Robert Elsmere
kept his young passion in awe. But he bent his head again over those
yielded hands, kissing them with dizzy unspeakable joy.
* * * * *
About twenty minutes later Catherine and Robert, having hurried back
with all speed from the top of Shanmoss, reached the farmhouse door. She
knocked. No one answered. She tried the lock; it yielded, and they
entered. No one in the kitchen. She looked disturbed and
conscience-stricken.
'Oh!' she cried to him, under her breath; 'have we been too long?' And
hurrying into the inner room she left him waiting.
Inside was a mournful sight. The two men and Mrs. Irwin stood close
round the settle, but as she came nearer, Catherine saw Mary Backhouse
lying panting on her pillows, her breath coming in loud gasps, her dress
and all the coverings of the bed showing signs of disorder and
confusion, her black hair tossed about her.
'It's bin awfu' work sence you left, miss,' whispered Mrs. Irwin to
Catherine excitedly, as she joined them. 'She thowt she heerd soombody
fleytin' and callin'--it was t' wind came skirlin' round t' place, an'
she aw' but thrown hirsel' oot o' t' bed, an' aa shooted for Jim, and
they came, and they and I--it's bin as much as we could a' du to hod
'er.'
'Luke! Steady!' exclaimed Jim. 'She'll try it again.'
For the hands were moving restlessly from side to side, and the face was
working again. There was one more desperate effort to rise, which the
two men checked--gently enough, but effectually--and then the exhaustion
seemed complete. The lids fell, and the struggle for breath was pitiful.
Catherine flew for some drugs which the doctor had left, and shown her
how to use. After some twenty minutes they seemed to give relief, and
the great haunted eyes opened once more.
Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Mary drank
mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. When Catherine
put down the glass the eyes followed her with a question which the lips
had no power to frame.
'Leave her now a little,' said Catherine to the others. 'The fewer
people and the more air the better. And please let the door be open; the
room is too hot.'
They went out silently, and Catherine sank down beside the bed. Her
heart went out in unspeakable longing towards the poor human wreck
before her. For her there was no morrow possible, no dawn of other and
softer skies. All was over: life was lived, and all its heavenly
capabilities missed for ever. Catherine felt her own joy hurt her, and
her tears fell fast.
'Mary,' she said, laying her face close beside the chill face on the
pillow, 'Mary, I went out; I climbed all the path as far as Shanmoss.
There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must tell you! _Can_ I make you
understand? I want you to feel that it is only God and love that are
real. Oh, think of them! He would not let you be hurt and terrified in
your pain, poor Mary. He loves you. He is waiting to comfort you--to set
you free from pain for ever; and He has sent you a sign by me.' ... She
lifted her head from the pillow, trembling and hesitating. Still that
feverish questioning gaze on the face beneath her, as it lay in deep
shadow cast by a light on the window-sill some paces away.
'You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the thought of which
has been tormenting and torturing you. You thought God would let a dark
lost spirit trouble you and take you away from Him--you, His child, whom
He made and whom He loves! And listen! While you thought you were
sending me out to face the evil thing, you were really my kind
angel--God's messenger--sending me to meet the joy of my whole life!
'There was some one waiting here just now,' she went on hurriedly,
breathing her sobbing words into Mary's ear. 'Some one who has loved me,
and whom I love. But I had made him sad, and myself; then when you sent
me out he came too; we walked up that path, you remember, beyond the
larchwood, up to the top, where the stream goes under the road. And
there he spoke to me, and I couldn't help it any more. And I promised to
love him and be his wife. And if it hadn't been for you, Mary, it would
never have happened. God had put it into your hand, this joy, and I
bless you for it! Oh, and Mary--Mary--it is only for a little little
while this life of ours! Nothing matters--not our worst sin and
sorrow--but God, and our love to Him. I shall meet you some day--I pray
I may--in His sight and all will be well, the pain all forgotten--all!'
She raised herself again and looked down with yearning passionate pity
on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer of heart to heart! There were
tears forming under the heavy lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed
and soft. Slowly the feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an
intense expectant silence.
