Robert Elsmere
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 administering
some sal-volatile to her.'
'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out of
her on the subject of the young man?'
'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only
remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In
between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we
had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making of them and the
cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a
young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular
preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her
when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I
held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to the point again,
gently, but firmly, and now I think I know all I want to know about the
interesting stranger.'
'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently
up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order in
them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy
Land, and his hair has been 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 perfections and the
aesthetic freedom of her attire.
'Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment is always
seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand before a mine.
Mr. Elsmere is the match--we are the mine!'
Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright rippling
laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own value, and in no hurry
to force an estimate of it on the male world.
'Well,' said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed with her
gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, 'there is no saying. "Propinquity does
it"--as Mrs. Thornburgh is always reminding us.--But where _can_
Catherine be? She went out directly after lunch.'
'She has gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at the Tysons--at
least I heard her talking to mamma about him, and she went out with a
basket that looked like beef-tea.'
Rose frowned a little.
'And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see Mrs. Robson,
instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I 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, 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 experience, rested kindly, but
only half consciously, on her younger sister, as Agnes softly nodded and
smiled to her. Evidently she was a good deal older than the other
two--she looked about six-and-twenty, a young and vigorous woman in the
prime of health and strength. The lines of the form were rather thin and
spare, but they were softened by the loose bodice and long full skirt of
her dress, and by the folds of a large white muslin handkerchief which
was crossed over her breast. The face, sheltered by the plain shady hat,
was also a little spoilt from the point of view of beauty by the
sharpness of the lines about the chin and mouth, and by a slight
prominence of the cheekbones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish gray, were
fine, the nose delicately cut, the brow smooth and beautiful, while the
complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air and
Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate austere
charm, something which 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 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?'
'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.
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 hand sat Mrs. Leyburn, a tall delicate-looking woman,
wrapped in a white shawl, about whom there were only three things to be
noticed--an amiable temper, a sufficient amount of weak health to excuse
her all the more tiresome duties of life, and an incorrigible tendency
to sing the praises of her daughters at all times and to all people. The
daughters winced under it: Catherine, because it was a positive pain to
her to 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 associations. The oak settle
near the fire, the oak sideboard running along one side of the room, the
black oak table with carved legs at which they sat, were genuine pieces
of old Westmoreland work, which had belonged to their grandfather. The
heavy carpet covering the stone floor of what twenty years before had
been the kitchen of the 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 outline, and bearing a strong
resemblance to Catherine; a line of silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece;
on the walls were prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals,
photographs of Greece, and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and
Milton; while a bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college
books and college prizes and the 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