lMlPf^lFlOT ROBEET ELSMEEE ROBERT ELSMERE // t ' ^ r j4-< & ^A^-C*-' ' BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD AUTHOR OF 'MISS BHETHERTON ' London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1888 All riyhts reserved Printed by R. & K. Cl.AKK, Edinburg ta Hit 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 SHINING ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SERVICE OF MAN: THOMAS HILL GREEN (LATE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD), Died 2Qth March 1882; AND LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON, Died Easter Eve 1886. CONTENTS BOOK I PAOM WESTMORELAND . 1 BOOK II SURREY . . . * . . .140 BOOK III THE SQUIRE 251 BOOK IV CRISIS 333 BOOK V ROSE 387' BOOK VI NEW OPENINGS . 461 BOOK VII GAIN AND Lost; 549 NOTE The quotations given in the present book on pp. 58, 330, and 536, are either literally or substantially taken from a volume of Lay Sermons, called The Witness of God, by the late Professor T. H. Green. BOOK I WESTMOKELAXD CHAPTER I IT was a brilliant afternoon towards 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 pene- trated 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 farmhouses sheltered by the crags at the head of the valley and those far-away regions of town and civilisation 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 becks runnfng down into the main river and many of the plantations round the farms were gay with the same tree, so that the farmhouses, gray-roofed and gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here ana 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 Whin- dale 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 bv regular lines of grayish black. But as the walker penetrates farther, 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 planta- tion, and the few farms stand more boldly and conspicuously 4 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 Whin- dale 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 colour 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, towards 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 splendour 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 farmhouses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines, in which the shrunken becks trickle musically down through the debris 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 him- self against her, to live his own independent life of labour and of will, and to develop the tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose, which is so often Aviled 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 clus- tered 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 nil their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flower-beds, 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 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 5 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 ; cur- tains 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 quick- ened 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 vigour, 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 nourishes and the broad cantabile passages of one of Spohr's Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower and lower towards 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 ? ' 6 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' Not that I know of. Do come here and look at pussie ; did you ever see anything so comfortable 1 ' 1 You and she look about equally lazy. What have you been doing all the afternoon 1 ' ' We look what we are, my dear. Doing ? Why, I have been attending to my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, mend- ing 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, pussie and I have come out for a rest. We've earned it, haven't we, Chattie 1 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-temperedness 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 naivete, 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 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 adminstering 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 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 7 his going to college, we had, let me see, the spare room cur- tains, 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 cut 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 get 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 colour 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 per- fections 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 remind- ing 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 daresay 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, 8 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 one 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 towards 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 hasn't 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 experi- ence, 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 com- plexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonised 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 neighbouring 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 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 9 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 paralysed 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 1 ' ' 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 some one 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 towards 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. 10 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i A quarter of an hour afterwards they were all gathered round the supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May twilight. At Catherine's right ha.nd 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 hear 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 associa- tions. 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 farmhouse 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 out- line, 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 favourite 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 elder sister, was, of all the persons gathered in this little room, the most pronounced CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 11 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 than 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 experi- ences 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, Roschen ? ' 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. Thorn- burgh means to let them loose on his devoted head to-morrow night.' ' Who are coming ? ' asked Mrs. Leyburn eagerly. The occa- sional tea parties of the neighbourhood were an unfailing excite- 12 EGBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ment 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 neighbourhood on Rose's playing or Agnes's conversation, or Catherine's prac- tical 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 drily. ' Dear mother, can't you by now make up a tea party at the Thornburghs out of your head 1 ' ' 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 slily. 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. Ley- burn," 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. ' How- ever,' 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 1 ' ' 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-colour and meant to try oils, and she told me to implore you not to, because " water-colour 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 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 13 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 dis- appeared, '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 table- cloth 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 droop- ing. 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 outlines of the fell the stars were just twinkling in the pale blue. Far away under the crag on the farther 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, ana 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 prptectingness. ' What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Roschen ? ' 'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two hours this morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.' 14 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' And you didn't look into the school ? ' asked Catherine, hesi- tating ; ' I know Miss Merry expected you.' ' No, I didn't. When one can play the violin and can't teach, any more than a cockatoo, 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 Cath- erine took up the subject with a zest which kept her mother happy till bedtime. Why couldn't she take as much interest in my SpohrT 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 ordi- nary 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 neat- ness 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 orna- ments. 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 informa- tion. 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 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 15 into tlie 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 moun- tains. 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 drily. ' 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 H 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. Thorn- burgh'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 neighbour- hood of this last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading ; but in reality the energies of her housewifely 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 savouries, 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 01 Long Whindale was particularly sensitive. Was she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of Whin- borough odious woman to tea ? Was it not incumbent on her 16 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 neighbouring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain newly - arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with the most airy and appetising trifles of a make and colouring 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 Mi-. 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 susten- ance 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 t\vo old men still lingering in the dale who could have told him CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 17 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 child- hood, dropping in for his ' crack ' and his glass of ' yale ' at this or that farmhouse 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 unre- membered graves, and new men of other ways a^nd other modes of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been emphasised by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone floors, their parlours lustrous with oak carving on chest or dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in favour of an upgrowth of new trim mansions designed to meet the needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks. And naturally the churches top have shared in the process of transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half- century has worked its will even in the remotest corners of the Cumbrian 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 genera- tions 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 c 18 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i the results namely, the new church, vicarage, and schoolhouse 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 influ- ences, some social, some economical, added to a certain amount of corrosion from within ; and their place had been taken by leaseholders, less drunken perhaps, and better educated, but also far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in the rude dignity of their predecessors. And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place of the dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and parson- age had got themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income raised, had let off his glebe to a neighbouring 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 un- usual 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. Backhouse he niver found oot till he'd got past t' bridge, and than it wur too late to 0:0 back.' CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 19 Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh pink colour slowly deserting her face as she realised 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, undig- nified steps across the front garden and down the steps to where Mr. Backhouse the carrier stood, bracing himself for self- defence. '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' 1 ' 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 towards 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, bit ya caan't help these things swmtimes an' it's naw gud, a 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 beeast like ony- thing ! ' Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this auda- cious recital. As for John, he looked on surveying his brother's philosophical demeanour at first with speechless wrath, and then with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, in which, how- ever, 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, mak- ing little incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him 20 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i about to depart, of which John at last gathered the main pur- port 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 of mice,' he raised his whip and the clattering vehicle moved forward : Jim meanwhile preserving through all his brother's wrath and Mrs. Thornburghs waitings 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. 'Hes sparin' oy 'is speach is John Backhouse,' said Sarah grimly, as her mistress returned to her. ' Maybe ee's aboot reet. It's a bad business an' 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. CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 21 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 consign- ment. The thing was inconceivable. Mrs. Thornburgh was well aware of it. Should William be informed 1 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 per- ception 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 1 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 1 ! 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-coloured things, and do her hair fit to frighten the crows ! Agnes too so lady- like 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 22 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 all part of her determination to move with the times, in spite of the station to which Providence had assigned her. A minute afterwards 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 mark 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. Hence- forth 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 took 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 apologise, I apologise, 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 realised 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 ndivetd 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. CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 23 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 in- finitely 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 f oiks can do perfectly well without ' et cetera, et cetera the hus- band'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 wind-blown streams, or the manners and customs of the inhabitants. His cousin's wife, in spite of her ambitious con- ventionalities, 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 24 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK T 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 neighbouring 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 Eointed out Burwood among its trees. Then with her eye eagerly xed upon him, she fell into a more or less incoherent account of her favourites. She laid on her colours 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 surelyj though you have one of the love- liest 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 CHAP, n WESTMORELAND 25 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 may 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 per- sistent 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 triumph- antly to Queen's College. His family watched his progress with a gaping, half -con- temptuous amazement, till he announced himself as safely in- stalled at Oxford, having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary to pay his college valuation a sum which wild horses could not nave dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and drink. 26 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 neces- sities. The money was promptly sent, together with photo- graphs 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. 4 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 bef oz-e 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 some one 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 Words- worth, and cold donnish ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his Me had disappointed him somehow.' 4 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 in- herited 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 CHAP, it WESTMORELAND 27 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 livecf there. And then to see those three delicately brought-up children going in and out of the parlour where old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drink- ing ; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had belaboured 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 1 ' ' Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And per- haps 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, whisky-drink- ing 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 expi-ession. '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 the upper end 28 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i of the valley a bare, desolate recess filled with 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 dis- trict. 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 farmhouses, the heckberry trees along the river and the road, caught and emphasised 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 Bur- wood, 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 neighbouring valley of Shanmoor, that the first coup d'oeil was good. The flowers had been arranged in the afternoon by Hose ; Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again ; a pleasing odour of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and fern and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses ana bright faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant play of crisp and delicate colour. CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 29 But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat witli 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 Thorn- burgh'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 neighbour a grim, uncommuni- cative person in his own devotion to a policy of silence. Mean- while the vicar was grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Ley burn had fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Dr. Baker, Agnes with Mr. May- hew'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 other open- ing into the great world should be discovered for him. Hose was on Eobert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white dress as being the least startling garment she pos- sessed, 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 Thornburghs' 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' con- versation 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 un- usually 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 ! 30 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 amuse- ment, wondering how she did it. What ? Had she got him on carpentering, engineering discovered his weak point 1 Water- wheels, inventors, 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 moire 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 neighbour with a bland majesty of eye, she inquired of him if he were ' any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere 1 ' Robert re- plied 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 Mow- bray 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 in- timacy to which she referred. Mrs. Seaton's father, in his capacity of solicitor in a small country town, had acted as elec- tioneering 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 repeti- tion 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 pro- ceeding 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 Universities. She and the Arch- deacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly occupied in ruining the young men's health by over-exami- nation, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the mothers of England would refuse CHAP, iti WESTMORELAND 31 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 a 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, he 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 cer- tain truculent elements in one of the mildest of men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl neighbour and ask her what people meant by calling the Lakes rainy. ' I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky here 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 colouring, 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 pro- mise 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. Thorn- burgh stood in awe of Catherine and had given her up in de- spair. 