Robert Elsmere
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 room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new
aspect of a man whose intellectual 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 powerfully. 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? 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. Thornburgh 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 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 communication. 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 commissions, 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, movements, leaders
of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes 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 generation.
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 diffidences.
Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homewards 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 implied 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 aptitudes to be explained unless the Great Designer
meant them to have a use and function in His world? 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 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 Whinborough. 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 Westmoreland 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 sitting 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' marvellous,' he heard
her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, 'some-thin' 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