Robert Elsmere
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 all.
He would have had the Church make peace with the Dissenters; 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 his in the _Record_ against admitting
Unitarians to the Universities or allowing them to sit in Parliament.
England is a Christian State, he said; they are not Christians; they
have no right in her except on sufferance. Well, I suppose he was about
right,' said the vicar with a sigh. 'We are all so 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 children know any
unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. He impressed it upon
them as their special sacred duty, in a time of wicked enmity to
religion, to cherish the faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife
and daughters to live on here after his death that they might be less in
danger spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have more
opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was also
some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children for the
godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach himself for
having in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he
might have helped to raise.'
'Well, but,' said Robert, 'all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don't
see the father in the two younger girls.'
'Ah, there is Catherine's difficulty,' said the vicar, shrugging his
shoulders. 'Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father's
death! She came down to see me in the 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 inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his
own, in his own domain.
'I should like to know the secret of the little musician's
independence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of blood at
all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'
'Oh, I don't know that! There's more than you think, or Catherine
wouldn't have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she
gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.'
'And why shouldn't she?'
'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you're not, to
remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course
nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would
no more have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her
family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling
than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard
him take a text out of the _Imitation_ and lecture Rose when she was
quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to
give her music-lessons. "Woe to them"--yes, that was it--"that inquire
many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving
me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that
brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs.
Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow,
and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I daresay, 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. I 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 miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little
wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this
humdrum place, and she may kick over the traces.'
'She's pretty enough for anything and anybody,' said Robert.
The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man's critical and
meditative look reassured him.
The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for
a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the
frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the vicarage garden. It was
Mrs. Thornburgh's accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood
inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for
them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.
'My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should
have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from
Randall's. I've had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking
back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if
we'd had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears----'
The vicar's wife paused. Her square short figure was between the two
girls; she had on 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?' she inquired,
beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose's arm, and
bringing out the last words with a rush.
Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose's eye, but she answered for them both
demurely.
'We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.'
'Explain!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh. 'I should think it explains itself. At
least if you'd been in this house the last twenty-four hours you'd think
so. Since the moment when he first met her, it's been "Miss Leyburn,"
"Miss Leyburn," all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye
from the beginning.'
Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was
pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness
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, _nothing_ to be said
against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he's a penny. A nice living, only
his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever stepped.'
Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls,
who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat,
looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting
her have her budget out.
'And now, of course,' she resumed, taking breath, and chilled a little
by their silence, 'now, of course, I want to know about Catherine?' She
regarded them with anxious interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly
shook her head.
'What!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, 'oh,
you can't know anything in two days.'
'That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening; 'we can't know anything in
two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes
to anybody, till the 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.
Thornburgh.
'Well, _what_ am I to do, my dears?' she said at last helplessly. 'Look
at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it's only to amuse
Robert.'
Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence and
a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes,
having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give
her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one
picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they
would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy
of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they departed
to their early dinner, leaving the vicars wife decidedly less
self-confident than they found her.
'The first matrimonial excitement of the family,' cried Agnes as they
walked home. 'So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been
besieged!'
'It will be all moonshine,' Rose replied decisively. 'Mr. Elsmere may
lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the
clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air
of an angel, to give him his _coup de grace_. As I said before--poor
fellow!'
Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the
whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she
understood that there was a soreness at the bottom of Rose's heart that
was always showing itself in unexpected connections.
There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for assisting
Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her expeditions, but
without them Robert Elsmere would have been still man enough to see
Catherine Leyburn every day. He loitered about the roads along which she
must needs pass to do her many offices of charity; he offered the vicar
to take a class in the school, and was 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 inconvenient respect
for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted