Robert Elsmere
Or, '_How provoking he was that afternoon! how cold that evening!_'
Nothing else--the pronoun remained ambiguous.
'I want a friend!' she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in
the bosom of High Fell, 'I want a friend badly. Yet my lover deserts me,
and I send away my friend!'
One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were wandering round
the churchyard together, enjoying a break of sunny weather after days of
rain. Mrs. Thornburgh's personal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps
a little more defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first
knew her. The vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle
more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of
life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But the
performance through which his wife was now taking him tried him
exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with difficulty. She had had
an attack of bronchitis in the spring, and was still somewhat
delicate--a fact which to his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him.
For she would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas which
he disliked, and in which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming
pleasure. The vicar was of opinion that when his latter end overtook him
he should meet it on the whole as courageously as other men. But he was
altogether averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it,
beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to
that inquisitive affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which
many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the vicar.
At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the precise spots in
the little churchyard where it seemed to her it would be pleasant to
rest. There was one corner in particular which attracted her, and she
stood now looking at it with measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth.
'William, I wish you would come here and help me!'
The vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose.
'William!' imperatively.
The vicar turned unwillingly.
'You know, William, if you wouldn't mind lying with your feet _that_
way, there would be just room for me. But, of course, if you _will_ have
them the other way----' The shoulders in the old black silk mantle went
up, and the gray curls shook dubiously.
The vicar's countenance showed plainly that he thought the remark worse
than irrelevant.
'My dear,' he said crossly, 'I am not thinking of those things, nor do I
wish to think of them. Everything has its time and place. It is close on
tea, and Miss Rose says she must be going home.'
Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a disapproving
sigh.
'You talk, William,' she said severely, 'as if you were a young man,
instead of being turned sixty-six last birthday.'
And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking the results
aloud. But the vicar was obdurately deaf. He strolled on with Rose, who
was chattering to him about a visit to Manchester, and the little church
gate clicked behind them. Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her
measurements. They were only really interesting to her after all when
the vicar was by. She hurried after them as fast as her short squat
figure would allow, and stopped midway to make an exclamation.
'A carriage!' she said, shading her eyes with a very plump hand,
'stopping at Greybarns!'
The one road of the valley was visible from the churchyard, winding
along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at least two miles.
Greybarns was a farmhouse just beyond Burwood, about half a mile away.
Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with interest.
'Mary Jenkinson taken ill!' she said. 'Of course, that's Doctor Baker!
Well, it's to be hoped it won't be twins _this_ time. But, as I told her
last Sunday, "It's constitutional, my dear." I knew a woman who had
three pairs! Five o'clock now. Well, about _seven_ it'll be worth while
sending to inquire.'
When she overtook the vicar and his companion, she began to whisper
certain particulars into the ear that was not on Rose's side. The vicar,
who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of a fine natural modesty, would
have preferred that his wife should refrain from whispering on these
topics in Rose's presence. But he submitted lest opposition should
provoke her into still more audible improprieties; and Rose walked on a
step or two in front of the pair, her eyes twinkling a little. At the
vicarage gate she was let off without the customary final gossip. Mrs.
Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate hanging over Mary Jenkinson
that she, for once, forgot to catechise Rose as to any marriageable
young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great
country-house of the neighbourhood; an operation which formed the
invariable pendant to any of Rose's absences.
So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homewards. As she
did so she became aware of a man's figure walking along the space of
road between Greybarns and Burwood, the western light behind it.
Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had brought him five
miles on a false alarm, in the provoking manner of matrons, the shortest
professional visit could not be over in this time.
She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the gate of Burwood,
and involuntarily slackened step. The man who was approaching, catching
sight of the slim girlish figure in the broad hat and pink and white
cotton dress, hurried up. The colour rushed to Rose's cheek. In another
minute she and Hugh Flaxman were face to face.
She could not hide her astonishment.
'Why are you not in Scotland?' she said after she had given him her
hand. 'Lady Helen told me last week she expected you in Ross-shire.'
Directly the words left her mouth she felt she had given him an opening.
And why had Nature plagued her with this trick of blushing?
'Because I am here!' he said smiling, his keen dancing eyes looking down
upon her. He was bronzed as she had never seen him. And never had he
seemed to bring with him such an atmosphere of cool pleasant strength.
'I have slain so much since the first of July that I can slay no more. I
am not like other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and goes to
sleep after a while. So this is Burwood?
He had caught her just on the little sweep leading to the gate, and now
his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, with its trim garden,
its overgrown porch and open casement windows. She dared not ask him
again why he was there. In the properest manner she invited him 'to come
in and see mamma.'
'I hope Mrs. Leyburn is better than she was in town? I shall be
delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon? I left my carriage
half a mile below, and have been revelling in the sun and air. I am loth
to go indoors yet awhile. Are you busy? Would it trouble you to put me
in the way to the head of the valley? Then, if you will allow me, I will
present myself later.'
Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of things as his
appearance. But she turned and walked beside him, pointing out the crags
at the head, the great sweep of High Fell, and the pass over to
Ullswater, with as much _sangfroid_ as she was mistress of.
He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he had
bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that he had stopped
at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the High Fell pass to
Ullswater, and making his way thence to Ambleside, Grasmere, and
Keswick.
'But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater?' cried Rose
incautiously.
'Certainly. You see my hotel,' and he pointed, smiling, to a white
farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where the road turned
towards Whinborough. 'I persuaded the good woman there to give me a bed
for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had
friends in these parts, I came on to explore.'
Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.
'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever stayed in
Whindale.'
'Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of
Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being
with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my
Murray in the railway carriage.'
He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong
sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand
on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night
before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to
be anything but natural--the child of the moment!
'You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you
last,' she said demurely. 'When did you leave Norway?'
They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had
been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was
giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown by
the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in the vicarage
hedge, laughing and chatting. Rose became aware of a window and a gray
head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash,
instantly suppressed, that shot across her face.
Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where
Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bedridden Jim
still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the hazel
plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable
night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a
scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High
Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose
that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never
her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or
another till they were at the top.
Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting
his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and
relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving
freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the
crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the
valley, the white sparkle of the river.
'It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and frugal
beauty--the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no peaks, no fiords!'
'No!' said Rose scornfully, 'we are not Norway, and we are not
Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once inform you that we
have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps only one place in the
district where a man who was not an idiot could succeed in killing
himself.'
He looked at her, calmly smiling.
'You are angry,' he said, 'because I make comparisons. You are wholly on
a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world that pleased me half as
much as this bare valley, that gray roof'--and he pointed to Burwood
among its trees--'and this knoll of rocky ground.'
His look travelled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. He threw
himself down on the short grass beside her.
'It rained this morning,' she still had the spirit to murmur under her
breath.
He took not the smallest heed.
'Do you know,' he said--and his voice dropped--'can you guess at all why
I am here to-day?'
'You had never seen the Lakes,' she repeated in a prim voice, her eyes
still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. 'You stopped at
Whinborough, intending to take the pass over to Ullswater, thence to
make your way to Ambleside and Keswick--or was it to Keswick and
Ambleside?'
She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met abashed her
again.
'_Taquine!_' he said, 'but you shall not laugh me out of countenance. If