bridegroom

were much fêted in a quiet way. They dined in many common rooms

and bursaries; they were invited to many luncheons, where at the

superabundance of food and the length of time spent upon it made the

Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and Langham, devoted himself to taking

the wife through colleges and gardens, schools and Bodleian, in most

orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself afterward for the sense of

constraint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke with

Robert.

He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a creature so mobile,

so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should have fallen in love with

this stately, silent woman, with her very evident rigidities of

thought and training, was only another illustration of the mysteries of

matrimony. He could not get on with her, and after a while did not try

to do so.

There could be no doubt as to Elsmere’s devotion. He was absorbed,

wrapped up in her.

‘She has affected him,’ thought the tutor, ‘at a period of life when

he is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong than by the

difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch of religious genius

in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine wind. One can see

him expanding, growing under it. _Bien!_ sooner he than! To be fair,

however, let me remember that she decidedly does not like me--which

may cut me off from Elsmere. However’--and Langham sighed over his

fire--‘what have he and I to do with one another in the future? By

all the laws of character something untoward might come out of this

marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will

have children--and that solves most things.’

Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people,

Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under

his careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old

friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange than ever; the

points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number

term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for

the retention of his post, and he spoke with whole-sale distaste of his

pupils. He had set up a book on ‘The Schools of Athens,’ but when Robert

saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly

understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a

difficult, fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been

intimate. Now, Laugham’s tone _à propos_ of Grey’s politics and Grey’s

dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard

to most of the strenuous things of life. ‘Nothing particular is true,’

his manner said, ‘and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through

the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as

may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven’s sake, don’t cant

about it to other people!’

If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey

should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look

of Elsmere’s wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he

tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both

of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldiness that should

have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, the spell

of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort of troubled

admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding

him, which contended with something else in her mind respecting him.

Some words of Robert’s, uttered very early in their acquaintance, had

set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert said, ‘Grey is not

one of us;’ and Catherine, restrained by a hundred ties of training and

temperament, would not surrender herself, and could not if she would.

Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and the first

institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for the

tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had received them,

and had then retired to a little cottage of her own close by. She had of

course already made the acquaintance of her daughter-in-law, for she

had been the Thornburghs’ guest for ten days before the marriage in

September, and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit in the

summer. But it was now that for the first she realized to the full the

character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine’s manner to her

was sweetness itself. Parted from her own mother as she was, the younger

wowan’s strong filial instincts spent themselves in tending the mother

who had been the guardian and life of Robert’s youth. And, Mrs. Elsmere

in return was awed by Catherine’s moral force and purity of nature,

and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real, in spite of the

severity of the type, and to which marriage had given, at any rate for

the moment, a certain added softness and brilliancy.

But there were difficulties in the way. Catherine was a little too apt

to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated her own mother. But to

be nursed and protected, to be, screened from draughts, and run after

with shawls and stools was something wholly new and intolerable to Mrs.

Elsmere. She could not away with it, and as soon as she had sufficiently

lost her first awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge herself in

all sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes of petulant Irish

wit which would make Catherine color and drawback. Then Mrs. Elsmere,

touched with remorse, would catch her by the neck and give her a

resounding kiss, which perhaps puzzled Catherine no less than her

sarcasm of a minute before.

Moreover Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that her new daughter

was decidedly deficient in the sense of humor.

‘I believe it’s that father of hers,’ she would say to herself crossly.

‘By what Robert tells me of him he must have been one of the people who

get ill in their minds for want of a good mouth-filling laugh now and

then. The man who can’t amuse himself a bit out of the world is sure to

get his head addled somehow, poor creature.’

Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able to take

Mrs. Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine was more

often scandalized than impressed by her mother-in-law’s charitable

performances.

Mrs. Elsmere’s little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans sent to

her from different London districts. The training of these girls was the

chief business of her life, and a very odd training it was, conducted in

the noisiest way and on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that

the girls generally did well and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere,

but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their household

teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha--as great an

original as herself, was so irregular, their religious training so

extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to disport

themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the rector’s wife, that

Catherine involuntarily regarded the little cottage on the hill as a

spot of misrule in the general order of the parish. She would go in,

say, at eleven o’clock in the morning, find her mother-in-law in bed,

half-dressed, with all her handmaidens about her, giving her orders,

reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting out her girls’ frocks,

instructing them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on

questions suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of

them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in a detestable

litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologized for it. On the contrary, as

she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _débris_ off a chair

in search of a seat, the small bright eyes would twinkle with something

that was certainly nearer amusement than shame.

And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere’s relations with the poor of

the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most

angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin

to her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the

stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was

human in them, than to weep over what was vile, Robert’s wife would go

away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing

harsh toward Robert’s mother.

But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or shallow,

no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the beginning of January

struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange ways of living were more the

result of certain longstanding delicacies of health than she had ever

allowed anyone to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the

lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish

character at its finest a moment of agonized wrestling with that terror

of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest

consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory--Robert found

himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the

beginning of the illness. In one of the intervals toward the end, when

there was a faint power of speech, she drew Catherine’s cheek down to

her and kissed her.

‘God bless you!’ the old woman’s voice said, with a solemnity in it

which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never heard before. ‘Be

good to him, Catherine--be always good to him!’

And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a certain

wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. But she answered

with tears and tender words, and at last the mother’s face settled into

a peace which death did but confirm.

This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their depths all the

feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown Elsmere more than ever

on his wife. To him, made as it seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief

was a novel and difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that

his wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened

but ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous

weariness and irritation into which his temperament might easily have

been betrayed.

