The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Elsmere, by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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Title: Robert Elsmere

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward

Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8737]
Posting Date: August 9, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT ELSMERE ***




Produced by Andrew Templeton





ROBERT ELSMERE

By Mrs. Humphrey Ward

Author of "Miss Bretherton"



BOSTON: DeWOLFE, FISKE & CO., 365 Washington Street



                     Dedicated to the memory
                               Of
                          MY TWO FRIENDS

        SEPARATED, IN MY THOUGHT OF THEM, BY MUCH DIVERSITY OF
         CIRCUMSTANCE AND OPINION; LINKED, IN MY FAITH ABOUT
            THEM, TO EACH OTHER, AND TO ALL THE SNINING
               ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD
                      AND THE SERVICE OF MAN:

                         THOMAS HILL GREEN

     (LAYE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD)

                        Died March 26, 1882

                              AND

                   LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON

                       Died Easter Eve, 1886



[Transcriber's note: In one section, marked by **, two Greek letters,
delta and epsilon, are transcribed as de. The allusion is to a poem by
Browning--'A Grammarian's Funeral']

[Italics are indicated by underscores.]




BOOK I. WESTMORELAND.



CHAPTER I.

It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The spring had been
unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general aspect of
the lonely Westmoreland valley of Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine
had only just penetrated to its bare, green recesses, where the few
scattered trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at
their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and
April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe
that their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted them. The
narrow road, which was the only link between the farm-houses sheltered
by the crags at the head of the valley, and those far away regions of
town and civilization suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on
the southern horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or
bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy line of white through the greenness of
the sloping pastures. The sides of some of the little books running down
into the main river and, many of the plantations round the farms
were gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed and
gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and there
to have been robbed of all their natural austerity of aspect, and to be
masquerading in a dainty garb of white and green imposed upon them by
the caprice of the spring.

During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whindale is
tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are low and rounded,
and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes unbroken either by wood or
rock. The fields are bare and close shaven by the flocks which feed on
them; the walls run either perpendicularly in many places up the fells
or horizontally along them, so that, save for the wooded course of the
tumbling river and the bush-grown hedges of the road, the whole valley
looks like a green map divided by regular lines of grayish black. But
as the walker penetrates further, beyond a certain bend which the stream
makes half-way from the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the
breadth between them contracts, the enclosure lines are broken and
deflected by rocks and patches of plantation, and the few farms stand
more boldly and conspicuously forward, each on its spur of land, looking
up to or away from the great masses of frowning crag which close in the
head of the valley, and which from the moment they come into sight give
it dignity and a wild beauty.

On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend
before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from Shanmoor,
was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing, bringing
out the whitewashed porch and the broad bands of white edging the
windows, into relief against the gray stone of the main fabric, the gray
roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and Scotch firs which
protected it from the cold east and north. The Western light struck full
on a copper beech, which made a welcome patch of warm color in front of
a long gray line of outhouses standing level with the house, and touched
the heckberry blossom which marked the upward course of the little lane
connecting the old farm with the road; above it rose the green fell,
broken here and there by jutting crags, and below it the ground sank
rapidly through a piece of young hazel plantation, at this present
moment a sheet of bluebells, toward the level of the river. There was a
dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the
North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere,
but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendor and
superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys
there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of
winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about
the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone
as the crags behind them, and the ravines in which the shrunken brooks
trickle musically down through the _débris_ of innumerable Decembers.
The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. Nature shows herself
delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about
her. Man is still well able to defend himself against her, to live his
own independent life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity
of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so
often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.

The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of
the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the
river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But as one came nearer
certain signs of difference became visible. The garden, instead of being
the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses,
gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers' wives
of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was trimly
laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we
are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones,
wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a new bow window,
modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to
another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant
sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left
by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide
slate-window sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds
standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals,
the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland
farmer. The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and
closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves
in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a
narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark.
No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but
lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses;
that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and
centre no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had become the
shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than once
possessed it.

In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this
particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a vanishing
past produced by the slight but significant modifications it had
undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain sounds which
were streaming out on to the evening air from one of the divisions of
that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling we have already
described. Some indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin
with surprising energy and vigor, and within the little garden the
distant murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of the West wind
round the fell were entirely conquered and banished by these triumphant
shakes and turns, or by the flourishes and the broad _cantabile_
passages of one of Spohr's Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower
and lower toward the Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all his,
or her, own way; the valley and its green spaces seemed to be possessed
by this stream of eddying sound, and no other sign of life broke the
gray quiet of the house. But at last, just as the golden ball touched
the summit of the craggy fell, which makes the western boundary of the
dale at its higher end, the house-door opened, and a young girl, shawled
and holding some soft burden in her arms, appeared on the threshold,
and stood there for a moment, as though trying the quality of the air
outside. Her pause of inspection seemed to satisfy her, for she moved
forward, leaving the door open behind her, and, stepping across the
lawn, settled herself in a wicker chair under an apple-tree, which had
only just shed its blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done so
when one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path flew open,
and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in aesthetic blue, a mass of
reddish brown hair flying back from her face, also stepped out into the
garden.

'Agnes!' cried the new-comer, who had the strenuous and dishevelled air
natural to one just emerged from a long violin practice. 'Has Catherine
come back yet?'

'Not that I know of. Do come here and look at pussy; did you ever see
anything so comfortable?'

'You and she look about equally lazy. What have you been doing all the
afternoon?'

'We look what we are, my dear. Doing? Why, I have been attending to
my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, mending my pink dress for
to-morrow night, and helping to keep mamma in good spirits; she is
depressed because she has been finding Elizabeth out in some waste or
other, and I have been preaching to her to make Elizabeth uncomfortable
if she likes, but not to worrit herself. And after all, pussy and I have
come out for a rest. We've earned it, haven't we, Chattie? And as for
you, Miss Artistic, I should like to know what you've been doing for the
good of your kind since dinner. I suppose you had tea at the vicarage?'

The speaker lifted inquiring eyes to her sister as she spoke, her cheek
plunged in the warm fur of a splendid Persian cat, her whole look
and voice expressing the very highest degree of quiet, comfort, and
self-possession. Agnes Leyburn was not pretty; the lower part of the
face was a little heavy in outline and moulding; the teeth were not as
they should have been, and the nose was unsatisfactory. But the eyes
under their long lashes were shrewdness itself, and there was an
individuality in the voice, a cheery even-temperediness in look and
tone, which had a pleasing effect on the bystander. Her dress was neat
and dainty; every detail of it bespoke a young woman who respected both
herself and the fashion.

Her sister, on the other hand, was guiltless of the smallest trace of
fashion. Her skirts were cut with the most engaging naïveté, she was
much adorned with amber beads, and her red brown hair had been tortured
and frizzled to look as much like an aureole as possible. But, on the
other hand, she was a beauty, though at present you felt her a beauty in
disguise, a stage Cinderella as it were, in very becoming rags, waiting
for the fairy godmother.

'Yes, I had tea at the vicarage,' said this young person, throwing
herself on the grass in spite of a murmured protest from Agnes, who had
an inherent dislike of anything physically rash, 'and I had the greatest
difficulty to get away. Mrs. Thornburgh is in such a flutter about
this visit! One would think it was the Bishop and all his Canons, and
promotion depending on it, she has baked so many cakes and put out so
many dinner napkins! I don't envy the young man. She will have no wits
left at all to entertain him with. I actually wound up by administering
some sal-volatile to her.'

'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out of
her on the subject of the young man?'

'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only
remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In
between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we
had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making of them and the
cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a
young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular
preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her
when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I
held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to the point again,
gently but firmly, and now I think I know all I want to know about the
interesting stranger.'

'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently
up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order
in them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy
Land, and his hair has been out close after a fever. It sounds odd, but
I am not curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.'

'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't got that sort of
thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he went
to college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his mother's
peculiarities which seem to be Irish and curious, where his living is,
how much it is worth, likewise the color of his eyes, as near as Mrs.
Thornburgh can get.'

'What a start you have been getting!' said Agnes lazily. 'But what is it
makes the poor old thing so excited?'

Rose sat up and began to fling the fir-cones lying about her at a
distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical perfections and the
aesthetic freedom of her attire.

'Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment is always
seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand before a mine.
Mr. Elsmere is the match--we are the mine.'

Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright rippling
laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own value, and in no hurry
to force an estimate of it on the male world.

'Well,' said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed with her
gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, 'there is no saying. "Propinquity
does it"--as Mrs. Thornburgh is always reminding us. But where _can_
Catherine be? She went out directly after lunch.'

'She has, gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at the Tysons--at
least I heard her talking to mamma about him, and she went out with a
basket that looked like beef-tea.'

Rose frowned a little.

'And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see Mrs.
Robson instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I dare say I ought--only
unfortunately I like my fiddle, and I don't like stuffy cottages, and as
for the goody books, I read them so badly that the old women themselves
come down upon me.'

'I seem to have been making the best of both worlds,' said Agnes
placidly. 'I haven't been doing anything I don't like, but I got hold
of that dress she brought home to make for little Emma Payne and nearly
finished the skirt, so that I feel as good as when one has been twice to
church on a wet Sunday. Ah, there is Catherine, I heard the gate.'

As she spoke steps were heard approaching through the clump of trees
which sheltered the little entrance gate, and as Rose sprang to her feet
a tall figure in white and gray appeared against the background of the
sycamores, and came quickly toward the sisters.

'Dears, I am so sorry; I am afraid you have been waiting for me. But
poor Mrs. Tyson wanted me so badly that I could not leave her. She had
no one else to help her or to be with her till that eldest girl of hers
came home from work.'

'It doesn't matter,' said, Rose, as Catherine put her arm round her
shoulder; 'mamma has been fidgeting, and as for Agnes, she looks as if
she never wanted to move again.'

Catherine's clear eyes, which at the moment seemed to be full of inward
light, kindled in them by some foregoing experience, rested kindly, but
only half consciously, on her younger sister as Agnes softly nodded
and smiled to her. Evidently she was a good deal older than the other
two--she looked about six-and-twenty, a young and vigorous woman in the
prime of health and strength. The lines of the form were rather thin and
spare, but they were softened by the loose bodice and long full skirt of
her dress, and by the folds of a large, white muslin handkerchief which
was crossed over her breast. The face, sheltered by the plain shady
hat was also a little spoilt from the point of view of beauty by
the sharpness of the lines about the chin and mouth, and by a slight
prominence of the cheek-bones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish gray, were
fine, the nose delicately cut, the brow smooth and beautiful, while the
complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air and
Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate austere
charm, something which harmonized with the bare stretches and lonely
crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her a true daughter
of the mountains, partaker at once of their gentleness and their
severity. _She_ was in her place here, beside the homely Westmoreland
house, and under the shelter of the fells. When you first saw the other
sisters you wondered what strange chance had brought them into that
remote sparely peopled valley; they were plainly exiles, and conscious
exiles, from the movement and exhilarations of a fuller social life. But
Catherine impressed you as only a refined variety of the local type;
you could have found many like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced
serious women of the neighboring farms.

Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting lightly on
the other's shoulder, a question from Agnes banished the faint smile on
her lips, and left, only the look of inward illumination, the expression
of one who had just passed, as it were, through a strenuous and heroic
moment of life, and was still living in the exaltation of memory.

'So the poor fellow is worse?'

'Yes. Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-day, says the spine is
hopelessly injured. He may live on paralyzed for a few months or longer,
but there is no hope of cure.'

Both girls uttered a shocked exclamation. 'That fine strong young man!'
said Rose under her breath. 'Does he know?'

'Yes; when I got there the doctor had just gone, and Mrs. Tyson, who was
quite unprepared for anything so dreadful, seemed to have almost lost
her wits, poor thing! I found her in the front kitchen with her
apron over her head, rocking to and fro, and poor Arthur in the inner
room--all alone--waiting in suspense.'

'And who told him? He has been so hopeful.'

'I did,' said Catherine, gently; 'they made me. He _would_ know, and she
couldn't--she ran out of the room. I never saw anything so pitiful.'

'Oh, Catherine!' exclaimed Rose's moved voice, while Agnes got up, and
Chattie jumped softly down from her lap unheeded.

'How did he bear it?'

'Don't ask me,' said Catherine, while the quiet tears filled her eyes
and her voice broke, as the hidden feeling would have its way. 'It was
terrible. I don't know how we got through that half-hour--his mother
and I. It was like wrestling with someone in agony. At last he was
exhausted--he let me say the Lord's Prayer; I think it soothed him, but
one couldn't tell. He seemed half asleep when I left. Oh!' she cried,
laying her hand in a close grasp on Rose's arm, 'if you had seen his
eyes, and his poor hands--there was such despair in them! They say,
though he was so young, he was thinking of getting married; and he was
so steady, such a good son!'

A silence fell upon the three. Catherine stood looking out across the
valley toward the sunset. Now that the demand upon her for calmness and
fortitude was removed, and that the religious exaltation in which she
had gone through the last three hours was becoming less intense, the
pure human pity of the scene she had just witnessed seemed to be gaining
upon her. Her lip trembled, and two or three tears silently overflowed.
Rose turned and gently kissed her cheek, and Agnes touched her hand
caressingly. She smiled at them, for it was not in her nature to let any
sign of love pass unheeded, and in a few more seconds she had mastered
herself.

'Dears, we must go in. Is mother in her room? Oh, Rose! in that thin
dress on the grass; I oughtn't to have kept you out. It is quite cold by
now.'

And, she hurried them in, leaving them to superintend the preparations
for supper downstairs while she ran up to her mother.

A quarter of an hour afterward they were all gathered round the
supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May twilight. At
Catherine's right hand sat Mrs. Leyburn, a tall delicate-looking woman,
wrapped in a white shawl, about whom there were only three things to be
noticed--an amiable temper, a sufficient amount of weak health to excuse
her all the more tiresome duties of life, and an incorrigible tendency
to sing the praises of her daughters at all times and to all people. The
daughters winced under it: Catherine, because it was a positive pain
to her to bear herself brought forward and talked about; the others,
because youth infinitely prefers to make its own points in its own way.
Nothing, however, could mend this defect of Mrs. Leyburn's. Catherine's
strength of will could keep it in check sometimes, but in general it
had to be borne with. A sharp word would have silenced the mother's
well-meant chatter at any time--for she was a fragile nervous woman,
entirely dependent on her surroundings--but none of them were capable of
it, and their mere refractoriness counted for nothing.

The dining room in which they were gathered had a good deal of homely
dignity, and was to the Leyburns full of associations. The oak settle
near the fire, the oak sideboard running along one side of the room, the
black oak table with carved legs at which they sat, were genuine pieces
of old Westmoreland work, which had belonged to their grandfather. The
heavy carpet covering the stone floor of what twenty years before had
been the kitchen of the farm-house was a survival from a south-country
home, which had sheltered their lives for eight happy years. Over the
mantelpiece hung the portrait of the girls' father, a long serious
face, not unlike Wordsworth's face in outline, and bearing a strong
resemblance to Catherine; a line of silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece;
on the walls were prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals,
photographs of Greece, and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and
Milton; while a bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college
books and college prizes and the favorite authors--mostly poets,
philosophers, and theologians--of his later years, gave a final touch
of habitableness to the room. The little meal and its appointments--the
eggs, the home-made bread and preserves, the tempting butter and
old-fashioned silver gleaming among the flowers which Rose arranged with
fanciful skill in Japanese pots of her own providing--suggested the same
family qualities as the room. Frugality, a dainty personal self-respect,
a family consciousness, tenacious of its memories and tenderly careful
of all the little material objects, which were to it the symbols of
those memories--clearly all these elements entered into the Leyburn
tradition.

And of this tradition, with its implied assertions and denials, clearly
Catherine Leyburn, the eldest sister, was, of all the persons gathered
in this little room, the most pronounced embodiment. She sat at the head
of the table, the little basket of her own and her mother's keys beside
her. Her dress was a soft black brocade, with lace collar and cuff,
which had once belonged to an aunt of her mother's. It was too old
for her both in fashion and material, but it gave her a gentle, almost
matronly dignity, which became her. Her long thin hands, full of
character and delicacy, moved nimbly among the cups; all her ways were
quiet and yet decided. It was evident that among this little party
she, and not the plaintive mother, was really in authority. To-night,
however, her looks were specially soft. The scene she had gone through
in the afternoon had left her pale, with traces of patient fatigue round
the eyes and mouth, but all her emotion was gone, and she was devoting
herself to the others, responding with quick interest and ready smiles
to all they had to say, and contributing the little experiences of her
own day in return.

Rose sat on her left hand in yet another gown of strange tint and
archaic outline. Rose's gowns were legion. They were manufactured by
a farmer's daughter across the valley, under her strict and precise
supervision. She was accustomed, as she boldly avowed, to shut herself
up at the beginning of each season of the year for two days' meditation
on the subject. And now, thanks to the spring warmth, she was entering
at last with infinite zest on the results of her April vigils.

Catherine had surveyed her as she entered the room with a smile, but a
smile not altogether to Rose's taste.

'What, another, Röschen?' she had said with the slightest lifting of the
eyebrows. 'You never confided that to me. Did you think I was unworthy
of anything so artistic?'

'Not at all,' said Rose calmly, seating herself. 'I thought you were
better employed.'

But a flush flew over her transparent cheek, and she presently threw an
irritated look at Agnes, who had been looking from her to Catherine with
amused eyes.

'I met Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Elsmere driving from the station,'
Catherine announced presently; 'at least there was a gentleman in a
clerical wideawake with a portmanteau behind, so I imagine it must have
been he.'

'Did he look promising?' inquired Agnes.

'I don't think I noticed,' said Catherine simply, but with a momentary
change of expression. The sisters, remembering how she had come in
upon them with that look of one 'lifted up,' understood why she had not
noticed, and refrained from further questions.

'Well, it is to be hoped the young man is recovered enough to stand Long
Whindale festivities,' said Rose. 'Mrs. Thornburgh means to let them
loose on his devoted head to-morrow night.'

'Who are coming?' asked Mrs. Leyburn eagerly. The occasional tea parties
of the neighborhood were an unfailing excitement to her, simply because,
by dint of the small adornings, natural to the occasion, they showed her
daughters to her under slightly new aspects. To see Catherine, who never
took any thought for her appearance, forced to submit to a white dress,
a line of pearls round the shapely throat, a flower in the brown hair,
put there by Rose's imperious fingers; to sit in a corner well out
of draughts, watching the effect of Rose's half-fledged beauty, and
drinking in the compliments of the neighborhood on Rose's playing or
Agnes's conversation, or Catherine's practical ability--these were Mrs.
Leyburn's passions, and a tea-party always gratified them to the full.

'Mamma asks as if really she wanted an answer,' remarked Agnes dryly.
'Dear mother, can't you by now make up a tea-party at the Thornburghs
out of your bead?'

'The Seatons?' inquired Mrs. Leyburn.

'_Mrs._ Seaton and Miss Barks,' replied Rose. 'The rector won't come.
And I needn't say that, having moved heaven, and earth to get Mrs.
Seaton, Mrs. Thornburgh is now miserable because she has got her. Her
ambition is gratified, but she knows that she has spoilt the party.
Well, then, Mr. Mayhew, of course, his son, _and_ his flute.'

'You to play his accompaniments?' put in Agnes slyly. Rose's lip curled.

'Not if Miss Barks knows it,' she said emphatically, 'nor if I know it.
The Bakers, of course, ourselves, and the unknown.'

'Dr. Baker is always pleasant,' said Mrs. Leyburn, leaning back and
drawing her white shawl languidly round her. 'He told me the other
day, Catherine, that if it weren't for you he should have to retire. He
regards you as his junior partner. "Marvellous nursing gift your
eldest daughter has, Mrs. Leyburn," he said to me the other day. A most
agreeable man.'

'I wonder if I shall be able to get any candid opinions out of Mr.
Elsmere the day after to-morrow?' said Rose, musing. 'It is difficult to
avoid having an opinion of some sort about Mrs. Seaton.'

'Oxford dons don't gossip and are never candid,' remarked Agnes
severely.

'Then Oxford dons must be very dull,' cried Rose. 'However,' and her
countenance brightened, 'if he stays here four weeks we can teach him.'

Catherine, meanwhile, sat watching the two girls with a soft elder
sister's indulgence. Was it in connection with their bright attractive
looks that the thought flitted through her head, 'I wonder what the
young man will be like?'

'Oh, by the way,' said Rose presently, 'I had nearly forgotten Mrs.
Thornburgh's two messages. I informed her, Agnes, that you had given up
water color and meant to try oils, and she told me to implore you not
to, because "water color is so _much_ more lady-like than oils." And as
for you, Catherine, she sent you a most special message. I was to tell
you that she just _loved_ the way you had taken to plaiting your hair
lately--that it was exactly like the picture of Jeanie Deans she has
in the drawing-room, and that she would never forgive you if you didn't
plait it so to-morrow night.'

Catherine flushed faintly as she got up from the table.

'Mrs. Thornburgh has eagle-eyes,' she said, moving away to give her arm
to her mother, who looked fondly at her, making some remark in praise of
Mrs. Thornburgh's taste.

'Rose!' cried Agnes indignantly, when the other two had disappeared,
'you and Mrs. Thornburgh have not the sense you were born with. What on
earth did you say that to Catherine for?'

Rose stared; then her face fell a little.

'I suppose it was foolish,' she admitted. Then she leant her head on one
hand and drew meditative patterns on the tablecloth with the other. 'You
know, Agnes,' she said presently, looking up, 'there are drawbacks to
having a St. Elizabeth for a sister.'

Agnes discreetly made no reply, and Rose was left alone. She sat
dreaming a few minutes, the corners of the red mouth drooping. Then she
sprang up with a long sigh. 'A little life!' she said half-aloud, 'A
little _wickedness!_' and she shook her curly head defiantly.

A few minutes later, in the little drawing-room on the other side of
the hall, Catherine and Rose stood together by the open window. For the
first time in a lingering spring, the air was soft and balmy; a tender
grayness lay over the valley; it was not night, though above the clear
outline's of the fell the stars were just twinkling in the pale blue.
Far away under the crag on the further side of High Fell a light was
shining. As Catherine's eyes caught it there was a quick response in the
fine Madonna-like face.

'Any news for me from the Backhouses this afternoon?' she asked Rose.

'No, I heard of none. How is she?'

'Dying,' said Catherine simply, and stood a moment looking out. Rose
did not interrupt her. She knew that the house from which the light was
shining sheltered a tragedy; she guessed with the vagueness of nineteen
that it was a tragedy of passion and sin; but Catherine had not been
communicative on the subject, and Rose had for some time past set up
a dumb resistance to her sister's most characteristic ways of life
and thought, which prevented her now from asking questions. She wished
nervously to give Catherine's extraordinary moral strength no greater
advantage over her than she could help.

Presently, however, Catherine threw her arm round her with a tender
protectingness.

'What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Röschen?'

'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two hours this
morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.'

'And you didn't look into the school?' asked Catherine, hesitating; 'I
know Miss Merry expected you.'

'No, I didn't. When one can play the violin and can't teach, any more
than a cuckatoo, what's the good of wasting one's time in teaching?'

Catherine did not reply. A minute after Mrs. Leyburn called her, and she
went to sit on a stool at her mother's feet, her hands resting on the
elder woman's lap, the whole attitude of the tall active figure one of
beautiful and childlike abandonment. Mrs. Leyburn wanted to confide in
her about a new cap, and Catherine took up the subject with a zest which
kept her mother happy till bedtime.

'Why couldn't she take as much interest in my Spohr? thought Rose.

Late that night, long after she had performed all a maid's offices for
her mother, Catherine Leyburn was busy in her own room arranging a
large cupboard containing medicines and ordinary medical necessaries, a
storehouse whence all the simpler emergencies of their end of the valley
were supplied. She had put on a white flannel dressing-gown and moved
noiselessly about in it, the very embodiment of order, of purity, of
quiet energy. The little white-curtained room was bareness and neatness
itself. There were a few book-shelves along the walls, holding the books
which her father had given her. Over the bed were two enlarged portraits
of her parents, and a line of queer little faded monstrosities,
representing Rose and Agnes in different stages of childhood. On the
table beside the bed was a pile of well-worn books--Keble, Jeremy
Taylor, the Bible--connected in the mind of the mistress of the room
with the intensest moments of the spiritual life. There was a strip of
carpet by the bed, a plain chair or two, a large press; otherwise no
furniture that was not absolutely necessary, and no ornaments. And yet,
for all its emptiness, the little room in its order and spotlessness had
the look and spell of a sanctuary.

When her task was finished Catherine came forward to the infinitesimal
dressing-table, and stood a moment before the common cottage
looking-glass upon it. The candle behind her showed her the outlines of
her head and face in shadow against the white ceiling. Her soft brown
hair was plaited high above the broad white brow, giving to it an added
stateliness, while it left unmasked the pure lines of the neck.
Mrs. Thornburgh and her mother were quite right. Simple as the new
arrangement was, it could hardly have been more effective.

But the looking-glass got no smile in return for its information.
Catherine Leyburn was young; she was alone; she was being very plainly
told that, taken as a whole, she was, or might be at any moment, a
beautiful woman. And all her answer was a frown and a quick movement
away from the glass. Putting up her hands she began to undo the plaits
with haste, almost with impatience; she smoothed the whole mass then
set free into the severest order, plaited it closely together, and then,
putting out her light, threw herself on her knees beside the window,
which was partly open to the starlight and the mountains. The voice of
the river far away, wafted from the mist-covered depths of the valley,
and the faint rustling of the trees just outside, were for long after
the only sounds which broke the silence.

When Catherine appeared at breakfast next morning her hair was plainly
gathered into a close knot behind, which had been her way of dressing it
since she was thirteen. Agnes threw a quick look at Rose; Mrs. Leyburn,
as soon as she had made out through her spectacles what was the matter,
broke into warm expostulations.

'It is more comfortable, dear mother, and takes much less time,' said
Catherine, reddening.

'Poor Mrs. Thornburgh!' remarked Agnes dryly.

'Oh, Rose will make up!' said Catherine, glancing, not without a spark
of mischief in her gray eyes, at Rose's tortured locks; 'and mamma's new
cap, which will be superb!'



CHAPTER II.

About four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked
in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh's 'high tea,'
that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her spectacles on her nose,
a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper
on her lap. The neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an
intermittent pretence of reading; but in reality the energies of her
house-wifely mind were taken up with quite other things. The vicar's
wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest. All
her _solid_ preparations for the evening were over, and in her own mind
she decided that with them there was no possible fault to be found.
The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish
and fastidious, breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no
plumper chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were
to be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And so
with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the hostess
felt no anxieties.

But a 'tea' in the north-country depends for distinction, not on its
solids or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural hostess earns her
reputation, not by a discriminating eye for butcher's-meat, but by her
inventiveness in cakes and custards. And it was just here, with regard
to this 'bubble reputation,' that the vicar's wife of Long Whindale was
particularly sensitive. Was she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of
the Rector of Whinborough--odious woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent
on her to do well, nay to do brilliantly, in the eyes of this local
magnate? And how was it possible to do brilliantly in this matter with
a cook whose recipes were hopelessly old-fashioned, and who had an
exasperating belief in the sufficiency of buttered 'whigs' and home-made
marmalade for all requirements?

Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. Thornburgh had gone prowling about the
neighboring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain newly
arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with the most airy
and appetizing trifles--of a make and coloring quite metropolitan. She
had flattened her gray curls against the window for one deliberative
moment; had then rushed in; and as soon as the carrier's cart of Long
Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting, should have arrived,
bearing with it the produce of that adventure, Mrs. Thornburgh would
be a proud woman, prepared to meet a legion of rectors' wives without
flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects a woman at peace with herself
and the world. In the country, where every household should be
self-contained, a certain discredit attaches in every well-regulated
mind to 'getting things in.' Mrs. Thornburgh was also nervous at the
thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually out of the weekly
money. For 'William' was to know nothing of the matter, except so far as
a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes
might inform him. But after all, in this as in everything else, one must
suffer to be distinguished.

The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have described,
and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped unheeded to her feet. The
vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new gray-stone
building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what had once been
the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive dwelling
house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after sundry augmentations,
amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. The modern house, though it
only contained sufficient accommodation for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one
guest and two maids, would have seemed palatial to those rustic clerics
of the past from whose ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its
spiritual sustenance in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to
another race--a race sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole
of life in very close contact and very homely intercourse with their
mother earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few
years before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and
who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had
only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what
these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange social status and
unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there were one or two old men
still lingering in the dale who could have told him a great deal about
them, whose memory went back to the days when the relative social
importance of the dale parsons was exactly expressed by the
characteristic Westmoreland saying: 'Ef ye'll nobbut send us a gude
schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson 'ull dea!' and whose slow minds,
therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate sense of difference
as they saw him pass along the road, and recalled the incumbent of their
childhood, dropping in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this
or that farm-house on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his
sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands like any other peasant of
the dale.

Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors of
this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland valleys
have dropped into their quiet, unremembered graves, and new men of other
ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long
Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasized by the
disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone floors,
their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest or dresser, and their
encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in favor of an upgrowth of
new trim mansions designed to meet the needs, not of peasants, but of
gentlefolks.

And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of
transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century has
worried its will even in the remotest corners of the Cambrian country,
and soon not a vestige of the homely worshipping-places of an earlier
day will remain. Across the road, in front of the Long Whindale
parsonage, for instance, rose a freshly built church, also peaked and
gabled, with a spire and two bells and a painted east window, and Heaven
knows what novelties besides. The primitive whitewashed structure it
replaced had lasted long, and in the course of many generations time had
clothed its moss-grown walls, its slated porch, and tombstones worn with
rain in a certain beauty of congruity and association, linking it with
the purple distances of the fells, and the brawling river bending round
the gray enclosure. But finally, after a period of quiet and gradual
decay, the ruin of Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and hurrying
ruin that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the roof
came dropping on the farmers heads, and the oak benches beneath
offered gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully learnt by the
substantial persons who sat on them, lest they should be overtaken by
undignified disaster; when the rain poured in on the Communion Table
and the wind raged through innumerable mortarless chinks, even the
slowly-moving folk of the valley came to the conclusion that 'summat
'ull hev to be deun.' And by the help of the Bishop and Queen Anne's
Bounty, and what not, aided by just as many half-crowns as the valley
found itself unable to defend against the encroachments of a new and
'moiderin' parson, 'summat' was done, whereof the results--namely, the
new church, vicarage, and school-house--were now conspicuous.

This radical change, however, had not been the work of Mr. Thornburgh,
but of his predecessor, a much more pushing and enterprising man, whose
successful efforts to improve the church accommodation in Long Whindale
had moved such deep and lasting astonishment in the mind of a somewhat
lethargic bishop, that promotion had been readily found for him. Mr.
Thornburgh was neither capable of the sturdy begging which had raised
the church, nor was he likely on other lines to reach preferment. He and
his wife, who possessed much more salience of character than he, were
accepted in the dale as belonging to the established order of things.
Nobody wished them any harm, and the few people they had specially
befriended, naturally, thought well of them.

But the old intimacy of relation which had once subsisted between the
clergyman of Long Whindale and his parishioners was wholly gone. They
had sunk in the scale; the parson had risen. The old statesmen or
peasant proprietors of the valley had for the most part succumbed to
various destructive influences, some social, some economical, added to a
certain amount of corrosion from within; and their place had been taken
by leaseholders, lets drunken perhaps, and better educated, but also
far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in the rude dignity of their
predecessors.

And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place of the
dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and Parsonage had got
themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income raised, had let off
his glebe to a neighboring farmer, kept two maids, and drank claret
when he drank anything. His flock were friendly enough, and paid their
commuted tithes without grumbling. But between them and a perfectly
well-meaning but rather dull man, who stood on his dignity and wore a
black coat all the week, there was no real community. Rejoice in it
as we may, in this final passage of Parson Primrose to social regions
beyond the ken of Farmer Flamborough, there are some elements of loss as
there are in all changes.

Wheels on the road! Mrs. Thornburgh woke up with a start, and stumbling
over newspaper and _couvre-pied_, hurried across the lawn as fast as
her short, squat figure would allow, gray curls and cap-strings flying
behind her. She heard a colloquy in the distance in broad Westmoreland
dialect, and as she turned the corner of the house she nearly ran into
her tall cook, Sarah, whose impassive and saturnine countenance bore
traces of unusual excitement.

'Missis, there's naw cakes. They're all left behind on t' counter at
Randall's. Mr. Backhouse says as how he told old Jim to go fur 'em, and
he niver went, and Mr. Backbouse he niver found oot till he'd got past
t' bridge, and than it wur too late to go back.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh pink
color slowly deserting her face as she realized the enormity of the
catastrophe. And was it possible that there was the faintest twinkle of
grim satisfaction on the face of that elderly minx, Sarah?

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, did, not stay to explore the recesses of
Sarah's mind, but ran with little pattering, undignified steps across
the front garden and down the steps to where Mr. Backhouse, the carrier,
stood, bracing himself for self-defense.

'Ya may weel fret, mum,' said Mr. Backhouse, interrupting the flood of
her reproaches, with the comparative _sang-froid_ of one who knew that,
after all, he was the only carrier on the road, and that the vicarage
was five miles from the necessaries of life; 'it's a bad job, and I's
not goin' to say it isn't. But; ya jest look 'ere, mum, what's a man to
du wi' a daft thingamy like _that_, as caan't teak a plain order, and
spiles a poor man's business as caan't help hissel'?'

And Mr. Backhouse pointed with withering scorn to a small, shrunken
old man, who sat dangling his legs on the shaft of the cart, and
whose countenance wore a singular expression of mingled meekness and
composure, as his partner flourished an indignant finger toward him.

'Jim,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh reproachfully, 'I did think you would have
taken more pains about my order!'

'Yis, mum,'said the old man, placidly, 'ya might 'a' thowt it. I's reet
sorry, but ya caan't help these things _sum_times--an' it's naw gud
hollerin' ower 'em like a mad bull. Aa tuke yur bit paper to Randall's
and aa laft it wi' 'em to mek up, an' than, aa weel, aa went to a frind,
an' ee _may_ hev giv' me a glass of yale, aa doon't say ee _dud_--but ee
may, I ween't sweer. Hawsomiver, aa niver thowt naw mair aboot it, nor
mair did John, so _ee_ needn't taak--till we wur jest two mile from
'ere. An' ee's a gon' on sence! My! an' a larroping the poor beast like
onything.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this audacious recital.
As for John, he looked on, surveying his brother's philosophical
demeanor at first with speechless wrath, and then with an inscrutable
mixture of expressions, in which, however, any one accustomed to his
weather-beaten countenance would have probably read a hidden admiration.

'Weel, aa niver!' he exclaimed, when Jim's explanatory remarks had
come to an end, swinging himself up on to his seat and gathering up the
reins. 'Yur a boald 'un to tell the missus theer to hur feeace as how
ya wur' tossicatit whan yur owt ta been duing yur larful business. Aa've
doon wi' yer. Aa aims to please ma coostomers, an' aa caan't abide sek
wark. Yur like an oald kneyfe, I can mak' nowt o' ya', nowder back nor
edge.'

Mrs. Thornburgh wrung her fat short hands in despair, making little
incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him about to depart, of
which John at last gathered the main purport to be that she wished him
to go back to Whinborough for her precious parcel.

He shook his head compassionately over the preposterous state of mind
betrayed by such a demand, and with a fresh burst of abuse of his
brother, and an assurance to the vicar's wife that he meant to 'gie that
oald man nawtice when he got haum; he wasn't goan to hev his bisness
spiled for nowt by an oald ijiot wi' a hed as full o' yale as a
hayrick's full o' mice,' he raised his whip and the clattering vehicle
moved forward; Jim meanwhile preserving through all his brother's wrath
and Mrs. Thornburgh's wailings the same mild and even countenance, the
meditative and friendly aspect of the philosopher letting the world go
'as e'en it will.'

So Mrs. Thornburgh was left gasping, watching the progress of the
lumbering cart along the bit of road leading to the hamlet at the head
of the valley, with so limp and crestfallen an aspect that even the
gaunt and secretly jubilant Sarah was moved to pity.

'Why, missis, we'll do very well. I'll hev some scones in t'oven in naw
time, an' theer's finger biscuits, an' wi' buttered toast an' sum
o' t'best jams, if they don't hev enuf to eat they ought to.' Then,
dropping her voice, she asked with a hurried change of tone, 'Did ye ask
un' hoo his daater is?'

Mrs. Thornburgh started. Her pastoral conscience was smitten. She opened
the gate and waved violently after the cart. John pulled his horse
up, and with a few quick steps she brought herself within speaking, or
rather shouting, distance.

'How's your daughter to-day, John?'

The old man's face peering round the oilcloth hood of the cart was
darkened by a sudden cloud as he caught the words. His stern lips
closed. He muttered something inaudible to Mrs. Thornburgh and whipped
up his horse again. The cart started off, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left
staring into the receding eyes of 'Jim the Noodle,' who, from his
seat on the near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had passed from
benevolence into a preternatural solemnity.

'He's sparin' ov 'is speach, is John Backhouse,' said Sarah grimly,
as her mistress returned to her. 'Maybe ee's aboot reet. It's a bad
business au' ee'll not mend it wi' taakin.'

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, could not apply herself to the case of Mary
Backhouse. At any other moment it would have excited in her breast
the shuddering interest, which, owing to certain peculiar attendant
circumstances, it, awakened in every other woman in Long Whindale. But
her mind--such are the limitations of even clergymen's wives--was now
absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings seemed to hang limp
with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly into the kitchen,
and gave what attention she could to, those second-best arrangements so
depressing to the idealist temper.

Poor soul! All the charm and glitter of her little social adventure was
gone. When she once more emerged upon the lawn, and languidly readjusted
her spectacles, she was weighed down by the thought that in two hours
Mrs. Seaton would be upon her. Nothing of this kind ever happened to
Mrs. Seaton. The universe obeyed her nod. No carrier conveying goods to
her august door ever got drunk or failed to deliver his consignment. The
thing was inconceivable. Mrs. Thornburgh was well aware of it.

Should William be informed? Mrs. Thornburgh had a rooted belief in the
brutality of husbands in all domestic crises, and would have preferred
not to inform him. But she had also a dismal certainty that the
secret would burn a hole in her till it was confessed-bill and all.
Besides--frightful thought!--would they have to eat up all those
_meringues_ next day?

Her reflections at last became so depressing that, with a natural
epicurean instinct, she tried violently to turn her mind away from them.
Luckily she was assisted by a sudden perception of the roof and chimneys
of Burwood, the Leyburns' house, peeping above the trees to the left. At
sight of them a smile overspread her plump and gently wrinkled face. She
fell gradually into a train of thought, as feminine as that in which she
had been just indulging, but infinitely more pleasing.

For, with regard to the Leyburns, at this present moment Mrs. Thornburgh
felt herself in the great position of tutelary divinity or guardian
angel. At least if divinities and guardian angels do not concern
themselves with the questions to which Mrs. Thornburgh's mind was now
addressed, it would clearly have been the opinion of the vicar's wife
that they ought to do so.

'Who else is there to look after these girls, I should like to know,'
Mrs. Thornburgh inquired of herself, 'if I don't do it? As if girls
married themselves! People may talk of their independence nowadays
as much as they like--it always has to be done for them, one way or
another. Mrs. Leyburn, poor lackadaisical thing! is no good whatever.
No more is Catherine. They both behave as if husbands tumbled into your
mouth for the asking. Catherine's too good for this world--but if she
doesn't do it, I must. Why, that girl Rose is a beauty--if they didn't
let her wear those ridiculous mustard-colored things, and do her hair
fit to frighten the crows! Agnes too--so ladylike and well mannered;
she'd do credit to any man. Well, we shall see, we shall see!'

And Mrs. Thornburgh gently shook her gray curls from side to side,
while, her eyes, fixed on the open spare room window, shone with
meaning.

'So eligible, too--private means, no encumbrances, and as good as gold.'

She sat lost a moment in a pleasing dream.

'Shall I bring oot the tea to you theer, mum?' called Sarah gruffly,
from the garden door. 'Master and Mr. Elsmere are just coomin' down t'
field by t' stepping-stones.' Mrs. Thornburgh signalled assent and
the tea-table was brought. Afternoon tea was by no means a regular
institution at the vicarage of Long Whindale, and Sarah never supplied
it without signs of protest. But when a guest was in the house Mrs.
Thornburgh insisted upon it; her obstinacy in the matter, like her
dreams of cakes and confections, being part of her determination to move
with the times, in spite the station to which Providence had assigned
her.

A minute afterward the vicar, a thick-set gray-haired man of sixty,
accompanied by a tall younger man in clerical dress, emerged upon the
lawn.

'Welcome sight!' cried Mr. Thornburgh; 'Robert and I have been coveting
that tea for the last hour. You guessed very well, Emma, to have it just
ready for us.'

'Oh, that was Sarah. She saw you coming down to the stepping-stones,'
replied his wife, pleased, however, by any talk of appreciation from her
mankind, however small. 'Robert, I hope you haven't been walked off your
legs?'

'What, in this air, cousin Emma? I could walk from sunrise to sundown.
Let no one call me an invalid any more. Henceforth I am a Hercules.'

And he threw himself on the rug which Mrs. Thornburgh's motherly
providence had spread on the grass for him, with a smile and a look of
supreme physical contentment, which did indeed almost efface the signs
of recent illness in the ruddy boyish face.

Mrs. Thornburgh studied him; her eye caught first of all by the stubble
of reddish hair which as he shook off his hat stood up straight and
stiff all over his head with an odd wildness and aggressiveness. She
involuntarily thought, basing her inward comment on a complexity of
reasons-'Dear me, what a pity; it spoils his appearance!'

'I apologize, I apologize, cousin Emma, once for all,' said the
young, man, surprising her glance, and despairingly smoothing down his
recalcitrant locks. 'Let us hope that mountain air will quicken the pace
of it before it is necessary for me to present a dignified appearance at
'Murewell.'

He looked up at her with a merry flash in his gray eyes, and her old
face brightened visibly as she realized afresh that in spite of the
grotesqueness of his cropped hair, her guest was a most attractive
creature. Not that he could boast much in the way of regular good looks:
the mouth was large, the nose of no particular outline, and in general
the cutting of the face, though strong and characteristic, had a
bluntness and _naïveté_ like a vigorous unfinished sketch. This
bluntness of line, however, was balanced by a great delicacy of
tint--the pink and white complexion of a girl, indeed--enhanced by the
bright reddish hair, and quick gray eyes.

The figure was also a little out of drawing, so to speak; it was tall
and loosely-jointed. The general impression was one of agility and
power. But if you looked closer you saw that the shoulders were narrow,
the arms inordinately long, and the extremities too small for the
general height. Robert Elsmere's hand was the hand of a woman, and few
people ever exchanged a first greeting with its very tall owner without
a little shock of surprise.

Mr. Thornburgh and his guest had visited a few houses in the course
of their walk, and the vicar plunged for a minute or two into some
conversation about local matters with his wife. But Mrs. Thornburgh,
it was soon evident; was giving him but a scatterbrained attention. Her
secret was working in her ample breast. Very soon she could contain it
no longer, and breaking in upon her husband's parish news, she tumbled
it all out pell-mell with a mixture of discomfiture and defiance
infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, but she also could
not bear to give William an advantage.

William certainly took his advantage. He did what his wife in her
irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. He first stared,
then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as soon as he had recovered
breath, into a series of unfeeling comments which drove Mrs. Thornburgh
to desperation.

'If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain folks can do
perfectly well without'--et cetera, et cetera--the husband's point of
view can be imagined. Mrs. Thornburgh could have shaken her good man,
especially as there was nothing new to her in his remarks; she had known
to a T beforehand exactly what he would say. She took up her knitting
in a great hurry, the needles clicking angrily, her gray curls quivering
under the energy of her hands and arms, while she launched at her
husband various retorts as to his lack of consideration for her efforts
and her inconvenience, which were only very slightly modified by the
presence of a stranger.

Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face discreetly turned
away, an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of his mouth.
Everything was fresh and piquant up here in this remote corner of the
north country, whether the mountain air or the windblown streams, or the
manners and customs of the inhabitants. His cousin's wife, in spite of
her ambitious conventionalities, was really the child of Nature to a
refreshing degree. One does not see these types, he said to himself,
in the cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. She was like a bit of
a bygone world--Miss Austen's or Miss Ferrier's--unearthed for his
amusement. He could not for the life of him help taking the scenes of
this remote rural existence, which was quite new to him, as though they
were the scenes of some comedy of manners.

Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the passage of arms
between himself and his spouse was becoming just a little indecorous.
He got up with a 'hem!' intended to put an end to it, and deposited his
cup.

'Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of your
determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn't you just ask the
Leyburns and let us enjoy ourselves?'

With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little maid whom
Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the evening's
festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper basket. His wife
looked after him with eyes that spoke unutterable things.

'You would never think,' she said in an agitated voice to Young Elsmere,
'that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to every invitation, that
he entirely agreed with me that one _must_ be civil to Mrs. Seaton,
considering that she can make anybody's life a burden to them about here
that isn't; but it's no use.'

And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her face full
of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere restrained a
strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead to distract and
console her. He expressed sympathy with her difficulties, he talked
to her about her party, he got from her the names and histories of the
guests. How Miss Austenish it sounded; the managing rector's wife, her
still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighboring clergyman
who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just
out--'Very pretty' sighed 'Mrs. Thornburgh, who was now depressed all
round, 'but all flounces and frills and nothing to say'--and last of
all those three sisters, the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different
level, and whom he had heard mentioned so often since his arrival by
both husband and wife.

'Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,' he said presently. 'You and cousin
William seem to have a great affection for them. Do they live near?'

'Oh, quite close,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh brightening at last, and like
a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the more ardently to
take up another. 'There is the house,' and she pointed out Burwood among
its trees. Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon him she fell into a
more or less incoherent account of her favorites. She laid on hot colors
thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.

'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!' he said
laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a widow and
three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement surely, though
you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in England.'

'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think it
very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a
carrier that gets drunk, too! Why you know they belong here. They're
real Westmoreland people.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the common farmers
about. Only his land was his own and theirs isn't.'

'He was one of the last of the statesmen,' interposed Mr.
Thornburgh--who, having rescued his sermon from Jane's tender mercies,
and put out his modest claret and sherry for the evening, had strolled
out again and found himself impelled as usual to put some precision into
his wife's statements--'one of the small freeholders who have almost
disappeared here as elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns always seems to
me typical of many things.'

Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first picked
up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was loftily
accepted--launched into a narrative which way be here somewhat
condensed.

The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was
the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. 'The people about here'
said the vicar, 'say he drank away an acre a year. He had some fifty
acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.'

Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons and
daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters, were brutal
and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead, it was reported
that, having on one occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm
man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife
whom he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden
shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his gray hair
streaming with blood; after which she had calmly put the horse into the
cart, and driven off to fetch the doctor to both her parents. But among
this grim and earthy crew, there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin,'
of whom all the rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard,
who showed such a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin', 'and such a
persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing
was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the
grammar school at Whinborough. From the moment the boy got a footing
in the school he hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local
bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or
failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which
carried him triumphantly to Queen's College.

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary
to pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not have
dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and
drink.

From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class
list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the
same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen's, his
ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country
grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till,
in the very last year of his father's life, the eldest son, who had
a shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest applied to
'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The
money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick's wife and
children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were
a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one
of themselves.

'Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. 'It happened the
year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I
never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. It was kept
up in the old style. Three of Leyburn's sons were there: two of them
farmers like himself, one a clerk, from Manchester, a daughter married
to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under
the table before supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn wrote
to ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But I was new to the
place,' said the vicar, flushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race
that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man
among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he
had all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of
someone that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and had
gone seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but between us we
couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had
gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an
August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in.
"I haven't breathed this air for five-and-twenty years;" he said. "I
thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there,
it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel after all that I have the
fells in my blood." He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy
creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish
ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had made
a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering about
the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And
George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him
without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last
offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it
was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife
and children here in the holidays," he said, "and the money will
set George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and got
possession of the old house, in which I should think he had passed
about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There's no
accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud
to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her
everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain
too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care
what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the
blues to look at.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in that
house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days--the
savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately
brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where old Leyburn
used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a
white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had belabored
him when he was a boy at the village school--it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and then
he died and the family lived on?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the
most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in
these valleys,' said the vicar smiling. 'I don't count for much,
she counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me their
secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and
her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they
take it from her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the
feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of
Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whiskey-drinking stock
should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine
Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling.
His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the
young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point
where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye
commanded the whole of upper end of the valley--a bare desolate recess
filled evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and purple
crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell marked the
course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater district.
Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled babbling
river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted imperceptibly
into the browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most of the scene,
except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut out the sun,
was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on the farm-houses, the
heckberry trees along the river and the road, emphasized the golden rays
which were flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green cup.
Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit-trees in blossom;
the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young man from the warmer
south there was still a bracing quality in the soft western breeze which
blew about him.

He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature going out
to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace of the scene. Lines
of Wordsworth were on his lips; the little well-worn volume was in his
pocket, but he did not need to bring it out; and his voice had all a
poet's intensity of emphasis as he strolled along, reciting under his
breath--

             It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
             The holy time is quiet as a nun
             Breathless; with adoration!

Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Burwood, lying
beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its
protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious
association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one white
life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the idea of her
seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry
and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to see her.



CHAPTER III.

The festal tea had begun and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite to
her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's wife. Poor Mrs.
Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered the room on the arm of Mr.
Mayhew, the incumbent of the neighboring valley of Shanmoor, that
the first _coup d'æil_ was good. The flowers had been arranged in the
afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again; a
pleasing odor of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and fern;
and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses and bright
faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant
play of crisp and delicate color.

But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with a little
sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of an eye-glass
at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a large and jewelled
hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled round the table,
lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited consciousness, on
every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_ should have been and was
not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to
restrain herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew,
giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the meal
which did but confirm her neighbor--a grim uncommunicative person--in
his own devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had
fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr.
Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth,
lately an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to
an invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some
opening into the great world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white
dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was
like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon,
her slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious
glances at the Thornburgh's guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she
thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so
often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems
brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times,
he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow with her still unsoftened angles and
movements was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain
sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes'
conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk. As to
Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.

She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her side.
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and
perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The hollows in the
cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead
somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face,
though still quite young and expressing a perfect physical health, had
the look of having been polished and refined away to its foundations.
There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on it, and not a vestige
of Rose's peach-like bloom. Her profile, as he saw it now, had the
firmness, the clear whiteness of a profile on a Greek gem.

She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk! Robert who,
out of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, had an abundant
compassion for and understanding of such beings as young Mayhew, watched
her with a pleased amusement, wondering how she did it. What? Had
she got him on carpentering, engineering--discovered his weak point?
Water-wheels, investors, steam-engines--and the lumpish lad all in a
glow, talking away nineteen to the dozen. What tact, what kindness in
her gray-blue eyes!

But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly well aware that
she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, an Oxford man, and a
member, besides, of a well-known Sussex county family. She was a large
and commanding person, clad in black _moiré_ silk. She wore a velvet
diadem, Honiton lace lappets, and a variety of chains, beads, and
bangles bestrewn about her that made a tinkling as she moved. Fixing
her neighbor with a bland majesty of eye, she inquired of him if he were
'any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere?' Robert replied that Sir Mowbray
Elsmere was his 'father's cousin, and the patron of the living to which
he had just been, appointed. Mrs. Seaton then graciously informed him
that long ago-'when I was a girl in my native Hampshire'--her family
and Sir Mowbray Elsmere had been on intimate terms. Her father had been
devoted to Sir Mowbray. 'And I,' she added with an evident though lofty
desire to please, 'retain an inherited respect, sir, for your name.'

Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the rector's
wife had made an impression. His general conception of his relative
and patron Sir Mowbray--who had been for many years the family black
sheep--was, indeed, so far removed from any notions of 'respect,' that
he had some difficulty in keeping his countenance under the lady's look
and pose. He would have been still more entertained had he known the
nature of the intimacy to which she referred. Mrs. Seaton's father,
in his capacity of solicitor in a small country town, had acted as
electioneering agent for Sir Mowbray (then plain Mr.) Elsmere on two
occasions--in 18__, when his client had been triumphantly returned at a
bye-election; and two years later, when a repetition of the tactics,
so successful in the previous contest, led to a petition, and to the
disappearance of the heir to the Elsmere property from parliamentary
life.

Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton did not
enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and proceeding in a more
neutral tone than before, she proceeded to put him through a catechism
on Oxford, alternately cross-examining him and expounding to him her own
views and her husband's on the functions of the Universities. She
and the Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly
occupied in ruining the young men's health by over-examination, and
poisoning their minds by free-thinking opinions. In her belief, if it
went on, the motherly of England would refuse to send their sons to
these ancient but deadly resorts. She looked at him sternly as she
spoke, as though defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed,
did his polite best to be serious.

But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find Miss Leyburn's
eyes upon him. And undeniably there was spark of laughter in them,
quenched, as soon as his glance crossed hers, under long lashes. How
that spark had lit up the grave, pale face! He longed to provoke it
again, to cross over to her and say, 'What amused you? Do you think me
very young and simple? Tell me about these people.'

But, instead, ho made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was soon engaged
in giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, an experience which
generally, ended by the appearance of certain truculent elements in one
of the mildest of men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl neighbor
and ask her what people meant by calling the Lakes rainy.

'I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky has been without
a cloud, and your rivers are running dry.'

'And you have mastered our climate in twenty-four hours, like the
tourists--isn't it?--that do the Irish question in three weeks?'

'Not the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,' he thought to himself,
amused, 'and yet what a child it looks.'

He threw himself into a war of words with her, and enjoyed it extremely.
Her brilliant coloring, her gestures as fresh and untamed as the
movements of the leaping river outside, the mixture in her of girlish
pertness and ignorance with the promise of a remarkable general
capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs.
Thornburgh--much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the
pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the
superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign
cooks--watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and
more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased her. Why
should people always talk of Catherine; Mrs. Thornburgh stood in awe of
Catherine and had given her up in despair. It was the other two whose
fortunes, as possibly directed by her, filled her maternal heart with
sympathetic emotion.

Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude shock. What on
earth was the vicar doing? After they had got through better than anyone
could have hoped, thanks to a discreet silence and Sarah's makeshifts,
there was the master of the house pouring the whole tale of his wife's
aspirations and disappointment into Mrs. Seaton's ear! If it were ever
allowable to rush upon your husband at table and stop his mouth with a
dinner napkin, Mrs. Thornburgh could at this moment have performed such
a feat. She nodded and coughed and fidgeted in vain!

The vicar's confidences were the result of a fit of nervous
exasperation. Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an account of 'our
charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleckwood was a
distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the
neighborhood--not, however, a very respectable magnate. Mr. Thornburgh
had heard accounts of Lupton Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least half
a dozen different occasions. Privately he believed them all to refer to
one visit, an event of immemorial antiquity periodically brought up
to date by Mrs. Seaton's imagination. But the vicar was a timid man,
without the courage of his opinions, and in his eagerness to stop the
flow of his neighbor's eloquence he could think of no better device,
or more suitable rival subject, than to plunge into the story of
the drunken carrier, and the pastry still reposing on the counter at
Randall's.

He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife's horrified
countenance embarrassed him. But anything was better than Lord
Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him with the slightest smile on her
formidable lip. The story was pleasing to her.

'At least, my dear sir,' she said when he paused, nodding her diademed
head with stately emphasis, 'Mrs. Thornburgh's inconvenience may have
one good result. You can now make an example of the carrier. It is our
special business, as my husband always says, who are in authority, to
bring their low vices home to these people.'

The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What ineptitude had he been guilty of
now! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood he might have started Mrs. Seaton
on teetotalism. Now if there was one topic on which this awe-inspiring
woman was more awe-inspiring than another it was on the topic of
teetotalism. The vicar had already felt himself a criminal as he drank
his modest glass of claret under her eye.

'Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,' said Dr. Baker from the
other end of the table. 'But there are plenty of worse things in these
valleys. Besides, what person in his senses would think of trying to
disestablish John Backhouse? He and his queer brother are as much a
feature of the valley as High Fell. We have too few originals left to be
so very particular about trifles.'

'Trifles?' repeated Mrs. Seaton in a deep voice, throwing up her eyes.
But she would not venture an argument with Dr. Baker. He had all the
cheery self-confidence of the old established local doctor, who knows
himself to be a power, and neither Mrs. Seaton nor her restless,
intriguing little husband had ever yet succeeded in putting him down.

'You must see these two old characters,' said Dr. Baker to Elsmere
across the table. 'They are relics of Westmoreland which will soon have
disappeared. Old John, who is going on for seventy, is as tough an old
dalesman as ever you saw. He doesn't measure his cups, but he would
scorn to be floored by them. I don't believe he does drink much, but if
he does there is probably no amount of whiskey that he couldn't carry.
Jim, the other brother, is about five years older. He is a kind of
softie--all alive on one side of his brain, and a noodle on the other. A
single glass of rum and water puts him under the table. And as he never
can refuse this glass, and as the temptation generally seizes him when
they are on their rounds, he is always getting John into disgrace.
John swears at him and slangs him. No use. Jim sits still, looks--well,
nohow. I never saw an old creature with a more singular gift of denuding
his face of all expression. John vow's he shall go to the "house;" he
has no legal share in the business; the house and the horse and cart
are John's. Next day you see them on the cart again just as usual. In
reality neither brother can do without the other. And three days after,
the play begins again.'

'An improving spectacle for the valley,' said Mrs. Seaton dryly.

'Oh, my dear madam,' said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders, 'we can't
all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a drunkard, he has got a heart of his
own somewhere, and can nurse a dying niece like a woman. Miss Leyburn
can tell us something about that.'

And he turned round to his neighbor with a complete change of
expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate
respect. Catherine colored as if she did not like being addressed on the
subject, and just nodded a little with gentle affirmative eyes.

'A strange case.' said Dr. Baker again looking at Elsmere. It is a
family that is original and old-world even in its ways of dying. I have
been a doctor in these parts for five-and-twenty years. I have seen what
you may call old Westmoreland die out--costume, dialect, superstitions.
At least, as to dialect, the people have become bilingual. I sometimes
think they talk it to each other as much as ever, but some of them won't
talk it to you and me at all. And as to superstitions, the only ghost
story I know that still has some hold on popular belief is the one which
attaches to this mountain here, High Fell, at the end of this valley.'

He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to penetrate even modern
provincial society, that no man may tell a ghost story without leave.
Rose threw a merry glance at him. They two were very old friends. Dr.
Baker had pulled out her first teeth and given her a sixpence afterward
for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten; the sixpence lived on
gratefully in a child's warm memory.

'Tell it,' she said; 'we give you leave. We won't interrupt you unless
you put in too many inventions.'

'You invite me to break the first law of storytelling, Miss Rose,' said
the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is bound to leave a
story better than he found it. However, I couldn't tell it if I would.
I don't know what makes the poor ghost walk; and if you do, I shall say
you invent. But at any rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the
side of High Fell at midnight every Midsummer day. If you see her and
she passes you in silence, why you only got a fright for your pains. But
if she speaks to you, you die within the year. Old John Backhouse is a
widower with one daughter. This girl saw the ghost last Midsummer day,
and Miss Leyburn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the
next; but with very small prospect of success.'

'What is the girl dying of?--fright?' asked Mrs. Seaton harshly.

'Oh, no!' said the doctor hastily, 'not precisely. A sad story; better
not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time of her death
seeing likely to be determined by the strength of her own and other
people's belief in the ghost's summons.'

Mrs. Seaton's grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. She put up her
eye-glass and looked at Catherine. 'An unpleasant household, I should
imagine,' she said shortly, 'for a young lady to visit.'

Doctor Baker looked at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame came
into his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a
quick-tempered mercurial sort of Man.

'I presume that one's guardian angel may have to follow one sometimes
into unpleasant quarters,' he said hotly. 'If this girl lives, it will
be Miss Leyburn's doing; if she dies, saved and comforted, instead of
lost in this world and the next, it will be Miss Leyburn's doing too.
Ah, my dear young lady, let me alone! You tie my tongue always, and I
won't have it.'

And the doctor turned his weather-beaten elderly face upon her with a
look which was half defiance and half apology. She, on her side, had
flushed painfully, laying her white fingertips imploringly on his arm.
Mrs. Seaton turned away with a little dry cough, so did her spectacled
sister at the other end of the table. Mrs. Leyburn, on the other hand,
sat in a little ecstasy, looking at Catherine and Dr. Baker, something
glistening in her eyes. Robert Elsmere alone showed presence of mind.
Bending across to Dr. Baker, he asked him a sudden question as to the
history of a certain strange green mound or barrow that rose out of
a flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his
whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance, and replied. Thenceforward
he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the traces of Norse
settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till the ladies left
the dining-room.

As Catherine Leyburn went out Elsmere stood holding the door open. She
could not help raising her eyes upon him, eyes full of a half-timid
half-grateful friendliness. His own returned her look with interest.

'"A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a new-born
thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She had not yet said a
direct word to him, and yet he was curiously convinced that here was one
of the most interesting persons, and one of the persons most interesting
to _him_, that he had ever met. What mingled delicacy and strength in
the hand that had lain beside her on the dinner-table--what potential
depths of feeling in the full dark fringed eye!

Half-an-hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing room, he found
Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French window that looked out
on the lawn and on the dim rocky face of the fell. Adeline Baker,
a stooping, red-armed maiden, with a pretty face, set off, as she
imagined, by a vast amount, of cheap finery, was sitting beside her,
studying her with a timid adoration. The doctor's daughter regarded
Catherine Leyburn, who during the last five years had made herself
almost as distinct a figure in the popular imagination of a few
Westmoreland valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall miners, as a being
of a totally different Order from herself. She was glued to the side of
her idol, but her shy, and awkward tongue could find hardly anything to
say to her. Catherine, however, talked away, gently stroking the while
the girl's rough hand which lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and
bliss of its owner, who was outraged by the contrast between her own
ungainly member and Miss Leyburn's delicate fingers.

Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply avenging
herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might have received at
tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with a face that seemed to be
perpetually peering forward, light colorless hair surmounted by a cap
adorned with artificial nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes armed with
spectacles, was having her way with Mrs. Leyburn, inquiring into the
household arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining power which
made the mild widow as pulp before her.

When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round hastily. She
herself had opened that door into the garden. A garden on a warm summer
night offers opportunities no schemer should neglect. Agnes and Rose
were chattering and laughing on the gravel path just outside it, their
white girlish figures showing temptingly against the dusky background
of garden and fell. It somewhat disappointed the vicar's wife to see
her tall guest take a chair and draw it beside Catherine--while Adeline
Baker awkwardly got up and disappeared into the garden.

Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong had been
his sense of attraction at tea; but like the rest of us he could find
nothing more telling to start with than a remark about the weather.
Catherine in her reply asked him if he were quite recovered from the
attack of low fever he was understood to have been suffering from.

'Oh, yes,' he said brightly, 'I am very nearly as fit as I ever was,
and more eager than I ever was, to got to work. The idling of it is
the worst part of illness. However, in a month from now I must be at my
living, and I can only hope it will give me enough to do.'

Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. What an eager
face it was! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be the note of the whole man,
of the quick eyes and mouth, the flexible hands and energetic movements.
Even the straight, stubbly hair, its owner's passing torment, standing
up round the high, open brow, seemed to help the general impression of
alertness and vigor.

'Your mother, I hear, is already there?' said Catherine.

'Yes. My poor mother!' and the young man smiled half sadly. 'It is
a curious situation for both of us. This living which has just been
bestowed on me is my father's old living. It is in the gift of my
cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. My great-uncle'--he drew himself together
suddenly. 'But I don't know why I should imagine that these things
interest other people,' he said, with a little quick, almost comical,
accent of self-rebuke.

'Please go on,' cried Catherine hastily. The voice and manner were
singularly pleasant to her; she wished he would not interrupt himself
for nothing.

'Really? Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished me to have
it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time; took Orders; but I
wanted something more stirring than a country parish. One has dreams of
many things. But one's dreams come to nothing. I got ill at Oxford. The
doctors forbade the town work. The old incumbent who had held the living
since my father's death died precisely at that moment. I felt myself
booked, and gave in to various friends; but it is second best.'

She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though his
talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past.

'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. Her cheek
was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual animation;
and her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save a small
old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a pair of
hair bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the nobleness and
simplicity of a Romney picture.

'_You_ do not find it so I imagine,' he replied, bending forward to her
with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her to talk to
him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally compared her to
Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the dark red flowers in
her white lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than
Rose's.

However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which she
turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive, confiding
nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the
moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighborhood,
the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at
least, as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength,
individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not
at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then,
indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an
absence of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary
south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.

'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said to him
once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told
him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to
him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life,
her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments
on her favorite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to
enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural
magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known
line of Shelley's she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him
deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy
and knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The
thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now
wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she
was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.

'Were you ever there?' he asked her.

'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have only,
a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great
building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'

'Did your father often go back?'

'No; never toward the later part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little, 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'

She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was
a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed somehow
to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.

'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw
when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford
was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men
'Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to
him.'

Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the
beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in
twenty years transformed the University.

'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little longer.
There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has
spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward
swell of a religious revival.'

Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to
her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her seemed to
satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.

'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, hesitating;
'but I don't know whether father would have liked that much 'better.'

The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself suddenly.
Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, and afraid lest
she might have said something discourteous.

'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it is a
mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has brought about
the new state of things. Some of the factors in the change were hardly
Christian at all, by name, but they have all helped to make men think,
to stir their hearts, to win them back to the old ways.'

His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently the
matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt a deep and
loving interest. His young boyish face had grown grave; there was a
striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which suddenly
aroused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of
distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things
of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a
beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full of soul.

The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their
conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind
them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candies and music-stools,
preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed
vicar of Shanmoor, and the room seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton's
strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted itself, and her face
settled again into the slight rigidity of expression characteristic of
it. She rose and prepared to move farther into the room.

'We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder.

And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn. He had a
momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive, sympathetic, felt
in the woman the presence of a strength, a self-sufficingness which was
not all attractive. His vanity, if he had cherished any during their
conversation, was not flattered by its close. But as he leant against
the window-frame waiting for the music to begin, he could hardly keep
his eyes from her. He was a man who, by force of temperament, made
friends readily with women, though except for a passing fancy or two he
had never been in love; and his sense of difficulty with regard to
this stiffly-mannered deep-eyed country girl brought with it an unusual
stimulus and excitement.

Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with
bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her.
Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He was a
powerful swarthy man who said little, and was generally alarming to the
ladies of the neighborhood. To propitiate him they asked him to bring
his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss
Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who
regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower's name
and position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with all his
taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend himself.

'Has it begun?' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and turning,
he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's cheeks flushed
by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head.

She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some
powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of
her wrists and the vicarage piano.

The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to
fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and
the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs.
Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton,
motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against
the wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth
expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.

It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which
flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning,
the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very
fast, which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing
performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the
resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line
with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the
wilder grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules
performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped
her little foot.

'Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, 'three bars this; will no one
stop her!'

But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a
sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the
room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was
to end, and who was to be victor.

Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have, been in any doubt as to that!
Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute, nearly half a
page behind, was left shrilly hanging, in mid-air, forsaken and
companionless, an object of derision to gods and men.

'Ah! I took it a little fast!' said the lady, triumphantly looking up at
the discomfited clergyman.

'Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window-curtain beside
him, that she might have her laugh in safety, 'do they play like that in
Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?'

But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl.

'Rose! Rose! Don't go out again! It is your turn next!'

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering
something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical power,
supposed that she felt it an indignity to be asked to play in such
company.

Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. Leyburn, a
summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, as it brought him once
more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn's oldest daughter.

'Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere?' asked Mrs. Leyburn in her little
mincing voice, making room for his chair beside them. 'If you are, I am
sure my youngest daughter's playing, will please you.'

Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some pleasant answer,
divined that the reserved and stately daughter must be often troubled by
the mother's expansiveness.

Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to, listen. Mrs. Seaton was
severely turning over a photograph book. In her opinion the violin was
an unbecoming instrument for young women. Miss Barks sat upright with
the studiously neutral expression which befits the artist asked to
listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the
other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him,
good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for
Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after
routing out from her music a couple of _Fantasie-Stücke_, which she had
wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to
the 'rubbish' played by the preceding performers. She stood with her
lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black
coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot advanced, the
ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and arm, beautifully formed but
still wanting the roundness of womanhood, raised high for action,
the lightly poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a
bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future
brilliance and empire.

Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial maiden learned
to play with this intelligence, this force, this delicate command of
her instrument? He was not a musician, and therefore could not gauge her
exactly, but he was more or less familiar with music and its standards,
as all people become nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society,
and he knew enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was
remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident was this,
when from the humorous piece with which the sisters led off--a dance of
clowns, but clowns of Arcady--they slid into a delicate rippling _chant
d'amour_, the long-drawn notes of the violin rising and falling on
the piano accompaniment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did
a _fillette_, unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much
eloquence--only from the natural dreams of a girl's heart as to 'the
lovers waiting in the hidden years?'

But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the
room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure
beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an
impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look which had piqued his
curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr.
Baker.

'Excellent!' cried Elsmere. 'How in the name of fortune, Miss Leyburn,
if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on so far in this remote
place?'

'She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we have there,'
said Catherine quietly; 'I believe she has been very well taught.'

'But surely,' he said warmly, 'it is more than teaching--more even than
talent--there is something like genius in it?'

She did not answer very readily.

'I don't know,' she said at last. 'Everyone says it is very good.'

He would have been repelled by her irresponsiveness but that her last
words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, as though
the subject were connected with an inner debate not yet solved which
troubled her. He was puzzled, but certainly not repelled.

Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons went first, and
the other guests lingered awhile afterward to enjoy the sense of freedom
left by their departure. But at last the Mayews, father and son, set
off on foot to walk home over the moonlit mountains; the doctor tucked
himself and his daughter into his high gig and drove off with a sweeping
ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps teasing him to the
last; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort the Miss Leyburns and their
mother home.

Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar's incredulous ears that
never--never as long as she lived--would she have Mrs. Seaton inside her
doors again.

'Her manners'--cried the vicar's wife, fuming-'her manners would
disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none-positively none!'

Then suddenly her round, comfortable face brightened and broadened out
into a beaming smile--

'But, after all, William, say what you will--and you always do say the
most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success. I
know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him
_looking_--_looking_--at that little minx Rose while she was playing
as if he couldn't take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be
sure!'

The vicar, who had been standing with his back to fireplace and his
hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks first of all with
lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half
compassionate, which made her start in her chair.

'Rose?' he said, impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?'

It was very rarely indeed, that on her own ground, so to speak, the
vicar ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh
looked at him in amazement.

'Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, 'that you didn't notice
that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn,
he had practically no attention for anybody else?'

Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening-and
her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to
ejaculate--

'Catherine!' she said feebly. 'Catherine! how absurd!'

But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of the window
after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that
night an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely
indispensable, more of a personage.



CHAPTER IV.

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure
of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little
more closely into the antecedents of the man who had suddenly roused so
much activity in her contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents
are important to us. For the interest of an uncomplicated story will
entirely depend upon the clearness with which the reader may have
grasped the general outlines of a quick soul's development. And
this development had already made considerable progress before Mrs.
Thornburgh set eyes upon her husband's cousin, Robert Elsmere.

Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well provided with this
world's goods; up to a certain moderate point, indeed, a favorite of
fortune in all respects. His father belonged to the younger line of an
old Sussex family, and owed his pleasant country living to the family
instincts of his uncle, Sir William Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines and
Conservative traditions were pretty evenly mixed, with a result of the
usual respectable and inconspicuous kind. His virtues had descended
mostly to his daughters, while all his various weaknesses and fatuities
had blossomed into vices in the person of his eldest son and heir, the
Sir Mowbray Elsmere of Mrs. Seaton's early recollections.

Edward Elsmere, rector of Murewell in Surrey, and father of Robert, had
died before his uncle and patron; and his widow and son had been left to
face the world together. Sir William Elsmere and his nephew's wife had
not much in common, and rarely concerned themselves with each other.
Mrs. Elsmere was an Irishwoman by birth, with irregular Irish ways,
and a passion for strange garments, which made her the dread of the
conventional English squire; and, after she left the vicarage with her
son, she and her husband's uncle met no more. But when he died it
was found that the old man's sense of kinship, acting blindly and
irrationally, but with a slow inevitableness and certainty, had stirred
in him at the last in behalf of his great-nephew. He left him a money
legacy, the interest of which was to be administered by his mother till
his majority, and in a letter addressed to his heir he directed that,
should the boy on attaining manhood show any disposition to enter the
Church, all possible steps were to be taken to endow him with the family
living of Murewell, which had been his father's, and which at the time
of the old Baronet's death was occupied by another connection of the
family, already well stricken in years.

Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with his cousin
Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, but his father knew that
the tenacious Elsmere instinct was to be depended on for the fulfillment
of his wishes. And so it proved. No sooner was his father dead, than
Sir Mowbray curtly communicated his instructions to Mrs. Elsmere, then
living at the town of Harden for the sake of the great public school
recently transported there. She was to inform him, when the right moment
arrived, if it was the boy's wish, to enter the Church, and meanwhile he
referred her to his lawyers for particulars of such immediate benefits
as were secured to her under the late Baronet's will.

At the moment when Sir Mowbray's letter reached her, Mrs. Elsmere was
playing a leading part in the small society to which circumstances had
consigned her. She was the personal friend of half the masters and their
wives, and of at least a quarter of the school, while in the little town
which stretched up the hill covered by the new school buildings, she
was the helper, gossip, and confident of half the parish. Her vast hats,
strange in fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls of many colors,
hitched now to this side now to that, her swaying gait and looped-up
skirts, her spectacles, and the dangling parcels in which her soul
delighted, were the outward signs of a personality familiar to all.
For under those checked shawls which few women passed without an inward
marvel, there beat one of the warmest hearts that ever animated mortal
clay, and the prematurely, wrinkled face, with its small quick eyes
and shrewd indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature as responsive as it was
vigorous.

Their owner was constantly in the public eye. Her house, during the
hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, was little else than a
halting place between two journeys. Visits to the poor, long watches by
the sick; committees, in which her racy breadth of character gave her
always an important place; discussions with the vicar, arguments with
the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that--these were
the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life was delightful
to her; action, energy, influence, were delightful to her; she could
only breathe freely in the very thick of the stirring, many-colored
tumult of existence. Whether it was a pauper in the workhouse, or boys
from the school, or a girl caught in the tangle of a love-affair, it was
all the same to Mrs. Elsmere. Everything moved her, everything appealed
to her. Her life was a perpetual giving forth, and such was the inherent
nobility and soundness of the nature, that in spite of her curious Irish
fondness for the vehement romantic sides of experience, she did
little harm, and much good. Her tongue might be over-ready and her
championships indiscreet, but her hands were helpful, and her heart was
true. There was something contagious in her enjoyment of life, and with
all her strong religious faith, the thought of death, of any final
pulse and silence in the whirr of the great social machine was to her
a thought of greater chill and horror than to many a less brave and
spiritual soul.

Till her boy was twelve years old, however, she had lived for him first
and foremost. She had taught him, played with him, learnt with him,
communicating to him through all his lessons her own fire and eagerness
to a degree which every now and then taxed the physical powers of the
child. Whenever the signs of strain appeared, however, the mother would
be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together
Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, storyteller,
and romp; and forget all his precocious interest in history or vulgar
fractions. In after years when Robert looked back upon his childhood,
he was often reminded of the stories of Goethe's bringing-up. He could
recall exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes,--mother and child
sitting together in the gloaming, the mother's dark eyes dancing with
fun or kindling with dramatic fire, as she carried an imaginary hero
or heroine through a series of the raciest adventures; the child all
eagerness and sympathy, now clapping his little hands at the fall of the
giant, or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting
in ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus to the mother's
inventiveness. He could see her dressing up with him on wet days,
reciting King Henry to his Prince Hal, or Prospero to his Ariel, or
simply giving free vent to her own exuberant Irish fun till both he and
she, would sink exhausted into each other's arms, and end the evening
with a long croon, sitting curled up together in a big armchair in front
of the fire. He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for
poetry one week, for natural history the next, now spending all his
spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now forgetting everything
but the delights of tree-climbing and bird-nesting.

And through it all he had the quiet, memory of his mother's
companionship, he could recall her rueful looks whenever the eager
inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradicable tendencies
of her own, had lost him a school advantage; he could remember her
exhortations, with the dash in them of humorous self-reproach which made
them so stirring to the child's affection; and he could realize their
old far-off life at Murewell, the joys and the worries of it, and see
her now gossiping with the village folk, now wearing herself impetuously
to death in their service, and now roaming with him over the Surrey
heaths in search of all the dirty delectable things in which a
boy-naturalist delights. And through it all he was conscious of the same
vivid energetic creature, disposing with some difficulty and _fracas_ of
its own excess of nervous life.

To return, however, to this same critical moment of Mowbray's offer.
Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, doing very well at school, a
favorite both with boys and masters. But as to whether his development
would lead him in the direction of taking Orders, his mother had not the
slightest idea. She was not herself very much tempted by the prospect.
There were recollections connected with Murewell, and with the long
death in life which her husband had passed through there, which were
deeply painful to her; and, moreover, her sympathy with the clergy as a
class was by no means strong. Her experience had not been large, but
the feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a favorite
prejudice. Fortune had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist
vicar. Mrs. Elsmere's inherited Evangelicalism--she came from an Ulster
county--rebelled against his doctrine, but the man himself was too
lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him. And
in his own narrow way, the small-headed emaciated vicar was a hero, and
he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality, and formed a
curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference.

But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with all the
more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were the chief crook
in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought
her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their
cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-woman's
sense of humor at every turn. The individuals came and went, but
the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made their
peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of the
English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very
broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in
general to see all the world's good points, was almost blind when it was
a curate's virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all
her persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as an
essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no yearning
for a clerical son. The little accidents of a personal experience had
led to wide generalizations, as is the way with us mortals, and the
position of the young parson in these days of increased parsonic
pretensions was, to Mrs. Elsmere, a position in which there was an
inherent risk of absurdity. She wished her son to impose upon her when
it came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for nothing
better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to bow the motherly
knee to him in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat
moments, a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense of
the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions.

Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only reflected that
it would certainly be better to Say nothing of it to Robert until he
should be at college. His impressionable temperament, and the power
he had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject till it
produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavorable to
health and nervous energy, all warned her not to supply him, at a period
of rapid mental and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense
of responsibility. As a boy he had always shown himself religiously
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother's religious likes and
dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and chivalrous support.
He was content to be with her, to worship with her, and to feel that no
reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had
been nothing specially noteworthy or precocious about his religious
development, and at sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate
compliance, and his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in
authority, his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in
his life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him.

He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen about
everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He was in the
sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed; that is to say, as soon
as he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected with the great
body which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded.
Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had always
been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to develop
by her own restless imaginative ways of approaching life and the world
made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before his
cousin's letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English
poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favorite tutor would
probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion
as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager a ebullient
childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the
subject, of 'The Faerie Queene' to a school-friend, in which, with a
sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--

'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.'

And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy's
prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for
which he had always shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously,
after an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands
through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut
a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which
was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.

'I have just finished Belial! 'he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
'and am beginning Beelzebub.'

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of
juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from
the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in
the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy
which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called
upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the
same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast
developing power. Virgil and Aeschylus appealed to the same fibres, the
same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and, the boy's quick
imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease
which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence
sprung the 'Canterbury Tales,' or 'As You Like It.' So that his tutor,
who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects
in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiæ_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very
smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college,
the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and
so on.

Evidently such a youth, was not likely to depend for the attainment of
a foothold in life on a piece of family privileges. The world was all
before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly to herself,
as her mother's fancy wandered rashly through the coming years. And for
many reasons she secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find
for himself some other post of ministry in a very various world than the
vicarage of Murewell.

So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mowbray, informing
him that the intentions of his great-uncle should be communicated to the
boy when he should be of fit age to consider them, and that meanwhile
she was obliged to him for pointing out the procedure by which she might
lay hands on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the
income of which would now be doubly welcome in view of his college
expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, during the two
years which followed, thought little more about it. She became more
and more absorbed in her boy's immediate prospects, in the care of his
health, which was uneven and tried somewhat by the strain of preparation
for an attempt on the St. Anselm's scholarship, and in the demands which
his ardent nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was
constantly making upon her support and sympathy.

At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere and her son
left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and settled themselves early
in November in Oxford lodgings. Robert was to have a few days' complete
holiday before the examination, and he and his mother spent it in
exploring the beautiful old town, now shrouded in the 'pensive glooms'
of still gray autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the misty
reaches of the river; the trees in the Broad Walk were almost bare; the
Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches of delicate crimson on the
college walls; the gardens were damp and forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere
and Robert the place needed neither sun nor summer 'for beauty's
heightening.' On both of them it laid its old irresistible spell; the
sentiment haunting its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious
chapels, stole into the lad's heart and alternately soothed and
stimulated that keen individual consciousness which naturally
accompanies the first entrance into manhood. Here, on this soil,
steepest in memories, _his_ problems, _his_ struggles, were to be fought
out in their turn, 'Take up thy manhood,' said the inward voice, 'and
show what is in thee. The hour and the opportunity have come!'

And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of an
expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was added by
the dumb influences of the old streets and weather-beaten stones. How
tenacious they were of the past! The dreaming city seemed to be still
brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The
continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort
of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were
the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary
shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother
from college to college.

Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her eager
interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her an under-mood
of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both had the impressionable
Celtic temperament, and both felt that a critical moment was upon them,
and that the Oxford air was charged with fate for each of them. For
the first time in their lives they were to be parted. The mother's long
guardianship was coming to an end. Had she loved him enough? Had she so
far fulfilled the trust her dead husband had imposed upon her? Would her
boy love her in the new life as he had loved her in the old? And would
her poor craving heart bear to see him absorbed by fresh interests and
passions, in which her share could be only, at the best, secondary and
indirect?

One day--it was on the afternoon preceding the examination--she gave
hurried, half-laughing utterance to some of these misgivings of hers.
They were walking down the Lime-walk of Trinity Gardens: beneath their
feet a yellow fresh-strewn carpet of leaves, brown interlacing branches
overhead, and a red misty sun shining through the trunks. Robert
understood his mother perfectly, and the way she had of hiding a storm
of feeling under these tremulous comedy airs. So that, instead of
laughing too, he took her hand and, there being no spectators anywhere
to be seen in the damp November garden, he raised it to his lips with a
few broken words of affection and gratitude which very nearly overcame
the self-command of both of them. She crashed wildly into another
subject, and then suddenly it occurred to her impulsive mind that the
moment had come to make him acquainted with those dying intentions of
his great-uncle which we have already described. The diversion was a
welcome one, and the duty seemed clear. So, accordingly, she made him
give her all his attention while she told him the story and the terms of
Sir Mowbray's letter, forcing herself the while to keep her own opinions
and predilections as much as possible out of sight.

Robert listened with interest and astonishment, the sense of a new-found
manhood waxing once more strong within him, as his mind admitted the
strange picture of himself occupying the place which had been his
fathers; master of the house and the parish he had wandered over with
childish steps, clinging to the finger or the coat of the tall, stooping
figure which occupied the dim background of his recollections. 'Poor
mother,' he said, thoughtfully, when she paused, 'it would be hard upon
_you_ to go back to Murewell!'


'Oh, you mustn't think of me when the time comes,' said Mrs. Elsmere,
sighing. 'I shall be a tiresome old woman, and you will be a young man
a wife. There, put it out of your head, Robert. I thought I had better
tell you, for, after all, the fact may concern your Oxford life. But
you've got a long time yet before you need begin to worry about it.'

The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his tumbling
reddish hair back from his eyes. He was nearly six feet already, with
a long, thin body and head which amply justified his school nickname of
'the darning-needle.'

'Don't you trouble either, mother,' he said, with a tone of decision; I
don't feel as if I should ever take Orders.'

Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to attach to the
trenchancy of eighteen, but still the words were pleasant to her.

The next day Robert went up for examination, and after three days of
hard work, and phases of alternate hope and depression, in which mother
and son excited one another to no useful purpose, there came the anxious
crowding round the college gate in the November twilight, and the
sudden flight of dispersing messengers bearing the news over Oxford. The
scholarship had been won by a precocious Etonian with an extraordinary
talent for 'stems' and all that appertaineth thereto. But the exhibition
fell to Robert, and mother and son were well content.

The boy was eager to come into residence at once, though he would
matriculate too late to keep the term. The college authorities were
willing, and on the Saturday following the announcement of his success
he was matriculated, saw the Provost, and was informed that rooms
would be found for him without delay. His mother and he gayly climbed
innumerable stairs to inspect the garrets of which he was soon to take
proud possession, sallying forth from them only to enjoy an agitated
delightful afternoon among the shops. Expenditure, always charming,
becomes under these circumstances a sacred and pontifical act. Never had
Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for herself with half the fervor which she
now threw into the purchase of Robert's; and the young man, accustomed
to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies
of life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him into
a printseller's, and added an engraving or two to the enticing
miscellaneous mass of which he was already master.

They only just left themselves time to rush back to their lodgings and
dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The
dinner, however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their
white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy,
unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had
more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the
Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she
must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like
the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could
not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe
of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the
thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the
arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and a
centre of influence over thousands of English lives.

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's
gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young
faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's
sermon, with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and
phrase--simplicities suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined
experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--completed
the general impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She came out,
tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She, too, like the
generations before her, had launched her venture into the deep. Her boy
was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she could but watch
him from the shore. Brought into contact with this imposing University
organization, with all its suggestions of virile energies and functions,
the mother suddenly felt herself insignificant and forsaken. He had been
her all, her own, and now on this training-ground of English youth, it
seemed to her that the great human society had claimed him from her.



CHAPTER V.

In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most
stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He
was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural gift of sympathy,
which was no doubt often abused, and by no means invariably profitable
to its owner, but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows,
like the power of half the potent men in the world's history always
lay rooted. He had his mother's delight in living. He loved the
cricket-field, he loved the river; his athletic instincts and his
athletic friends were always fighting in him with his literary instincts
and the friends who appealed primarily to the intellectual and moral
side of him. He made many mistakes alike in friends and in pursuits; in
the freshness of a young and roving curiosity he had great difficulty
in submitting himself to the intellectual routine of the University, a
difficulty which ultimately cost him much; but at the bottom of the lad,
all the time, there was a strength of will, a force and even tyranny
of conscience, which kept his charm and pliancy from degenerating into
weakness, and made it not only delightful, but profitable to love him.
He knew that his mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to
satisfy, so far as he could, all her honorable ambitions.

His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence must have been
in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us here. His
future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably affected by two
men older than himself, and belonging to the dons--both of them fellows
and tutors of St. Anselm's, though on different planes of age.

The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert's tutor, and about seven years
older than himself. He was a man about whom, on entering the college,
Robert heard more than the usual crop of stories. The healthy young
English barbarian has an aversion to the intrusion of more manner into
life than is absolutely necessary. Now Langham was overburdened with
manner, though it was manner of the deprecating and not of the arrogant
order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts were abominable to him. To
help a friend he had once consented to be Pro-proctor. He resigned in a
month, and none of his acquaintances ever afterward dared to allude
to the experience. If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was
affirmed, the persons most obnoxious there would have been found to be
the scout, who intrusively asked him every morning what he would
have for breakfast, and the college cook, who, till such a course was
strictly forbidden him, mounted to his room at half-past nine to inquire
whether he would "dine in." Being a scholar of considerable eminence,
it pleased him to assume on all questions an exasperating degree of
ignorance; and the wags of the college averred that when asked if it
rained, or if collections took place on such and such a day, it was pain
and grief to him to have to affirm positively, without qualifications,
that so it was.

Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, to captivate
an ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward Langham, however,
notwithstanding undergraduate tales, was a very remarkable person. In
the first place, he was possessed of exceptional personal beauty. His
coloring was vividly black and white, closely curling jet-black hair
and fine black eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even,
white teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain Irishmen
share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iberian brilliance was
balanced by a classical delicacy and precision of feature. He had the
brow, the nose, the upper lip, the finely-molded chin, which belong to
the more severe and spiritual Greek type. Certainly of Greek blitheness
and directness there was no trace. The eye was wavering and profoundly
melancholy; all the movements of the tall, finely-built frame were
hesitating and doubtful. It was as though the man were suffering from
paralysis of some moral muscle or other; as if some of the normal
springs of action in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened.

He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor in a
Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict
provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible.
They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put
down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common,
middle-class Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however,
the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to
the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion. Poems were
sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals,
with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical
art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which
seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and
subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question,
and showed especially scant respect for the "Protestantism of the
Protestant religion." The father warned him grimly that he was not
going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he had taken
a double first in Greats. Then the publication of an article in one of
the leading Reviews on "The Ideals of Modern Culture," not only brought
him a furious letter from home stopping all supplies, but also lost him
a probable fellowship. His college was one of the narrowest and most
backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him before the
fellowship examination that he would not be elected.

He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a vacant
fellowship at St. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and got it with
flying colors.

Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favorable
mental development was secured to him. Not at all. The moment of his
quarrel with his father and his college had, in fact, represented a
moment of energy, of comparative success, which never recurred. It Was
as though this outburst of action and liberty had disappointed him, as
if some deep-rooted instinct--cold, critical, reflective--had reasserted
itself, condemning him and his censors equally. The uselessness of
utterance, the futility of enthusiasm, the inaccessibility of the ideal,
the practical absurdity of trying to realize any of the mind's inward
dreams: these were the kind of considerations which descended upon him,
slowly and fatally, crushing down the newly springing growths of
action or of passion. It was as though life had demonstrated to him the
essential truth of a childish saying of his own which had startled and
displeased his Calvinist mother years before. "Mother," the delicate,
large-eyed child had said to her one day in a fit of physical weariness,
"how is it I dislike the things I dislike so much more than I like the
things I like?"

So he wrote no more, he quarreled no more, he meddled with the great
passionate things of life and expression no more. On his taking up
residence in St. Anselm's, indeed, and on his being appointed first
lecturer and then tutor, he had a momentary pleasure in the thought of
teaching. His mind was a storehouse of thought and fact, and to the
man brought up at a dull provincial day-school and never allowed to
associate freely with his kind, the bright lads fresh from Eton and
Harrow about him were singularly attractive. But a few terms were enough
to scatter this illusion too. He could not be simple, he could not
be spontaneous; he was tormented by self-consciousness; and it was
impossible to him to talk and behave as those talk and behave who have
been brought up more or less in the big world from the beginning. So
this dream too faded, for youth asks before all things simplicity and
spontaneity in those who would take possession of it. His lectures,
which were at first brilliant enough to attract numbers of men from
other colleges, became gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without
life or feeling. It was possible to learn a great deal from him; it
was not possible to catch from him any contagion of that _amor
intellectualis_ which had flamed at one moment so high within him.
He ceased to compose; but as the intellectual faculty must have some
employment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries, a
microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything beyond,
but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking.

The only survival of that moment of glow and color in his life was
his love of music and the theatre. Almost every year he disappeared
to France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fortnight; to Berlin or
Bayreuth to drink his fill of music. He talked neither of music nor of
acting; he made no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did enjoy. It was
simply his way of cheating his creative faculty, which, though it
had grown impotent, was still there, still restless. Altogether
a melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going sceptic and
thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical sense which says
'No' to every impulse, and is always restlessly and yet hopelessly,
seeking the future through the neglected and outraged present.

And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any rate,
were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women, and
was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression
on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was always seeking
in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always
escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the
first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck
at some favorable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective
tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one
else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to
take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in
passing, by weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous
tone of the college toward him. He showed his liking impetuously,
boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career
Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto
might have been that dismal one--'The small things of life are odious
to me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are
eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;' but
for the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his
eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable
mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the
roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the
precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of
work supplied exactly the antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste
and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the
inexhaustible patience and labor involved in all true knowledge; and it
was to the germs of critical judgment so planted in him that Elsemere
owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we
have not yet to concern ourselves.

And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment
of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening, in the
summer term following the boy's matriculation, Elsmere brought him an
essay after Hall, and they sat on talking afterward. It was a rainy,
cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed
in cold wind and sheet; a dreary blast whistled through the college.
Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. 'I have had an
offer, Elsmere,' he said, abruptly.

And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch
professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it.
The last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence.
Langham's contributions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford
recommendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, coming
from one who was himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms
flattering to any young man's vanity.

Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had finished the
letter.

'I congratulate you, sir.'

'I have refused it,' said Langham, abruptly.

His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he know perfectly well
that this particular appointment was one of the blue ribbons of British
scholarship.

'Do you think--' said the other in a tone of singular vibration, which
had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation--'do you think _I_
am the man to get and keep a hold on a rampageous class of hundreds
of Scotch lads? Do you think _I_ am the man to carry on what Reid
began--Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant
dogmas?'

He looked at Elsmere under his straight, black brows, imperiously. The
youth felt the nervous tension in the elder man's voice and manner, was
startled by a confidence never before bestowed upon him, close as that
unequal bond between them had been growing during the six months of his
Oxford life, and plucking up courage hurled at him a number of frank,
young expostulations, which really put into friendly shape all that was
being said about Langham in his College and in the University. Why was
he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent
on hiding his great gifts under a bushel?

The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands
and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a
hand toward a book which lay on a table near. It was the 'Reveries' of
Senancour. 'My answer is written _here_,' he said. 'It will seem to
you now, Elsmere, mere Midsummer madness. May it always seem so to you.
Forgive me. The pressure of solitude sometimes is too great.'

Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate smiles, and
took the book from Langham's hand. He found on the open page a marked
passage:

"Oh swiftly passing seasons of life! There was a time when men seemed
to be sincere; when thought was nourished on friendship, kindness, love;
when dawn still kept its brilliance, and the night its peace. _I can_,
the soul said to itself, and _I will_; I will do all that is right--all
that is natural. But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we
know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy
on our necks; Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe.
Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realize their
impotence: we have time and strength to do what we _must_, never what we
will. Men go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools! Will
all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves,
enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering
forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens?"

Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. The words
sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, to crave.

Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him almost with violence.

'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is
not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They
would request me to resign in a week.'

Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking awhile on other things, had
gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty grate.

'Corrupter of youth!' he said to himself once, bitterly. And perhaps
it was to a certain remorse in the tutor's mind that Elsmere owed an
experience of great importance to his afterlife.

The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his entry at
Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert's ears as that of a person
of great influence and consideration at St. Anselm's. His tutor at
Harden had spoken of him in the boy's hearing as one of the most
remarkable men of the generation, and had several times impressed upon
his pupil that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the
friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview
with the Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was
first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember a short dark
man standing beside the Provost, who had been introduced to him by that
name, but the nervousness of the moment had been so great that the boy
had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention.

During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occasionally met
Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and the tutor, remembering
the thin, bright-faced youth, would return his salutations kindly,
and sometimes stop to speak to him, to ask him if he were comfortably
settled in his rooms, or make a remark about the boats. But the
acquaintance did not seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats
tutor, and Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as work
was concerned.

However, a day or two after the conversation we have described, Robert,
going to Langham's rooms late in the afternoon to return a book which
had been lent to him, perceived two figures standing talking on the
hearth-rug and by the western light beating in recognized the thickset
frame and broad brow of Mr. Grey.

'Come in, Elsmere,' said Langham, as he stood hesitating on the
threshold. 'You have met Mr. Grey before, I think?'

'We first met at an anxious moment,' said Mr. Grey, smiling and shaking
hands with the boy. 'A first interview with the Provost is always
formidable. I remember it too well myself. You did very well, I
remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, Langham, I must be off. I shall be late for
my meeting as it is. I think we have settled our business. Good night.'

Langham stood a moment after the door closed, eyeing Elsmere. There was
a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind.

'Elsmere,' he said at last, abruptly, 'would you like to go tonight and
hear Grey preach?'

'Preach!' exclaimed the lad. 'I thought he was a layman.'

So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the custom here with
the clerical tutors to address their men once a term before Communion
Sunday, and some years ago, when Grey first became tutor, he
determined, though he was a layman, to carry on the practice. It was an
extraordinary effort, for he is a man to whom words on such a subject
are the coining of his heart's blood, and he has repeated it very
rarely. It is two years now since his last address.'

Of course I should like to go,' said Robert, with eagerness. Is it
open?'

'Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. It is
hardly meant for freshmen; but--well, you are far enough on to make it
interesting to you.'

'The lad will take to Grey's influence like a fish to water,' thought
the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without strange reluctance.
'Well, no one can say I have not given him his opportunity to be
"earnest."'

The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm which a man of his
type in an earlier generation might have applied to the 'earnestness' of
an Arnoldian Rugby.

At eight o'clock that evening Robert found himself crossing the
quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the larger lecture-rooms,
which was to be the scene of the address. The room when they got in
was already nearly full, all the working fellows of the college were
present, and a body of some thirty men besides, most of them already
far on in their University career. A minute or two afterward Mr.
Grey entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees,
undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut; and the
little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey's voice with its broad intonation,
in which a strong native homeliness lingered under the gentleness of
accent, recited the collect 'Lord of all power and might,' a silent
pause following the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and
Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him,
began his address.

All the main points of the experience which followed stamped themselves
on Robert's mind with extraordinary intensity. Nor did he ever lose the
memory of the outward scene. In after-years, memory could always recall
to him at will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb
and feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude
strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility,
the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation
of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed
of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kindling and
enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, filled with a
fervor and an admiration which he was too young and immature to analyze,
but which was to be none the less potent and lasting.

Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning
of St. Paul's great conception, 'Death unto sin and a new birth unto
righteousness.' What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self?
What were the precise ideas attached to the words 'risen with Christ?'
Are this, death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain
alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they
not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process
perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the
veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting Witness of
the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or
the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much
Importance?

Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh from
school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow with
any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere.
It was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit selfishness, vice--how,
as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the
'pitiful, earthy self' with its passions and its cravings sank into
nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and the 'great causes' for which,
as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion.

To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face
supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker,
it seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless
curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from
this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the
world had been shaped and inspired, he felt brought near to the great
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of
natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him
suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. 'Axioms are not axioms,'
said poor Keats, 'till they have been proved upon our pulses;' and the
old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man
and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May
night, in the hush of that quiet lecture-room.

As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to
their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment
in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy
moon.

'Thank you, thank you, sir!' said the lad, eager and yet afraid to
speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. 'I should be sorry
indeed to have missed that!'

'Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever given, I
think. Good night.'

And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, his hands behind
him. Robert went to his room conscious of a momentary check of feeling.
But it soon passed, and he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or
pouring out in a letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his
mind was full.

A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the junior
exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey's house. Elsmere went in a
state of curious eagerness and trepidation, and came away with a number
of fresh impressions which, when he had put them into order, did but
quicken his new-born sense of devotion. The quiet unpretending house,
with its exquisite neatness and its abundance of books, the family life,
with the heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust and courtesy
on the surface, the little touches of austerity which betrayed
themselves here and there in the household ways--all these surroundings
stole into the lad's imagination, touched in him responsive fibres of
taste and feeling.

But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. He came, still
shaken, as it were, by the power of the sermon, expecting to see in the
preacher of it the outward and visible signs of a leadership which, as
he already knew, was a great force in Oxford life. His mood was that of
the disciple only eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet,
friendly host, surrounded by a group of men talking the ordinary
pleasant Oxford chit-chat--the river, the schools, the Union, the
football matches, and so on. Every now and then, as Elsmere stood at the
edge of the circle listening, the rugged face in the centre of it
would break into a smile, or some boyish speaker would elicit the low
spontaneous laugh in which there was such a sound of human fellowship,
such a genuine note of self-forgetfulness. Sometimes the conversation
strayed into politics, and then Mr. Grey, an eager politician, would
throw back his head, and talk with more sparkle and rapidity, flashing
occasionally into grim humor which seemed to throw light on the innate
strength and pugnacity of the peasant and Puritan breed from which
he sprang. Nothing could be more unlike the inspired philosopher, the
mystic surrounded by an adoring school, whom Robert had been picturing
to himself in his walk up to the house, through the soft May twilight.

It was not long before the tutor had learned to take much kindly notice
of the ardent and yet modest exhibitioner, in whose future it was
impossible not to feel a sympathetic interest.

'You will always find us on Sunday afternoons, before chapel,' he said
to him one day as they parted after watching a football match in the
damp mists of the Park, and the boy's flush of pleasure showed how much
he valued the permission.

For three years those Sunday half-hours were the great charm of Robert
Elsmere's life. When he came to look back upon them, he could remember
nothing very definite. A few interesting scraps of talk about books; a
good deal of talk about politics, showing in the tutor a living interest
in the needs and training of that broadening democracy on which the
future of England rests; a few graphic sayings about individuals; above
all, a constant readiness on the host's part to listen, to sit quiet,
with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent of
a strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that
sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say--these were
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, reinforced always,
indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great soul speaking with
difficulty and labor, but still clearly, still effectually, through an
unblemished series of noble acts and efforts.

Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more and more proud
of her boy, and more and more assured that her years of intelligent
devotion to him had won her his entire love and confidence, 'so long as
they both should live;' she came up to him once or twice, making Lagham
almost flee the University because she would be grateful to him in
public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she had
devoted the most anxious attention for Robert's sake, and which made
her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all observers. When
she came, she and Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and
most of the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion; and she
soon gathered with that solemn, half-tragic sense of change which besets
a mother's heart at such a moment, that there were many new forces at
work in her boy's mind, deep undercurrents of feeling, stirred in him
by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise powerfully to the
surface.

He was passing from a bright, buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardor
and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr.
Grey.

Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final schools were
a different matter. In the first days of his, return to Oxford, in the
October of his third year, while he was still making up his lecture
list, and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him,
before plunging definitely into it, he was oppressed with a sense that
the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be
harder to solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in
a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been
growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far too many
camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all those
midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which Oxford was preparing
for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence with minds as
eager and as crude as his own, and of all the delightful dipping into
the very latest literature, which such moments encouraged and involved,
seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy's will that it was not
equal to the situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for
a striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from attempting
impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity? He felt a dismal
certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will
and curiosity, now into this path, now into that; and a still stronger
and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets
up the Ethics or the Annals.

Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In spite of the
paralysis of all natural ambitious in himself, he was illogically keen
that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the place. He, the most
laborious, the most disinterested of scholars, turned himself almost
into a crammer for Elsmere's benefit. He abused the lad's multifarious
reading, declared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached
to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts
to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some triumphant
retort drawn from his own utterances at some sincerer and less discreet
moment. In vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks were
over that Elsmere would miss his First in Greats. He was too curious,
too restless, too passionate about many things. Above all he was
beginning, in the tutor's opinion, to concern himself disastrously
early with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing of all human
interests--the interest of religion. Grey had made him 'earnest' with a
vengeance.

Elsmere was now attending Grey's philosophical lectures, following them
with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as so often happens, for the
defence and fortification of views quite other than his teacher's. The
whole basis of Grey's thought was ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had
broken with the popular Christianity, but for him, God, consciousness,
duty, were the only realities. None of the various forms of materialist
thought escaped his challenge; no genuine utterance of the spiritual
life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It was known that after having
prepared himself for the Christian ministry, he had remained a layman
because it had become impossible to him to accept miracle; and it
was evident that the commoner type of Churchmen regarded him as an
antagonist all the more dangerous because he was to sympathetic. But the
negative and critical side of him was what in reality told least upon
his pupils. He was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect
for the immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that
what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a
well-known rationalist about him: 'The Tories were always carrying off
his honey to their hive.' Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey
had to give, drank in all the ideal fervor, the spiritual enthusiasm of
the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty
years earlier, carried his religious passion so stimulated into the
service of the great positive tradition around him.

And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from
philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian
system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in
the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the
Church. The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of
reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with
tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity.
It had begun to be recognized with a great burst of enthusiasm and
astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said
the last word on all things in heaven and earth. And now there was
exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast
gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place
which Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once more
popular among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large
proportion of the nobler ones.

With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself in
close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impression left upon his
boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden curates, and
by his mother's shifts of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of
him by the stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was
revealed to him at Oxford. The religious air, the solemn beauty of
the place itself, its innumerable associations with an organized and
venerable faith, the great public functions and expressions of that
faith, possessed the boy's imagination more and more. As he sat in the
undergraduates' gallery at St. Mary's on the Sundays, when the great
High Church preacher of the moment occupied the pulpit, and looked down
on the crowded building, full of grave black-gowned figures and framed
in one continuous belt of closely packed boyish faces; as he listened
to the preacher's vibrating voice, rising and falling with the
orator's instinct for musical effect; or as he stood up with the great
surrounding body of undergraduates to send the melody of some Latin hymn
rolling into the far recesses of the choir, the sight and the experience
touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic
instincts of a passionate nature. The system behind the sight took
stronger and stronger hold upon him; he began to wish ardently and
continuously to become a part of it, to cast in his lot definitely with
it.

One May evening he was wandering by himself along the towing-path which
skirts the upper river, a prey to many thoughts, to forebodings about
the schools which were to begin in three weeks, and to speculations
as to how his mother would take the news of the second class, which he
himself felt to be inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there
flashed into his mind the little conversation with his mother, which
had taken place nearly four years before, in the garden at Trinity. He
remembered the antagonism which the idea of a clerical life for him
had raised in both of them, and a smile at his own ignorance and his
mother's prejudice passed over his quick young face. He sat down on the
grassy bank, a mass of reeds at his feet, the shadows of the poplars
behind him lying across the still river; and opposite, the wide green
expanse of the great town-meadow, dotted with white patches of geese
and herds of grazing horses. There, with a sense of something solemn and
critical passing over him, he began to dream out his future life.

And when he rose half an hour afterward, and turned his steps homeward,
he knew with an inward tremor of heart that the next great step of the
way was practically taken. For there by the gliding river, and in view
of the distant Oxford spires, which his fancy took to witness the act,
he had vowed himself in prayer and self-abasement to the ministry of the
Church.

During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to
make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he
had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous
succession of enthusiasms and now at the critical moment his stock of
nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired,
his friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic
paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm caught
by Mr. Grey.

'Come with me for a walk, Elsmere; you look as if some air would do you
good.'

Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passageway leading
out on to Radcliffe Square.

'I have done for myself, sir,' said the youth, with a sigh, half
impatience, half depression. 'It seems to me to-day that I had neither
mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be lucky.'

'Oh, you will get your second whatever happens,' said Mr. Grey, quietly,
'and you mustn't be too much cast down about it if you don't get your
first.'

This implied acceptance of his partial defeat, coming from another's
lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was only what he had
been saying to himself, but in the most pessimist forecasts we make for
ourselves, there is always an under-protest of hope.

'I have been wasting my time here lately,' he said, hurriedly raising
his college cap from his brows as if it oppressed them, and pushing his
hair back with a weary, restless gesture.

'No,' said Mr. Grey, turning his kind, frank eyes upon him. 'As far as
general training goes, you have not wasted your time at all. There are
many clever men who don't get a first class, and yet it is good for them
to be here--so long as they are not loungers and idlers, of course.
And you have not been a lounger; you have been headstrong and a little
over-confident, perhaps,'--the speaker's smile took all the sting out
of the words--'but you have grown into a man, you are fit now for man's
work. Don't let yourself be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better in
life than you have done in examination.'

The young man was deeply touched. This tone of personal comment and
admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He felt a sudden consciousness
of a shared burden which was infinity soothing, and though he made no
answer, his face lost something of its harassed look, as the two walked
on together down Oriel Street and into Merton Meadows.

'Have you any immediate plans?' said Mr. Grey, as they turned into the
Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June, and rustling under a brisk
western wind blowing from the river.

'No; at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a fellowship.
But I meant to tell you, Sir, of one, thing-I have, made up my mind to
take Orders.'

'You have? When?'

'Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back for divinity
lectures in the autumn.'

Mr. Grey said nothing for a while, and they strolled in and out of the
great shadows thrown by the elms across their path.

'You feel no difficulties in the way?' he asked at last, with a certain
quick brusqueness of manner.

'No,' said Robert, eagerly. 'I never had any. Perhaps,' he added with
a sudden humility, 'it is because I have never gone deep enough. What
I believe might have been worth more if I had had more struggle; but it
has all seemed so plain.'

The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and yet with a
deep inner, conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. Grey turned toward it,
and the great eyes under the furrowed brow had a peculiar gentleness of
expression.

'You will probably be very happy in the life,' he said. 'The Church
wants men of your sort.'

But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was conscious of a veil
between them. He knew, of course, pretty much what it was, and with a
sudden impulse he felt that he would have given worlds to break through
it and talk frankly with this man whom he revered beyond all others,
wide as was the intellectual difference between them. But the tutor's
reticence and the younger man's respect prevented it.

When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to the world,
Langham took it to heart perhaps more than either Elsmere or his mother.
No one knew better than he what Elsmere's gifts were. It was absurd
that he should not have made more of them in sight of the public. '_Le
cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi!_' was about the gist of Langham's mood
during the days that followed on the class list.

Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking Orders to
him till ten days afterward, when he had carried off Langham to stay
at Harden, and he and his old tutor were smoking in his mother's little
garden one moonlit night.

When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a moment,
watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious
interest in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months
had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was
his own languid, paradoxical self.

'Well, after all,' he said at last, very slowly, 'the difficulty lies
in preaching anything. One may as well preach a respectable mythology as
anything else.'

'What do you mean by a mythology?' cried Robert, hotly.

'Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,' said Langham, puffing away.
'I take it they are the subject-matter of all theologies.'

'I don't understand you,' said Robert, flushing. 'To the Christian,
facts have been the medium by which ideas the world could not otherwise
have come at have been communicated to man. Christian theology is a
system of ideas indeed, but of ideas realized, made manifest in facts.'

Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided; then that suppressed
irritation we have already spoken of broke through. 'How do you know
they are facts?' he said, dryly.

The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural eagerness,
and the conversation resolved itself into a discussion of Christian
evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and Langham kept him going by
an occasional remark which acted like the prick of a spur. The tutor's
psychological curiosity was soon satisfied. He declared to himself that
the intellect had precious little to do with Elsmere's Christianity. He
had got hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his
companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely
the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something
wholly distinct from intellectual conviction--by moral passion, by love,
by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy youth should
be without.

'He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,' was the inward comment
of one of the most melancholy of sceptics, 'and he has never so much as
exerted it. What a brute protest!'

And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out his hand to his
companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in his black eyes, such as on
one or two critical occasions before had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere.

'No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of course, and
you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging away at reforming and
enlightening the world, don't trample too much on the people who have
more than enough to do to enlighten themselves.'

As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this now turn of her son's fortunes she realized
with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been
educating her as well as himself. Her old rebellious sense of something
inherently absurd in the clerical status had been gradually slain in her
by her long contact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects
of church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the Harden
curates, and at times she would flame out into the wildest, wittiest
threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfaction of her own essentially
lay instincts; but at bottom she knew perfectly well that, when the
moment came, no mother could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon,
than she would be.

'I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before very
long,' she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him the while out
of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there was already in the young
lightly-built frame! What frankness and character in the irregular,
attractive face!

'Mother,' cried Elsmere, indignantly, 'what do you take line for? Do
you imagine I am going to bury myself in the country at five or
six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing to do for it? That
would be a deserter's act indeed.'

Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh, I supposed you would insist on
killing yourself, to begin with. To most people nowadays that seems to
be the necessary preliminary of a useful career.'

Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred him so
much that he sat down that very evening to write to his cousin Mowbray
Elsmere. He announced to him that he was about to read for Orders,
and that at the same time he relinquished all claim on the living of
Murewell. 'Do what you like with it when it falls vacant,' he wrote,
'without reference to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in
health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows himself
the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years at any
rate, to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the fight is
hardest-among our English town population.'

Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two, to the effect that
Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir. Mowbray, had nothing
to do with his cousin's views. When the living was vacant--the present
holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying--he should
follow out the instructions of his father's will, and if Robert did not
want the thing he could say so.

In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following
spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a
Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the beat men
of his year, and in June he was ordained.

In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and
by Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that
London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest
for which his soul was pining. 'Stay here a year or two,' Grey said,
bluntly; 'you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you
are not one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the
better worth having afterward, and there is no lack of work here for a
man's moral energies.'

Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three happy and
fruitful years followed. The young lecturer developed an amazing power
of work. That concentration which he had been unable to achieve for
himself his will was strong enough to maintain when it was a question
of meeting the demands of a college class in which he was deeply
interested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of
the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility toward
his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which he was constantly
physically unequal, and fill the vacations almost as full as the terms.
And as he was comparatively a man of means, his generous, impetuous
temper was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been
impossible to others. The story of his summer reading parties, for
instances, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be
one long string of acts of kindness toward men poorer and duller than
himself.

At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of
the religious party in Oxford. His mother's Evangelical training of
him, and Mr. Grey's influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts
of temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The
sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But
to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion
of God's work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and
none coming close to him could mistake the fervor and passion of his
Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancor or
bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned
a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual,
perhaps a dangerous, amount of liking and affection. He threw himself
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church
vicar, and now toiling with Gray and one or two other Liberal fellows,
at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by
them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship
the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of
the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark.

So the three years passed--not, perhaps, of great intellectual advance,
for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly to the
fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and moral
experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer, and
it was accepted.

The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little
house in Morton Street where she had established herself, had watched
her boy's meteoric career through those crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realized long before
he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end
for him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her
remonstrance, nor Mr. Grey's common sense, nor Langham's fidgety
protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter
came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he
was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only
to break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the
collapse became so decided, that he consented, bribed by the prospect
of the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East,
accompanied by his mother and a college friend.

Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the Rector
of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was feeling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within
him was a slowly emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labor and the
worst forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.

But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.

'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor, with
emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1,200 souls, and no curate, is
a sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd--you couldn't stand it.
And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth saving out of the
towns.'

Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a corrupt and
indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly that they probably
were, but that the fact did not affect, so far as he could see,
Elsmere's competence to fulfil all the duties of rector of Murewell.

'After all, my dear fellow,' he said, a smile breaking over his strong,
expressive face, 'it is well even for reformers to be sane.'

Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had foreseen it all
along. She was miserable about his health, but she too had a moment of
superstition, and would not urge him. Murewell was no name of happy omen
to her--she had passed the darkest hours of her life there.

In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted
him. Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly
determined to get well and beat the fates. But, after a halcyon time
Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on
their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters.
Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled
out again into the hot Riviera sunshine, it was clear to himself and
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in
the Christian vineyard.

'Mother,' he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she sat near
him working, 'can _you_ be happy at Murewell?'

There was a wistfulness in the long, thin face, and a pathetic accent of
surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother's heart.

'I can be happy wherever you are,' she said, laying her brown nervous
hand on his blanched one.

'Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray; I wonder
whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho! How is one to preach to
people who have stuffed you up with gooseberries, or swung you on gates,
or lifted you over puddles to save your petticoats? I wonder what has
become of that boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or
of that other lout who pummelled me into the middle of next week
for disturbing his bird-trap? By the way, is the Squire-is Roger
Wendover--living at the Hall now?'

