Robert Elsmere
'Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you!'
Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother's side, and put her arms
round her waist.
'Yes, mother darling,' she said, half smiling.
'Oh, Catherine! if--if--you like Mr. Elsmere, don't mind--don't
think--about us, dear. We can manage--we can manage, dear!'
The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn's face is indescribable.
She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, her beautiful brows
drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn looked up at her with a pathetic mixture of
helplessness, alarm, entreaty.
'Mother, who has been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?' demanded
Catherine.
'Oh, never mind, dear, never mind,' said the widow hastily; 'I should
have seen it myself--oh, I know I should; but I'm a bad mother,
Catherine!' And she caught her daughter's dress and drew her towards
her. '_Do_ you care for him?'
Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid her head on her
mother's hands.
'I want nothing,' she said presently in a low voice of intense
emotion--'I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my life, I ask
for nothing more. I am abundantly--content.'
Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. The brown hair,
escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still pretty neck, a pink
spot of excitement was on each gently-hollowed cheek; she looked almost
younger than her pale daughter.
'But--he is very nice,' she said timidly. 'And he has a good living.
Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman's wife.'
'I ought to be, and I am your daughter,' said Catherine, smiling a
little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand.
Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps in
imagination she saw the vicar's wife. 'I think--I think,' she said very
seriously, 'I should like it!'
Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as though she
had felt a blow.
'Mother!' she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet still trying
to smile, 'do you want to send me away?'
'No, no!' cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. 'But if a nice man wants you to
marry him, Catherine? Your father would have liked him--oh, I know your
father would have liked him! And his manners to me are so pretty, I
shouldn't mind being _his_ mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother,
you know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.'
She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imaginations--the
pallor, the latent storm of Catherine's look--exciting her more and
more.
Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother's hand again.
'Dear little mother--dear, kind little mother! You are an angel, you
always are. But I think, if you'll keep me, I'll stay.'
And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Leyburn's knee.
'But _do_ you--_do_ you love him, Catherine?'
'I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.'
'Oh dear,' sighed Mrs. Leyburn, as though addressing a third person, the
tears in her mild eyes, 'she won't, and she _would_ like it, and so
should I!'
Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing.
'And I count for nothing to you, mother!' her deep voice quivering. 'You
could put me aside, you and the girls, and live as though I had never
been!'
'But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, Catherine!' cried
Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pettishness. 'People have to do
without their daughters. There's Agnes--I often think, as it is, you
might let her do more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it
might be a good thing--a very good thing--if there were a man to take
her in hand!'
'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, choked.
'Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening. 'They
say it _is_ such a nice house, Catherine, and such pretty country; and
I'm sure I should like his mother, though she _is_ Irish!'
It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn's life. In it the
heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling ironic touch of
circumstance laid upon it made it look even in her own eyes almost
ridiculous. What had she been living for, praying for, all these years?
She threw herself down by the widow's side, her face working with a
passion that terrified Mrs. Leyburn.
'Oh, mother, say you would miss me--say you would miss me if I went!'
Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women clung to each
other, weeping. Catherine's sore heart was soothed a little by her
mother's tears, and by the broken words of endearment that were lavished
on her. But through it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire
in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. It was the cheapening--the vulgarising,
so to speak, of her whole existence.
In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall various items
of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her
mother, and one of which startled her.
'He comes back to-night, my dear--and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and,
Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he _does_ care so much. Poor young man!'
And Mrs. Leyburn looked up at her now standing daughter with eyes as
woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.
'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You won't
sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornburgh than I am
already.'
Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and
Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which
the worn wedding-ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left
her at last to sleep.
'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed
widow to herself. 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!'
Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle
was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent
generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take
it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for
sanctification, for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honour. And
meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing
of two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world fairer
and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.
* * * * *
As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar
and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing
of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious
timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the
Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in
the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of
the dying girl, took a couple of hours' rest, and hurried off again. She
passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.
'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking
after her sister's retreating figure. 'It is all over! They can't meet
now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'
The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the
window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine's
coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling--to fling a
hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.
The stormy light of the afternoon was fading towards sunset. Catherine
walked on fast towards the group of houses at the head of the valley, in
one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with
Mrs. Thornburgh's housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically,
but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of
one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her
self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the
wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve,
extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed to
her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious
over-estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like one
ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepening her discomfiture at
every step. How rich her life had always been in the conviction of
usefulness--nay, indispensableness! Her mother's persuasions had dashed
it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her her
past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and
cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light.
And he? Still near her for a few short hours! Every pulse in her had
thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered him. But she will
see him no more. And she is glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have
discovered how cheaply they held her--those dear ones of hers for whom
she had lived till now! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity
what she had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured,
half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is gone she
will recover something of that moral equilibrium which has been so
shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she
has no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years crumbling
beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self-control.
As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less tempestuous.
The great wall of High Fell, towards which she was walking, seemed to
shelter her from its worst violence. But the hurrying clouds, the gleams
of lurid light which every now and then penetrated into the valley from
the west, across the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river
answering the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken shadow that
covered the group of houses and trees towards which she was walking, all
served to heighten the nervous depression which had taken hold of her.
As she neared the bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond
which northwards all was stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in
front of her the gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great
copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself by
both hands, try and realise her mission afresh, and the scene which lay
before her.
CHAPTER X
Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with
regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing
a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the victim of a fate sordid and
common enough, yet not without its elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen
months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely
old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in
which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no
doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away. She had been then
strong and well favoured, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed
beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such
as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom of
all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong
wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame.
Neither was to be found in sufficient measure within her home. Her
father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other up to a
certain point the natural instincts of kinship. On her uncle, whom she
regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers. She
was, indeed, the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the wool
with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on his
curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For the rest, they had no