And how his very dependence had endeared him to Catherine! That

vibrating responsive quality in him, so easily mistaken for mere

weakness, which made her so necessary to him--there is nothing perhaps

which wins more deeply upon a woman. For all the while it was balanced

in a hundred ways by the illimitable respect which his character and his

doings compelled from those about him. To be the strength, the inmost

joy, of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero

at every turn--there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than

this.

On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visitors. Catherine

had sent the pony-carriage to the station to meet Rose and Langham,

who was to escort her from Waterloo. For various reasons, all

characteristic, it was Rose’s first visit to Catherine’s new home.

Now she had been for six weeks in London, and had been persuaded to come

on to her sister, at the end of her stay. Catherine was looking forward

to her coming with many tremors. The wild ambitious creature had been

not one atom appeased by Manchester and its opportunities. She had gone

back to Whindale in April only to fall into more hopeless discontent

than ever. ‘She can hardly be civil to anybody,’ Agnes wrote to

Catherine. ‘The cry now is all “London” or at least “Berlin,” and she

cannot imagine why papa should ever have wished to condemn us to such a

prison.’

Catherine grew pale with indignation as she read the words, and thought

of her father’s short-lived joy in the old house and its few green

fields, or of the confidence which had soothed his last moments, that it

would be well there with his wife and children, far from the hubbub of

the world.

But Rose and her whims were not facts which could be put aside. They

would have to be grappled with, probably humored. As Catherine strolled

out into the garden, listening alternately for Robert and for the

carriage, she told herself that it would be a difficult visit. And the

presence of Mr. Langham would certainly not diminish its difficulty. The

mere thought of him set the wife’s young form stiffening. A cold breath

seemed to blow from Edward Langham, which chilled Catherine’s whole

being. Why was Robert so fond of him?

But the more Langham cut himself off from the world, the more Robert

clung to him in his wistful affectionate way. The more difficult their

intercourse became, the more determined the younger man seemed to be to

maintain it. Catherine imagined that he often scourged himself in secret

for the fact that the gratitude which had once flowed so readily had now

become a matter of reflection and resolution.

‘Why should we always expect to get pleasure from our friends?’ he had

said to her once with vehemence. ‘It should be pleasure enough to love

them.’ And she knew very well of whom he was thinking.

How late he was this afternoon. He must have been a long round. She had

news for him of great interest. The lodge-keeper from the Hall had just

looked in to tell the rector that the Squire and his widowed sister were

expected home in four days.

But, interesting as the news was, Catherine’s looks as she pondered

it were certainly not looks of pleased expectation. Neither of them,

indeed, had much cause to rejoice in the Squire’s advent. Since their

arrival in the parish the splendid Jacobean Hall had been untenanted.

The Squire, who was abroad to With his sister at the time of their

coming, had sent a civil note to the new rector on his settlement in

the parish, naming some common Oxford acquaintances, and desiring him to

make what use of the famous Murewell Library he pleased. ‘I hear of

you as a friend to letters,’ he wrote; ‘do my books a service by using

them.’ The words were graceful enough. Robert had answered them warmly.

He had also availed himself largely of the permission they had conveyed.

We shall see presently that the Squire, though absent, had already made

a deep impression on the young man’s imagination.

But unfortunately he came across the Squire in two capacities. Mr.

Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, he was also the owner of

the whole land of the parish, where, however, by a curious accident of

inheritance, dating some generations back, and implying some very remote

connection between the Wendover and Elsmere families, he was not the

patron of the living. Now the more Elsmere studied him under this

aspect, the deeper became his dismay. The estate was entirely in the

hands of an agent who had managed it for some fifteen years, and of

whose character the Rector, before he had been two months in the parish,

had formed the very poorest opinion. Robert, entering upon his duties

with the Order of the modern reformer, armed not only with charity but

with science, found himself confronted by the opposition of a man

who combined the shrewdness of an attorney with the callousness of a

drunkard. It seemed incredible that a great landowner should commit his

interests and the interests of hundreds of human beings to the hands of

such a person.

By-and-by, however, as the Rector penetrated more deeply into the

situation, he found his indignation transferring itself more and more

from the man to the master. It became clear to him that in some respects

Henslowe suited the Squire admirably. It became also clear to him that

the Squire had taken pains for years to let it be known that he cared

not one rap for any human being on his estate in any other capacity than

as a rent-payer or wage-receiver. What! Live for thirty years in that

great house, and never care whether your tenants and laborers lived like

pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, or the children

of diphtheria, which you might have prevented! Robert’s brow grew dark

over it.

The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at

once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment

Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his

face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his

wife. She hung on his arm, and, with his hand laid tenderly on hers, he

asked her how she fared. She answered briefly, but with a little flush,

her eyes raised to his. She was within a few weeks of motherhood.

Then they strolled along talking. He, gave her an account of his

afternoon which, to judge from the worried expression which presently

effaced the joy of their meeting, had been spent in some unsuccessful

effort or other. They paused after awhile and stood looking over the

plain before them to a spot beyond the nearer belt of woodland, where

from a little hollow about three miles off there rose a cloud of bluish

smoke.

‘He will do nothing!’ cried Catherine, incredulous.

‘Nothing! It is the policy of the estate, apparently, to let the old

and bad cottages fall to pieces. He sneers at one for supposing any

landowner has money for “philanthropy” just now. If the people don’t

like the houses they can go. I told him I should appeal to the Squire as

soon as he came home.’

‘What did he say?’

He smiled, as much as to say, “Do as you like and be a fool for your

pains.” How the Squire can let that man tyrannize over the estate as he

does, I cannot conceive. Oh, Catherine, I am full of qualms about the

Squire!’

