Robert Elsmere
they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute
surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to
chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair.
And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the verge
of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in
resisting, but resist she must by the law of her nature.
Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon her
violin, and rushed through a Brahms's 'Liebeslied,' her eyes dancing,
her whole light form thrilling with the joy of it; and then with a
sudden revulsion she stopped playing, and threw herself down listlessly
by the open window. Close by against the wall was a little
looking-glass, by which she often arranged her ruffled locks; she
glanced at it now, it showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping
lips, and eyes darkened with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen.
'It is come to a pretty pass,' she said to herself, 'that I should be
able to think of nothing but schemes for getting Catherine married and
out of my way! Considering what she is and what I am, and how she has
slaved for us all her life, I seem to have descended pretty low. Heigh
ho!'
And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her hand. She was
half acting, acting to herself. Life was not really quite unbearable,
and she knew it. But it relieved her to overdo it.
'I wonder how much chance there is,' she mused presently. 'Mr. Elsmere
will soon be ridiculous. Why, _I_ saw him gather up those violets she
threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don't believe she
has realised the situation a bit. At least, if she has, she is as unlike
other mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does----'
She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie
jumped up on the window-sill, with her usual stealthy _aplomb_, and
rubbed herself against the girl's face.
'Oh, Chattie!' cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, 'if
Catherine 'll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be happy ever
afterwards, and set me free to live my own life a bit, I'll be so good,
you won't know me, Chattie. And you shall have a new collar, my beauty,
and cream till you die of it!'
And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a scarlet anemone
from a bunch on the table, stood opposite Chattie, who stood slowly
waving her magnificent tail from side to side, and glaring as though it
were not at all to her taste to be hustled and bustled in this way.
'Now, Chattie, listen! Will she?'
A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie's nose.
'Won't she? Will she? Won't she? Will---- Tiresome flower, why did
Nature give it such a beggarly few petals? If I'd had a daisy it would
have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz; and let's forget this wicked
world!'
And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss waltz,
dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her pretty feet
twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks blazed with a double
intoxication--the intoxication of movement, and the intoxication of
sound--the cat meanwhile following her with little mincing perplexed
steps, as though not knowing what to make of her.
'Rose, you madcap!' cried Agnes, opening the door.
'Not at all, my dear,' said Rose calmly, stopping to take breath.
'Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and
see!'
The weather held up in a gray grudging sort of way, and Mrs. Thornburgh
especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with the
expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be
driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others would
be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be
happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in
it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage 'man' in a most
delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not
confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had
given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his
secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the
neighbourhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest
chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue
could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing
that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might
be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and
playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so
worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh's state is easier imagined than
described.
The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together.
Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the
way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so it did not disquiet
him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a
lovely gaiety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the
others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the
towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.
And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised
to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on
a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice
this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she
held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even _she_ had
been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of
a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for
the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale,
and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And
then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression,
blown away by the winds,--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly
presence, a keen responsive eye?
Elsmere, indeed, was gaiety itself. He kept up an incessant war with
Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar's expense,
which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way;
he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form,
and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the
girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted
himself on Whindale.
'How fine all this black purple is!' he cried, as they topped the ridge,
and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by
line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in
the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. 'I had grown quite
tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.'
'Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?' said Catherine, with a little
mocking wonder. 'How wanton, how prodigal!'
'Does it deserve a Nemesis?' he said, laughing. 'Drowning from now till
I depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On
this enchanted soil all things are welcome!'
She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute to
the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his
stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a
little way off laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange
new pulse leapt up in Catherine.
'The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 'I think we
ought to be going on.'
And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till
they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have
tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and
Mrs. Thornburgh's gray curls shaking at the window.
'William!' she shouted, 'bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr.
Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the
visitors' book!'
While the girls went in Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the
bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The
low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right,
the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its
greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his
left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a
little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great
slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighbourhood,
and a tiny towered church--the scene on the Sabbath of Mr. Mayhew's
ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind
the inn masses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into
a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing.
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general, the
colour was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and
purple background. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily,
trying to fix it there for ever.
Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread
in a light upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of
the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors' book. The scrambling,
chattering meal passed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs.
Thornburgh's small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face,
as though to say, 'What--_no_ news yet? Nothing happened?' As for
Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest
moments of existence, he remembered little afterwards but the scene: the
peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer
season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a
stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose's golden head and heavy amber
necklace, and the figure at the vicar's right, in a gown of a little
dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.
When tea was over they lounged out on the bridge. There was to be no
long lingering, however. The clouds were deepening, the rain could not
be far off. But if they started soon they could probably reach home
before it came down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet,
mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down
through a fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into
the clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one elbow,
and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and Catherine were
standing in front of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful
light slipping between two great rain-clouds.
'How well that hat and dress become your sister!' he said, the words
breaking, as it were, from his lips.
'Do you think Catherine pretty?' said Rose with an excellent pretence of
innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it harmlessly at a
water-wagtail balancing on a stone below.
He flushed. 'Pretty! You might as well apply the word to your mountains,
to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak!'
'Yes,' thought Rose, 'she is not unlike that high cold peak!' But her
girlish sympathy conquered her; it was very exciting, and she liked
Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face overspread with a quite
irrepressible smile. He reddened still more, then they stared into each
other's eyes, and without a word more understood each other perfectly.
Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque _bon camarade_
gesture. He pressed it warmly in his.
'That was nice of you!' he cried. 'Very nice of you! Friends then?'
She nodded, and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the vicar disturbed
them.
Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony carriage,