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 any one 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 allow- able 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 32 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i exasperation. Mrs. Seatpn had just embarked upon an account of ' our charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleck- wood was a distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the neighbourhood, 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 neighbour'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 Kandall'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 Up. 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 in- convenience may have one good result. You can now make an example of the carrier. It is our special business, as my hus- band 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 par- ticular about trifles.' ' Trifles 1 ' 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 estab- lished 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 a 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 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 33 them. I don't believe he does drink much, but if he does there is probably no amount of whisky 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 temp- tation 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 denud- ing his face of all expression. John vows he shall go to the " house " ; he has no legal share in the business ; the house and the horse and cai't 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 drily. '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 neighbour with a complete change of expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate respect. Catherine coloured 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 bi-lingual. 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 pene- trate 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 afterwards for each opera- tion. The pull was soon forgotten ; the sixpence lived on grate- fully 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 story-telling, Miss Rose,' said the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is P 34 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 get 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 thpst last Midsummer day, and Miss Leyburn and I are now oing 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 seems 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 un- pleasant 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 finger-tips 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 anti- quarian 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 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 85 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 adora- tion. 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 any- thing 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 Ley- burn'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 colourless 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 house- hold 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 36 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I was, and more eager than I ever was to get 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 2 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 vigour. ' 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 inter- rupt himself for nothing. ' Really 1 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 j 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 for- bade 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, bendmg 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 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 37 fibre in her which for the moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighbourhood, 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 attain- ments 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 medi- tative soul, had taught her judgments and comments on her favourite 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 towards the latter 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 face and clerical dress seemed somehow to reassure her, and she began again, thougli reluctantly. ' He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fel- lows 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 Ley burn must have left Oxford about the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed 38 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I Tractarianism, and in twenty years transformed the Uni- versity. ' 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 roused 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 candles 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-suflicingness 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 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 39 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 neighbourhood. 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 perform- ing 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 counten- ance 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 40 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i half a page behind was left shrilly hanging in mid-air, for- saken 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 ' Eose ! Rose ! Don't go out again ! It is your turn next ! ' Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remem- bering 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 eldest 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. Seatpn 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-Stiicke, 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 or her instrument ? He was not a musician, CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 41 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 Jillette, unformed, inex- perienced, 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. ' Every one 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 afterwards to enjoy the sense of freedom left by their departure. But at last the Mayhews, 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 incredu- lous 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 man- ners would disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none positively none ! ' 42 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I 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 Ley burns 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 the fire- place 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 any- body 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 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 de- velopment 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 favourite 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 i IIAI-. TV WESTMORELAND 48 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 recollec- tions. 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 fulfilment of his wishes. And so it proved. No sooner was his father dead than Sir Mowbray curtly com- municated 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 hUl covered by the new school buildings, she was the helper, gossip, and confidante of half the parish. Her vast hats, strange in fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls of many colours, 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 per- 44 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i sonality 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-coloured 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 pause 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 over- taken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, story- teller, 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 giantj or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting in ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus rinr. iv WESTMORELAND 45 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 quick 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 realise 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 Sir Mowbray's offer. Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, doing very well at school, a favourite 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 sti'ong. Her experience had not been large, but the feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a favourite 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 toler- able 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- 46 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i woman's sense of humour 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 generalisations, 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 re- flected that it would certainly be better to say nothing of it to Robert until he should be at college. His impressionable tem- perament, and the power he had occasionally shown of absorb- ing himself in a subject till it produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavourable 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 reli- giously 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 wj.th her, and to feel that no reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had been nothing specially note- worthy 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 in which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded. Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had CHAP, iv WESTMORELAND 47 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 favourite tutor would probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager 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 keep- ing 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 satisfac- tion, ' 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 Col- umbus, 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 ./Eschylus appealed to the same fibres, the same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shak- speare, 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 Ids main objects in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical minutice, 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 las 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 privilege. 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 48 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 Mow- bray, 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, steeped 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 com- plexity 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 frag- mentary 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 CHAP, iv WESTMORELAND 49 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 corning to an end. Had she loved him enough 1 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 1 And could her poor craving heart bear to see him absorbed by fresh intei-ests 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 dashed 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 Ms 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 father's ; 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 wanting 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 50 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 gaily 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 fervour 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 influ- ence 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 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 51 straggles, 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 Sun- day. 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 so sugges- tive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterwards 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 ; hence- forth she could but watch him from the shore. Brought into contact with this imposing University organisation, 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 honourable 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 belong- 52 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ing 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 or 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 afterwards dared to allude to the experi- ence. 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 ques- tions an exasperating degree of ignorance ; and the wags 01 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 colouring 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-moulded 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 move- ments 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 idiosyn- crasies 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 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 53 brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible ex- pansion. 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 publica- tion 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 fellow- ship. 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 bt. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and got it with flying colours. Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favourable 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 in- stinct cold, critical, reflective had reasserted itself, condemn- ing him and his censors equally. The uselessness of utterance, the futility of enthusiasm, the inaccessibility of the ideal, the practical absurdity of trying to realise any of the mind's inward dreams : these were the kind of considerations which descended upon him, slowly and fatally, crushing down the newly spring- ing 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 2 he quarrelled 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 pro- vincial 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 54 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 pos- sible 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 em- ployment, 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 colour 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 fort- night 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 cheat- ing 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 favourable 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, of weariness or shrink- ing, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the College towards 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 curi- CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 55 osity, 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 that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the inexhaustible patience and labour involved in all true knowledge ; and it was to the germs of critical judg- ment so implanted in him that Elsmere 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 talk- ing afterwards. It was a rainy, cheerless evening ; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in cold wind and sleet ; 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 knew 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 vibra- tion, which had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation ' do you think / am the man to get and keep a hold on a ram- pagious class of hundreds of Scotch lads ? Do you think / am the man to carry on what Reid began Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant dogmas 1 ' He looked at Elsmere under his straight black brows im- periously. 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 Uni- versity. Why was he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident 56 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great gifts under a bushel 1 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 towards a book which lay on a table near. It was the Reveries of Senancour. 'My answer is written /tere,' he said. ' It will seem to you now, Elsmere, mere Mid- summer 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. / 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 realise 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 resound- ing 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 a while 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 after life. 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 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 57 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 occa- sionally 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 after- noon 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 recognised the thick-set 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 young Elsmere. There was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind. 'Elsmere,' he said at last abruptly, 'would you like to go to-night and hear Grey preach 1 ' ' 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 lay- man, to carry on the practice. It was an extraordinary effort, for ne 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 58 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i a 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 afterwards 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 fervour and an admiration which he was too young and immature to analyse, 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 ' 1 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 consti- tuting 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, through- CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 59 out 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, address- ing 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 breath- ing 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 60 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 humour 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 inter- esting 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 labour, but still clearly, OHAP. v WESTMORELAND 61 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 see him once or twice, making Langham 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 under-currents 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 ardour 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 con- trol 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 ot the paralysis of all natural ambitions in himself, he was illogically keen that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the 62 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 rest- less, 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 popu- lar 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 so 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 fervour, 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 pass- ing 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 recognised with a great burst of enthusiasm and astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 63 said the last word on all things in. heaven and earth. And now there was exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanti- cism 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 on.es. With this movement of opinion Kobert had very soon found himself in close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impres- sion left upon his boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succes- sion of the Harden curates, and by his mother's shafts 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 organised 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 Silpit, and looked down on the crowded building, full of grave ack-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 ex- perience 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 afterwards, and turned his 64 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i steps homewards, 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 passage way 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 lueky.' ' 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 pessi- mist 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 ii' 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, and 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 in- finitely 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, CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 65 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 1 ' he asked at last, with a certain quick brusqueness of manner. ' No,' said Eobert 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 towards 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 con- scious 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 cle'rical-isme, voila Vennemi ! ' 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 afterwards, 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. ' yVell, after all,' he said at last, very slowly, 'the difficulty lies in preaching anything. One may as well preach a respect- able mythology as anything else.' ' What do you mean by a mythology ? ' cried Robert hotly. F 66 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i '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 realised, 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 drily. 