‘So am I,’ she said, with a little darkening of her clear look. ‘Old

Benham has just been in to say they are expected on Thursday.’

Robert started. ‘Are these our last days of peace?’ he said

wistfully--‘the last days of our honeymoon, Catherine?’

She smiled at him with a little quiver of passionate feeling under the

smile.

‘Can anything touch that?’ she said under her breath.

‘Do you know,’ he said, presently, his voice dropping, ‘that it is only

a month to our wedding day? Oh, my wife, have I kept my promise--is the

new life as rich as the old?’

She made no answer, except the dumb sweet answer that love writes on

eyes and lips. Then a tremor passed over her.

‘Are we too happy? Can it be well--be right?’

Oh, let us take it like children!’ he cried, with a shiver, almost

petulantly. ‘There will be dark hours enough. It is so good to be

happy.’

She leant her cheek fondly against his shoulder. To her, life always

meant self-restraint, self-repression, self-deadening, if need be. The

Puritan distrust of personal joy as something dangerous and ensnaring

was deep ingrained in her. It had no natural hold on him.

They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the corn-field and the

sun-filled West, while the afternoon breeze blew back the man’s curly

reddish hair, long since restored to all its natural abundance.

Presently Robert broke into a broad smile.

‘What do you suppose Langham has been entertaining Rose with on the

way, Catherine? I wouldn’t miss her remarks to-night on the escort we

provided her for a good deal.’

Catherine said nothing, but her delicate eyebrows went up a little.

Robert stooped and lightly kissed her.

‘You never performed a greater art of virtue even in _your_ life Mrs.

Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham that nice letter of invitation.’

And then the young Rector sighed, as many a boyish memory came crowding

upon him.

A sound of wheels! Robert’s long legs took him to the gate in a

twinkling, and he flung it open just as Rose drove up in fine style, a

thin dark man beside her.

Rose lent her bright cheek to Catherine’s kiss, and the two sisters

walked up to the door together, while Robert and Langham loitered after

them talking.

‘Oh, Catherine!’ said Rose under her breath, as they got into the

drawing-room, with a little theatrical gesture, ‘why on earth did you

inflict that man and me on each other for two mortal hours?’

‘Sh-sh!’ said Catherine’s lips, while her face gleamed with laughter.

Rose sank flushed upon a chair, her eyes glancing up with a little

furtive anger in them as the two gentlemen entered the room.

‘You found each other easily at Waterloo?’ asked Robert.

‘Mr. Langham would never have found me,’ said Rose, dryly, ‘but I

pounced on him at last, just, I believe, as he was beginning to

cherish the hope of an empty carriage and the solitary enjoyment of his

“Saturday Review.”’

Langham smiled nervously. ‘Miss Leyburn is too hard on a blind man,’ he

said, holding up his eye-glass apologetically; ‘it was my eyes, not my

will, that were fault.’

Rose’s lip curled a little. ‘And Robert,’ she cried, bending forward as

though something had just occurred to her, ‘do tell, me--I vowed I would

ask--_is_ Mr. Langham a Liberal or a conservative? _He_ doesn’t know!’

Robert laughed, so did Langham.

‘Your sister,’ he said, flushing, ‘will have one so very precise in all

one says.’

He turned his handsome olive face toward her, an unwonted spark of

animation lighting up his black eyes. It was evident that he felt

himself persecuted, but it was not so evident whether he enjoyed the

process or disliked it.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said Rose nonchalantly. ‘Only I have just come from a

house where everybody either loathes Mr. Gladstone or would die for him

to-morrow. There was a girl of seven and a boy of nine who were always

discussing “Coercion” in the corners of the schoolroom. So, of course,

I have grown political too, and began to catechize Mr. Langham at once,

and when he said “he didn’t know,” I felt I should like to set those

children at him! They would soon put some principles into him!’

‘It is not generally lack of principle, Miss Rose,’ said her

brother-in-law, ‘that turns a man a doubter in politics, but too much!’

And while he spoke, his eyes resting on Langham, his smile broadened as

he recalled all those instances in their Oxford past, when he had taken

a humble share in one of the Herculean efforts on the part of Langham’s

friends, which were always necessary whenever it was a question of

screwing a vote out of him on any debated University question.

‘How dull it must be to have too much principle!’ cried Rose. ‘Like a

mill choked with corn. No bread because the machine can’t work!’

‘Defend me from my friends!’ cried Langham, roused. ‘Elsmere, when did I

give you a right to caricature me in this way? If I were interested,’ he

added, subsiding into his usual hesitating ineffectiveness, ‘I suppose I

should know my own mind.’

And then seizing the muffins, he stood presenting them to Rose as though

in deprecation of any further personalities. Inside him there was a

hot protest against an unreasonable young beauty whom he had done his

miserable best to entertain for two long hours, and who in return had

made feel himself more of a fool than he had done for years. Since when

had young women put on all these airs? In his young days they knew their

place.

Catherine meanwhile sat watching her sister. The child was more

beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the Rose of Long

Whindale had undergone much transformation. The puffed sleeves, the

_æsthetic_ skirts, the naïve adornments of bead and shell, the formless

hat, which it pleased her to imagine ‘after Gainsborough,’ had all

disappeared. She was clad in some soft fawn-colored garment, cut very

much in the fashion; her hair was closely rolled and twisted about her

lightly balanced head; everything about her was treat and fresh and

tight-fitting. A year ago she had been a damsel from the ‘Earthly

Paradise;’ now, so far as an English girl can achieve it she might have

been a model for Tissot. In this phase, as in the other, there was a

touch of extravagance. The girl was developing fast, but had clearly not

yet developed. The restlessness, the self-consciousness of Long Whindale

were still there; but they spoke to the spectator in different ways.

