Robert Elsmere
watching Mrs. Thornburgh's preparations.
'You're sure you don't mind driving home alone?' she said in a troubled
voice. 'Mayn't I go with you?'
'My dear, certainly not! As if I wasn't accustomed to going about alone
at my time of life! No, no, my dear, you go and have your walk; you'll
get home before the rain. Ready, James.'
The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his charge so
anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out of his hand and gave a
flick to the pony, who swerved and started off in a way which would have
made his mistress clamorously nervous under any other circumstances.
Catherine stood looking after her.
'Now, then, right about face and quick march!' exclaimed the vicar.
'We've got to race that cloud over the Pike. It'll be up with us in no
time.'
Off they started, and were soon climbing the slippery green slopes, or
crushing through the fern of the fell they had descended earlier in the
afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the
vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over
its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very
close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.
'You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully
into his pocket-book; 'but it is worth while to be crushed by any one
who can give so much ground for their knowledge. How you do know your
mountains--from their peasants to their plants!'
'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among
them,' she said, smiling.
'Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?'
'Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the
winter. And our winter is often not as hard as yours down south.'
'Do you go on with that night-school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?' he
said, with another note in his voice.
Catherine looked at him and coloured. 'Rose has been telling tales,' she
said. 'I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the
family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always
take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the
ground, and Bob is always with me; aren't you, Bob?'
And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her,
blinking with a proudly confidential air as though to remind her that
there were a good many such secrets between them.
'I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, the
hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing about you, the
black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream, perhaps,
running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good
angels going with you.'
She flushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her
strangely.
'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and
very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elsmere; the
rain has beaten us!'
He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out
in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side
gleamed green and vivid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging
out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in
the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness;
children with their petticoats over their heads ran homewards along the
road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading
broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it
came, and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was
beating in their faces.
'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help
you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'
He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackintosh. The vicar
in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair,
then hurried after the others, evidently with the view of performing
for them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.
Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless
silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides.
He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form and his big
umbrella as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of
the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over
which the rain streams were running, that his heart filled with the
shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder
and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that
face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and
the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their
valley life?
Suddenly he heard an exclamation, and saw her run on in front of him.
What was the matter? Then he noticed for the first time that Rose, far
ahead, was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain
had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was Catherine
stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's
determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before
she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by some shaft
from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it.
'Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?'
'Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said briefly. 'She has a very thin
dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.'
'You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once.
She laughed in his face.
'As if I should do anything of the sort!'
'You must,' he said, quietly stripping it off. 'Do you think that you
are always to be allowed to go through the world taking thought of other
people and allowing no one to take thought for you?'
He held it out to her.
'No, no! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong yet. And I have
often told you that nothing hurts me.'
He hung it deliberately over his arm. 'Very well, then, there it stays!'
And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the point of
laughter.
'Mr. Elsmere, be sensible!' she said presently, her look changing to one
of real distress. 'I should never forgive myself if you got a chill
after your illness!'
'You will not be called upon,' he said in the most matter-of-fact tone.
'Men's coats are made to keep out weather,' and he pointed to his own,
closely buttoned up. 'Your dress--I can't help being disrespectful under
the circumstances--will be wet through in ten minutes.'
Another silence. Then he overtook her.
'Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her.
There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain splashed on
the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest,
most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he
joined.
'Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!'
But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man,
as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth's 'Louisa,'
and the poet's cry of longing.
And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration
he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something--what was
it?--drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of
her mingled with his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon.
They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side of the pass.
To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten
and dark, the river issuing from the heart of it like an angry voice.
'What a change!' he said, coming up with her as the path widened. 'How
impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was
lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises,
watching the white butterflies on the turf, and reading "Laodamia"!'
'"Laodamia"!' she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 'Is it one
of those you like best?'
'Yes,' he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the
umbrella. 'How superb it is--the roll, the majesty of it; the severe
chastened beauty of the main feeling, the individual lines!'
And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.
'It was my father's favourite of all,' she said, in the low vibrating
voice of memory. 'He said the last verse to me the day before he died.'
Robert recalled it--
'Yet tears to human suffering are due,
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone
As fondly we believe.'
Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?
'Was he happy in his school life?' he asked gently. 'Was teaching what
he liked?'
'Oh yes--only--' Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though
drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never
knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always
believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that
anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was
always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest,
purest, most devoted----'
She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was
startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the
few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her
father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the
child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now
after this lapse of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous,
despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had
gone uncomforted out of life--even by her--even by religion?--was that
the sting?
'Oh, I can understand!' he said reverently--'I can understand. I have
come across it once or twice, that fierce self-judgment of the good. It
is the most stirring and humbling thing in life.' Then his voice
dropped. 'And after the last conflict--the last "quailing breath"--the
last onslaughts of doubt or fear--think of the Vision waiting--the
Eternal Comfort--
'"Oh, my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night!"'
The words fell from the softened voice like noble music.
There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eyes to his. They swam in
tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were radiance itself. It
seemed to him as though she came closer to him like a child to an elder
who has soothed and satisfied an inward smart.
They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the swollen river
which roared below them. On the opposite bank two umbrellas were
vanishing through the field gate into the road, but the vicar had turned
and was waiting for them. They could see his becloaked figure leaning on
his stick through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the
tumbling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds
seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the valley.
The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first and held out
his hand to her. When they started she would have refused his help with
scorn. Now, after a moment's hesitation she yielded, and he felt her
dear weight on him as he guided her carefully from stone to stone. In
reality it is both difficult and risky to be helped over
stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way
through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her
lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone
to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in
his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his;
and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that