Robert Elsmere
resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line
with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder
grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules
performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped
her little foot.
'Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, 'three bars this: will no one
stop her!'
But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a
sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the
room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was
to end, and who was to be victor.
Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have been in any doubt as to that!
Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute nearly half a page behind
was left shrilly hanging in mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an
object of derision to gods and men.
'Ah! I took it a little fast!' said the lady, triumphantly looking up at
the discomfited clergyman.
'Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window curtain beside
him, that she might have her laugh in safety. 'Do they play like that in
Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?'
But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl--
'Rose! Rose! Don't go out again! It is your turn next!'
Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering
something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical power,
supposed that she felt it an indignity to be asked to play in such
company.
Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. Leyburn, a
summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, as it brought him once
more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn's 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. Seaton was
severely turning over a photograph book. In her opinion the violin was
an unbecoming instrument for young women. Miss Barks sat upright with
the studiously neutral expression which befits the artist asked to
listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the
other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him,
good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for
Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after
routing out from her music a couple of _Fantasie-Stuecke_, which she had
wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to
the 'rubbish' played by the preceding performers. She stood with her
lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black
coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot advanced, the
ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and arm, beautifully formed,
but still wanting the roundness of womanhood, raised high for action,
the lightly poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a
bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future
brilliance and empire.
Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial maiden learned
to play with this intelligence, this force, this delicate command of her
instrument? He was not a musician, and therefore could not gauge her
exactly, but he was more or less familiar with music and its standards,
as all people become nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society,
and he knew enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was
remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident was this,
when from the humorous piece with which the sisters led off--a dance of
clowns, but clowns of Arcady--they slid into a delicate rippling _chant
d'amour_, the long drawn notes of the violin rising and falling on the
piano accompaniment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did a
_fillette_, unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much
eloquence--only from the natural dreams of a girl's heart as to 'the
lovers waiting in the hidden years'?
But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the
room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure
beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an
impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look, which had piqued his
curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr.
Baker.
'Excellent!' cried Elsmere. 'How in the name of fortune, Miss Leyburn,
if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on so far in this remote
place?'
'She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we have there,'
said Catherine quietly; 'I believe she has been very well taught.'
'But surely,' he said warmly, 'it is more than teaching--more even than
talent--there is something like genius in it?'
She did not answer very readily.
'I don't know,' she said at last. '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 incredulous ears that
never--never as long as she lived--would she have Mrs. Seaton inside her
doors again.
'Her manners--' cried the vicar's wife, fuming--'her manners would
disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none--positively none!'
Then suddenly her round comfortable face brightened and broadened out
into a beaming smile--
'But, after all, William, say what you will--and you always do say
the most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success.
I know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him
_looking_--_looking_ at that little minx Rose while she was playing as
if he couldn't take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be
sure!'
The vicar, who had been standing with his back to the fireplace and his
hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks first of all with
lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half
compassionate, which made her start in her chair.
'Rose?' he said impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?'
It was very rarely indeed that on her own ground, so to speak, the vicar
ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh looked
at him in amazement.
'Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, 'that you didn't notice
that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn,
he had practically no attention for anybody else?'
Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening--and
her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to
ejaculate--
'Catherine!' she said feebly. 'Catherine! how absurd!'
But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of [the] window
after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that night
an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely
indispensable, more of a personage.
CHAPTER IV
Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure
of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little
more closely into the antecedents of the man who had suddenly roused so
much activity in her contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents are
important to us. For the interest of an uncomplicated story will
entirely depend upon the clearness with which the reader may have
grasped the general outlines of a quick soul's development. And this
development had already made considerable progress before Mrs.
Thornburgh set eyes upon her husband's cousin, Robert Elsmere.
Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well provided with this
world's goods; up to a certain moderate point, indeed, a 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 Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines and
Conservative traditions were pretty evenly mixed, with a result of the
usual respectable and inconspicuous kind. His virtues had descended
mostly to his daughters, while all his various weaknesses and fatuities
had blossomed into vices in the person of his eldest son and heir, the
Sir Mowbray Elsmere of Mrs. Seaton's early recollections.
Edward Elsmere, rector of Murewell in Surrey, and father of Robert, had
died before his uncle and patron; and his widow and son had been left to
face the world together. Sir William Elsmere and his nephew's wife had
not much in common, and rarely concerned themselves with each other.
Mrs. Elsmere was an Irishwoman by birth, with irregular Irish ways, and
a passion for strange garments, which made her the dread of the
conventional English squire; and, after she left the vicarage with her
son, she and her husband's uncle met no more. But when he died it was
found that the old man's sense of kinship, acting blindly and
irrationally, but with a slow inevitableness and certainty, had stirred
in him at the last in behalf of his great-nephew. He left him a money
legacy, the interest of which was to be administered by his mother till
his majority, and in a letter addressed to his heir he directed that,
should the boy on attaining manhood show any disposition to enter the
Church, all possible steps were to be taken to endow him with the family
living of Murewell, which had been his father's, and which at the time
of the old Baronet's death was occupied by another connection of the
family, already well stricken in years.
Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with his cousin
Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, but his father knew that
the tenacious Elsmere instinct was to be depended on for the fulfilment
of his wishes. And so it proved. No sooner was his father dead than Sir
Mowbray curtly communicated his instructions to Mrs. Elsmere, then
living at the town of Harden for the sake of the great public school
recently transported there. She was to inform him, when the right moment
arrived, if it was the boy's wish to enter the Church, and meanwhile he
referred her to his lawyers for particulars of such immediate benefits
as were secured to her under the late Baronet's will.
At the moment when Sir Mowbray's letter reached her, Mrs. Elsmere was
playing a leading part in the small society to which circumstances had
consigned her. She was the personal friend of half the masters and their
wives, and of at least a quarter of the school, while in the little town
which stretched up the hill covered by the new school buildings, she was
the helper, gossip, and 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 personality familiar to all. For
under those checked shawls which few women passed without an inward