But in her anxious study of her sister Catherine did not forget her

place of hostess. ‘Did our man bring you through the park, Mr. Langham?’

she asked him timidly.

‘Yes. What an exquisite old house!’ he said, turning to her, and

feeling through all his critical sense the difference between the gentle

matronly dignity of the one sister and the young self-assertion of the

other.

‘Ah,’ said Robert, ‘I kept that as a surprise! Did you ever see a more

perfect place?’

‘What date?’

‘Early Tudor--as to the oldest part. It was built by a relation of

Bishop Fisher’s; then largely rebuilt under James I. Elizabeth stayed

there twice. There is a trace of a visit of Sidney’s. Waller was there,

and left a copy of verses in the library. Evelyn laid out a great deal

of the garden. Lord Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden,

et cetera, et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and as

beautiful as a dream to begin with.’

‘And the owner of all this is the author of the “Idols of the Market

Place”?’

Robert nodded.

‘Did you ever meet him at Oxford? I believe he was there once or twice

during my time, but I never saw him.’

‘Yes,’ said Langham, thinking. ‘I met him at dinner at the

Vice-Chancellor’s, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person--very

difficult to talk to,’ he added reflectively.

Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose Leyburn’s lip

and understood it in a moment. Incontinently he forgot the Squire and

fell to asking himself what had possessed him on that luckless journey

down. He had never seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable;

and for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the certainty

that this slim flashing creature must have thought him a morbid idiot

with as much _sang-froid_ as usual.

Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and

presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their way they

passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, and then with

a bright flush on the face, which had such maternal calm in it already,

she threw her arm round Rose and drew her in. It was a white empty room,

smelling of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for

the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all--at the piles of tiny

garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch’s ‘Song of the Bell,’

which had been the companions of their own childhood, on the walls--and

something stirred in the girl’s breast.

‘Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you soon will

have!’ she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, laying her hands on

her sister’s shoulders.

‘Everything but worthiness!’ said Catherine softly, a mist rising in her

calm gray eyes. ‘And you, ‘Röschen,’ she added wistfully--‘have you been

getting a little more what you want?’

‘What’s the good of asking?’ said the girl, with a little shrug of

impatience. ‘As if creatures like we ever got what they want! London has

been good fun certainly--if one could get enough, of it. Catherine, how

long is that marvelous person going to stay?’ and she pointed in the

direction of Langham’s room.

‘A week,’ said Catherine, smiling at the girl’s disdainful tone. ‘I was

afraid you didn’t take to him.’

‘I never saw such a being before,’ declared Rose--‘never! I thought I

should never get a plain answer from him about anything. He wasn’t even

quite certain it was a fine day! I wonder if you set fire to him whether

he would be sure it hurt! A week, you say? Heigho! what an age!’

‘Be kind to him,’ said Catherine, discreetly veiling her own feelings,

and caressing the curly golden head as they moved toward the door. ‘He’s

a poor lone don, and he was so good to Robert!’

‘Excellent reason for you, Mrs. Elsmere,’ said Rose pouting; ‘but----’

Her further remarks were cut short by the sound of the front-door bell.

‘Oh, I had forgotten Mr. Newcome!’ cried Catherine, starting. ‘Come down

soon, Rose, and help us through.’

‘Who is he?’ inquired Rose, sharply.

‘A High Church clergyman near here, whom Robert asked to tea this

afternoon,’ said Catherine, escaping.

Rose took her hat off very leisurely. The prospect down-stairs did not

seem to justify despatch. She lingered and thought, of ‘Lohengrin’

and Albani, of the crowd of artistic friends that had escorted her to

Waterloo, of the way in which she had been applauded the night before,

of the joys of playing Brahms with a long-haired pupil of Rubinstein’s,

who had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand at the end of it, etc.

During the last six weeks the colors of ‘this thread-bare world’ had

been freshening before her in marvellous fashion. And now, as she stood

looking out, the quiet fields opposite, the sight of a cow pushing its

head through the hedge, the infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house,

filled her with a sudden depression. How dull it all seemed--how wanting

in the glow of life!

CHAPTER XII.

Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, watched by

Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner

of his own as soon as another visitor appeared. Beside Catherine sat a

Ritualist clergyman in cassock and long cloak--a saint clearly, though

perhaps, to judge from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed

to quiver through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the

saint’s wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow, high and narrow, the

veins showing through the skin, and a personality as magnetic as it was

strong.

Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, with

an aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. ‘She is the

Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh!’ he said to himself. ‘For her there

must neither be too much nor too little. How can Elsmere stand it?’

Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat balancing his long

person over the arm of a chair listening to the recital of some of the

High Churchman’s parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile.

The Vicar of Mottringham was always in trouble. The narrative he

was pouring out took shape in Langham’s sarcastic sense as a sort

of classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of

Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass

churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine’s fine face grew more

and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women

never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents.

At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre

in the young Rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious,

persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn

by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to

the St. Anselm’s undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as

much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to

die for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circumventing a

bishop.

But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from

Mottringham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was

leading, his eye now on the apostalic-looking priest, now on his wife.

Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that

behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringhan, there lay an

heroic period when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London

Poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the mêelée.

Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with

difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian

bishop--what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And

presently round Elsmere’s lip there dawned a little smile of triumph.

Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was

bending forward eagerly--listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and

facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in

the sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with

inward light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him

unsheathed its wings. Suddenly the story of the slums that Mr. Newcome

was telling--a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the

simplest way--came to an end, and Catherine leaned toward him with a

long quivering breath.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privilege!’

Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise.

