Robert Elsmere
comfort or command, but sayings of fire and flame that burn their
coercing way through life and thought. We recite so glibly, 'He that
loseth his life shall save it;' and when we come to any of the common
crises of experience which are the source and the sanction of the words,
flesh and blood recoil. This girl amid her mountains had carried
religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in the
wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring
before her eyes; the great placid deeps of the soul are breaking up.
To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.
Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of
mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?
Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles
compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they
haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be
counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.
'Why, why am I so weak?' she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew
not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from
which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.
CHAPTER IX
Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we
have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's
study afterwards, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase
of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was
now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his
reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was
intangible. '_We are not here only to be happy_,' she had said to him,
with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.
The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of
her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting,
torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her
evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was
his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them,
all would be well?
As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment.
No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be
Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it as a binding obligation upon
her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three
persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary
need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather
braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.
But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter! He
realised with despair the brooding scrupulous force of moral passion to
which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father's nature working
in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the
world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a
lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realised to their
pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the
processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds!
Robert's heart sank before the memory of that frail indomitable look,
that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him
farewell. And yet, surely--surely under the willingness of the spirit
there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely,
now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white--trembling: her
hand had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh,
why had he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her
personality produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not
boldly caught her to himself, and, with all the eloquence of a
passionate nature, trampled on her scruples, marched through her
doubts, convinced--reasoned her into a blessed submission!
'And I will do it yet!' he cried, leaping to his feet with a sudden
access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile looking out into the
rainy evening, all the keen irregular face and thin pliant form
hardening into the intensity of resolve, which had so often carried the
young tutor through an Oxford difficulty, breaking down antagonism and
compelling consent.
At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the household he
was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got out of him that he had
been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, but for all her ingenuities of
cross-examination she got nothing more. Afterwards, when he and the
vicar were smoking together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two
should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater.
'I want to go away,' he said, with a hand on the vicar's shoulder, '_and
I want to come back_.' The deliberation of the last words was not to be
mistaken. The vicar emitted a contented puff, looked the young man
straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk to
Patterdale _via_ High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by
Haweswater.
To Mrs. Thornburgh Robert announced that he must leave them on the
following Saturday, June 24.
'You _have_ given me a good time, Cousin Emma,' he said to her, with a
bright friendliness which dumbfoundered her. A good time, indeed! with
everything begun and nothing finished; with two households thrown into
perturbation for a delusion, and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for
want of a little common sense and plain speaking, which _one_ person at
least in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been
ignored and brow beaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, in
his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the privacy of
the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife so exasperated. To
think what might have been, what she might have done for the race, but
for the whims of two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons,
that would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people to
manage them for them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret of
Elsmere's remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself certain
counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into
well-simulated slumber. However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious
that some time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of
him peremptorily, 'When do you get back, William?' To the best of his
memory the vicar had sleepily murmured, 'Thursday'; and had then heard,
echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, 'He goes Saturday--one
clear day!'
The following morning was gloomy but fine, and after breakfast the vicar
and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the High Fell
pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate farewell
to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech in the
garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on
northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.
Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appearance in the
school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in a new set of
covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah's love affairs, which were
always passing through some tragic phase or other, and into which Mrs.
Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into
Catherine Leyburn's. Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then, and found
her not at all disposed to talk to them on the great event of the
day--Elsmere's absence and approaching departure. They cautiously
communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of the
preceding afternoon; and Rose gave vent to one fiery onslaught on the
'moral obstacle' theory, during which Mrs. Thornburgh sat studying her
with small attentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side. But
for once in her life the vicar's wife was not communicative in return.
That the situation should have driven even Mrs. Thornburgh to finesse
was a surprising testimony to its gravity. What between her sudden
taciturnity and Catherine's pale silence, the girls' sense of expectancy
was roused to its highest pitch.
'They come back to-morrow night,' said Rose thoughtfully, 'and he goes
Saturday--10:20 from Whinborough--one day for the Fifth Act! By the way,
why did Mrs. Thornburgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home?'
She _had_ asked them, however; and with a pleasing sense of conspiracy
they complied.
It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs. Thornburgh, finding the
Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged way into the hall, and
after an unanswered knock at the drawing-room door, opened it and peered
in to see who might be there.
'May I come in?'
Mrs. Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the window absorbed
in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her more than she could
manage. Her card was mislaid, the girls were none of them at hand, and
she felt as helpless as she commonly did when left alone.
'Oh, do come in, please! So glad to see you. Have you been nearly blown
away?'
For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous north-west wind was still
rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were swaying and
groaning under the force of its onslaught.
'Well, it is stormy,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, stepping in and undoing all
the various safety pins and elastics which had held her dress high above
the mud. 'Are the girls out?'
'Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school; and Rose, I think, is
practising.'
'Ah, well,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a chair close by
her friend, 'I wanted to find you alone.'
Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, was flushed
and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped nervously on her lap, and
there was about her such an air of forcibly restrained excitement that
Mrs. Leyburn's mild eyes gazed at her with some astonishment. The two
women were a curious contrast: Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we
know, to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether it were
curls or cap-strings or conversation; Mrs. Leyburn tall and well
proportioned, well dressed, with the same graceful ways and languid
pretty manners as had first attracted her husband's attention thirty
years before. She was fond of Mrs. Thornburgh, but there was something
in the ebullient energies of the vicar's wife which always gave her a
sense of bustle and fatigue.
'I am sure you will be sorry to hear,' began her visitor, 'that Mr.
Elsmere is going.'
'Going?' said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. 'Why, I thought he
was going to stay with you another ten days at least.'
'So did I--so did he,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, and then pausing
with a most effective air of sudden gravity and 'recollection.'
'Then why--what's the matter?' asked Mrs. Leyburn, wondering.
Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a minute, and Mrs. Leyburn began to
feel a little nervous, her visitor's eyes were fixed upon her with so
much meaning. Urged by a sudden impulse she bent forward; so did Mrs.
Thornburgh, and their two elderly heads nearly touched.
'The young man is in love!' said the vicar's wife in a stage whisper,
drawing back after a pause, to see the effect of her announcement.
'Oh! with whom?' asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look brightening. She liked a
love affair as much as ever.
Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door was shut and
all safe--she felt herself a criminal, but the sense of guilt had an
exhilarating rather than a depressing effect upon her.
'Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you anything?'
'No!' said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and wider. She never