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 Lang- ham 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 con- viction 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 I am to 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 new turn of her son's fortunes, she realised with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been educating her as well as himself. Her old re- bellious 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 satisfac- tion 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 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 67 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 me 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 hei', 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 re- linquished 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 him- self 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 in- structions 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 com- pletely by winning a Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the best 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 postpon- ing 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 afterwards, 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 de- veloped 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. 68 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility towards 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 instance, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be one long string of acts of kindness towards 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 Evan- gelical training of him and Mr. Grey's influence, together, per- haps, 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 fervour and passion of his Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancour 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 Grey 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 years not, perhaps, of great intel- lectual advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly to the fore, but years certainly of continu- ous 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 Merton Street, where she had established herself, had watched her boy's meteoric career through these crowded months with very frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realised 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 remonstrances, 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, CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 69 in the January of his fourth year, the collapse became so de- cided 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 labour 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 1200 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 cheat the fates. But, after a halcyon time in 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. 70 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' 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? 1 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 1 ' He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest. 'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere drily. '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 pos- sessed 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 con- valescent, 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 4 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 colour 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 Phoebus. CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 71 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 in- dication 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 Hose, 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. / 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 in- structing 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 chevelwe de poete, the eve 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 drily. 'But you can't wonder if under the circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To 72 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i return to the subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.' ' Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose discontentedly ; ' Cath- erine 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 argu- ments 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 jnot 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 colour than usual, and as Mrs. Ley burn shook hands with the young clergyman her mother's eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter. ' After all, she is as hand- some 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 favourite low seat beside her mother, clasp- ing Mrs. Leyburn's thin mittened hand awhile tenderly in her CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 73 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 differ- ence 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, Roschen ? ' Clearly the strong con- templative 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 god- father ? '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. - had been extinct before his day. But could they ask him any other questions ? Mrs. Leyburn became quite ani- mated, and, diving into her memory, produced a number of fragmentary reminiscences of her husband's Queen's friends, asking him for 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 re- turning 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 describ- ing 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 promi- 74 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i nent figure in the college ; and once embarked on this theme he 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 Cath- erine'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 1 ' ' 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 towards Elsmere with outstretched hand. But he also sprang up. ' I, too, must be going,' he said ; ' I have paid you an uncon- scionable visit. If you are going past the vicarage, Miss Ley- burn, may I escort you so far ? ' She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Agnes, CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 75 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 denned 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 re- treated 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 towards 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 beauti- ful 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 ex- ample,' 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 con- versation 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 manoeuvres 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. 76 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 'Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,' said Robert, a 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 favourite 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 see- ing 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 somewhere near the school of which he was master a good family, I be- lieve 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 1 ' ' 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 Wesley ans ; but he was very loyal to the Church all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. George Herbert was his favourite 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 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 77 all. He would have had the Church make peace with the Dis- senters ; he was all for upsetting 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 Ms 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 abou t right,' said the vicar with a sigh. ' We are all so half- hearted nowadays.' 'Not he,' cried Robert hotly. 'Who are we that because a man differs from us in opinion we 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 child- ren 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 oppor- tunity 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 dining- 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 in- conveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his own, in his own domain. ' I should like to know the secret of the little musician's inde pendence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of mood at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.' 78 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' 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 towards 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. 1 see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her ; and then there is the beauty and refinement of her 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 the 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 what can I do ? " she said. " I promised papa." She makes herself miser- able, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get her- self 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 nutter. ' My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning ! I should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tire- CHAP. vi WESTMORELAND 79 some 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 be- tween 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 you 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 1 ' she in- quired, 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 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.' Airs. 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 backwards or forwards. '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 as plain as a pike- staff. And, my dears, not/ting 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 elo- quence. 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 incon- sistency, ' oh, you can't know anything in two days.' 80 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening ; ' we can't know any- thing iii two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes to anybody, till the last 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. Thorn- burgh. ' Well, wliat 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 effer- vescence 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. Els- mere 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 grdce. 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 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 81 her many offices of charity ; he offered the vicar to take a class in the school, and was naively 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 incon- venient 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 paralysed for some time, under the weight, moreover, of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson kept her talking in the roem, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intel- lectual 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 power- fully. 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 afterwards for having juggled in the matter. Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gaiety for her sisters sometimes f 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 afterwards 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 manoeuvres of those about her. It did not strike her that Mrs. Thorn burgh 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 analyse what would have been the a 82 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 learnt 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 communi- cation. 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 neighbourhood, plunging into reports of agricultural com- missions, 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 any one ; 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-bye ! 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 towards 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, move- ments, leaders of the day that she was often puzzled, sometimes CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 83 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 genera- tion. 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 diffi- dences. Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering home- wards 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 im- plied in the pursuer the emphasising 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 world, 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 apti- tudes to be explained unless the Great Designer meant them to have a use and function in His world 1 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 humanising effect of music on the poor. He described to her the efforts of a London society, of which he was a subscribing member, to popularise the best music among the lowest class ; he dwelt 84 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i almost with passion on the difference between the joy to be got out of such things and the common brutalising 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 Whin- borough. 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 Westmore- land 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 sit- ting 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 eldest 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' marvel- lous,' he heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, ' some-thin' CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 85 marvellous. The Lord has blessed him indeed ! It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's meetin's, or sermons, or parlour work, or just faithful dealin's with souls one by one. Satan has no cliverer 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 roadside, 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, pray- ing 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 minis- ters. A bit farther I met a boy carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went on, taking, without know- ing 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 Nun- eaton. 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 labours 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 86 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 opp 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 sence 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 mounta in 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 fervours 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 OHAP. vii WESTMORELAND 87 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. 1 leming's disappear- ance, 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 even- ing 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 realised 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 her- self 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 get our walk to Shanmoor after all, and if we don't, and if if ' her cheek flushed with a 88 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 awhile,' she thought, ' and if it rains later we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.' And she walked on homewards meditating, her thin fingers clasped before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue rib- bons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty many-coloured 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 neighbourhood, 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 feted 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 musi- cal, but a pictorial life of its own ; its young artists dub them- selves '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 dead 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 89 creature of London and Paris and Italy, and set her pining for that golden vie de Boheme 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 I 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 sur- render 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 iu 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's ' 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. Heigh ho ! ' 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, / saw him gather up those violets she threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don't believe she has realised the situation a bit. At least, if she has, she is as unlike other mortals in this as iu everything else. But when she does ' 90 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie jumped up on the window-sill, 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 '11 only marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be happy ever afterwards, 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 forget 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 move- ment, and the intoxication of sound the cat meanwhile follow- ing 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 braying 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 neighbourhood 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 91 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 gaiety 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 gaiety 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 Jset the girls scoffing at the pre- tence of invalidism under which he had foisted himself on Whin dale. ' 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 1 ' 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 chatter- 92 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ing. 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 neighbour- hood, 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 colour was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple back- ground. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix it there for ever. 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. Thornburgli'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 afterwards 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 on the bridge. There was to be no long lingering, however. The clouds were deepen- ing, 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 93 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 ! Friends 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 ? ' she 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 oft". 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 look- ing 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 de- scended earlier in the afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrc-p, 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. 94 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully into his pocket-book ; ' but it is worth while to be crushed by any one 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 in- stance 1 ' he said, with another note in his voice!* Catherine looked at him and coloured. 'Rose has been tell- ing 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 1 ' 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 com- pany, your dog guarding you, and all good angels going with you.' She flushed 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. Elsmere ; 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 vivid 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 homewards 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 round 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 95 with the 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 some shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it. ' Miss Ley burn, 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 for 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 my- self 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 lie 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. 96 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' 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 butterflies 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 in- dividual lines ! ' And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences. 'It was my father's favourite of all, she said, in the low vibrating voice of memory. ' He said the last verse to me the day before he died.' Kobert 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 1 ' 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 blam- ing, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest, purest, most devoted ' CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 97 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, despond- ent 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 1 1 Oh, I can understand ! ' he said reverently ' I can under- stand. 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 eyes 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 hesita- tion 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 naif 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 for ever. She was wrapped up gro- tesquely 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. 