‘Yes, it was a privilege,’ he said slowly--the story had been an account

of the rescue of a young country lad from a London den of thieves and

profligates--‘you are right; it was just that.’

And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set vibrating, and he

would talk no more of himself or his past, do what they would.

So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he fell upon that

of the Squire.

Mr. Newcome’s eyes flashed.

‘He is coming back? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. “Woo is me that I am

constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my habitation among the

tents of Kedar!”’

And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin long hand

lying along the arm of it, answering to that general impression of

combat, of the spiritual athlete, that hung about him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Robert brightly, as he leant against the

mantelpiece looking curiously at his visitor. ‘The Squire is a man of

strong-character, of vast learning. His library is one of the finest in

England, and it is at my service. I am not concerned with his opinions.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Newcome in his driest voice, but sadly. You are one of

the people who believe in what you call tolerance--I remember.’

‘Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,’ said Robert,

perhaps with equal dryness; ‘and you--have your worries driven you to

throw tolerance overboard?’

Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and intensity of the

fanatical eyes--strange beauty of the wasted, persecuting lips!

‘Tolerance!’ he said with irritable vehemence--‘tolerance! Simply

another name for betrayal, cowardice, desertion--nothing else. God,

Heaven, Salvation on the one side, the Devil and Hell on the other--and

one miserable life, one wretched sin-stained will, to win the battle

with; and in such a state of things _you_--’ He dropped his voice,

throwing out every word with a scornful, sibilant emphasis--

‘_You_ would have us believe as though our friends were our enemies and

our enemies our friends, as though eternal misery were a bagatelle, and

our faith a mere alternative. _I stand for Christ_, and His foes are

mine.’

‘By which I suppose you mean,’ said Robert, quietly, that you would shut

your door on the writer of “The Idols of the Market-place”?’

‘Certainly.’

And the priest rose, his whole attention concentrated on Robert, as

though some deeper-lying motive were suddenly brought into play than any

suggested by the conversation itself.

‘Certainly. _Judge not_--so long as a man has not judged himself,--only

till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian’s path is clear. We are

but soldiers under orders. What business have we to be truce-making on

our own account? The war is not ours, but God’s!’

Robert’s eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a

quick passage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his

look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife.

A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised

to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion

of sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed,

the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and

the color rushed over all his young boyish face.

‘To me,’ he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her than on

Newcome, ‘a clergyman has enough to do with those foes of Christ he

cannot choose but recognize. There is no making truce with vice or

cruelty. Why should we complicate our task and spend in needless

struggle the energies we might give to our brother?’

His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then a swift

lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome moved away, with a

gesture that was half bitterness, half weariness.

‘Wait, my friend,’ he said slowly, ‘till you have watched that man’s

books eating the very heart out of a poor creature, as I have. When you

have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that might have been His, by the

infidel of genius, you will loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance

as I do!’

There was, an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass on, was

carefully examining the make of a carved paper-knife lying near him.

The strained, preoccupied mind of the High Churchman had never taken the

smallest account of his presence, of which Robert had been keenly, not

to say humorously, conscious throughout.

But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, and

addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. Newcome, in a

kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly descended on him, stood near

them, his priestly cloak falling in long folds about him, his ascetic

face grave and rapt. Gradually, however, the talk of the two men

dissipated the mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch

the savour of Langham’s modes of speech, and of his languid, indifferent

personality.

‘I must go,’ he said abruptly, after a minute or two, breaking in upon

the friends’ conversation. ‘I shall hardly get home before dark.’

He took a cold, punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still colder and

lighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied him to the gate.

On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the arm.

‘Elsmere, let me--I am the elder by so many years--let me speak to you.

My heart goes out to you!’

And the eagle face softened; the harsh, commanding presence became

enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked down upon him, a quick

light of foresight in his eye. He felt what was coming.

And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from Newcome’s

inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered passion of years against

certain ‘dangerous tendencies’ the elder priest discerned in the

younger, against the worship of intellect and science as such which

appeared in Elsmere’s talk, in Elsmere’s choice of friends. It was the

eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.

‘Scholarship! Learning!’ Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement scorn.

‘You allow them a value in themselves, apart from the Christian’s test.

It is the modern canker, the modern curse! Thank God, my years in London

burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all

these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to

worship? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal

sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!--a time

for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the lusts of the

body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to pray than to

understand!’

Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, Newcome’s gaze of

fiery appeal fixed upon him.

‘We are differently made, you and I’ said the young Rector at last

with difficulty. ‘Where you see temptation I see opportunity. I cannot

conceive of God as the Arch-plotter against His own creation!’

Newcome dropped his hold abruptly.

‘A groundless optimism,’ he said with harshness. ‘On the track of the

soul from birth to death there are two sleuth-hounds--Sin and Satan.

Mankind forever flies them, is forever vanquished and devoured. I

see life always as a thread-like path between abysses along which man

_creeps_’--and his gesture illustrated the words--‘with bleeding hands

and feet toward one-narrow-solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn to the

right hand or the left--“I will repay, saith the Lord!”’

Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy.

Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense

of profound, intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable

soul! Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows

from human joy; for ever self-forbidden, and this grind creed for

recompense!

He caught Newcome’s hand with a kind filial eagerness.

‘You are a perpetual lesson to me,’ he said, most gently. ‘When the

world is too much with me, I think of you and am rebuked. God bless you!

But I know myself. If I could see life and God as you see them for one

hour, I should cease to be a Christian in the next!’

A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over Newcome’s face.

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes

opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left

alone.

It was a still, clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm

which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the

house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his

whole being wrought into a passionate protest--a passionate invocation

of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and

nature as to something wronged and outraged.

Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to warn him that

it was late and that Langham had gone to dress; but she stood lingering

by his side after her message was given, and he made no movement to go

in. He turned to her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face,

and at last he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike

him. She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing toward him

as though to make amends--for she knew not what. Something--some sharp,

momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt that inmost fibre

which is the conscience of true passion. She did the most generous,

the most ample penance for it as she stood there talking to him of

half-indifferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and

voice which seemed to take all the severity from her beauty and make her

womanhood itself.

At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed to

Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college-rooms in vacation,

that everything looked flat and stale beside her, beside the flash of

her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the confident grace of every

movement. He thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied; and

she certainly did not make herself agreeable to him; but for all that he

could hardly take his eyes off her; and it occurred to him once or twice

to envy Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and

to him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between her and

Catherine was evident to the stranger at once--what, indeed, could the

two have in common? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point

of blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the

wrinkling of Catherine’s brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently

of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip the names

of some of her male friends without the ‘Mr.,’ or launched into some

bolder affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of London

society. The girl, in spite of all her beauty, and her fashion, and the

little studied details of her dress, was in reality so crude, so much

of a child under it all, that it made her audacities and assumptions the

more absurd, and he could see that Robert was vastly amused by them.

But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was too beautiful and too

full of character.

It astonished him to find himself afterward edging over to the corner

where she sat with the Rectory cat on her knee--an inferior animal, but

the best substitute for Chattie available. So it was, however; and once

in her neighborhood he made another serious effort to get her to talk to

him. The Elsmeres had never seen him so conversational. He dropped his

paradoxical melancholy; he roared as gently as any sucking dove; and

Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm’s, as the evening went

on, some hesitating common-places worthy of a bashful undergraduate on

the subject of the boats and Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat,

so greatly did the situation tickle his sense of humor.

But the tutor made his various ventures under a discouraging sense of

failure. What a capricious, ambiguous creature it was, how fearless, how

disagreeably alive to all his own damaging peculiarities! Never had he

been so piqued for years, and as he floundered about trying to find

some common ground where he and she might be at ease, he was conscious

throughout of her mocking indifferent eyes, which seemed to be saying

to him all the time, ‘You are not interesting,--no, not a bit! You are

tiresome, and I see through you, but I must talk to you, I suppose,

_faute de mieux_.’

Long before the little party separated for the night, Langham had given

it up, and had betaken himself to Catherine, reminding himself with some

sharpness that he had come down to study his friend’s life, rather than

the humors of a provoking girl. How still the summer night was round the

isolated rectory; how fresh and spotless were all the appointments of

the house; what a Quaker neatness and refinement everywhere! He drank in

the scent of air and flowers with which the rooms were filled; for the

first time his fastidious sense was pleasantly conscious of Catherine’s

grave beauty; and even the mystic ceremonies of family prayer had

a certain charm for him, pagan as he was. How much dignity and

persuasiveness it has still he thought to himself, this commonplace

country life of ours, on its best sides!

Half-past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand; Catherine gave

him a quiet good-night, with various hospitable wishes for his nocturnal

comfort, and the ladies withdrew. He saw Robert open the door for his

wife and catch her thin white fingers as she passed him with all the

secrecy and passion of a lover.

Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and smoked their fill.

The study was an astonishing medley. Books, natural history specimens,

a half-written sermon, fishing rods, cricket bats, a huge medicine

cupboard--all the main elements of Elsmere’s new existence were

represented there. In the drawing-room with his wife and his

sister-in-law he had been as much of a boy as ever; here clearly he was

a man, very much in earnest. What about? What did it all come to? Can

the English country clergyman do much with his life and his energies.

Langham approached the subject with his usual skepticism.

Robert for awhile, however, did not help him to solve it. He fell at

once to talking about the Squire, as though it cleared his mind to talk

out his difficulties even to so ineffective a counsellor as Langham.

Langham, indeed was but faintly interested in the Squire’s crimes as a

landlord, but there was a certain interest to be got out of the struggle

in Elsmere’s mind between the attractiveness of the Squire, as one of

the most difficult and original personalties of English letters, and

that moral condemnation of him as a man of possessions and ordinary

human responsibilities with which the young reforming Rector was clearly

penetrated. So that, as long as he could smoke under it, he was content

to let his companion describe to him, Mr. Wendover’s connection with the

property, his accession to it in middle life after a long residence in

Germany, his ineffectual attempts to play the English country gentleman,

and his subsequent complete withdrawal from the life about him.

‘You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in that huge

place,’ said Robert with energy. ‘He is not unpopular exactly with the

poor down here. When they want to belabor anybody they lay on at the

agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor

like a mystery. They never see him; when he is here the park is shut up;

the common report is that he walks, at night; and he lives alone in that

enormous house with his books. The country folk have all quarrelled with

him, or nearly. It pleases him to get a few of the humbler people about,

clergy, professional men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And he

often fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two.

But otherwise, he knows no one, and nobody knows him.’

‘But you say he has a widowed sister? How does she relish the kind of

life?’

‘Oh, by all accounts,’ said the Rector with a shrug, ‘she is as little

like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, they say,

as fond of solitude down here as the Squire, and full of hobbies. In her

youth she was about the Court. Then she married a Canon of Warham,

one of the popular preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright

little cousin of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here,

and tells one stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little

aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never

got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now,

after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the

purest parvenu. The Squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no

influence with him. However, there is something naïve in the stories

they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the Squire!’

And the Rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots

with a certain dolefulness.

Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation

presented to him as an epicure treats food, felt at this point that he

had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.

‘So you physic bodies as well as Minds?’ he said, pointing to the

medicine cupboard.

‘I should think so!’ cried Robert, brightening at once. Last winter I

causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand.

Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And

if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it’s a pleasure I

may promise myself most years. But it shan’t remain what it is.’

And the Rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or

two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him

in the depths of an armchair.

‘I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their

drains!’

‘It seems to me,’ said Langham, musing, ‘that in my youth people talked

about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.’

‘And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad

upon them. It’s all very well, but they are the foundations of a sound

religion.’

‘Dirt, drains, and Darwin,’ said Langham meditatively, taking up

Darwin’s ‘Earthworms,’ which lay on the study table beside him, side by

side with a volume of Grant Allen’s ‘Sketches.’ ‘I didn’t know you cared

for this sort of thing!’

Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into his

face.

‘Imagine, Langham!’ he said presently, ‘I had never read even the

“Origin of Species” before I came here. We used to take the thing half

for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense.

But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force

one’s self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is

a very different matter. It is a revelation.’

‘Yes,’ said Langham; and could not forbear adding, ‘but it is a

revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with

other revelations.’

In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. The man

who is religious by nature tends to keep his treasure hid from the man

who is critical by nature, and Langham was much more interested in other

things. But still it had always been understood that each was free to

say what he would.

‘There was a natural panic,’ said Robert, throwing back his head at the

challenge. ‘Men shrank and will always shrink, say what you will, from

what seems to touch things dearer to them than life. But the panic is

passing. The smoke is clearing away, and we see that the battle-field

is falling into new lines. But the old truth remains the same. Where and

when and how you will, but somewhen and somehow, God created the heavens

and the earth!’

Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that the clergy were

becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old Testament overboard, and all

that it appeared to him to imply was that men’s logical sense is easily

benumbed where their hearts are concerned.

‘Not that everyone need be troubled with the new facts,’ resumed Robert

after a while, going back to his pipe. ‘Why should they? We are not

saved by Darwinism. I should never press them on my wife, for instance,

with all her clearness and courage of mind.’

His voice altered as he mentioned his wife--grew extraordinarily soft,

even reverential.

‘It would distress her?’ said Langham interrogatively, and inwardly

conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year before.

‘Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she was taught

them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem doubtful or grotesque to

others. And why should I or anyone else trouble her? I above all, who am

not fit to tie her shoe-strings.’

The young husband’s face seemed to gleam in the dim light which fell

upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in silence and touched

his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly look, and the two men

instantly plunged into some quite trivial and commonplace subject.

Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense of pleasure in

the country quiet, the peaceful flower-scented house. Catherine, who

was an admirable housewife, had put out her best guest-sheets for his

benefit, and the tutor, accustomed for long years to the second-best of

college service, looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at

the freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at

the spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct sense that

matrimony had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres,

sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved Elsmere and

cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no doubt, than that which

he had given to the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder

creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after tentacle,

and becoming more and more content to live without his kind. Robert’s

parsonage, however, and Robert’s wife had no attractions for him; and it

was with an effort that he had made up his mind to accept the invitation

which Catherine had made an effort to write.

And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His fastidious

love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was touched by the

Elsmere surroundings. And whatever Miss Leyburn might be, she was not

commonplace. The demon of convention had no large part in _her!_ Langham

lay awake for a time analyzing his impressions of her with some gusto,

and meditating, with a whimsical candor which seldom failed him, on the

manner in which she had trampled on him, and the reasons why.

He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. He was

preeminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, as all moods are,

on certain obscure physical variations. And his mental temperature had

run down in the night. The house, the people who had been fresh and

interesting to him twelve hours before, were now the burden he had

more than half-expected them to be. He lay and thought of the unbroken

solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour’s flight from human kind,

of the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and

could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which

had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new

one.

Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. That prototype of

all the disillusioned had to cut himself adrift from the society of the

eagles on the Dent du Midi, to go and hang, like any other ridiculous

mortal, on the Paris law courts. Langham, whether he liked it or not,

had to face the parsonic breakfast and the parsonic day.

He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl’s voice drew him

to the window, which was open. In the garden stood Rose, on the edge of

the sunk fence dividing the Rectory domain from the cornfield. She was

stooping forward playing with Robert’s Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she

held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue

dress; the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping round

her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist; the sunshine caught the

curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace

ruffles at her throat and wrist. The lithe, glittering figure stood

thrown out against the heavy woods behind, the gold of the cornfield,

the blues of the distance. All the gayety and color which is as truly

representative of autumn as the gray languor of a September mist had

passed into it.

Langham stood and watched, hidden, as he thought, by the curtain, till

a gust of wind shook the casement window beside him, and threatened to

blow it in upon him. He put out his hand perforce to save it, and the

slight noise caught Rose’s ear. She looked up; her smile vanished. ‘Go

down, Dandie,’ she said severely, and walked quickly into the house with

as much dignity as nineteen is capable of.

At breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. But they

also, as we know, had expected it. He was languor itself; none of their

conversational efforts succeeded; and Rose, studying him out the corners

of her eyes, felt that it would be of no use even to torment so strange

and impenetrable a being. Why on earth should people come and visit

their friends, if they could not keep up even the ordinary decent

pretences of society?

Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterward and Langham

wandered out into the garden by himself. As he thought of his Greek

texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, he had the same sort of craving

that an opium-eater has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get

through?

Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful of volumes,

and carried them out. True to himself in the smallest things, he could

never in his life be content with the companionship of one book. To

cut off the possibility of choice and change in anything whatever was

repugnant to him.

He sat himself down in the shade of a great chestnut near the house, and

an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, however, he did not open

one of the books he had brought with him. A thought had struck him as

he sat down, and he went groping in his pockets in search of a

yellow-covered brochure, which, when found, proved to be a new play by

Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company in London. Langham,

whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we know, with a

great deal of life, without the trouble of living, was going to see it,

and always made a point of reading the piece beforehand.

The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in a manner

rather more French than usual. The reader shrugged his shoulders a good

deal as he read on. ‘Strange nation!’ he muttered to himself after an

act or two. ‘How they do revel in mud!’

Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold of him with

that force which, after all, only a French playwright is master of, he

looked up and saw the two sisters coming round the corner of the house

from the great kitchen garden which stretched its grass paths and

tangled flower-masses down the further slope of the hill. The transition

was sharp from Dumas’ heated atmosphere of passion and crime to the

quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, and the figures of the

two Englishwomen advancing toward him.

Catherine was in a loose white dress with a black lace scarf draped

about her head and form. Her look hardly suggested youth, and there was

certainly no touch of age in it. Ripeness, maturity, serenity--these

were the chief ideas which seemed to rise in the mind at sight of her.

‘Are you amusing yourself, Mr. Langham?’ she said, stopping beside

him and retaining with slight, imperceptible force Rose’s hand, which

threatened to slip away.

‘Very much. I have been skimming through a play, which I hope to see

next week, by way of preparation.’

Rose turned involuntarily. Not wishing to discuss ‘Marianne’ with

either Catherine or her sister, Langham had just closed the book and was

returning it to his pocket. But she had caught sight of it.

You are reading “Marianne,”’ she exclaimed, the slightest possible touch

of wonder in her tone.

‘Yes, it is “Marianne,”’ said Langham, surprised in his turn. He had

very old-fashioned notions about the limits of a girl’s acquaintance

with the world, knowing nothing, therefore, as may be supposed, about

the modern young woman, and he was a trifle scandalized by Rose’s accent

of knowledge.

‘I read it last week,’ she said carelessly; ‘and the Piersons’--turning

to her sister--‘have promised to take me to see it next winter if

Desforêts comes, again, as everyone expects.’

‘Who wrote it?’ asked Catherine innocently. The theatre not only gave

her little pleasure, but wounded in her a hundred deep unconquerable

instincts. But she had long ago given up in despair the hope of

protecting against Rose’s dramatic instincts with success.

‘Dumas _fils_’ said Langham dryly. He was distinctly a good deal

astonished.

Rose looked at him, and something brought a sudden flame into her cheek.

‘It is one of the best of his,’ she said defiantly. ‘I have read a good

many others. Mr. Pierson lent me a volume. And when I was introduced to

Madame Desforêts last week, she agreed with me that “Marianne” is nearly

the best of all.’

All this, of course, with the delicate nose well in air.

‘You were introduced to Madame Desforêts?’ cried Langham, surprised this

time quite out of discretion. Catherine looked at him with anxiety. The

reputation of the black-eyed little French actress, who had been for a

year or two the idol of the theatrical public of Paris and London, had

reached even to her, and the tone of Langham’s exclamation struck her

painfully.

‘I was,’ said Rose proudly. ‘Other people may think it a disgrace. _I_

thought it an honor!’

Langham could not help smiling, the girl’s naïveté was so evident. It

was clear that, if she had read “Marianne,” she had never understood it.

‘Rose, you don’t know!’ exclaimed Catherine, turning to her sister with

a sudden trouble in her eyes. ‘I don’t think Mrs. Pierson ought to have

done that, without consulting mamma especially.’

‘Why not?’ cried Rose vehemently. Her face was burning, and her heart

was full of something like hatred of Langham but she tried hard to be

calm.

‘I think,’ she said, with a desperate attempt at crushing dignity, ‘that

the way in which all sorts of stories are believed against a woman, just

because she is an actress, is _disgraceful!_ Just because a woman is

on the stage, everybody thinks they may throw stones at her. I _know_,

because--because she told me,’ cried the speaker, growing, however, half

embarrassed as she spoke, ‘that she feels the things that are said of

her deeply! She has been ill, very ill, and one of her friends said to

me, “You know it isn’t her work, or a cold, or anything else that’s made

her ill--it’s calumny!” And so it is.’

The speaker flashed an angry glance at Langham. She was sitting on the

arm of the cane chair into which Catherine had fallen, one hand grasping

the back of the chair for support, one pointed foot beating the ground

restlessly in front of her, her small full mouth pursed indignantly, the

greenish-gray eyes flashing and brilliant.

As for Langham, the cynic within him was on the point of uncontrollable

laughter. Madame Desforêts complaining of calumny to this little

Westmoreland maiden! But his eyes involuntarily met Catherine’s, and the

expression of both fused into a common wonderment--amused on his side,

anxious on hers. ‘What a child, what an infant it is!’ they seemed, to

confide to one another. Catherine laid her hand softly on Rose’s, and

was about to say something soothing, which might secure her an opening

for some sisterly advice later on, when there was a sound of calling

from the gate. She looked up and saw Robert waving to her. Evidently, he

had just run up from the school to deliver a message. She hurried across

the drive to him and afterwards into the house, while he disappeared.

Rose got up from her perch on the armchair, and would have followed, but

a movement of obstinacy or Quixotic wrath, or both, detained her.

‘At any rate, Mr. Langham,’ she said, drawing herself up, and speaking

with the most lofty accent, ‘if you don’t know anything personally about

Madame Desforêts, I think it would be much fairer to say nothing--and

not to assume at once that all you hear is true!’

Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, as he sat leaning

forward under the tree, this slim, indignant creature standing over

him, and his consciousness about equally divided between a sense of her

absurdity and a sense of her prettiness.