There was a faint breathing from the lips; she stooped and caught it.
'Kiss me!' said the whisper; and she laid her soft fresh lips to the
parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her head again Mary still
held her hand; Catherine softly stretched out hers for the opiate Dr.
Baker had left; it was swallowed without resistance, and a quiet to
which the invalid had been a stranger for days stole little by little
over the wasted frame. The grasp of the fingers relaxed, the laboured
breath came more gently, and in a few more minutes she slept. Twilight
was long over. The ghost-hour was past, and the moon outside was slowly
gaining a wider empire in the clearing heavens.
* * * * *
It was a little after ten o'clock when Rose drew aside the curtain at
Burwood and looked out.
'There is the lantern,' she said to Agnes, 'just by the vicarage. How
the night has cleared!'
She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. Mrs. Leyburn was
sitting by the bit of fire that was generally lit for her benefit in the
evenings, her white shawl dropping gracefully about her, a copy of the
_Cornhill_ on her lap. But she was not reading, she was meditating, and
the girls thought her out of spirits. The hall door opened.
'There is some one with Catherine!' cried Rose, starting up. Agnes
suspended her letter.
'Perhaps the vicar,' said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh.
A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the doorway stood Elsmere.
Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the little stairs behind him.
Elsmere's look was enough for the two girls. They understood in an
instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact with love is
intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though the romance be not
hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat bewildered.
Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand.
'Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn?' he said, his boyish looks
aglow, his voice unsteady. 'Will you let me be a son to you?'
Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked up at him
helplessly.
'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, where is Catherine?'
'I brought her home,' he said gently. 'She is mine, if you will it. Give
her to me again!'
Mrs. Leyburn's face worked pitifully. The rectory and the wedding dress,
which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts since her last sight
of Catherine, sank out of them altogether.
'She has been everything in the world to us, Mr. Elsmere.'
'I know she has,' he said simply. 'She shall be everything in the world
to you still. I have had hard work to persuade her. There will be no
chance for me if you don't help me.'
Another breathless pause. Then Mrs. Leyburn timidly drew him to her, and
he stooped his tall head and kissed her like a son.
'Oh, I must go to Catherine!' she said, hurrying away, her pretty
withered cheeks wet with tears.
Then the girls threw themselves on Elsmere. The talk was all animation
and excitement for the moment, not a tragic touch in it. It was as well
perhaps that Catherine was not there to hear!
'I give you fair warning,' said Rose, as she bade him good-night, 'that
I don't know how to behave to a brother. And I am equally sure that Mrs.
Thornburgh doesn't know how to behave to a _fiance_.'
Robert threw up his arms in mock terror at the name, and departed.
'We are abandoned,' cried Rose, flinging herself into the chair
again--then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness--'and we
are free! Oh, I hope she will be happy!'
And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she would drown her
first words in her last.
'Madcap!' cried Agnes, struggling. 'Leave me at least a little breath to
wish Catherine joy!'
And they both fled upstairs.
There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs.
Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation downstairs she could not
persuade herself to go to bed. She first knocked up Sarah and
communicated the news; then she sat down before a pier-glass in her own
room studying the person who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband.
'My doing from beginning to end,' she cried with a triumph beyond words.
'William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as
much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be
sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There's no one but
Providence could have foreseen it--they're so different. And after all
it's _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?'
BOOK II
SURREY
CHAPTER XI
Farewell to the mountains!
The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run
its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern
nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant,
and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest
places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely
more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may
wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless
of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies,
where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they
please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded
by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in
these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature
lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented, a
feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into
scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow
in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness
of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a
wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt
petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for
man's grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she
will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful,
enticing, capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task
with all the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.
It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which
is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we
next meet with Robert and Catherine Elsmere. The rectory of Murewell
occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped
through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the
south, and climbed away on the north towards the long chalk ridge of the
Hog's Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor
state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch
of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs
climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern
side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down towards the
village at its foot--a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks,