Robert Elsmere
roadside, mendin' his cart. And he stopped did Edward, and gave him the
Word _strong_. The man seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm.
"No harm!" says Edward, "when you're just doin' the devil's work every
nail you put in, and hammerin' away, mon, at your own damnation." But
here's his letter.' And while Rose turned away to a far window to hide
an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag,
took out a treasured paper, and read with the emphasis and the unction
peculiar to a certain type of revivalism--
'"Poor sinner! He was much put about. I left him, praying the Lord my
shaft might rankle in him; ay, might fester and burn in him till he
found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed very dark and destitute--no
respect for the Word or its ministers. A bit farther I met a boy
carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went on,
taking, without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag.
Glorious work! If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways
for God, sin will skulk yet."'
A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put it back into
her bag.
'There's your true minister,' she said, with a large judicial utterance
as she closed the snap. 'Wherever he goes Edward must have souls!'
And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman in the
window.
'He must have very hard work with so much walking and preaching,' said
Catherine gently.
Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd little scene
with other eyes.
'His work is just wearin' him out,' said the mother fervently; 'but a
minister doesn't think of that. Wherever he goes there are sinners
saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nuneaton. At family prayer
alone there were five saved. And at the prayer-meetin's on the Sabbath
such outpourin's of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells me,
just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,' she added, turning
suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation,
'with the labours of our Wesleyan ministers?'
'No,' said Robert, with his pleasant smile, 'not personally. But I have
the greatest respect for them as a body of devoted men.'
The look of battle faded from the woman's face. It was not an
unpleasant face. He even saw strange reminiscences of Catherine in it at
times.
'You're aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take any credit to
themselves--it's grace, sir, all grace.'
'Aunt Ellen,' said Catherine, while a sudden light broke over her face;
'I just want you to take Edward a little story from me. Ministers are
good things, but God can do without them.'
And she laid her hand on her aunt's knee with a smile in which there was
the slightest touch of affectionate satire.
'I was up among the fells the other day,' she went on; 'I met an elderly
man cutting wood in a plantation, and I stopped and asked him how he
was. "Ah, miss," he said, "verra weel, verra weel. And yet it was nobbut
Friday morning lasst, I cam oop here, awfu' bad in my sperrits like. For
my wife she's sick, an' a' dwinnelt away, and I'm gettin' auld, and
can't wark as I'd used to, and it did luke to me as thoo there was
naethin' afore us nobbut t' Union. And t' mist war low on t' fells, and
I sat oonder t' wall, wettish and broodin' like. And theer--all ov a
soodent the Lord found me! Yes, puir Reuben Judge, as dawn't matter to
naebody, the Lord found un. It war leyke as thoo His feeace cam
a-glisterin' an' a-shinin' through t' mist. An' iver sence then, miss,
aa've jest felt as thoo aa could a' cut an' stackt all t' wood on t'
fell in naw time at a'!" And he waved his hand round the mountain side
which was covered with plantation. And all the way along the path for
ever so long I could hear him singing, chopping away, and quavering out,
"Rock of Ages."'
She paused, her delicate face, with just a little quiver in the lip,
turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hidden fire had leapt
suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, the attitude, was simplicity and
unconsciousness itself. Robert had never heard her say anything so
intimate before. Nor had he ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She
had transmuted the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous prose;
she had turned it into purest poetry. Only the noblest souls have such
an alchemy as this at command, thought the watcher on the other side of
the room with a passionate reverence.
'I wasn't thinkin' of narrowin' the Lord down to ministers,' said Mrs.
Fleming, with a certain loftiness. 'We all know He can do without us
puir worms.'
Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to go. Much of
her apparel had slipped away from her in the fervours of revivalist
anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves and reticule--officiously
helped by the younger girls--Robert crossed over to Catherine.
'You lifted us on to your own high places!' he said, bending down to
her; 'I shall carry your story with me through the fells.'
She looked up, and as she met his warm moved look a little glow and
tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted expression. He broke
the spell; she sank from the poet into the embarrassed woman.
'You must see my old man,' she said, with an effort; 'he is worth a
library of sermons. I must introduce him to you.'
He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could only stand
impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming's disappearance, that he might
somehow appropriate her eldest niece. But alas! when she went, Catherine
went out with her, and reappeared no more, though he waited some time.
He walked home in a whirl of feeling; on the way he stopped, and leaning
over a gate which led into one of the river-fields gave himself up to
the mounting tumult within. Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos of
hope and memory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost
manhood.
'In her and her only is my heart's desire! She and she only if she will,
and God will, shall be my wife!'
He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the evening beauty
of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change--
'Tears
Were in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.'
He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never felt
before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he had sprung
suddenly into maturity--entered at last into the full human heritage.
But the very intensity and solemnity of his own feeling gave him a rare
clear-sightedness. He realised that he had no certainty of success,
scarcely even an entirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they
not together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? Would they
not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after? Were not time and
opportunity all his own? How kind her looks are even now! Courage! And
through that maidenly kindness his own passion shall send the last,
transmuting glow.
CHAPTER VII
The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and
persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing
class at the school, closed the school door behind her with a sigh of
relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood.
'How abominably they sang this morning!' she said to herself with
curving lip. 'Talk of the natural north-country gift for music! What
ridiculous fictions people set up! Dear me, what clouds! Perhaps we
shan't get our walk to Shanmoor after all, and if we don't, and
if--if--' her cheek flushed with a sudden excitement--'if Mr. Elsmere
doesn't propose, Mrs. Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes
and I can do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if _something_ doesn't
come off to-day, she'll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and
asking _Catherine_ her intentions, which would ruin everything.'
Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was
freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the
summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged
curtain was already lowering.
'It will hold up yet awhile,' she thought, 'and if it rains later we can
get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.'
And she walked on homewards meditating, her thin fingers clasped before
her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the
little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty many-coloured turmoil
about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which
was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full
of artistic odds and ends--her fiddle, of course, and piles of music,
her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a
number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still
ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood
photographs of musicians and friends--the spoils of her visits to
Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points
in the girl's memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd
medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She
had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighbourhood, and paid for it
with her own money. There a group of unfinished headlong sketches of the
most fiercely impressionist description--the work and the gift of a knot
of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little
Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her heart's
content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the present
day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young
artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when they come
home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival
art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north.
Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond
enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard;
at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad
enough to befriend his dead brother's children, who wanted nothing of
him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their
good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which he
touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it
pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose
went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired
artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged
her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the
pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris and Italy, and
set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone
apparently of all artists was destined never to know.
For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what
she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what,
thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free,
reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and
found Burwood waiting for her--Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely
valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For
Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her
it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the
most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most
determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world,' with all its
indefensible delights, to a cold other-world with its torturing
inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester
or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving
through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere as