Robert Elsmere
She locks her hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the
worst struggle is _here_, the quickest agony _here_. But she does not
waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of
her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal
craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.
'_Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth
from all earthly comfort._'
'_If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of all
created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with
greater abundance of grace._'
'_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is
withdrawn from thee._'
'_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy
Creator...._'
She presses the sentence she has so often meditated in her long solitary
walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of George
Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally--
'Thy Saviour sentenced joy!'
Ay, sentenced it for ever--the personal craving, the selfish need, that
must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night
Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her
young new-born joy at the feet of the Master.
She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of
bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity.
Then there was a curious little epilogue.
'It is all over,' she said to herself tenderly. 'But he has taught me so
much--he has been so good to me--he is so good! Let me take to my heart
some counsel--some word of his, and obey it sacredly--silently--for
these days' sake.'
Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose.
How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling
it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he with
his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on
the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? 'I have tried to
stifle her passion,' she thought, 'to push it out of the way as a
hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step
in the ladder--to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh,
let me take his word for it--be ruled by him in this one thing, once!'
She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had
thrown herself at Elsmere's feet, that her cheek was pressed against
that young brown hand of his. How long the moment lasted she never knew.
When at last she rose stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the
lingering northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on the
moors; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly
white; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted valley and the
scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the
dale; they moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied them a
troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who
were bearing it away to burial.
As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale side of the fell
a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had talked to her only that
morning of Rose and Rose's desire, and she had received the news with
her habitual silence.
The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had gone upstairs.
Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn discovered that she looked
worn out, and she was sent off to bed. She went along the passage
quickly to Rose's room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was
inside, crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and
went in.
Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing-gown over her
shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all about her. She was
swaying backwards and forwards dreamily singing, and she started up when
she saw Catherine.
'Roeschen,' said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor of
heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden hair and the
half-covered shoulders, 'you never told me of that letter from
Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, Roeschen, I would never let you
have your way? Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong--I think I
have been wrong; you shall do what you will, Roeschen. If you want to go,
I will ask mother.'
Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. She was struck
dumb by this sudden breaking down of Catherine's long resistance. And
what a strange white Catherine! What did it mean? Catherine withdrew her
arms with a little sigh and moved away.
'I just came to tell you that, Roeschen,' she said, 'but I am very tired
and must not stay.'
Catherine 'very tired'! Rose thought the skies must be falling.
'Cathie!' she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained the door.
'Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty, odious little wretch.
But oh, tell me, what is the matter?'
And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate
strength.
The elder sister struggled to release herself.
'Let me go, Rose,' she said in a low voice. 'Oh, you _must_ let me go!'
And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes as though
trying to drive away the mist from them.
'Good-night! Sleep well.'
And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. Rose stood
staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a flood of many
feelings--remorse, love, fear, sympathy--threw herself face downwards on
her bed and burst into a passion of tears.
CHAPTER VIII
Catherine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out her
resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was
painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without a scene, without a
definite proposal and a definite rejection. It was no use letting things
drift. Something brusque and marked there must be. She quietly made her
dispositions.
It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before
she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless
night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it,
whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her
one supreme moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she
knew in the neighbourhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of them,
too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed indeed?
All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride in her own
spiritual strength. 'It was not mine,' she would have said with perfect
sincerity, 'but God's.' Still, whatever its source, it had been there at
command, and the reflection carried with it a sad sense of security. It
was as though a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate
himself on being bulletproof.
To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the thought
that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again, probably many times. The
period of his original invitation had been warmly extended by the
Thornburghs. She believed he meant to stay another week or ten days in
the valley. But in the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt
herself equal to any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the
hands clasped on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like
those of some old sepulchral monument.
The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the barometer with
abnormal interest. The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining,
and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of
the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to
picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar's wife.
She was all sighs and flightiness. She 'supposed they could go,' and
'didn't see what good it would do them'; she had twenty different views,
and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best
place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult that
Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household, and
withdrew lest male guests might be in the way. Then she pursued him into
the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to convey
it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously with many sighs, her cap much
askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for
suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her
committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an
extraordinary person it was!
Off he went, however, with his _Spectator_ under his arm, whistling.
Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open window, and tore the
flannel across she was preparing for a mothers' meeting with a noise
like the rattle of musketry. Whistling! She would like to know what
grounds he had for it, indeed! She always knew--she always said, and she
would go on saying--that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid.
Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the lightest heart.
By way of keeping all his anticipations within the bounds of strict
reason, he told himself that it was impossible he should see 'her' in
the morning. She was always busy in the morning.
He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a shrine. That was
her window, that upper casement with the little Banksia rose twining
round it. One night, when he and the vicar had been out late on the
hills, he had seen a light streaming from it across the valley, and had
thought how the mistress of the maiden solitude within shone 'in a
naughty world.'
In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about the garden.
She at once informed him with much languid plaintiveness that Catherine
had gone to Whinborough for the day, and would not be able to join the
picnic.
Elsmere stood still.
'_Gone!_' he cried. 'But it was all arranged with her yesterday!' Mrs.
Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was evidently much put out.
'So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere'--and the gentle widow dropped
her voice as though communicating a secret--'when Catherine's once made
up her mind, you may as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She
asked me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh--will you, please?--that she found it
was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of
business, and she must go.'
'_Mrs. Thornburgh!_' And not a word for him--for _him_ to whom she had
given her promise? She had gone to Whinborough to avoid him, and she had
gone in the brusquest way, that it might be unmistakable.
The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his long
coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. Leyburn was making
to him about the picnic. Was the wretched thing to come off after all?
He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But Mrs. Thornburgh
managed that for him. When he got back, he told the vicar in the hall of
Miss Leyburn's flight in the fewest possible words, and then his long
legs vanished up the stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room
shut behind him. A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Thornburgh's shrill voice
was heard in the hall calling to the servant.
'Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.'
And a minute after the vicar came up to his door.
'Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain; better put it
off.'
To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. The vicar
slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to have established
herself for the morning in his sanctum, though the parish accounts were
clamouring to be done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by
immemorial usage.
But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite to him with one
hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him if _he_ knew what was to be