He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest.

'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere, dryly. '_He_ won't be much good to you.'

He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He had forgotten
the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, the famous and eccentric
owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and scholar, possessed of one of the most
magnificent libraries in England, and author of books which had carried
a revolutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not a
figure to be overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one
possessed of Robert's culture and imagination.

The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a sudden access
of interest in his new home that was to be.

Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now convalescent,
had accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long Whindale with his
mother's cousins, the Thornburghs, who offered him quiet, and bracing
air. He was to enter on his duties at Murewell in July, the Bishop, who
had been made aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit
to the diocese with marked warmth of manner.



CHAPTER VI.

'Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from
outside through the dining-room window; 'and tell mamma.'

It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert
Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent
foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed
that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer. Early
in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the color out of
the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous
gray-blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches, and the
birches, and the hawthorns were already sobered by a longer acquaintance
with life and Phœbus.

Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when in its proper
place served her, apparently, both as hat and as parasol. She seemed to
have been running races with a fine collie, who lay at her feet panting,
but studying her with his bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off
again at the first indication that his playmate had recovered her wind.
Chattie was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a model of
treacherous beauty.

'Chattie, you fiend, come here!' cried Rose, holding out a hand to her;
'if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must have looked like you at this
moment.'

'I won't have Chattie put upon,' said Agnes, establishing herself at the
other side of the little tea-table; 'she has done you no harm. Come to
me, beastie. I won't compare you to disagreeable old maids.'

The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking; then with a
sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes's lap and curled herself up
there.

'Nothing but cupboard love,' said Rose scornfully, in answer to Agnes's
laugh; 'she knows you will give her bread and butter and I won't, out
of a double regard for my skirts and her morals. Oh, dear me! Miss Barks
was quite seraphic last night; she never made a single remark about my
clothes, and she didn't even say to me as she generally does, with an
air of compassion, that she "quite understands how hard it must be to
keep in tune."'

'The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,' said Agnes. 'I just
love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear her instructing other people in
their own particular trades. She didn't get much change out of him.'

Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with one hand on her
heart, said in a stage whisper, with a dramatic glance round the garden,
'My heart is whole. How is yours?'

'_Intact_,' said Agnes, calmly, as that French bric-a-brac man in the
Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he is very nice.'

'Oh, charming! But when my destiny arrives'-and Rose, returning to her
tea, swept her little hand with a teaspoon in it eloquently round-'he
won't have his hair cut close. I must have luxuriant locks, and I will
take _no_ excuse! _Une chevelure de poète_, the eye of an eagle, the
moustache of a hero, the hand of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him,
the temper of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the world
besides, except for me; and for me he will be heaven.'

She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a little flush
of something half real on her cheek.

'No doubt,' said Agnes, dryly. 'But you can't wonder if under the
circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.'

'Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose, discontentedly. Catherine likes
everybody--of a certain sort--and everybody likes Catherine.'

'Does that mean, Miss Hasty,' said her sister, 'that you have made up
your mind Catherine will never marry?'

'Marry!' cried Rose. 'You might as 'well talk of marrying Westminster
Abbey.'

Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose's fun had a decided lack of
sweetness. 'After all,' she said, demurely, 'St. Elizabeth married.'

'Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were
"her Royal Highness" it would be her duty to marry, which would just
make all the difference. Duty! I hate the word.'

And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the
collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking
and dignified protest against his mistress's follies.

Agnes again studied her sister. 'What's the matter with you, Rose?'

'The usual thing, my dear,' replied Rose, curtly, 'only more so. I had
a letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter you know, of those
nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me
to go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man,
Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter.
I haven't said a word about it--what's the use? I know all Catherine's
arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to
live in Whindale; I am not somebody else and needn't earn my bread; and
art is not religion; and--'

'Wheels!' exclaimed Agnes. 'Catherine, I suppose, home from
Whinborough.'

Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the
wall which shut them off from the road.

'Catherine and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot's pace, and the
unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course--Mr. Elsmere. He will
come in to tea, so I'll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us
to-day.'

When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert
Elsmere were coming up the drive. Something had given Catherine more
color than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the young
clergyman her mother's eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter.
'After all she is as handsome as Rose,' she said to herself-'though it
_is_ quite a different style.'

Rose, who was always tea-maker, dispensed her wares; Catherine took
her favorite low seat beside her mother, clasping Mrs. Leyburn's thin
mittened hand a while tenderly in her own; Robert and Agnes set up a
lively gossip on the subject of the Thornburghs' guests, in which Rose
joined, while Catherine looked smiling on. She seemed apart from the
rest, Robert thought; not, clearly, by her own will, but by virtue of a
difference of temperament which could not but make itself felt. Yet once
as Rose passed her Robert saw her stretch out her hand and touch her
sister caressingly, with a bright upward look and smile, as though
she would say, 'Is all well? have you had a good time this afternoon,
Röschen?' Clearly, the strong contemplative nature was not strong
enough to dispense with any of the little wants and cravings of human
affection. Compared to the main impression she was making on him, her
suppliant attitude at her mother's feet and her caress of her sister
were like flowers breaking through the stern March soil and changing the
whole spirit of the fields.

Presently he said something of Oxford, and mentioned, Merton. Instantly
Mrs. Leyburn fell upon him. Had he ever seen Mr. S--, who had been a
Fellow there, and Rose's godfather?

'I don't acknowledge him,' said Rose, pouting. 'Other people's
godfathers give them mugs and corals. Mine never gave me anything but a
Concordance.'

Robert laughed, and proved to their satisfaction that Mr. S-- had been
extinct before his day. But could they ask him any other questions?
'Mrs. Leyburn became quite animated, and, diving into her memory,
produced a number of fragmentary reminiscences of her husband's Queen's
friends, asking him information about each and all of them. The young
man disentangled all her questions, racked his brains to answer, and
showed all through a quick friendliness, a charming deference as of
youth to age, which confirmed the liking of the whole party for him.
Then the mention of an associate of Richard Leyburn's youth, who had
been one of the Tractarian leaders, led him into talk of Oxford changes
and the influences of the present. He drew for them the famous High
Church preacher of the moment, described the great spectacle of his
Bampton Lectures, by which Oxford had been recently thrilled, and gave a
dramatic account of a sermon on evolution preached by the hermit-veteran
Pusey, as though by another Elias returning to the world to deliver a
last warning message to men. Catherine listened absorbed, her deep
eyes fixed upon him. And though all he said was pitched in a vivacious
narrative key and addressed as much to the others as to her, inwardly it
seemed to him that his one object all through was to touch and keep her
attention.

Then, in answer to inquiries about himself, he fell to describing St.
Anselm's with enthusiasm,--its growth its Provost, its effectiveness as
a great educational machine, the impression it had made on Oxford and
the country. This led him naturally to talk of Mr. Grey, then, next to
the Provost, the most prominent figure in the college; and once embarked
on this theme be became more eloquent and interesting than ever. The
circle of women listened to him as to a voice from the large world.
He made them feel the beat of the great currents of English life and
thought; he seemed to bring the stir and rush of our central English
society into the deep quiet of their valley. Even the bright-haired
Rose, idly swinging her pretty foot, with a head full of dreams and
discontent was beguiled, and for the moment seemed to lose her restless
self in listening.

He told an exciting story of a bad election riot in Oxford, which had
been quelled at considerable personal risk by Mr. Grey, who had gained
his influence in the town by a devotion of years to the policy of
breaking down as far as possible the old venomous feud between city and
university.

When he paused Mrs. Leyburn said, vaguely, 'Did you say he was a canon
of somewhere?'

'Oh, no,' said Robert, smiling, 'he is not a clergyman.'

'But you said he preached,' said Agnes.

'Yes--but lay sermons--addresses. He is not one of us even, according to
your standard and mine.'

A Nonconformist?' sighed Mrs. Leyburn. 'Oh, I know they have let in
everybody now.'

'Well, if you like,' said Robert. 'What I meant was that his opinions
are not orthodox. He could not be a clergyman, but he is one of the
noblest of men!'

He spoke with affectionate warmth. Then suddenly Catherine's eyes met
his and he felt an involuntary start. A veil had fallen over them; her
sweet moved sympathy was gone; she seemed to have shrunk into herself.

She turned to Mrs. Leyburn. 'Mother, do you know, I have all sorts of
messages from Aunt Ellen'--and in an under-voice she began to give Mrs.
Leyburn the news of her afternoon expedition.

Rose and Agnes soon plunged young Elsmere into another stream of talk.
But he kept his feeling of perplexity. His experience of other women
seemed to give him nothing to go upon with regard to Miss Leyburn.

Presently Catherine got up and drew her plain little black cape round
her again.

'My dear!' remonstrated Mrs. Leyburn. 'Where are you off to now?'

'To the Backhouses, mother,' she said, in a low voice; 'I have not been
there for two days. I must go this evening.'

Mrs. Leyburn said no more. Catherine's 'musts were never disputed. She
moved toward Elsmere with out-stretched hand. But he also sprang up.

'I too must be going,' he said; 'I have paid you an unconscionable
visit. If you are going past the Vicarage, Miss Leyburn, may I escort
you so far?'

She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Agnes, whose eye
fell on her sister during the pause, was struck with a passing sense
of something out of the common. She could hardly have defined her
impression, but Catherine seemed more alive to the outer world, more
like other people, less nun-like, than usual.

When they had left the garden together, as they had come into it,
and Mrs. Leyburn, complaining of chilliness, had retreated to the
drawing-room, Rose laid a quick hand on her sister's arm.

'You say Catherine likes him? Owl! What is a great deal more certain is
that he likes her.'

'Well,' said Agnes, calmly, 'well, I await your remarks.'

'Poor fellow!' said Rose grimly, and removed her hand.

Meanwhile Elsmere and Catherine walked along the valley road toward the
Vicarage. He thought, uneasily, she was a little more reserved with him
than she had been in those pleasant moments after he had overtaken her
in the pony-carriage; but still she was always kind, always courteous.
And what a white hand it was, hanging ungloved against her dress! What
a beautiful dignity and freedom, as of mountain winds and mountain
streams, in every movement!

'You are bound for High Ghyll?' he said to her as they neared the
Vicarage gate. 'Is it not a long way for you? You have been at a meeting
already, your sister said, and teaching this morning!'

He looked down on her with a charming diffidence, as though aware that
their acquaintance was very young, and yet with a warm eagerness of
feeling piercing through. As she paused under his eye the slightest
flush rose to Catherine's cheek. Then she looked up with a smile. It was
amusing to be taken care of by this tall stranger!

'It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,' she said, but I couldn't be tired
if I tried.'

Elsmere grasped her hand.

'You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking-example,' he said,
letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of his own renunciation was
still keen in him. She lingered a moment, could find nothing to say,
threw him a look all shy sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone.

In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden stiffening in
his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed him. He and the vicar
were sitting smoking in the study after dinner, and the ingenious young
man managed to shift the conversation on to the Leyburns, as he had
managed to shift it once or twice before that day, flattering himself,
of course, on each occasion that his manœuvres were beyond detection.
The vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, detected them
all, and with a sense of appropriation in the matter, not at all unmixed
with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., kept the ball rolling merrily.

'Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,' said Robert,
_à propos_ of some remark of the vicar's as to the assistance she was to
him in the school.

'Ah, she is her father's daughter,' said the vicar, genially. He had
his oldest coat on, his favorite pipe between his lips, and a bit of
domestic carpentering on his knee at which he was fiddling away; and,
being perfectly happy, was also perfectly amiable. 'Richard Leyburn was
a fanatic--as mild as you please, but immovable.'

'What line?'

'Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me Madame Guyon's
Life once to read. I didn't appreciate it. I told him that for all her
religion she seemed to me to have a deal of the vixen in her. He could
hardly get over it; it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was
very like her, except that--in my opinion--his nature was sweeter. He
was a fatalist--saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And
such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and
all, his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was
seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with a
start, as though you belonged to another world than the one, he was
walking in.'

'And his eldest daughter was much with him?'

'The apple of his eye. She understood him. He could talk his soul out to
her. The others, of course, were children; and his wife--well, his wife
was just what you see her now, poor thing. He must have married her when
she was very young and very pretty. She was a squire's daughter
some where near the school of which he was master--a good family, I
believe--she'll tell you so, in a ladylike way. He was always fidgety
about her health. He loved her, I suppose, or had loved her. But it was
Catherine who had his mind, Catherine who was his friend. She adored
him. I believe there was always a sort of pity in her heart for him too.
But at any rate he made her and trained her. He poured all his ideas and
convictions into her.'

'Which were strong?'

'Uncommonly. For all his gentle ethereal look, you could neither bend
nor break him. I don't believe anybody but Richard Leyburn could have
gone through Oxford at the height of the Oxford Movement, and, so
to speak, have known nothing about it, while living all the time for
religion. He had a great deal in common with the Quakers, as I said; a
great deal in common with the Wesleyans; but he was very loyal to the
Church all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. George Herbert
was his favorite poet. He used to carry his poems about with him on the
mountains, and an expurgated "Christian Year"--the only thing he ever
took from the High Churchmen--which he had made for himself, and which
he and Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a bigot at all.
He would have had the Church make peace with the Dissenters; he was all
for up setting tests so far as Nonconformity was concerned. But he drew
the most rigid line between belief and unbelief. He would not have
dined at the same table with a Unitarian if he could have helped it.
I remember a furious article of his in the "Record" against admitting
Unitarians to the Universities or allowing them to sit in Parliament.
England is a Christian State, he said; they are not Christians--they
have no right in her except on sufferance. Well, I suppose he was
about right,' said the vicar, with a sigh. 'We are all so halfhearted
nowadays.'

'Not he,' cried Robert, hotly. 'Who are we that because a man differs
from us in opinion who are to shut him out from the education of
political and civil duty? But never mind, Cousin William. Go on.'

'There's no more that I remember, except that of course Catherine
took all these ideas from him. He wouldn't let his children know any
unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. He impressed it upon
them as their special sacred duty, in a time of wicked enmity to
religion, to cherish the faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife
and daughters to live on here after his death, that they might be less
in danger spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have
more opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was
also some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children for
the godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach himself
for having in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he
might have helped to raise.'

'Well, but,' said Robert, 'all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don't
see the father in the two younger girls.'

'Ah, there is Catherine's difficulty,' said the vicar, shrugging his
shoulders. 'Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father's
death! She came down to see me in the dinning-room about some
arrangement for the funeral. She was only sixteen, so pale and thin with
nursing. I said something about the comfort she had been to her father.
She took my hand and burst into tears. "He was so good!" she said; "I
loved him so! Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others!"
And that's been her one thought since then--that, next to following the
narrow road.'

The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally happened to him
whenever he was beguiled into much speech about Catherine Leyburn. There
must have been something great somewhere in the insignificant elderly
man. A meaner soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with
her inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his
own, in his own domain.

'I should like to know the secret of the little musician's
independence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of blood at
all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'

'Oh, I don't know that. There's more than you think, or Catherine
wouldn't have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she
gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.'

'And why shouldn't she?'

'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you're not, to
remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course
nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would
no more have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her
family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling
than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard
him take a text out of the "Imitation," and lecture Rose when she was
quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to
give her music lessons. "Woe to them"--yes, that was it--"that inquire
many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving
Me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that
brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs.
Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow,
and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I dare say poor man, it
was one of the acts toward his children that tormented his mind in his
last hour.'

'She has certainly had her way about practising it; she plays superbly.'

'Oh, yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is Rose. I see
a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then there is the
beauty and refinement of bar mother's side of the family. Lately she has
got quite out of hand. She went to stay with some relations they have
in Manchester, got drawn into a musical set there, took to these funny
gowns, and now she and Catherine are, always half at war. Poor Catherine
said to me the other day, with tears, in her eyes, that she knew Rose
thought her as hard as iron. "But I promised papa." She makes herself
miserable and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get
herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place and she may
kick over the traces.'

'She's pretty enough for anything and anybody,' said Robert.

The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man's critical and
meditative look reassured him.

The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for
a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the
frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the Vicarage garden. It was
Mrs. Thornburgh's accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood
inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for
them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.

'My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should
have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from
Randall's--I've had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking
back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if
we'd had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears--'

The vicar's wife paused. Her square, short figure was between the two
girls; she had an arm of each, and she looked significantly, from one to
another, her gray curls, flapping across her face as she did so.

'Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,' cried Rose. 'You make us quite nervous.'

'How do ypu like Mr. Elsmere?' she inquired, solemnly.

'Very much,' said both, in chorus.

Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose's smiling frankness with a little sigh.
Things were going grandly, but she could imagine a disposition of
affairs which would have given her personally more pleasure.

'_How--would--you--like_--him for a brother-in-law?' she inquired,
beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose's arm, and
bringing out the last words with a rush.

'Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose's eye, but she answered for them both
demurely.

'We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.'

'Explain!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh. 'I should think it explains itself. At
least if you'd been in this house for the last twenty-four hours you'd
think so. Since the moment when he first met her, it's been "Miss
Leyburn," "Miss Leyburn," all the time. One might have seen it with half
an eye from the beginning.

Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was
pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness
backward or forward.

'He went to see you yesterday, didn't he--yes, I know he did--and he
overtook her in the pony-carriage--the vicar saw them from across
the valley--and he brought her back from your house, and then he kept
William up till nearly twelve talking of her. And now he wants a picnic.
Oh, it's plain as a pikestaff. And, my dears, _nothing_ to be said
against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he's a penny. A nice living, only
his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever, stepped.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls,
who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat,
looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting
her have her budget out.

'And now, of course,' she resumed, taking breath, and chilled a little
by their silence, 'now, of course, I want to know about Catherine?' She
regarded them with anxious interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly
shook her head.

'What!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, 'Oh,
you can't know anything in two days.'

'That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening; 'we can't know anything in
two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes
to anybody, till the list minute.'

Mrs. Thornburgh's face fell. 'It's very difficult 'when people will be
so reserved,' she said, dolefully.

The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out of it.

'At any rate we can bring them together,' she broke out, brightening
again. 'We can have picnics, you know, and teas, and all that--and
watch. Now listen.'

And the vicar's wife sketched out a programme of festivities for the
next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive head, which took
the sisters' breath away. Rose bit her lip to keep in her laughter.
Agnes, with vast self-possession, took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She
pointed out firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine
impracticable as fuss. 'In vain is the net spread,' etc. She preached
from the text with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs.
Thornburgh.

'Well, _what_ am I to do, my dears?' she said at last, helplessly.
'Look at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it's only to amuse
Robert.'

Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence
and a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes,
having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give
her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one
picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they
would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy
of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they
departed to their early dinner, leaving the vicar's wife decidedly less
self-confident than they found her.

'The first matrimonial excitement of the family,' cried Agnes, as
they walked home. 'So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been
besieged!'

'It will be all moonshine,' Rose replied, decisively. 'Mr. Elsmere may
lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the
clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air
of an angel, to give him his _coup de grâce_. As I said before--poor
fellow!'

Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the
whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she
understood that there was a soreness at the bottom of Rose's heart that
was always showing itself in unexpected connections.

There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for assisting
Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her expeditions, but
without them Robert Elsmere would have been still man enough to see
Catherine Leyburn every day. He loitered about the roads along which she
must needs pass to do her many offices of charity; he offered the vicar
to take a class in the school, and was naïvely exultant that the vicar
curiously happened to fix an hour when he must needs see Miss Leyburn
going or coming on the same errand; he dropped into Burwood on any
conceivable pretext, till Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect
for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted
that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his pastoral
services in one or two of the cases of sickness or poverty under their
care. Catherine, with a little more reserve than usual, took him one
day to the Tysons', and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was
likely to live on paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover,
of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson Kept her
talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new
aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while
his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's
face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and
tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he
said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He
had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and
the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering
Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped out
while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.

As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The sensitive
soul often reproached itself afterward for having juggled in the matter.
Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gayety for her
sisters sometimes? Her mother could not undertake it, and was always
plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a short
week or two Catherine did her best to be young and climbed the mountain
grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of
perfect health, trembling afterward at night as she knelt by her window
to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had
always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice
during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her,
and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away.
But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her
perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case--the little
arts and maneuvers of those about her. It did not strike her that Mrs.
Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the
vicar's wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted
effusion; or that Agnes and Rose, when they were in the wild heart
of the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a
picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both
of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell
to her. Nor did she ever analyze what would have been the attraction of
those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding
step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when nature
throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would
fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might
be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through
a golden darkness.

Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learned with
wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two
households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides,
were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most
stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more
strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether
to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living--reading
up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighborhood,
plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick
brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so
far as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his
disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being
whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would
come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in
hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour
out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and
suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling
out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so
much of her own life to anyone; her consciousness of it sometimes filled
her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading as it were,
for her own advantage, on the sacred things of God. But he would have
it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the
stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften!
With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-by!

And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as
he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she
could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden,
the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even
picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author
of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank
from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his
future relations toward a personality so marked, and so important to
every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was
plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or
her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.

But it was when he turned to larger things--to books, movements,
leaders, of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed.
Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established
order in the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was,
would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in
itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though
right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and
an obligation? When his comments on men and things took this tinge,
she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his
venturesome speech and his clergyman's dress.

And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He
was merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation;
whereas she, the child of a mystic--solitary, intense, and deeply
reflective from her earliest Youth--was still thinking and speaking in
the language of her father's generation.

But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these
points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, conscious that here
was the one profound difference between them; it was clear to him
that insensibly she had moved further than she knew from her father's
standpoint. Even among these solitudes, far from men and literature,
she had unconsciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he
penetrated deeper into the nature, he found it honeycombed as it were,
here and there, with beautiful, unexpected softnesses and diffidences.
Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homeward under a cloudy
evening sky, he came upon the great problem of her life--Rose and Rose's
art. He drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill.
She had laid it bare, and was blushing to think how she had asked his
counsel, almost before she knew where their talk was leading. How was
it lawful for the Christian to spend the few short years of the earthly
combat in any pursuit however noble and exquisite, which merely aimed
at the gratification of the senses, and implied in the pursuer the
emphasizing rather than the surrender of self?

He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, tried to lift
her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious work, dwelling on
the function of pure beauty in life, and on the influence of beauty
on character, pointing out the value to the race of all individual
development, and pressing home on her the natural religious question:
How are the artistic aptitudes to be explained unless the Great
Designer meant them to have a use and function in His world? She replied
doubtfully that she had always supposed they were lawful for recreation,
and like any other trade for bread-winning, but--

Then he told her much that he knew about the humanizing effect of music
on the poor. He described to her the efforts of a London society, of
which he was a subscribing member, to popularize the best music among
the lowest class; he dwelt almost with passion on the difference between
the joy to be got out of such things and the common brutalizing joys of
the workman. And you could not have art without artists. In this again
he was only talking the commonplaces of his day. But to her they were
not commonplaces at all. She looked at him from time to time, her great
eyes lightening and deepening as it seemed with every fresh thrust of
his.

'I am grateful to you,' she said at last, with an involuntary outburst,
'I am _very_ grateful to you!'

And she gave a long sigh, as if some burden she had long borne in
patient silence had been loosened a little, if only by the fact of
speech about it. She was not convinced exactly. She was too strong a
nature to relinquish a principle without a period of meditative struggle
in which conscience should have all its dues. But her tone made his
heart leap. He felt in it a momentary self-surrender that, coming from
a creature of so rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of
power, and yet at the same time with a strange humility beyond words.

A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little scene. An
aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came to see them. She was
their father's youngest sister, and the wife of a man who had made some
money as a builder in Whinborough. When Robert came in he found her
sitting on the sofa having tea, a large homely-looking woman with gray
hair, a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had unfastened her
bonnet strings, and a clean white handkerchief lay spread out on her
lap. When Elsmere was introduced to her, she got up, and said with some
effusiveness, and a distinct Westmoreland accent:

'Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,' while she enclosed
his fingers in a capacious hand.

Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sitting near
her, and Catherine, the only member of the party who showed no sign of
embarrassment when Robert entered was superintending her aunt's tea and
talking busily the while.

Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and Rose, who were
chattering together a little artificially and of set purpose, as it
seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be ignored. She talked too loud
not to be overheard, and Agnes inwardly noted that as soon as Robert
Elsmere appeared she talked louder than before. He gathered presently
that she was an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in describing
to Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic exploits of her oldest
son, who had recently obtained his first circuit as a Wesleyan minister.
He was shrewd enough, too, to guess, after a minute or two, that his
presence and probably his obnoxious clerical dress gave additional zest
to the recital.

'Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin' marvellous,' he heard
her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, '"some-thin" marvellous. The
Lord has blessed him indeed! It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's
meetin's, or sermons, or parlor work, or just faithful dealin's with
souls one by one. Satan has no cleverer foe than Edward. He never shuts
his eyes; as Edward says himself, it's like trackin' for game is huntin'
for souls. Why, the other day he was walkin' out from Coventry to a
service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit of grass by the
road-side, mendin' his cart. And he stopped did Edward, and gave him the
Word _strong_. The man seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm.
"No harm!" says Edward, "when you're just doin' the devil's work every
nail you put in, and hammerin' away, mon, at your own damnation." But
here's his letter.' And while Rose turned away to a far window to hide
an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag,
took out a treasured paper, and read with the emphasis and the unction
peculiar to a certain type of revivalism:--

'"Poor sinner! He was much put about. I left him, praying the Lord my
shaft might rankle in him; ay, might fester and burn in him till he
found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed very dark and destitute--no
respect for the Word or its ministers. A bit farther I met a boy
carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went
on, taking without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag.
Glorious work! If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways
for God, sin will skulk yet."'

A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put it back into
her bag.

'There's your true minister,' she said, with a large judicial utterance
as she closed the snap. 'Wherever he goes Edward must have souls!'

And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman in the
window.

'He must have very hard work with so much walking and preaching,' said
Catherine, gently.

Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd little scene
with other eyes.

'His work is just wearin' him out,' said the mother, fervently; 'but
a minister doesn't think of that. Wherever he goes there are sinners
saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nuneaton. At family prayer
alone there were five saved. And at the prayer-meetin's on the Sabbath
such outpourin's of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells
me, just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,' she added, turning
suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation,
'with the labors of our Wesleyan ministers?'

'No,' said Robert, with his pleasant smile, 'not personally. But I have
the greatest respect for them as a body of devoted men.'

The look of battle faded from the woman's face. It was not an unpleasant
face. He even saw strange reminiscences of Catherine in it at times.

'You're aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take any credit to
themselves--it's grace, sir, all grace.'

'Aunt Ellen,' said Catherine, while a sudden light broke over her face;
'I just want you to take Edward a little story from me. Ministers are
good things, but God can do without them.'

And she laid her hand on her aunt's knee with a smile in which there was
the slightest touch of affectionate satire.

'I was up among the fells the other day'--she went on--'I met an elderly
man cutting wood in a plantation, and I stopped and asked him how he
was. "Ah, miss," he said, "verra weel, verra weel. And yet it was nobbut
Friday morning lasst, I cam oop here, awfu' bad in my sperrits like. For
my wife she's sick an a' dwinnelt away, and I'm gettin' auld, and can't
wark as I'd used to, and it did luke to me as thoo there was naethin'
afore us nobbut t' Union. And t' mist war low on t' fells, and I sat
oonder t' wall, wettish and broodin' like. And theer--all ov a soodent
the Lord found me! Yes, puir Reuben Judge, as dawn't matter to naebody,
the Lord found un. It war leyke as thoo His feeace cam a glisterin' an'
a shinin' through t' mist. An' iver sense then, miss, aa've jest felt
as thoo aa could a' cut an' stackt all t' wood on t' fell in naw time
at a'!" And he waved his hand round the mountain side which was covered
with plantation. And all the way along the path for ever so long I could
hear him singing, chopping away, and quavering out "Rock of Ages."'

'She paused; her delicate face, with just a little quiver in the lip,
turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hidden fire had leapt
suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, the attitude, was simplicity
and unconsciousness itself. Robert had never heard her say anything so
intimate before. Nor had he ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She
had transmuted the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous prose;
she had turned it into purest poetry. Only the noblest souls have such
an alchemy as this at command, thought the watcher on the other side, of
the room, with a passionate reverence.

'I wasn't thinkin' of narrowin' the Lord down to ministers; said Mrs.
Fleming, with a certain loftiness. 'We all know He can do without us
puir worms.'

Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to go. Much
of her apparel had slipped away from her in the fervors of revivalist
anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves and reticule--officiously
helped by the younger girls--Robert crossed over to Catherine.

'You lifted us on to your own high places!' he said, bending down to
her; 'I shall carry your story with me through the fells.'

She looked up, and as she met his warm, moved look a little glow and
tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted expression. He broke
the spell; she sank from the poet into the embarrassed woman.

'You must see my old man,' she said, with an effort; 'he is worth a
library of sermons. I must introduce him to you.'

He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could only stand
impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming's disappearance, that he might
somehow appropriate her eldest niece. But alas! when she went, Catherine
went out with her, and reappeared no more, though he waited some time.

He walked home in a whirl of feeling; on the way he stopped, and leaning
over a gate which led into one of the river-fields, gave himself up to
the mounting tumult within. Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos
of hope and memory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost
manhood.

'In her and her only is my heart's desire! She and she only if she will,
and God will, shall be my wife!'

He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the evening beauty
of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change:--

                                         Tears
             Were in his eyes, and in his ears
                The murmur of a thousand years.

He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never felt
before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he had sprung
suddenly into maturity--entered at last into the full human heritage.
But the very intensity and solemnity of his own feeling gave him a rare
clear-sightedness. He realized that he had no certainty of success,
scarcely even an entirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they
not together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? Would they
not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after? Were not time and
opportunity all his own? How kind her looks are even now! Courage! And
through that maidenly kindness his own passion shall send the last,
transmuting glow.



CHAPTER VII.

The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and
persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing
class at the school, closed the school door behind her with a sigh of
relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood.

'How abominably they sang this morning!' she said to herself, with
curving lip. 'Talk of the natural north-country gift for music! What
ridiculous fictions people set up! Dear me, what clouds! Perhaps
we shan't got our walk to Shanmnoor after all, and if we don't, and
if-if--' her cheek flashed with a sudden excitement-'if Mr. Elsmere
doesn't propose, Mrs. Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes
and I can do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if something doesn't
come off to-day, she'll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and
asking Catherine her intentions, which would ruin everything.'

Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was
freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the
summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged
curtain was already lowering.

'It will hold up yet a while,' she thought, 'and if it rains later we
can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.'

And she walked on homeward meditating, her thin fingers clasped before
her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the
little gold curls on her temples, in an artistic many-colored turmoil
about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which
was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full
of artistic odds and ends--her fiddle, of course, and piles of music,
her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by
a number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still
ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood
photographs of musicians and friends--the spoils of her visits to
Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points
in the girl's memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd
medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She
had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighborhood, and paid for it
with her own money. There a group of unfinished, headlong sketches of
the most fiercely-impressionist description--the work and the gift of
a knot of Manchester artists, who had fêted and flattered the beautiful
little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her
heart's content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the
present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own;
its young artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when
they come home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a
rival art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky
north. Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough
diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother
Richard; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and
was glad enough to befriend his dear brother's children, who wanted
nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible,
by their good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which
he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it
pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose
went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired
artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged
her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the
pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris, and Italy,
and set her pining for that golden _vie de Bohême_ which she alone
apparently of all artists was destined never to know.

For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what
she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not
what, thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free,
reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and
found Burwood waiting for her, Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely
valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For
Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her
it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the
most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most
determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world,' with all its
indefensible delights, to a cold other-world, with its torturing,
inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester
or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving
through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere
as they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute
surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to
chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair.
And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the
verge of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in
resisting, but resist she must by the law of her nature.

Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon her
violin, and rushed through a Brahms' 'Liebeslied,' her eyes dancing, her
whole light form thrilling with the joy of it; and then with a sudden
revulsion she stopped playing, and threw herself down listlessly by the
open window. Close by against the wall was a little looking-glass, by
which she often arranged her ruffled locks; she glanced at it now, it
showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping lips, and eyes darkened
with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen.

'It is come to a pretty pass,' she said to herself, 'that I should be
able to think of nothing but schemes for getting Catherine married and
out of my way! Considering what she is and what I am, and how she
has slaved for us all her life, I seem to have descended pretty low.
Heigho!'

And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her hand. She was
half acting, acting to herself. Life was not really quite unbearable,
and she knew it. But it relieved her to overdo it.

'I wonder how much chance there is,' she mused, presently. 'Mr. Elsmere
will soon be ridiculous. Why, _I_ saw him gather up those violets she
threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don't believe she
has realized the situation a bit. At least, if she has she is as unlike
other mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does--'

She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie
jumped up on the windowsill, with her usual stealthy _aplomb_, and
rubbed herself against the girl's face.

'Oh, Chattie!' cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, 'if
Catherine 'll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, nay dear, and be happy ever
afterward, and set me free to live my own life a bit, I'll be _so_ good,
you won't know me, Chattie. And you shall have a new collar, my beauty,
and cream till you die of it!'

And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a scarlet anemone
from a bunch on the table, stood opposite Chattie, who stood slowly
waving her magnificent tail from side to side, and glaring as though it
were not at all to her taste to be hustled and bustled in this way.

'Now, Chattie, listen! Will she?'

A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie's nose.

'Won't she? Will she? Won't she? Will--Tiresome flower, why did Nature
give it such a beggarly few petals? 'If I'd had a daisy it would have
all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz; and let's forgot this wicked
world!'

And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss waltz,
dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her pretty feet
twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks blazed with a double
intoxication--the intoxication of movement, and the intoxication of
sound--the cat meanwhile following her with little mincing, perplexed
steps, as though not knowing what to make of her.

'Rose, you madcap!' cried Agnes, opening the door.

'Not at all, my dear,' said Rose calmly, stopping to take breath.
'Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and
see!'

The weather held up in a gray, grudging, sort of way, and Mrs.
Thornburgh especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with
the expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be
driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others
would be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be
happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in
it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage 'man,' in a most
delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not
confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had
given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his
secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably
the neighborhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest
chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue
could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing
that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might
be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and
playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so worked
on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh's state is easier imagined than described.

The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together.
Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the
way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so, it did not disquiet
him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a
lovely gayety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like
the others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the
towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.

And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised
to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on
a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice
this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she
held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even she had
been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of
a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for
the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale,
and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And
then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression,
blown away by the winds--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly
presence, a keen responsive eye?

Elsmere, indeed, was gayety itself. He kept up an incessant war with
Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar's expense,
which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way;
he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form,
and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the
girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted
himself on Whindale.

'How fine all this black purple is!' he cried, as they topped the ridge,
and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by
line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in
the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. 'I had grown quite
tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.'

'Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?' said Catherine, with a little
mocking wonder. 'How wanton how prodigal!'

'Does it deserve a Nemesis?' he said laughing. 'Drowning from now till I
depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On this
enchanted soil all things are welcome!'

She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute
to the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his
stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a
little way off, laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange
new pulse leapt up in Catherine.

'The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 'I think we
ought to be going on.'

And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till
they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have
tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and
Mrs. Thornburgh's gray curls shaking at the window.

'William!' she shouted, 'bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr.
Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the
visitors' book!'

While the girls went in, Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the
bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The
low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right,
the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its
greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his
left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a
little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great
slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighborhood,
and a tiny towered church--the scene on the Sabbath of Mr. Mayhew's
ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind
the inn masses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into
a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing.
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general,
the color was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and
purple background. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily,
trying to fix it there forever.

Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread
in a light-upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of
the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors' book. The scrambling,
chattering meal passed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs.
Thornburgh's small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to
face, as though to say, 'What--_no_ news yet? Nothing happened?' As
for Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest
moments of existence, he remembered little afterward but the scene: the
peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer
season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a
stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose's golden head, and heavy amber
necklace, and the figure at the vicar's right, in a gown of a little
dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.

When tea was over they lounged out onto the bridge. There was to be no
long lingering, however. The clouds were deepening, the rain could not
be far off. But if they started soon they could probably reach home
before it came down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet,
mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down
through a fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into
the clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one elbow,
and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and Catherine were
standing in front of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful
light slipping between two great rain-clouds.

'How well that hat and dress become your sister!' he said, the words
breaking, as it were, from his lips.

'Do you think Catherine pretty?' said Rose, with an excellent pretence
of innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it harmlessly at a
water-wagtail balancing on a stone below.

He flushed. 'Pretty! You might as well apply the word to your mountains,
to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak!'

'Yes,' thought Rose, 'she is not unlike that high cold peak!' But her
girlish sympathy conquered her; it was very exciting, and she liked
Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face overspread with a quite
irrepressible smile. He reddened still more, then they stared into each
other's eyes, and without a word more understood each other perfectly.

Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque _bon camarade_
gesture. He pressed it warmly in his.

'That was nice of you!' he cried. 'Very nice of you! Friend, then?'

She nodded and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the vicar disturbed
them.

Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony carriage,
watching Mrs. Thornburgh's preparations.

'You're sure you don't mind driving home alone?' said, in a troubled
voice. 'Mayn't I go with you?'

'My dear, certainly not! As if I wasn't accustomed to going about alone
at my time of life! No, no, my dear, you go and have your walk; you'll
get home before the rain. Ready, James.'

The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his charge so
anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out of his hand and gave a
flick to the pony, who swerved and started off in a way which would have
made his mistress clamorously nervous under any other circumstances.
Catherine stood looking after her.

'Now, then, right about face and quick march!' exclaimed the vicar.
'We've got to race that cloud over the Pike. It'll be up with us in no
time.'

Off they started and were soon climbing the slippery green slopes, or
crushing through the fern of the fell they had descended earlier in the
afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the
vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over
its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very
close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.

'You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully
into his pocketbook; 'but it is worth while to be crushed by anyone
who can give so much ground for their knowledge. How you do know your
mountains--from their peasants to their plants!'

'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among
them,' she said, smiling.

'Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?'

'Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the
winter. And our winter is often not as hard as yours down south.'

'Do you go on with that night school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?' he
said, with another note in his voice.

Catherine looked at him and colored. 'Rose has been telling tales,' she
said. 'I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the
family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always
take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the
ground, and Bob is always with me--aren't you, Bob?'

And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her,
blinking with a proudly confidential air, as though to remind her that
there were a good many such secrets between them.

'I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, the
hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing about you, the
black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream perhaps
running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good
Angels going with you.'

She blushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her
strangely.

'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and
very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elemere; the
rain has beaten us!'

He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out
in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side
gleamed green and livid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging
out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in
the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness;
children with their petticoats over their heads ran homeward along the
road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading
broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it
came and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was beating
in their faces.

'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help
you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'

He flung it around her and struggled into his own Mackintosh. The vicar
in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair,
then hurried after the others, evidently with a view of performing for
them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.

Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless
silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides.
He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form, and his big
umbrella, as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of
the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass
over which the rain-streams were running, that his heart filled with the
shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder
and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that
face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and
the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their
valley life?

Suddenly he heard an exclamation and saw her run on in front of him.
What was the matter? Then he noticed for the first time that Rose far
ahead was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain
had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was
Catherine stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's
determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before
she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by same shaft
from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful to judge by the tone of it.

'Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?'

'Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said, briefly; 'she has a very thin
dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.'

'You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once.

She laughed in his face.

'As if I should do anything of the sort!'

'You must,' he said, quietly stripping it off. 'Do you think that you
are always to be allowed to go through the world taking thought of other
people and allowing no one to take thought of you?'

He held it out to her.

'No, no! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong yet. And I have
often told you that nothing hurts me.'

He hung it deliberately over his arm. 'Very well, then, there it stays!'

And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the point of
laughter.

'Mr. Elsmere, be sensible!' she said presently, her look changing to
one of real distress. 'I should never forgive myself if you got a chill
after your illness!'

'You will not be called upon,' he said, in the most matter-of-fact tone.
'Men's coats are made to keep out weather,' and he pointed to his own,
closely buttoned up. 'Your dress--I can't help being disrespectful under
the circumstances--will be wet through in ten minutes.'

Another silence. Then he overtook her.

'Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her.

There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain splashed on
the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest,
most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he
joined.

'Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!'

But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man,
as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth's 'Louisa,'
and the poet's cry of longing.

And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration
he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something--what was
it?--drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of
her mingled with his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon.

They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side of the pass.
To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten
and dark, the river issuing from the heart of it like an angry voice.

What a change!' he said, coming up with her as the path widened. 'How
impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was
lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises,
watching the white butter-flies on the turf, and reading "Laodamia!"'

'"Laodamia!"' she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 'Is it one
of those you like best?'

'Yes,' he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the
umbrella. How superb it is--the roll, the majesty of it; the severe,
chastened beauty of the main feeling, the individual lines!'

And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.

'It was my father's favorite of all,' she said, in the low vibrating
voice of memory. 'He said the last verse to me the day before he died.'

Robert recalled it--

             'Yet tears to human suffering are due,
            And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
            Are mourned by man, and not by man alone
            As fondly we believe.

Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?

'Was he happy in his school life?' he asked, gently. 'Was teaching what
he liked?'

Oh yes--only--', Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though
drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look-'I never
knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always
believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was
always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest,
purest, most devoted--'

She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was
startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the
few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her
father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the
child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now
after this lapse of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous,
despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had
gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by religion?--was that
the sting?

'Oh, I can understand!' he said, reverently--'I can understand. I have
come across it once or twice, that fierce self-judgment of the good.
It is the most stirring and humbling thing in life.' Then his voice
dropped.--'And after the last conflict--the last "quailing breath,"--the
last onslaughts of doubt or fear--think of the Vision waiting--the
Eternal Comfort--

                  "Oh, my only Light!
                      It cannot be
                      That I am he
                   On whom Thy tempests fell all night!"

The words fell from the softened voice like noble music.

There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eye's to his. They swam
in tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were radiance itself. It
seemed to him as though she came closer to him, like a child to an elder
who has soothed and satisfied an inward smart.

They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the swollen river
which roared below them. On the opposite bank two umbrellas were
vanishing through the field gate into the road, but the vicar had turned
and was waiting for them. They could see his becloaked figure leaning
on his stick, through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the
tumbling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds
seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the valley.

The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first and held out
his hand to her. When they started she would have refused his help with
scorn. Now, after a moment's hesitation she yielded, and he felt her
dear weight on him as he guided her carefully from stone to stone'
In reality it is both difficult and risky to be helped over
stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way
through, Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her
lips, which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone
to stone could have lasted forever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in
his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his;
and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that
delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown
water, was never seen in Westmoreland wilds before.

'It is clearing,' he cried, with ready optimism, as they reached the
bank. 'We shall get our picnic to-morrow after all--we _must_ get it!
Promise me it shall be fine--and you will be there!'

The vicar was only fifty yards away, waiting for them against the field
gate. But Robert held her eagerly, imperiously--and it seemed to her,
her hold was still dizzy with the water.

'Promise!' he repeated, his voice dropping.

She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising for
Westmoreland weather. She could only say faintly 'Yes!' and so release
her hand.

'You _are_ pretty wet!' said the vicar, looking from one to the other
with a curiosity which Robert's quick sense divined at once was directed
to something else than the mere condition of their garments. But
Catherine noticed nothing; she walked on wrestling blindly with she
knew not what, till they reached the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs.
Thornburgh, the light drizzle into which the rain had declined beating
unheeded on her curls and ample shoulders. She stared at Robert's
drenched condition, but he gave her no time to make remarks.

'Don't take it off,' he said, with a laughing wave of the hand to
Catherine; 'I will come for it to-morrow morning.'

And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be prudent to
get himself into something less spongelike than his present attire as
quickly as possible.

The vicar followed him.

'Don't keep Catherine, my dear. There's nothing to tell. Nobody's the
worse.'

Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate, she went through it
on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both her hands on Catherine's
shoulders, and looked her straight in the eyes. The vicar's anxious hint
was useless. She could contain herself no longer. She had watched
them from the vicarage come down the fell together, had seen cross the
stepping stones, lingeringly, hand in hand.

'My dear Catherine!' she cried, effusively kissing Catherine's glowing
cheek under the shelter of the laurustinus that made a bower of the
gate. 'My _dear_ Catherine!'

Catherine gazed at her in astonishment Mrs. Thornburgh eyes were all
alive, and swarming with questions. If it had been Rose she would have
let them out in one fell flight. But Catherine's personality kept her in
awe. And after a second, as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on
Catherine's face, and an expression of half-frightened apology dawned in
Mrs. Thornburgh's.

Catherine drew herself away. 'Will you please give Mr. EIsmere his
mackintosh?' she said, taking it off; 'I shan't want it this little
way.'

And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh's arm, she turned away, walking
quickly round the bend of the road.

Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved slowly back to the
house in a state of complete collapse.

'I always knew'--she said with a groan-'I always knew it would never go
right if it was Catherine! _Why_ was it Catherine?'

And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vindictive query.

Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush leaving a sudden
pallor behind it, was twisting her hands before her in a kind of agony.

'What have I been doing?' she said to herself. 'What have I been doing?'

At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She saw the girls
in their own room--Agnes was standing behind, Rose had evidently rushed
forward to see Catherine come in, and now retreated as suddenly when she
saw her sister look up.

Catherine understood it all in an instant. 'They too are on the watch,'
she thought to herself, bitterly. The strong reticent nature was
outraged by the perception that she had been for days the unconscious
actor in a drama of which her sisters and Mrs. Thornburgh had been the
silent and intelligent spectators.

She came down presently from her room, very white and quiet; admitted
that she was tired, and said nothing to anybody. Agnes and Rose
noticed the change at once, whispered to each other when they found an
opportunity, and foreboded ill.

After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out of the
little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the house leading
on to the fell. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and
threatening, and the close air was saturated with moisture. As she
gained the bare fell, sounds of water met her on all sides. The river
cried hoarsely to her from below, the becks in the little ghylls were
full and thunderous; and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a
new-born rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to vanish with
the night. Catherine's soul went out to welcome the gray damp of the
hills. She knew them best in this mood. They were thus most her own.

She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the ridge. Behind
her lay the valley, and on its further side the fells she had crossed
in the afternoon. Before her spread a long green vale, compared to which
Whindale with its white road, its church, and parsonage, and scattered
houses, was the great world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a
single house. As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of human
life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the long June twilight;
the blackish walls ran down and up again, dividing the green hollow with
melancholy uniformity. Here and there was a sheepfold, suggesting the
bleakness of winter nights; and here and there a rough stone barn for
storing fodder. And beyond the vale, eastward and northward, Catherine
looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and
storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and inkiest over
the high points of the Ullswater mountains.

When she was once below the pass, man and his world were shut out.
The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was absolutely alone. She
descended till she reached a point where a little stream had been turned
into a stone trough for cattle. Above it stood a gnarled and solitary
thorn. Catherine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was
a seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father; she had
thought and prayed there as girl and woman; she had wrestled there often
with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual temptations
which were all her pure youth had known, till the inner light had dawned
again, and the humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the
shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and the clouds, the
white stores and 'sleeping wings' of ministering spirits.

But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with what fierce
suddenness had it come upon her! She looked back over the day with
bewilderment. She could see dimly that the Catherine who had started on
that Shanmoor walk had been full of vague misgivings other than those
concerned with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense
of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the
way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and Robert Elsmere
apart.

And then; beyond the departure from Shanmoor she seemed to lose the
thread of her own history. Memory was drowned in a feeling to which the
resisting soul as yet would have no name. She laid her head on her knees
trembling. She heard again the sweet imperious tones with which he broke
down her opposition about the cloak; she felt again the grasp of his
steadying hand on hers.

But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted thus. She
raised her head again, scourging herself in shame and self-reproach,
recapturing the empire of the soul with a strong effort. She set herself
to a stern analysis of the whole situation. Clearly Mrs. Thornburgh and
her sisters had been aware for some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had
been showing a peculiar interest in her. _Their_ eyes had been open. She
realized now with hot cheeks how many meetings and _tête-à-têtes_ had
been managed for her and Elsmere, and how complacently she had fallen
into Mrs. Thornburgh's snares.

'Have I encouraged him?' she asked herself, sternly.

'Yes,' cried the smarting conscience.

'Can I marry him?'

'No,' said conscience again; 'not without deserting your post, not
without betraying your trust.'

What post? What trust? Ah, conscience was ready enough with the answer.
Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of sixteen, prematurely old
and thoughtful, she had sat beside her father's deathbed, while her
delicate, hysterical mother in a state of utter collapse was kept away
from him by the doctors? She could see the drawn face, the restless,
melancholy eyes. 'Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They
will look to you. Support them.' And she could see in imagination
her own young face pressed against the pillows. 'Yes, father,
always--always!' 'Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower
than ever. I die'--and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn
breath by which the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about
many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others.
Bring them safe to the Day of account.' 'Yes, father, with God's help.
Oh, with God's help!'

That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were
spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks
back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long
dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her
relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the
spirit of her father's life and beliefs.

Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that
her work is done, her promise kept?

Oh, no--no--she cries to herself, with vehemence. Her mother depends on
her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are
at the opening of life--Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all experience
to come. And Rose--Ah! at the thought of Rose Catherine's heart sinks
deeper and deeper--she feels a culprit before her father's memory. What
is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of the child?
Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and here is
Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father's wishes, from
the galling pressure of the family tradition!

No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical,
moment. How can she leave it? Impossible.

What claim can she put against these supreme claims of her promise, her
mother's and sisters' need?

_His_ claim? Oh, no--no! She admits with soreness and humiliation
unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened
the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the
inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of
her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But
it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest
school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights
of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them, Catherine Leyburn
knew of no supreme right but the right of God to the obedience of man.

Oh, and besides--besides--it is impossible that he should care so very
much. The time is so short--there is so little in her, comparatively,
to attract a man of such resource, such attainments, such access to the
best things of life.

She cannot--in a kind of terror--she _will_ not, believe in her own
love-worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting wound.

Then her _own_ claim? Has she any claim, has the poor bounding heart
that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this strenuous
debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?

She locks here hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the
worst struggle is _here_, the quickest agony _here_. But she does not
waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of
her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal
craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.

'_Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth
from all earthly comfort._'

'_If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of
all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with
greater abundance of grace._'

'_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is
withdrawn from thee._'

'_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy
Creator..._'

She presses the sentences she has so often meditated in her long
solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of
George Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally:

              '_Thy Saviour sentenced joy!_'

Ah, sentenced it forever--the personal craving, the selfish need, that
must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night
Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her
young, new-born joy at the feet of the Master.


She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of
bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity.
Then there was a curious little epilogue.

'It is all over,' she said to herself, tenderly. 'But he has taught me
so much--he has been so good to me--he is so good! Let me
take to my heart some counsel--some word of his, and obey it
sacredly--silently--for these, days' sake.'

Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose.
How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling
it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he, with
his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger
on the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? 'I have tried
to stifle her passion,' she thought; 'to push it out of the way as a
hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in
the ladder--to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh, let
me take his word for it--be ruled by him in this one thing, once!'

She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had
thrown herself at Elsmere's feet, that her cheek was pressed against
that young brown hand of his. How long the moment lasted she never knew.
When at last she rose, stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the
lingering northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on
the moors; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly
white; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted valley and the
scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the
dale, they moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied them
a troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who
were bearing it away to burial.

As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale side of the
fell, a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had talked to her only that
morning of Rose and Rose's desire, and she had received the news with
her habitual silence.

The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had gone up-stairs.
Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn discovered that she looked
worn out, and she was sent off to bed. She went along the passage
quickly to Rose's room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was
inside, crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and
went in.

Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing-gown over
her shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all about her. She was
swaying backward and forward dreamily singing, and she started up when
she saw Catherine.

'Röschen,' said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor of
heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden hair and
the half-covered shoulders, 'you never told me of that letter from
Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, Röschen, I would never let you
have your way? Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong--I think I
have been wrong; you shall do what you will, Röschen. If you want to go,
I will ask mother.'

Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. She was struck
dumb by this sudden breaking down of Catherine's long resistance. And
what a strange white Catherine! What did it mean? Catherine withdrew her
arms with a little sigh and moved away.

'I just came to tell you that, Röschen,' she said, 'but I am very tired
and must not stay.'

Catherine 'very tired!' Rose thought the skies must be falling.

'Cathie!' she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained the door.
'Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty odious little wretch.
But oh, tell me, what is the matter?'

And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate
strength.

The elder sister struggled to release herself.

'Let me go, Rose,' she said, in a low voice. 'Oh, you must let me go!'

And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes as though
trying to drive away the mist from them.

'Good-night! Sleep well.'

And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. Rose
stood staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a flood of many
feelings--remorse, love, fear, sympathy--threw herself face downward on
her bed and burst into a passion of tears.



CHAPTER VIII.

Catherine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out her
resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was
painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without a scene, without a
definite proposal and a definite rejection. It was no use letting things
drift. Something brusque and marked there must be. She quietly made her
dispositions.

It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before
she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless
night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it,
whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her
one supreme moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she
knew in the neighborhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of them,
too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed indeed?

All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride in her own
spiritual strength. 'It was not mine,' she would have said with perfect
sincerity, 'but God's.' Still, whatever its source, it had been there at
command, and the reflection carried with it a sad sense of security.
It was as though a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate
himself on being bullet-proof.

To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the thought
that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again probably many times. The period
of his original invitation had been warmly extended by the Thornburghs.
She believed he meant to stay another week or ten days in the valley.
But in the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to
any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped on
her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those of some
old sepulchral monument.

The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the barometer with
abnormal interest. The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining,
and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption
of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to
picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar's wife.
She was all sighs and flightiness. She 'supposed they could go,' and
'didn't, see what good it would do them;' she had twenty different
views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the
best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult
that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household,
and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way. T hen she pursued him
into the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to
convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously, with many sighs, her
cap much askew. Robert could, have kissed her, curls and all, one moment
for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her
committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an
extraordinary person it was!

Off he went, however, with his _Spectator_ under his arm, whistling.
Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open window, and tore the
flannel across she was preparing for a mothers' meeting, with a noise
like the rattle of musketry. Whistling! She would like to know what
grounds he had for it, indeed! She always knew--she always said--and she
would go on saying--that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid.

Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the lightest heart.
By way of keeping all his anticipations within the bounds of strict
reason, he told himself that it was impossible he should see 'her' in
the morning. She was always busy in the morning.

He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a shrine. That was
her window, that upper casement with the little Banksia rose twining
round it. One night, when he and the vicar had been out late on the
hills, he had seen a light streaming from it across the valley, and
had thought how the mistress of the maiden solitude within shone 'in a
naughty world.'

In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about the garden.
She at once informed him, with much languid plaintiveness, that
Catherine had gone to Whinborough for the day, and would not be able to
join the picnic.

Elsmere stood still.

'_Gone!_' he cried. 'But it was all arranged with her yesterday!' Mrs.
Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was evidently much put out.

'So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere'--and the gentle widow dropped
her voice as though communicating a secret--'when Catherine's once made
up her mind, you may as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She
asked me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh--will you please?--that she found
it was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of
business, and she must go.'

'_Mrs. Thornburqh!_' And not a word for him, for him to whom she had
given her promise? She had gone to Whinborough to avoid him, and she had
gone in the brusquest way, that it might be unmistakable.

The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his long
coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. Leyburn was making
to him about the picnic. Was the wretched thing to come off after all?

He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But Mrs. Thornburgh
managed that for him. When he got back he told the vicar in the hall of
Miss Leyburn's flight in the fewest possible words, and then his long
legs vanished up the stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room
shut behind him. A few minutes afterward Mrs. Thornburgh's shrill voice
was heard in the hall, calling to the servant.

'Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.'

And a minute after the vicar came up to his door.

'Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain; better put it
off.'

To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. The vicar
slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to have established
herself for the morning in his sanctum, though the parish accounts were
clamoring to be done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by
immemorial usage.

But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite to him with one
hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him if _he_ knew what was to be
done with young women nowadays, because _she_ didn't.

The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a subject,
recommended patience, declared that it might all be a mistake, and tried
hard to absorb himself in the consideration of _2s. 8d. plus 2s. 11d.
minus 9d_.

'And I suppose, William,' said his wife to hint at last, with withering
sarcasm, 'that you'd sit by and see Catherine break that young man's
heart, and send him back to big mother no better than he came here, in
spite of all the beef-tea and jelly Sarah and I have been putting into
him, and never lift a finger; you'd see his life _blasted_ and you'd do
nothing--nothing, I suppose.'

And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye.

'Of course,' cried the vicar, roused; 'I should think so. What good
did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? Take care of
yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn't care for him, you can't make her.'

The vicar's wife rose the upturned corners of her mouth saying
unutterable things.

'Doesn't care for him!' she echoed, in a tone which implied that her
husband's headpiece was past praying for.

'Yes, doesn't care for him!' said the vicar, nettled. 'What else should
make her give him a snub like this?'

Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious
expression stole into her eyes.

'Oh, the Lord only knows!' she said, with a hasty freedom of speech
which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable, as she shut the
door after her.

However, if the Higher Powers alone knew, Mrs. Thornburgh was convinced
that she could make a very shrewd guess at the causes of Catherine's
behavior. In her opinion it was all pure 'cussedness.' Catherine Leyburn
had always conducted her life on principles entirely different from
those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat
bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make yourself
and other people uncomfortable. 'Yet this was what this perverse young
woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had fallen
in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact
plain to her in the most chivalrous, devoted ways. Catherine encourages
him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three weeks more gay
and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever been known
to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly
awaiting the natural _dénouement_, goes off to spend the day that
should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan
asylums;--leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look
ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her--none at all.
It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but must
needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and go
into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what to
be at.

Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere
had been talking in the garden, she had been discreetly waiting in the
back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off
she followed him with eager, sympathetic eyes.

'Poor fellow!' she said to herself, but this time with the little tone
of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good
looks, never shrinks from assuming toward an elder male, especially a
male in love with someone else. 'I wonder whether he thinks he knows
anything about Catherine.'

But her own feeling, to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it
had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering
curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white
face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this
brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the
loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere
during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly
absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh
in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither
Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the
Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in
fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better
known to her than anyone else.

'Oh, of course it's our salvation in this world and the next that's
in the way,' thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the
garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. 'I wish
to goodness Catherine wouldn't think so much about mine, at any rate.
I hate,' added this incorrigible young person, 'I hate being the third
part of a "moral obstacle" against my will. I declare I don't believe we
should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a
wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh, dear, I wish she'd let me
do something for her; I wish she'd ask me to black her boots for her,
or put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse
still, and I'd do it and welcome!'

It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. But there
was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, and that was Mrs.
Leyburn's unconsciousness.

'Mamma, is too good,' thought the girl, with a little ripple of
laughter. 'She takes it as a matter of course that all the world
should admire us, and she'd scorn to believe that anybody did it from
interested motives.'

Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted to her daughters
to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. Of course the most
eligible persons would be only too thankful to marry them when the
moment came. Meanwhile her devotion was in no need of the confirming
testimony of lovers. It was sufficient in itself and kept her mind
gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred to her to
notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special attention to anyone
in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naïveté that it
was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and
consideration, and she was of opinion that 'poor Richard's views' of
the degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen
this particular specimen.

Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, while Agnes
drove with her mother. On the way home she overtook Elsmere returning
from an errand for the vicar.

'It is not so bad,' she said to him, laughing, pointing to the sky; 'we
really might have gone.'

'Oh, it would have been cheerless,' he said, simply. His look of
depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sympathy, a wild
wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she could just have shown
him Catherine as she looked last night! Why couldn't she talk it out
with him? Absurd conventions! She had half a mind to try.

But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her young
half-childish audacity.

'Catherine will have a good day for all her business,' she said,
carelessly.

He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge yesterday
she could not stand it--she must give him hint how the land lay.

'I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. Elsmere, what
do you think of Aunt Ellen?'

Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young girl's
beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun.

'A most estimable person,' he said. 'Are you on good terms with her,
Miss Rose?'

'Oh dear, no!' she said, with a little face. 'I'm not a Leyburn; I wear
aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has "special leadings of the spirit"
to the effect that the violin is a soul-destroying instrument. Oh,
dear!'--and the girl's mouth twisted--'it's alarming to think, if
Catherine hadn't been Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might, have
been!'

She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she caught the
sudden change of expression in his face.

'Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her--one can see that,' he
said, evidently speaking with some difficulty.

'Strength! Oh, yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,' cried Rose, and
then was silent a moment. 'You know, Mr. Elsmere,' she went on at last,
obeying some inward impulse--'or perhaps you don't know--that at home we
are all Catherine's creatures. She does exactly what she likes with us.
When my father died she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was eight. We came
here to live--we were not very rich, of course, and mamma wasn't strong.
Well, she did everything: she taught us--we have scarcely had any
teacher but her since then; she did most of the housekeeping; and you
can see for yourself what she does for the neighbors and poor folk. She
is never ill, she is never idle, she always knows her own mind. We owe
everything we are, almost everything we have, to her. Her nursing has
kept mamma alive through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says he
never knew any business affairs better managed than ours, and Catherine
manages them. The one thing she never takes any care or thought for
is herself. What we should do without her I can't imagine; and yet
sometimes I think if it goes on much longer none of us three will have
any character of our own left. After all, you know, it may be good for
the weak people to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only
believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong people _needn't_
be always trampling on themselves--if they only knew----'

She stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. Her eyes
were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under a strange mixture
of feelings--sympathy, reverence, and a passionate inner admiration
struggling with rebellion and protest.

They had reached the gate of the Vicarage. Elsmere stopped and looked at
his companion with a singular lightening of expression. He saw perfectly
that the young impetuous creature understood him, that she felt his
cause was not prospering and that she wanted to help him. He saw that
what she meant by this picture of their common life was, that no one
need expect Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey; that she wanted to
impress on him in her eager way that such lives as her sister's were
not to be gathered at a touch, without difficulty, from the branch that
bears them. She was exhorting him to courage--nay he caught more than
exhortation--a sort of secret message from her bright, excited looks
and incoherent speech--that made his heart leap. But pride and delicacy
forbade him to put his feelings into words.

'You don't hope to persuade me that your sister reckons you among the
weak persons of the world?' he said, laughing, his hand on the gate.
Rose could have blessed him for thus turning the conversation. What on
earth could she have said next?

She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with Bob.

Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering meditatively over the
cloudy fells. After all he was only where he was before the blessed
madness, the upflooding hope, nay, almost certainty, of yesterday. His
attack had been for the moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose's manner
that Catherine's action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning
nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying to
persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be ominous. Well,
then, at worst, when they met they would meet on a different footing,
with a sense of something critical between them. Oh, if he did but know
a little more clearly how he stood! He spent a noonday hour on a gray
rock on the side of the fell, between Whindale and Marrisdale, studying
the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the bit of white road. The
minutes passed in a kind of trance of memory. Oh, that soft, childlike
movement to him, after his speech about her father! that heavenly
yielding and self-forgetfulness which shone in her every look and
movement as she stood balancing on the stepping-stones! If after all she
should prove cruel to him, would he not have a legitimate grievance, a
heavy charge to fling against her maiden gentleness? He trampled on the
notion. Let her do with him as she would, she would be his saint always,
unquestioned, unarraigned.

But with such a memory in his mind it was impossible that any man, least
of all a man of Elsmere's temperament, could be very hopeless. Oh, yes,
he had been rash, foolhardy. Do such divine creatures stoop to mortal
men as easily as he had dreamt? He recognizes all the difficulties, he
enters into the force of all the ties that bind her--or imagines that he
does. But he is a man and her lover'; and if she loves him, in the
end love will conquer--must conquer. For his more modern sense, deeply
Christianized as it is, assumes almost without argument the sacredness
of passion and its claim--wherein a vast difference between himself and
that solitary wrestler in Marrisdale.

Meanwhile he kept all his hopes and fears to himself. Mrs. Thornburgh
was dying to talk to him; but though his mobile, boyish temperament made
it impossible for him to disguise his change of mood, there was in him a
certain natural Dignity which life greatly developed, but which made
it always possible for him to hold his own against curiosity and
indiscretion. Mrs. Thornburgh had to hold her peace. As for the vicar,
he developed what were for him a surprising number of new topics of
conversation, and in the late afternoon took Elsmere a run up the
fells to the nearest fragment of the Roman road which runs, with such
magnificent disregard of the humors of Mother Earth, over the very top
of High Street toward Penrith and Carlisle.

Next day it looked as though after many waverings, the characteristic
Westmoreland weather had descended upon them in good earnest. From early
morn till late evening the valley was wrapped in damp clouds or moving
rain, which swept down from the west through the great basin of the
hills, and rolled along the course of the river, wrapping trees and
fells and houses in the same misty, cheerless drizzle. Under the outward
pall of rain, indeed, the valley was renewing its summer youth; the
river was swelling with an impetuous music through all its dwindled
channels; the crags flung out white waterfalls again, which the heat had
almost dried away; and by noon the whole green hollow was vocal with the
sounds of water--water flashing and foaming in the river, water leaping
downward from the rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and
sycamores and the slate-eaves of the houses.

Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish system of
Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner of the study, where
he and the vicar protected each other against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good
woman would open the door once and again in the morning and put her head
through in search of prey; but on being confronted with two studious
men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give
vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere
was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might
be doing that morning. Judging a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous
Southern standard, he found himself glorying in the weather. She could
not wander far from him to-day.

After the early dinner he escaped, just as the vicar's wife was devising
an excuse on which to convey both him and herself to Burwood, and
sallied forth with a mackintosh for a rush down the Whinborough road. It
was still raining, but the clouds showed a momentary lightening, and
a few gleams of watery sunshine brought out every now and then that
sparkle on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and atmosphere
which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator forget the petulant
abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere passed Burwood with a thrill. Should
he or should he not present himself? Let him push on a bit and think.
So on he swung, measuring his tall frame against the gusts, spirits and
masculine energy rising higher with every step. At last the passion of
his mood had wrestled itself out with the weather, and he turned back
once more determined to seek and find her, to face his fortunes like a
man. The warm rain beating from the west struck on his uplifted face. He
welcomed it as a friend. Rain and storm had opened to him the gates of a
spiritual citadel. What could ever wholly close it against him any more?
He felt so strong, so confident! Patience and courage!

Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the
white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper
end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in
air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of steam wavering
through it, and all around it and below it the rolling rain-clouds.

Suddenly, between him and that enchanter's vision he saw a dark slim
figure against the mists, walking before him along the road. It was
Catherine--Catherine just emerged from a footpath across the fields,
battling with wind and rain, and quite unconscious of any spectator. Oh,
what a sudden thrill was that! What a leaping together of joy and dread,
which sent the blood to his heart! Alone--they two alone again-in
the wild Westmoreland mists--and half a mile at least of winding road
between them and Burwood. He flew after her, dreading, and yet longing
for the moment when he should meet her eyes. Fortune had suddenly given
this hour into his hands; he felt it open upon him like that mystic
valley in the clouds.

Catherine heard the hurrying steps behind her and turned. There was an
evident start when she caught sight of her pursuer--a quick change of
expression. She wore a close-fitting waterproof dress and cap. Her hair
was loosened, her cheek freshened by the storm. He came up with her; he
took her hand, his eyes dancing with the joy he could not hide.

'What are you made of, I wonder?' he said, gayly. 'Nothing, certainly,
that minds weather.'

'No Westmoreland native thinks of staying at home for this,' she said,
with her quiet smile, moving on beside him as she spoke.

He looked down upon her with an indescribable mixture of feelings. No
stiffness, no coldness in her manner--only the even gentleness which
always marked her out from others. He felt as though yesterday were
blotted out, and would not for worlds have recalled it to her or
reproached her with it. Let it be as though they were but carrying on
the scene of the stepping-stones.

'Look,' he said, pointing to the west; 'have you been watching that
magical break in the clouds?'

Her eyes followed his to the delicate picture hung high among the moving
mists.

'Ah,' she exclaimed, her face kindling, 'that is one of our loveliest
effects, and one of the rarest. You are lucky to have seen it.'

'I am conceited enough,' he said, joyously, 'to feel as if some
enchanter were at work up there drawing pictures on the mists for my
special benefit. How welcome the rain is! As I am afraid you have heard
me say before, what new charm it gives to your valley!'

There was something in the buoyancy and force of his mood that seemed to
make Catherine shrink into herself. She would not pursue the subject of
Westmoreland. She asked with a little stiffness whether he had good news
from Mrs. Elsmere.

'Oh, yes. As usual, she is doing everything for me,' he said, smiling.
'It is disgraceful that I should be idling here while she is struggling
with carpenters and paperers, and puzzling out the decorations of the
drawing-room. She writes to me in a fury about the word "artistic." She
declares even the little upholsterer at Churton hurls it at her every
other minute, and that if it weren't for me she would select everything
as frankly, primevally hideous as she could find, just to spite him. As
it is, he has so warped her judgment that she has left the sitting-room
papers till I arrive. For the drawing-room she avows a passionate
preference for one all cabbage-roses and no stalks; but she admits that
it may be exasperation. She wants your sister, clearly, to advise her.
By the way,' and his voice changed, 'the vicar told me last night that
Miss Rose is going to Manchester for the winter to study. He heard
it from Miss Agnes, I think. The news interested me greatly after our
conversation.'

He looked at her with the most winning interrogative eyes. His whole
manner implied that everything which touched and concerned her touched
and concerned him; and, moreover, that she had given him in some sort a
right to share her thoughts and difficulties. Catherine struggled with
herself.

'I trust it may answer,' she said, in a low voice.

But she would say no more, and he felt rebuffed. His buoyancy began to
desert him.

'It must be a great trial to Mrs. Elsmere,' she said presently with an
effort, once more steering away from herself and her concerns, 'this
going back to her old home.'

'It is. My father's long struggle for life in that house is a very
painful memory. I wished her to put it off till I could go with her, but
she declared she would rather get over the first week or two by herself.
How I should like you to know my mother, Miss Leyburn!

At this she could not help meeting his glance and smile, and answering
them, though with a kind of constraint most unlike her.

'I hope I may some day see Mrs. Elsmere,' she said.

'It is one of my strongest wishes,' he answered, hurriedly, 'to bring
you together.'

The words were simple enough; the tone was full of emotion. He was fast
losing control of himself. She felt it through every nerve, and a sort
of wild dread seized her of what he might say next. Oh, she must prevent
it!

'Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she not?' she
said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday tones.

He controlled himself with a mighty effort.

'Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the world so long. We
have never been able to do without each other.'

'Isn't it wonderful to you?' said Catherine, after a little electric
pause--and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the
beginning of their conversation--'how little the majority of sons and
daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to
live their own lives? The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to
throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them--decently, of
course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the long
years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.'

He looked at her quickly--a troubled, questioning look.

'It is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly
understood their problem. The real difficulty for father and mother is
not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when
the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and
governed should become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I
have been lucky.'

'Yes,' she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking with
a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, 'and so are the greater
debtors! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, least of all for
the child who has had years of understanding love to look back upon, if
it puts its own claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when
there is age and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is
still urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger,
than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the
cost.'

The voice was low, but it had the clear, vibrating ring of steel.
Robert's face had darkened visibly.

'But, surely,' he cried, goaded by a now stinging sense of revolt and
pain-'surely the child may make a fatal mistake if it imagines that its
own happiness counts for nothing in the parents' eyes. What parent but
must suffer from the starving of the child's nature? What have mother
and father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the
child's life? Their longing is that it should fulfil itself in all
directions. New ties, new affections, on the child's part mean the
enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to
make it the jailer and burden of the younger!'

He spoke with heat and anger, with a sense of dashing himself against an
obstacle, and a dumb despairing certainty, rising at the heart of him.

'Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,' she answered, her breath
coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism
in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out
the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is
bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties,
it belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be
forgotten and put aside.'

'So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past?' he cried,
quivering under the blow she was dealing him.

'No, not all life,' she said, struggling hard to preserve her perfect
calm of manner: he could not know that she was trembling from head to
foot. 'There are many for whom it is easy and right to choose their own
way; their happiness robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has
been laid from their childhood a charge perhaps--and her voice faltered
at last--'impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern, possess
their lives; which it would be baseness, treason, to betray. We are not
here only to be happy.'

And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her
lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after
phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him.
The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him
singularly. He realized through every nerve that what she had just said
to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last
parting. And now he could not tell, or, rather, blindly could not see,
whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest rose in him,
not so much against her words as against her self-control. The man in
him rose up against the woman's unlooked-for, unwelcome strength.

But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity to avert
from them both were bursting from him, they were checked by a sudden
physical difficulty. A bit of road was under water. A little beck,
swollen by the rain, had overflowed, and for a few yards distance the
water stood about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had
splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly
since then. He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a
way to the other side.

'You must climb the bank,' he said, 'and get through into the field.'

She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way
through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding back some young
hazel saplings and breaking others, made an opening for her through
which she scrambled with bent head; then, stretching out his hand to
her, he made her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other
side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on
his cheek.

'You talk of baseness and treason,' he began, passionately, conscious of
a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her light weight upon his
arm.

'Life is not so simple. It is so easy to sacrifice others with one's
self, to slay all claims in honor of one, instead of knitting the new
ones to the old. Is life to be allowed no natural expansion? Have you
forgotten that, in refusing the new bond for the old bond's sake, the
child may be simply wronging the parents, depriving them of another
affection, another support, which ought to have been theirs?'

His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that she grew
suddenly white, and he grasped her more firmly still. She reached the
level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, and for a moment their
eyes met, her pale face raised to his. It seemed an age, so much was
said in that look. There was appeal on her side, passion on his. Plainly
she implored him to say no more, to spare her and himself.

'In some cases,' she said, and her voice sounded strained and hoarse
to both of them, 'one cannot risk the old bond. On dare not trust one's
self--or circumstance. The responsibility is too great; one can but
follow the beaten path, cling to the one thread. But don't let us talk
of it anymore. We must make for that gate, Mr. Elsmere. It will bring us
out on the road again close by home.'

He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. He was struck
again with that sense of a will firmer and more tenacious than his own,
which had visited him in a slight passing way on the first evening they
ever met, and now filled him with a kind of despair. As they pushed
silently along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang
that the stepping-stones lay just below them. The gleam of sun had died
away, the aërial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a fresh storm of
rain brought back the color to Catherine's cheek. On their left hand
was the roaring of the river, on their right they could already hear the
wind moaning and tearing through the trees which sheltered Burwood.
The nature which an hour ago had seemed to him so full of stimulus and
exhilaration, had taken to itself a note of gloom and mourning; for he
was at the age when Nature is the mere docile responsive mirror of the
spirit, when all her forces and powers are made for us, and are only
there to play chorus to our story.

They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. She paused
at the foot of it.

'You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?'

Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. 'Your pardon, your
friendship,' it cried, with the usual futility of all good women under
the circumstances. But as he met it for one passionate instant, he
recognized fully that there was not a trace of yielding in it. At the
bottom of the softness there was the iron of resolution.

'No, no; not now,' he said involuntarily; and she never forgot the
painful struggle of the face; 'good-by.' He touched her hand without
another word, and was gone.

She toiled up to the gate with difficulty; the gray rain-washed road,
the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes.

In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her with a start.

'My dear Cathie! you have been walking yourself to death. You look like
a ghost. Come and have some tea at once.'

And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine submitted with all
her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at her sister's onslaught. But
she would not let Agnes put her down on the sofa. She stood with her
hand on the back of a chair.

'The weather is very close and exhausting,' she said, gently lifting
her hand to her hat. But the hand dropped, and she sank heavily into the
chair.

'Cathie, you are faint,' cried Agnes, running to her.

Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which none but she
would have been capable, mastered the physical weakness.

'I have been a long way, dear,' she said, as though in apology, 'and
there is no air. Yes, I will go up-stairs and lie down a minute or two.
'Oh no, don't come, I will be down for tea directly.'

And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, her face the
color of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes stood dumfounded. Never in
her life before had she seen Catherine betray any such signs of physical
exhaustion.

Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, and rushing up
to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders.

'He has proposed to her, and she has said no!'

'He? What, Mr. Elsmere? How on earth can you know?'

'I saw them from up-stairs come to the bottom of the lane. Then he
rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It's as plain as the
nose on your face.'

Agnes sat down bewildered.

'It is hard on him' she said at last.

'Yes, it is _very_ hard on him!' cried Rose, pacing the room, her long
thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, 'for she loves him!'

'Rose!'

'She does, my dear, she does,' cried the girl, frowning. I know it in a
hundred ways.'

Agnes ruminated.

'And it's all because of us?' she said at last reflectively.

'Of course! I put it to you, Agnes'--and Rose stood still with a tragic
air--'I put it to you, whether it isn't too bad that three unoffending
women should have such a role as this assigned them against their will!'

The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her head in the
sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless laughter. Rose meanwhile
stood in the window, her thin form drawing up to its full height, angry
with Agnes, and enraged with all the world.

'It's absurd, it's insulting,' she exclaimed. 'I should imagine that you
and I Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to look after mamma, put
out the stores, say our prayers, and prevent each other from running
away with adventurers! I won't be always in leading-strings. I won't
acknowledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in
order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.'

And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, a passion
of manifold protest in the girlish looks.

'It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one's own case,' replied Agnes
calmly, recovering herself. 'Suppose you tell Catherine some of these
home-truths?'

Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and fell, head
drooping, into a moody silence, Agnes watched her with a kind of
triumph. When it came to the point, she knew perfectly well that there
was not a will among them that could measure itself with any chance of
success against that lofty, but unwavering will of Catherine's. Rose was
violent, and there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she
preferred not to dash her head against stone walls.

'Well, then, if you won't say them to Catherine, say them to mamma,' she
suggested presently, but half ironically.

'Mamma is no good,' cried Rose angrily; 'why do you bring her in?
Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.'

Long after everyone else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was
asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy northwest
wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low chair, her
head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her
knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand hung down
beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her cheeks. It
was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew why she wept,
she only knew that there was something within her which must have its
way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the
self against the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it? It
was as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral world
whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she knew; and now
the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and strange lights,
strange voices, strange colors were breaking through. All the sayings
of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for years, tonight for
the first time seem to her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but
sayings of fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and
thought. We recite so glibly, 'He that loseth his life shall save it;'
and when we come to any of the common crises of experience which are the
source and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This
girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can
be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm,
simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid
deeps of the soul are breaking up.

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.
Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of
mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles
compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they
haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be
counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.

'Why, why am I so weak?' she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew
not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from
which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.



CHAPTER IX.

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine
we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's
study afterward, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase
of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was
now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his
reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was
intangible. '_We are not here only to be happy_,' she had said to him,
with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.
The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of
her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting,
torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her
evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was
his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them,
all would be well?

As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment.
No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be
Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it as a binding obligation
upon her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three
persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary
need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather
braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.

But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter! He
realized with despair the brooding, scrupulous force of moral passion to
which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father's nature working
in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the
world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a
lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realized to their
pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the
processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds!
Robert's heart sank before the memory of that frail, indomitable look,
that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him
farewell. And yet, surely--surely under the willingness of the spirit
there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely,
now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white--trembling: her hand
had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh, why had
he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her personality
produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not boldly caught
her to himself and, with all the eloquence of a passionate
nature, trampled on her scruples, marched through her doubts,
convinced--reasoned her into a blessed submission?

'And I will do it yet!' he cried, leaping to his feet with a sudden
access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile looking out into the
rainy evening, all the keen, irregular face, and thin, pliant form
hardening into the intensity of resolve, which had so often carried the
young tutor through an Oxford difficulty, breaking, down antagonism and
compelling consent.

At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the household he
was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got out of him that he had
been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, but for all her ingenuities of
cross-examination she got nothing more. Afterward, when he and the
vicar were smoking together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two
should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater.

'I want to go away,' he said, with a hand on the vicar's shoulder, '_and
I want to come back_.' The deliberation of the last words was not to
be mistaken. The vicar emitted a contented puff, looked the young man
straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk
to Patterdale viâ High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by
Hawes-water.

To Mrs. Thornburgh, Robert announced that he must leave them on the
following Saturday, June 24.

'You have given me a good time, cousin Emma,' he said to her, with a
bright friendliness which dumfounded her. A good time, indeed! with
everything begun and nothing finished: with two households thrown into
perturbation for a delusion, and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for
want of a little common sense and plain speaking, which _one_ person
at least in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been
ignored and browbeaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, in
his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the privacy of
the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife so exasperated. To
think what might have been--what she might have done for the race, but
for the whims of two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons,
that would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people to
manage them for them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret of
Elsmere's remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself certain
counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into
well-simulated slumber. However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious
that some time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of
him peremptorily, 'When do you get back, William?' To the best of his
memory, the vicar had sleepily murmured, 'Thursday;' and had then heard,
echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, 'He goes Saturday--one
clear day!'

The 'following morning was gloomy but fine, and after breakfast the
vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the
High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate
farewell to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech
in the garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly
stepped on northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.

Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appearance in
the school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in a new set of
covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah's love affairs, which were
always passing through some traffic phase or other, and into which
Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into
Catherine Leyburn's. Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then and
found her not disposed to talk to them on the great event of the
day, Elsmere's absence and approaching departure. They cautiously
communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of the
preceding afternoon; and Rose gave vent to one fiery onslaught on the
'moral obstacle' theory, during which Mrs. Thornburgh sat studying her
with small attentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side. But
for once in her life the vicar's wife was not communicative in return.
That the situation should have driven even Mrs. Thornburgh to finesse
was a surprising testimony to its gravity. What between her sudden
taciturnity and Catherine's pale silence, the girls' sense of expectancy
was roused to its highest pitch.

'They come back to-morrow night,' said Rose, thoughtfully, 'and he goes
Saturday--10.20 from Whinborough--one day for the Fifth Act! By the way,
why did Mrs. Thornburgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home?'

She _had_ asked them, however; and with a pleasing sense of conspiracy
they complied.

It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs. Thornburgh, finding the
Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged way into the hall, and
after an unanswered knock at the drawing-room door, opened it and peered
in to see who might be there.

'May I come in?'

Mrs. Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the window absorbed
in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her more than she could
manage. Her card was mislaid, the girls were none of them at hand, and
she felt as helpless as she commonly did when left alone.

'Oh, do come in, please! So glad to see you. Have you been nearly blown
away?'

For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous northwest wind was still
rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were swaying and
groaning under the force of its onslaught.

'Well, it is stormy,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, stepping in and undoing all
the various safety-pins and elastics which had held her dress high above
the mud. 'Are the girls out?'

'Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school; and Rose, I think, is
practising.'

'Ah, well,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a chair close by
her friend, 'I wanted to find you alone.'

Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, was flushed
and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped nervously on her lap, and
there was about her such an air of forcibly restrained excitement, that
Mrs. Leyburn's mild eyes gazed at her with some astonishment. The two
women were a curious contrast: Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we
know, to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether it
were curls or cap-strings or conversation; Mrs. Leyburn tall and well
proportioned, well dressed, with the same graceful ways and languid
pretty manners as had first attracted her husband's attention thirty
years before. She was fond of Mrs. Thornburgh, but there was something
in the ebullient energies of the vicar's wife which always gave her a
sense of bustle and fatigue.

'I am sure you will be sorry to hear,' began her visitor, that Mr.
Elsmere is going.'

'Going?' said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. 'Why, I thought he
was going to stay with you another ten days at least.'

'So did I--so did he,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, and then pausing
with a most effective air of sudden gravity and 'recollection.'

'Then why--what's the matter?' asked Mrs. Leyburn, wondering.

Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a minute, and Mrs. Leyburn began to
feel a little nervous, her visitor's eyes were fixed upon her with so
much meaning. Urged by a sudden impulse, she bent forward; so did Mrs.
Thornburgh, and their two elderly heads nearly touched.

'The young man is in love!' said the vicar's wife in a stage whisper,
drawing back after a pause, to see the effect of her announcement.

'Oh! with whom?' asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look brightening. She liked a
love affair as much as ever.

Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door was shut and
all safe--she felt herself a criminal, but the sense of guilt had an
exhilarating rather than a depressing affect upon her.

'Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you anything?'

'No!' said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and wider. She never
guessed anything; there was no need, with three daughters to think for
her, and give her the benefit of their young brains. 'No,' she said
again. 'I can't imagine what you mean.'

Mrs. Thornburgh felt a rush of inward contempt for so much obtuseness.

'Well, then, _he is in love with Catherine!_' she said abruptly, laying
her hand on Mrs. Leyburn's knee, and watching the effect.

'With Catherine!' stammered Mrs. Leyburn; '_with Catherine!_'

The idea was amazing to her. She took up her knitting with trembling
fingers, and went on with it mechanically a second or two. Then laying
it down--'Are you quite sure? has he told you?'

'No, but one has eyes,' said Mrs. Thornburgh hastily. 'William and I
have seen it from the very first day. And we are both certain that on
Tuesday she made him understand in some way or other that she wouldn't
marry him, and that is why he went off to Ullswater, and why he made up
his mind to go south before his time is up.'

'Tuesday?' cried Mrs. Leyburn. 'In that walk, do you mean, when
Catherine looked so tired afterward? You think he proposed in that
walk?'

She was in a maze of bewilderment and excitement.

'Something like it--but if he did, she said "No;" and what I want to
know is _why_ she said "No."'

'Why, of course, because she didn't care for him!' exclaimed Mrs.
Leyburn, opening her blue eyes wider and wider. 'Catherine's not like
most girls; she would always know what she felt, and would never keep a
man in suspense.'

'Well, I don't somehow believe,' said Mrs. Thornburgh boldly, 'that she
doesn't care for him. He is just the young man Catherine might care for.
You can see that yourself.'

Mrs. Leyburn once more laid down her knitting and stared at her visitor.
Mrs. Thornburgh, after all her meditations, had no very precise idea as
to _why_ she was at that moment in the Burwood living-room bombarding
Mrs. Leyburn in this fashion. All she knew was that she had sallied
forth determined somehow to upset the situation, just as one gives
a shake purposely to a bundle of spillikins on the chance of more
favorable openings. Mrs. Leyburn's mind was just now playing the part of
spillikins, and the vicar's wife was shaking it viciously, though with
occasional qualms as to the lawfulness of the process.

'You think Catherine does care for him?' resumed Mrs. Leyburn
tremulously.