98 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' 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 head 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 them 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's 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. Elsmere 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. CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 99 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 vin- dictive 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, Hose 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. Ana beyond the vale, eastwards and northwards, Catherine looked 100 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 abso- lutely 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 stoles 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 Kobert 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 give 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 realised now with hot cheeks how many meetings and tete-a-tetes 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 101 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 1 She could see the drawn face, the restless melancholy eyes. ' Cath- erine, 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 1 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, com- fort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life, Agnes twenty, llose 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. Cath- erine 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 102 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i so very much. The time is so short there is so little in her, comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such attain- ments, 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 bound- ing heart that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy 1 She locks her 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 thyselj of all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee ^o^th greater abundance of grace.' ' When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is withdrawn from thee.' 1 Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy Creator. . . .' She presses the sentence 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 1 Thy Saviour sentenced joy ! ' Ay, sentenced it for ever 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 Hose. 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 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 103 the ladder to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar 1 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 01 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 upstairs. 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, listen- ing 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 backwards and forwards dreamily singing, and she started up when she saw Catherine. ' Roschen,' 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, Roschen, 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, Roschen. 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 Cath- erine ! What did it mean ? Catherine withdrew her arms with a little sigh and moved away. ' I just came to tell you that, Roschen,' 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 ? ' 104 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate strength. The elder sister struggled to release herself. ' Let me go, Hose,' 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, svmpathy threw herself face downwards 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 neighbourhood 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 CHAP, vni WESTMORELAND 105 lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thorn- burgh, 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. Then 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, whist- ling. 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 impos- sible 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 yester- day ! ' 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 106 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of business, and she must go.' ' Mrs. Thombtirgh ! ' And not a word for him for him to whom she had given her promise? She had gone to Whin- borough 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 1 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 afterwards 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 clamouring to be done, and this morn- ing 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 be all a mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the consideration of 2s. 8d. plus 2s. lid. minus 9d. ' And I suppose, William,' said his wife to him at last, with withering sarcasm, ' that you'd sit by and see Catherine break that young man's heart, and send him back to his 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 Hasted 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 food did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? ake 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 say- ing unutterable things. ' Doesn't care for him ! ' she echoed in a tone which implied that her husband's headpiece was past praying for. CHAP, vin WESTMORELAND 107 ' Yes, doesn't care for him ! ' said the vicar, nettled. ' What else should make her give him a snub like this 1 ' Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious expression stole into her eves. ' 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 behaviour. 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 denouement, 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 1 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 towards an elder male, especially a male in love with some one 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 1 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, how- 108 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ever, 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 any one 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 devo- tion 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 attentions to any one in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naivete 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 sym- pathy, 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 1 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. ( HM-. via WESTMORELAND 109 ' 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 a hint how the land lay. 'I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. Mr. Elsmere, what did 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 Hose ? ' ' Oh dear, no ! ' she said, with a little face. ' I'm not a Ley- burn ; 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 housekeep- ing ; and you can see for yourself what she does for the neigh- bours 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 out- 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. 110 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i They had reached the gate of the vicarage. Elsmere stopped and looked at his companion with a singular lightening of ex- pression. 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 feeling 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 medi- tatively 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 Cath- erine'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 child -like 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 recognises 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 CHAP, via WESTMORELAND 111 Christianised 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 de- veloped 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 Eoman road which runs, with such magnificent disregard of the humours of Mother Earth, over the very top of High Street towards Penrith and Carlisle. Next day it looked as though after many waverings the char- acteristic 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 downwards from the rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and sycamores and the slate-eaves 01 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 Ley burn might be doing that morning. Judg- ing 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 her- self 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 112 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and atmosphere which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator forget the petu- lant abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere passed Burwood with a thrill. Should he or should he not present himself 1 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 stream 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 pur- suer a quick change of expression. She wore a close-fitting waterproof dress and cap. Her hair was lightly 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 gaily. ' 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. CHAP, vin WESTMORELAND 113 ' Look,' he said, pointing to the west ; ' have you been watch- ing 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, Ho 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 passion- ate 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 buoy- ancy 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, 114 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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, 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 new 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 work- ing 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 CHAP, vnr WESTMORELAND 115 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 him- self 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 whirl- wind of feeling possessed him. The strangeness, the unworldli- ness of what she had done struck him singularly. He realised 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 un- looked-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. Eobert 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, 116 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 honour of one, instead of knitting the new ones to the old. Is life to be allowed no natural expansion 1 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 affec- tion, 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. One 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 any more. 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 aerial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a fresh storm of rain brought back the colour 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 exhilara- tion 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 CHAP, viii WESTMORELAND 117 good women under the circumstances. But as he met it for one passionate instant, he recognised 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 for- got the painful struggle of the face ; ' good-bye.' 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 weak- ness. ' I have been a long way, dear,' she said, as though in apology, ' and there is no air. Yes, I will go upstairs 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 colour of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes stood dumfoundered. 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 upstairs 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. 