Robert Elsmere
done with young women nowadays, because _she_ didn't.
The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a subject,
recommended patience, declared that it might be all a mistake, and tried
hard to absorb himself in the consideration of 2s. 8d. _plus_ 2s. 11d.
_minus_ 9d.
'And I suppose, William,' said his wife to him at last, with withering
sarcasm, 'that you'd sit by and see Catherine break that young man's
heart, and send him back to his mother no better than he came here, in
spite of all the beef-tea and jelly Sarah and I have been putting into
him, and never lift a finger. You'd see his life _blasted_ and you'd do
nothing--nothing, I suppose.'
And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye.
'Of course,' cried the vicar, roused; 'I should think so. What good did
an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? Take care of
yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn't care for him, you can't make her.'
The vicar's wife rose, the upturned corners of her mouth saying
unutterable things.
'Doesn't care for him!' she echoed in a tone which implied that her
husband's headpiece was past praying for.
'Yes, doesn't care for him!' said the vicar, nettled. 'What else should
make her give him a snub like this?'
Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious
expression stole into her eyes.
'Oh, the Lord only knows!' she said, with a hasty freedom of speech
which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable as she shut the
door after her.
However, if the Higher Powers alone _knew_, Mrs. Thornburgh was
convinced that she could make a very shrewd guess at the causes of
Catherine's behaviour. In her opinion it was all pure 'cussedness.'
Catherine Leyburn had always conducted her life on principles entirely
different from those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as
she sat bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make
yourself and other people uncomfortable. Yet this was what this perverse
young woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had
fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make
the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous devoted ways. Catherine
encourages him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three
weeks more gay and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever
been known to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is
breathlessly awaiting the natural _denouement_, goes off to spend the
day that should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about
orphan asylums, leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to
look ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her--none at
all. It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but
must needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and
go into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what
to be at.
Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere
had been talking in the garden she had been discreetly waiting in the
back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off
she followed him with eager sympathetic eyes.
'Poor fellow!' she said to herself, but this time with the little tone
of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good
looks, never shrinks from assuming towards an elder male, especially a
male in love with some one else. 'I wonder whether he thinks he knows
anything about Catherine.'
But her own feeling to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it had
been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering
curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white
face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this
brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the
loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere
during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly
absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh
in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither
Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the
Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in
fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better
known to her than any one else.
'Oh, of course it's our salvation in this world and the next that's in
the way,' thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the
garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. 'I wish to
goodness Catherine wouldn't think so much about mine, at any rate. I
hate,' added this incorrigible young person--'I hate being the third
part of a "moral obstacle" against my will. I declare I don't believe we
should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a
wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh dear, I wish she'd let me
do something for her; I wish she'd ask me to black her boots for her, or
put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse
still, and I'd do it and welcome!'
It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. But there
was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, and that was Mrs.
Leyburn's unconsciousness.
'Mamma is too good,' thought the girl, with a little ripple of laughter.
'She takes it as a matter of course that all the world should admire us,
and she'd scorn to believe that anybody did it from interested motives.'
Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted to her daughters
to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. Of course the most
eligible persons would be only too thankful to marry them when the
moment came. Meanwhile her devotion was in no need of the confirming
testimony of lovers. It was sufficient in itself, and kept her mind
gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred to her to
notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special attentions to any one
in the family, she would have suggested with perfect _naivete_ that it
was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and
consideration, and she was of opinion that 'poor Richard's views' of the
degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen
this particular specimen.
Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, while Agnes
drove with her mother. On the way home she overtook Elsmere returning
from an errand for the vicar.
'It is not so bad,' she said to him, laughing, pointing to the sky; 'we
really might have gone.'
'Oh, it would have been cheerless,' he said simply. His look of
depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sympathy, a wild
wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she could just have shown
him Catherine as she looked last night! Why couldn't she talk it out
with him? Absurd conventions! She had half a mind to try.
But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her young
half-childish audacity.
'Catherine will have a good day for all her business,' she said
carelessly.
He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge yesterday
she could not stand it,--she must give him a hint how the land lay.
'I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. Mr. Elsmere,
what did you think of Aunt Ellen?'
Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young girl's
beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun.
'A most estimable person,' he said. 'Are you on good terms with her,
Miss Rose?'
'Oh dear, no!' she said, with a little face. 'I'm not a Leyburn; I wear
aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has "special leadings of the spirit" to
the effect that the violin is a soul-destroying instrument. Oh
dear!'--and the girl's mouth twisted--'it's alarming to think, if
Catherine hadn't been Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might have
been!'
She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she caught the
sudden change of expression in his face.
'Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her--one can see that,' he
said, evidently speaking with some difficulty.
'Strength! Oh yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,' cried Rose, and
then was silent a moment. 'You know, Mr. Elsmere,' she went on at last,
obeying some inward impulse--'or perhaps you don't know--that, at home,
we are all Catherine's creatures. She does exactly what she likes with
us. When my father died she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was eight. We
came here to live--we were not very rich of course, and mamma wasn't
strong. Well, she did everything: she taught us--we have scarcely had
any teacher but her since then; she did most of the housekeeping; and
you can see for yourself what she does for the neighbours and poor folk.
She is never ill, she is never idle, she always knows her own mind. We
owe everything we are, almost everything we have, to her. Her nursing
has kept mamma alive through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says he
never knew any business affairs better managed than ours, and Catherine
manages them. The one thing she never takes any care or thought for is
herself. What we should do without her I can't imagine; and yet
sometimes I think if it goes on much longer none of us three will have
any character of our own left. After all, you know, it may be good for
the weak people to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only
believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong people _needn't_
be always trampling on themselves,--if they only knew----'
She stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. Her eyes
were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under a strange mixture
of feelings--sympathy, reverence, and a passionate inner admiration
struggling with rebellion and protest.
They had reached the gate of the vicarage. Elsmere stopped and looked at
his companion with a singular lightening of expression. He saw perfectly
that the young impetuous creature understood him, that she felt his
cause was not prospering, and that she wanted to help him. He saw that
what she meant by this picture of their common life was that no one need
expect Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey; that she wanted to impress
on him in her eager way that such lives as her sister's were not to be
gathered at a touch, without difficulty, from the branch that bears
them. She was exhorting him to courage,--nay, he caught more than
exhortation--a sort of secret message from her bright excited looks and
incoherent speech that made his heart leap. But pride and delicacy
forbade him to put his feeling into words.
'You don't hope to persuade me that your sister reckons _you_ among the
weak persons of the world?' he said, laughing, his hand on the gate.
Rose could have blessed him for thus turning the conversation. What on
earth could she have said next?
She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with Bob.
Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering meditatively over the
cloudy fells. After all he was only where he was, before the blessed
madness, the upflooding hope, nay, almost certainty, of yesterday. His
attack had been for the moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose's manner
that Catherine's action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning
nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying to
persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be ominous. Well,
then, at worst, when they met they would meet on a different footing,
with a sense of something critical between them. Oh, if he did but know
a little more clearly how he stood! He spent a noonday hour on a gray
rock on the side of the fell between Whindale and Marrisdale, studying
the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the bit of white road. The
minutes passed in a kind of trance of memory. Oh, that soft child-like