'Well isn't he just the kind of man one would suppose Catherine would
like?' repeated Mrs. Thornburgh, persuasively: 'he is a clergyman, and
she likes serious people; and he's sensible and nice and well-mannered.
And then he can talk about books, just like her father used--I'm sure
William thinks he knows everything! He isn't as nice-looking as he might
be just now, but then that's his hair and his fever, poor man. And
then he isn't hanging about. He's got a living, and there'd be the poor
people all ready, and everything else Catherine likes. And now I'll just
ask you--did you ever see Catherine more--more--_lively_--well, I know
that's not just the word, but you know what I mean--than she has been
the last fortnight?'

But Mrs. Leyburn only shook her head helplessly. She did not know in the
least what Mrs. Thornburgh meant. She never thought Catherine doleful,
and she agreed that certainly 'lively' was not the word.

'Girls get so frightfully particular nowadays,' continued the vicar's
wife, with reflective candor. 'Why, when William fell in love with me,
I just fell in love with him--at once--because he did. And if it hadn't
been William, but somebody else, it would have been the same. I don't
believe girls have got hearts like pebbles--if the man's nice, of
course!'

Mrs. leyburn listened to this summary of matrimonial philosophy with the
same yielding, flurried attention as she was always disposed to give to
the last speaker.

'But,' she said, still in a maze, 'if she did care for him, why should
she send him away?'

'_Because she won't have him!_' said Mrs. Thornburgh, energetically,
leaning over the arm of her chair that she might bring herself nearer to
her companion.

The fatuity of the answer left Mrs. Leyburn staring.

'Because she won't have him, my dear Mrs. Leyburn! And--and--I'm sure
nothing would make me interfere like this if I weren't so fond of you
all, and if William and I didn't know for certain that there never was a
better young man born! And then I was just sure you'd be the last person
in the world, if you knew, to stand in young people's way!'

'_I!_' cried poor Mrs. Leyburn--'I stand in the way!' She was getting
tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself a brute.

'Well,' she said, plunging on desperately, 'I have been thinking over
it night and day. I've been watching him, and I've been talking to the
girls, and I've been putting two and two together, and I'm just about
sure that there might be a chance for Robert, if only Catherine didn't
feel that you and the girls couldn't get on without her!'

Mrs. Leyburn took up her knitting again with agitated fingers. She
was so long in answering, that Mrs. Thornburgh sat and thought with
trepidation of all sorts of unpleasant consequences which might result
from this audacious move of hers.

'I don't know how we _should_ get on,' cried Mrs. Leyburn at last, with
a sort of suppressed sob, while something very like a tear fell on the
stocking she held.

Mrs. Thornburgh was still more frightened, and rushed into a flood
of apologetic speech. Very likely she was wrong perhaps it was all a
mistake, she was afraid she had done harm, and so on. Mrs. Leyburn took
very little heed, but at last she said, looking up and applying a soft
handkerchief gently to her eyes--

'Is his mother nice? Where's his living? Would he want to be married
soon?'

The voice was weak and tearful, but there was in it unmistakable
eagerness to be informed. Mrs. Thornburgh, overjoyed, let loose upon her
a flood of particulars, painted the virtues and talents of Mrs. Elsmere,
described Robert's Oxford career, with an admirable sense for effect,
and a truly feminine capacity for murdering every university detail,
drew pictures of the Murewell living, and rectory, of which Robert had
photographs with him, threw in adroit information about the young man's
private means, and in general showed what may be made of a woman's mind
under the stimulus of one of the occupations most proper to it. Mrs.
Leyburn brightened visibly as the flood proceeded. Alas, poor Catherine!
How little room there is for the heroic in this trivial everyday life of
ours!

Catherine a bride, Catherine a wife and mother, dim visions of a white
soft morsel in which Catherine's eyes and smile should live again--all
these thoughts went trembling and flashing through Mrs. Leyburn's mind
as she listened to Mrs. Thornburgh. There is so much of the artist in
the maternal mind, of the artist who longs to see the work of his hand
in fresh combinations and under all points of view. Catherine, in the
heat of her own self-surrender, had perhaps forgotten that her mother
too had a heart!

'Yes, it all sounds very well' said Mrs. Leyburn at last, sighing, 'but,
you know, Catherine isn't easy to manage.'

'Could you talk to her--find out a little?'

'Well, not to-day; I shall hardly see her. Doesn't it seem to you
that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine's she hasn't time for
thinking about the young men? Why, she's as full of business all day
long as an egg's full of meat. Well, it was my poor Richard's doing--it
was his doing, bless him! I am not going to say anything against it but
it was different--once.'

'Yes, I know,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, thoughtfully. 'One had plenty of
time, when you and I were young, to sit at home and think what one was
going to wear, and how one would look, and whether he had been paying
attention to any one else; and if he had, why; and all that. And now the
young women are so superior. But the marrying has got to be done somehow
all the same. What is she doing to-day?'

'Oh, she'll be busy all to-day and to-morrow; I hardly expect to see her
till Saturday.'

Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay.

'Why, what is the matter now?' she cried in her most aggrieved tones.
'My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one would think we had the cholera in the parish.
Catherine just spoils the people.'

'Don't you remember,' said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her turn, and
drawing herself up a little, 'that to-morrow is Midsummer Day, and that
Mary Backhouse is as bad as she can be?'

'Mary Backhouse! Why I had forgotten all about her!' cried the vicar's
wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pensively eyeing the carpet
awhile.

Then she got what particulars she could out of Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine,
it appeared, was at this moment at High Ghyll, was not to return till
late and would be with the dying girl through the greater part of the
following day, returning for an hour or two's rest in the afternoon, and
staying in the evening till the twilight, in which the ghost always made
her appearances, should have passed into night.

Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind working the
while at railway speed on the facts presented to her.

'How do you get her home tomorrow night?' she asked, with sudden
animation.

'Oh, we send our man Richard at ten. He takes a lantern if it's dark.'

Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures were all alive again
with energy and hope. She had given her shake to Mrs. Leyburn's mind.
Much good might it do! But, after all, she had the poorest opinion of
the widow's capacities as an ally.

She and her companion said a few more excited, affectionate, and
apologetic things to one another, and then she departed.

Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an hour later in a
state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Leyburn kept her own counsel,
having resolved for once, with a timid and yet delicious excitement, to
act as the head of the family.

Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans on her own account.

'Ten o'clock-moonlight,' said that contriving person to herself going
home--'at least if the clouds hold up--that'll do--couldn't be better.'


To any person familiar with her character the signs of some unusual
preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn during this Thursday
evening. Catherine noticed them at once when she got back from High
Ghyll about eight o'clock, and wondered first of all what was
the matter; and then, with more emphasis, why the trouble was not
immediately communicated to her. It had never entered into her head to
take her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she
could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate
nervous mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was at
system in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect
contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there was good
news, it was presented in its most sugared form to Mrs. Leyburn; but the
moment any element of pain and difficulty cropped up in the common life,
it was pounced upon and appropriated by Catherine, aided and abetted by
the girls, and Mrs. Leyburn knew no more about it than an unweaned babe.

So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct of a Perth
dyer with regard to her mother's best gray poplin, when one of the
greatest surprises of her life burst upon her.

She was in Mrs. Leyburn's bedroom that night, helping to put away her
mother's things as her custom was. She had just taken off the widow's
cap, caressing as she did so the brown hair underneath, which was still
soft and plentiful, when Mrs. Leyburn turned upon her. 'Catherine!' she
said in an agitated voice, laying a thin hand on her daughter's arm.
'Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you!'

Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother's side and put her arms round
her waist.

'Yes mother darling,' she said, half smiling.

'Oh, Catherine! If--if--you like Mr. Elsmere--don't mind--don't
think--about us, dear. We can manage--we can manage, dear!'

The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn's face is indescribable.
She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, her beautiful brows
drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn, looked up at her with a pathetic mixture
of helplessness, alarm, entreaty.

'Mother, who hag been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?' demanded
Catherine.

'Oh, never mind, dear, never mind,' said the widow hastily; 'I should
have seen it myself--oh, I know I should; but I'm a bad mother,
Catherine!' and she caught her daughter's dress and drew her toward her.
_Do_ you care for him?'

Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid her head on her
mother's hands.

'I want nothing,' she said presently in a low voice of intense
emotion--'I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my life--I ask
for nothing more. I am abundantly--content.'

Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. The brown hair,
escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still pretty neck, a pink
spot of excitement was on each gently hollowed cheek; she looked almost
younger than her pale daughter.

'But--he is very nice,' she said timidly. 'And he has a good living.
Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman's wife.'

'I ought to be, and I am your daughter,' said Catherine smiling, a
little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand.

Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps in
imagination she saw the vicar's wife. 'I think--I think,' she said very
seriously, 'I should like it.'

Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as though she
had felt a blow.

'Mother!' she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet still trying
to smile, 'do you want to send me away?'

'No-no!' cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. 'But if a nice man wants you to
marry him, Catherine? Your father would have liked him--oh! I know your
father would have liked him. And his manners to me are so pretty, I
shouldn't mind being _his_ mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother,
you know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.'

She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imaginations--the
pallor, the latent storm of Catherine's look--exciting her more and
more.

Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother's hand again.

'Dear little mother--dear, kind little mother! You are an angel--you
always are. But I think, if you'll keep me, I'll stay.'

And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Leyburn's knee.

But _do_ you--'_do_ you love him, Catherine?'

'I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.'

'Oh dear,' sighed Mrs. Leyburn, as though addressing a third person,
the tears, in her mild eyes, 'she won't; and she _would_ like it--and so
should I!'

Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing.

'And I count for nothing to you, mother!'--her deep voice quivering;
'you could put me aside--you and the girls, and live as though I had
never been!'

'But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, Catherine!' cried
Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pettishness. 'People have to do
without their daughters. There's Agnes--I often think, as it is, you
might let her do more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it
might be a good thing--a very good thing if there were a man to take her
in hand!'

'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, choked.

'Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening. 'They
say it _is_ such a nice house, Catherine, and such pretty country, and
I'm sure I should like his mother, though she _is_ Irish!'

It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn's life. In it the
heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling ironic touch
of circumstance laid upon it made it look even in her own eyes almost
ridiculous. What had she been living for, praying for, all these years?
She threw herself down by the widow's side, her face working with a
passion that terrified Mrs. Leyburn.

'Oh, mother, say you would miss me--say you would miss me if I went!'

Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women clung to each
other, weeping. Catherine's sore heart was soothed a little by her
mother's tears, and by the broken words of endearment that were lavished
on her. But through it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire
in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. It was the cheapening--the vulgarizing,
so to speak, of her whole existence.

In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall various items
of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her
mother, and one of which startled her.

'He comes back tonight, my dear--and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and,
Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. Poor young man!'

And Mrs. Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as
woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.

'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You
won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornbourgh than I am
already.'

Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and
Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which
the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left
her at last to sleep.

'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed
widow to herself, 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!'

Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle
was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent
generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take
it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for
sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile
half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two
estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific
spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more
desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.


As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar
and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing
of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious
timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the
Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in
the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of
the dying girl, took a couple of hours rest, and hurried off again. She
passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.

'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking
after her sister's retreating figure, 'It is all over! They can't meet
now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'

The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the
window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine's
coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling--to fling a
hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.

The stormy light of the afternoon was fading toward sunset. Catherine
walked on fast toward the group of houses at the head of the valley, in
one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with
Mrs. Thornburgh's housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically,
but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of
one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her
self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the
wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve,
extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed
to her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious
over-estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like one
ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepening her discomfiture
at every step. How rich her life had always been in the conviction of
usefulness--nay, indispensableness! Her mother's persuasions had dashed
it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her her
past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and
cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light.

And he? Still near her for a few short hours! Every pulse in her had
thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered him. But she will
see him no more. And she is glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have
discovered how cheaply they held her--those dear ones of hers for whom
she had lived till now! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity
what she had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured,
half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is gone she
will recover something of that moral equilibrium which has been, so
shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she
has no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years crumbling
beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self-control.

As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less tempestuous.
The great wall of High Fell, toward which she was walking, seemed to
shelter her from its worst violence. But the hurrying clouds, the gleams
of lurid light which every now and then penetrated into the valley from
the west, across the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river
answering the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken shadow that
covered the group of houses and trees toward which she was walking, all
served to heighten the nervous depression which had taken hold of her.
As she neared the bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond
which northward all was stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in
front of her the gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great
copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself by
both hands, try and realize her mission afresh, and the scene which lay
before her.



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.

'You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,' he said at last, an
enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. 'I
could not argue with you; I had better not try.'

Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which
were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help
reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforêts and
her _causes célèbres_ which were coursing through the brain behind them,
and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary
attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him.


In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable to his own great chagrin,
and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies.
The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first
that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that
women's society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made
for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with
tolerable certainty.

But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by
him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the
sound of music.

Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the
drawing-room window to find out.

Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid, dowdy daughter of a
local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her
lavish, impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new music, the
accumulations of her visit to London. She stood up beside the piano, her
hair gleaming in the shadow of the drawing-room, her white brow hanging
forward over her violin as she peered her way through the music, her
whole soul absorbed in what she was doing, Langham passed unnoticed.

What astonishing playing! Why had no one warned him of the presence
of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe creature? He sat down
against the wall of the house, as close as possible, but out of sight,
and listened. All the romance of his spoilt and solitary life had come
to him so far through music, and through such music as this! For she
was playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those
passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart
of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than
through the voice of literature. Hans Sachs' immortal song, echoes from
the love duets in 'Tristan und Isolde,' fragments from a wild and alien
dance-music, they rippled over him in a warm, intoxicating stream of
sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from sleep a
hundred bygone moods of feeling.

What magic and mastery in the girl's touch! What power of divination,
and of rendering! Ah! she too was floating in passion and romance, but
of a different sort altogether from the conscious reflected product of
the man's nature. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future;
she was weaving her story that was to be into the flying notes,
playing to the unknown of her Whindale dreams, the strong, ardent
unknown,--'insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to
_me_ heaven!' She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but her heart
was ready for him.

Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window opened and
Langham stood before her. She looked at him with a quick stiffening of
the face which a minute before had been all quivering and relaxed, and
his instant perception of it chilled the impulse which had brought him
there.

He said something _banal_ about his enjoyment, something totally
different from what he had meant to say. The moment presented itself,
but he could not seize it or her.

'I had no notion you cared for music,' she said carelessly, as she shut
the piano, and then she went away.

Langham felt a strange, fierce pang of disappointment. What had he meant
to do or say? Idiot! What common ground was there between him and any
such exquisite youth? What girl would ever see in him anything but the
dull remains of what once had been a man!



CHAPTER XIII.

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick
as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether
intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the
prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the
subject of severe scientific investigation. He would 'do it' thoroughly.

So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in
spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert's old tutor was a
good deal more interested by Robert's sermon than he had expected to be.
It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note
of historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of
circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were,
by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his
experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game
of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good
points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration
was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up
to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to
music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him
kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the
church,--'This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark: Elsmere is
at the beginning of a career!'

In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife,
in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of
Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at
four o'clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham
was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday
cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young Rector
had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably
always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country
gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of
fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant
quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough
at Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially
good stead with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant
they were not likely to find out; his bowling they set small store
by; but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort which soon
carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position among the clubs of
the neighborhood than it had ever yet aspired to occupy.

The Rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, after they
had hung about the green a little while, he took his friend over to the
Workmen's Institute, which stood at the edge of it. He explained
that the Institute had been the last achievement of the agent before
Henslowe, a man who had done his duty to the estate according to his
lights, and to whom it was owing that those parts of it, at any rate,
which were most in the public eye, were still in fair condition.

The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the place. 'But
catch that man doing anything for us!' exclaimed Robert hotly. 'He will
hardly mend the roof now, merely, I believe, to spite me. But come and
see my new Naturalists' Club.'

And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed, in the temper of one
getting up a subject for examination.

Poor Robert! His labor and his enthusiasm deserved a more appreciative
eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which had been the great success
of his first year, and he dragged Langham through it all, not indeed,
sympathetic creature that he was, without occasional qualms. 'But after
all,' he would say to himself indignantly, 'I must do something with
him.'

Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at the collections
for the year, and was quite ready to take it for granted that they
were extremely creditable. Into the old-fashioned window-sills glazed
compartments had been fitted, and these were now fairly filled with
specimens, with eggs, butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what
not. A case of stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the
centre of the room; another containing the birds of the district was
close by. On a table further on stood two large opera books, which
served as records of observations on the part of members of the Club. In
one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, anyone might
write what he would. In the other, only such facts and remarks as had
passed the gauntlet of a Club meeting were recorded in Robert's neatest
hand. On the same table stood jars full of strange creatures--tadpoles
and water larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed
poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom only the
generalizations of science were congenial, stood by and mildly scoffed.

As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been hanging
about waiting for the Rector, came up to him, boorishly touched his
cap, and then, taking a cardboard box out of his pocket, opened it with
infinite caution, something like a tremor of emotion passing over his
gnarled countenance.

The Rector's eyes glistened.

'Hullo! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did you get that? You
lucky fellow! Come in, and let's look it out!'

And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving Langham to the
philosophic and patient contemplation of the village green, its geese,
its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe of houses. He felt that quite
indisputably life would have, been better worth living if, like Robert,
he could have taken a passionate interest in rare moths or common
plough-boys; but Nature having denied him the possibility, there was
small use in grumbling.

Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off,
bearing his treasure with him.

'Lucky dog!' said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading
out of the village, 'he's found one of the rarest moths of the district.
Such a hero he'll be in the Club to-morrow night. It's extraordinary
what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him
in public last winter.'

And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick
look of feeling in the gray eyes.

'"Magnificent, but not war,"' said Langham dryly. 'I wouldn't have given
much for your chances against those shoulders.'

'Oh, I don't know. I should have had a little science on my side, which
counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality
toward the old grandmother he lives with--turned him out in public. Such
a scene! I shall never forget the boy's face. It was like a corpse, and
the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up
round, and we got him put out.'

'Hard lines on the grandmother,' remarked Langham.

'She thought so--poor old thing! She left her cottage that night,
thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week
he came into the friend's house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered
under the bed-clothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead
of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to
come home. "He wouldn't do her no mischief." Everybody dissuaded her,
but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterward she sent for me
and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody
at his work. "Lord, sir!" she said, "it do remind me, when he sits
glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the Devils inside
'em kep' a-tearing 'em. But he's like a new-born babe to me, sir--never
does me no 'arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do
take his vittles!" So I made tracks for that lad,' said Robert, his
eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. 'I found him in the fields one
morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the
evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since
then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there
is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right.
And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow
came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me--well, never
mind! but it gives one a good glow at one's heart to think about it.'

The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own
feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a
novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of
his Oxford recollections had its interest.

A quarter to six,' said Robert, as on their return from their walk they
were descending a low wooded hill above the village, and the church
clock rang out. 'I must hurry, or I shall be late for my storytelling.'

'Story-telling!' said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. 'What
next? You clergy are too inventive by half!'

Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.

'I can't congratulate you on your epithets,' he said, thrusting his
hands far into his pockets. 'Good Heavens, if we _were_--if we were
inventive as a body, the Church wouldn't be where she is in the rural
districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began
it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the
_imagination_ of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to live
someone else's life--it is the one thing worth doing with them.
That's what I have been aiming at. I _told_ my stories all the
winter--Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas--Heaven knows what! And on the
whole it answers best. But now we are reading "The Talisman." Come and
inspect us, unless you're a purist about your Scott. None other of the
immortals have such _longueurs_ as he, and we cut him freely.'

'By all means,' said Langham; lead on.' And he followed his companion
without repugnance. After all, there was something contagious in so much
youth and hopefulness.

The story-telling was hold in the Institute.

A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when they reached
it. The two friends made their way through, greeted in the dumb,
friendly English fashion on all sides, and Langham found himself in a
room half-filled with boys and youths, a few grown men, who had just put
their pipes out, lounging at the back.

Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the hour
that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most enthusiastic,
imaginative people are. He was a master of all those arts of look and
gesture which make a spoken story telling and dramatic, and Langham
marvelled with what energy, after his hard day's work and with
another service before him, he was able to throw himself into such a
hors-d'œuvre as this. He was reading to night one of the most perfect
scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured: the scene in
the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life
of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on,
his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full
of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience,
surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives
he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type
and model of a man who had found his _métier_, found his niche in the
world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an 'adequate
and masterly expression of oneself' be the aim of life, Robert was
achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all the
scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather above
than below his deserts. He was content--more than content to spend
ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or carried
him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing a few hundred
of England's rural poor. The future might bring him worldly
success--Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert's stamp
are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious
effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and
put from him, less it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was
happy--deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches,
by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of
thought by this realization, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another
man's happiness.

Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant
children or animals passed in and out of the golden light spaces; the
patches of heather left here and here glowed as the sunset touched them.
Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay
with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and
bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the
road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene
seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and
helplessness of human existence, which generation after generation, is
still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out
from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what
agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may
know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! _Happy!_--in
this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's
confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.

What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--'on the
passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreamy
spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the
critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never
given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the
straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him,
between him and unpleasant facts!


In the evening, Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self
against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him
to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he
stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest
of the household went to evening service.

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was
streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the
trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham
had shut himself up in Robert's study he did what he had been admonished
to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily
into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself
down into Robert's chair, with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction.
'Good! Now for something that takes the world less naïvely,' he said to
himself; 'this house is too virtuous for anything.'

He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The
house seemed entirely deserted.

'All the servants gone too!' he said presently, looking up and
listening. 'Anybody who wants the spoons needn't trouble about me. I
don't leave this fire.'

And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of
the swing door which separated Robert's passage from the front hall,
opening and shutting. Steps came quickly toward the study, the handle
was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.

He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She
also started as she saw him.

'I did not know anyone was in,' she said awkwardly, the color spreading
over her face. 'I came to look for a book.'

She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness of
the doorway, her long dress caught up round her in one hand, the other
resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate perfume seemed to enter
the room with her, and a thrill of pleasure passed through Langham's
senses.

Can I find anything for you?' he said, springing up.

She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind that it would
be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she said, with an accent as
coldly polite as she could make it,--

'Pray don't disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.'

She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, and began
running her fingers over the books, with slightly knitted brows and a
mouth severely shut. Langham, still standing, watched her and presently
stepped forward.

'You can't reach those upper shelves,' he said; 'please let me.'

He was already beside her, and she gave way.

'I want "Charles Auchester,"' she said, still forbiddingly. It ought to
be there.'

'Oh, that queer musical novel--I know it quite well. No sign of it
here,' and he ran over the shelves with the practised eye of one
accustomed to deal with books.

'Robert must have lent it,' said Rose, with a little sigh. 'Never mind,
please. It doesn't matter,' and she was already moving away.

'Try some other, instead,' he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched.
'Robert has no lack of choice.' His manner had an animation and ease
usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a
little.

'He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced
at last to stealing the servant's "Family Herald" out of the kitchen
cupboard,' she said, a smile dawning.

Langham laughed.

'Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact
that when he and I begin to task novels I am always nowhere.'

'I shouldn't have supposed you ever read them,' said Rose, obeying an
irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterward.

'Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to
works on the "enclitic de**"?' he asked, his fine eyes lit up with
gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily so
much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against the
books behind him.

Natures like Langham's, in which the nerves are never normal, have their
moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression.
After his melancholy of the last two days, the tide of reaction had been
mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.

She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened
to Robert's silent and finicking friend?

'I know nothing of Oxford,' she said a little primly, in answer to his
question. 'I never was there--but I never was anywhere, I have seen
nothing,' she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.

'Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforêts!' he answered,
laughing. 'Is that so little?'

She flashed a quick, defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame
Desforêts, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not
help softening toward him. What magic had passed over him?

'Do you know,' said Langham, moving, 'that you are standing in a
draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?'

For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the
window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither,
and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.

'So it has,' said Rose, shivering. 'I don't envy the Church people. You
haven't found me a book, Mr. Langham!'

'I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the
fire,' he said, with his hand on the door.

She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened.
She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of
night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the
armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.

'Find me an exciting one, please.'

Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand
trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found 'Villette' and
offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at
once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.

The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a
sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly
as it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little
stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne
impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every
detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or
imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and thrust
the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose hastily
withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.

'I am so sorry!' he interjected. 'Coals never do what you want them to
do. Are you very much interested in "Villette"?'

'Deeply,' said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She
laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check,
half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the
moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty,
her mutinous, mocking gayety--these things had all worked on the man
beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was
adorable.

'Charlotte Bronté wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn't She?'
she resumed languidly. 'How sorry she must have been to come back to
that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!'

'There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come
back,' said Langham, reflectively, 'But how she pined for her wilds all
through! I am afraid you don't find your wilds as interesting as she
found hers?'

His question and his smile startled her.

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that
her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably
the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so
personal, so manly. Instead, 'Villette' slid a little further from her
hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.

'No, I don't find my wilds interesting at all,' she said forlornly. 'You
are not fond of the people, as your sister is?'

'Fond of them?' cried Rose hastily. 'I should think not; and what is
more, they don't like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left.
I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do
all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a
genius for doing just what you do worst.'

The young girl's hands fell across one another with a little impatient
gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion
toward the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative
positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two
days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the
mercy of her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why,
Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man's natural
advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.

'Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?' he said.

'Oh dear, yes,' said Rose irritably; 'anything that has two legs and is
ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.'

'And _you_ want something quite different, something more exciting?' he
asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in
thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his, wits about him.
Rose met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness
creeping over her.

'Yes, I want something different,' she said in a low voice and paused;
then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her
knees. 'But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I
was born for; I can't have patience with old women, but I could slave
all day and all night to play the violin.'

You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?' he
said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play
with her rings.

That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in
her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other
self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine's
sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly
gentleness.

'But it is all so difficult, you see,' she said despairingly. 'Papa
thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had
lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has
been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to
do.'

'He would have changed with the times,' said Langham.

'I know he would,' cried Rose. 'I have told Catherine so a hundred
times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don't
they, Mr. Langham?

She spoke with perfect _naïveté_. He saw more and more of the child in
her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.

'They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling.

Rose made a little face.

'I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. 'But then there's something
else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles
from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What's
to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa
died I've just been plotting and planning to get away. But there's the
difficulty,'--and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid
out her case. 'That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns
ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't
ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa
retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such
a dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall
over her knee.

'Had he been so happy there?'

'Happy!--and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff him,
his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace till he
went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years
and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made
him so fond of it?'

And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off
perversity of her father's.

'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the
pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves
in the oddest ways.'

'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He
went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated
other places. I think he must have thought'--and her voice dropped--'he
wasn't going to live long--he wasn't well when he gave up the
school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of
getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting
very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him
to know that we should be out of it.'

Then she broke off suddenly.

'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her
companion, 'after all, he gave me my first violin?'

Langham smiled.

'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.

'Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to
scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion,
and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated
Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself
nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn't have it.
Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around
his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the
hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him
sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed
again-on Sundays!'

Her companion's eyes were not quite as clear as before.

'Poor little naughty child,' he said, bending over to her. 'I think your
father must have been a man to be loved.'

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft
remorse.

'Oh, so he was--so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it
would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was
Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see
what a chain it's been--what a weight! And as I must struggle--_must_,
because I was I--to get back into the world on the other side of the
mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why
I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn't exhilarating always.'

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick,
over-tragic emotion of nineteen.

'I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play
yesterday,' he said gently.

She started.

'_Did_ you hear me--that Wagner?'

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.

'Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.'

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say 'I am not quite the mummy
you thought me, after all!' And she colored slightly.

'I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play
often; and it seemed to me that with time--and work--you might play as
well as any of them.'

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she
gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.

'And I can't help thinking,' he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own
_rôle_ of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, 'that if your father
had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must
have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and
to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.'

'Catherine hasn't moved with the times,' said Rose dolefully.

Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a
question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently
emphatic.

'And you think,' she went on, 'you _really_ think, without being too
ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts'--and a
little laugh danced through the vibrating voice--'I might try and get
them to give up Burwood--I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of
course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one
can't help having qualms, though one doesn't tell them to one's sisters
and cousins and aunts. And sometimes'--she turned her chin round on her
hand and looked at him with a delicious, shy impulsiveness--'sometimes a
stranger sees clearer. Do _you_ think me a monster, as Catherine does?'

Even as she spoke her own words startled her--the confidence, the
abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely; only her eyelids
quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, and there was a warm
penitence in her heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic!

He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece,
looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it seemed to her, of
her friend, her confessor. Her white childish brow, the little curls of
bright hair upon her temples, her parted lips, the pretty folds of the
muslin dress the little foot on the fender--every detail of the picture
impressed itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to his
grave.

'Tell me,' she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage
him--'tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what you think?'

The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a gust of wind
sweeping through the house--voices and steps approaching. Rose
sprang up, and for the first time during all the latter part of their
conversation felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.

'How early you are, Robert!' she exclaimed, as the study door opened
and Robert's wind-blown head and tall form wrapped in an I