118 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i ' 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 r61e as this as- signed 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 drawn 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 pre- ferred 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 every one else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy north-west 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 some- thing 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 colours were breaking through. All the sayings of Christ which had lain CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 119 closest to her heart for years, to-night 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 experi- ence 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. Yester- day a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down ? Simply a pair of reproachful eves, 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 1 ' 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 miser- able hour in the vicar's study afterwards, 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 120 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced than in- jured by the withdrawal of her strong support. But the obstacle of character ah, there was a different matter ! He realised 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 realised 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 re- produced 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 look- ing 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 diffi- culty, 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. Afterwards, when he and the vicar were smoking to- gether, 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 con- tented puff, looked the young man straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk to Patterdale via 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 dumfoundered her. A good time, indeed ! with everything begun and nothing finished ; with two households thrown into perturbation for a delusion, CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 121 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 1 ' 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 break- fast the vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpen- stock, 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 appear- ance 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 tragic phase or other, and into which Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into Catherine Leyburn's. Hose and Agnes dropped in now and then, and found her not at all 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 on- slaught 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 ?' 122 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i She Jiad 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 draw- ing-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 f ' For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous north-west wind was still rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were swaying and groaning under the force of its onslaught. '"Wel^ 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. Thorn- burgh, 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 1 ' 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, won- dering. CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 123 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 effect upon her. 'Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you any- thing?' ' 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. ' Will- iam 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 afterwards ? You think he pro- posed 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. ' Cath- erine'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.' 124 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 Bur- wood drawing-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 favourable openings. Mrs. Leyburn's mind was just now playing the part of spillikins, and the vicar's wife was shaking it vigorously, though with occasional qualms as to the lawfulness of the process. ' You think Catherine does care for him ? ' resumed Mrs. Ley- burn tremulously. ' Well, isn't he just the kind of man one would suppose Cath- erine 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 candour. ' 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 philo- sophy 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 ener- getically, 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 ! ' '//'cried poor Mrs. Leyburn 'I stand in the way!' She CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 125 was getting tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself a brute. ' Well,' she said, plunging on desperately, ' I have been think- ing 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 to- gether, 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 con- sequences 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, per- haps 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 unmis- takable 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 Mure- well 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 combina- tions 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 126 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 ag- grieved 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 pen- sively 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 work- ing the while at railway speed on the facts presented to her. ' How do you get her home to-morrow nignt ? ' 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. CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 127 ' Ten o'clock moonlight,' said that contriving person to her- self 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 con- fidence 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 a 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 diffi- culty 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 un weaned 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 ner. 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. Ley- burn 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 has been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me 1 ' 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 towards 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 J 128 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 1 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 imagina- tions 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. Ley- burn'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 pet- tishness. ' 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 ! ' CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 129 'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, choked. ' Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brighten- ing. ' 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. ' Oli, 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 endear- ment 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 vulgarising, 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 to-night, 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. Thorn- burgh 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 honour. And meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of 130 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i two estimates of life the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is for ever 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. Ley- burn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never men- tioned Elsmere's name to any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the after- noon 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 towards sunset. Catherine walked on fast towards 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 housekeep- ing 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 CHAI-. x WESTMORELAND 131 has been so shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, in- vaded 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, towards 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 towards 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 northwards 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 realise her mission afresh, and the scene which lay before her. CHAPTEE X MAKY 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 Mid- summer 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 favoured, 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 was 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 neighbours with whom the girl could fraternise, and Whinborough was "too far off to provide any 132 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion and excite- ment. In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse attractions of a young farmer in the neighbouring 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 realised 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 recognised 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 Mid- summer 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 neighbourhood. 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 legs CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 133 from the shaft of the carrier's cart ; his absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less buoyancy and in- ventiveness 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 first 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 neighbour 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 an.d 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 aiar, 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 mother's favourite seat, sat Mary Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, her eyes staring into the parlour 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 towards 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 upstairs wi' ye.' And he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a staircase to the upper storey. 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 134 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 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 towards 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 he 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 the 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 haa 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 neighbour from next door, Jim got her upstairs 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 downstairs 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 parlour 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