Robert Elsmere
towards the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative
positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two
days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the
mercy of her scornful sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why,
Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man's natural
advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.
'Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?' he said.
'Oh dear, yes,' said Rose irritably; 'anything that has two legs and is
ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.'
'And _you_ want something quite different, something more exciting?' he
asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in
thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his wits about him. Rose
met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness
creeping over her.
'Yes, I want something different,' she said in a low voice and paused;
then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her
knees. 'But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I
was born for; I _can't_ have patience with old women, but I could slave
all day and all night to play the violin.'
'You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?'
he said quietly.
She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play
with her rings.
That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in
her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other
self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine's
sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly
gentleness.
'But it is all so difficult, you see,' she said despairingly. 'Papa
thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had
lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has
been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to
do.'
'He would have changed with the times,' said Langham.
'I know he would,' cried Rose. 'I have told Catherine so a hundred
times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don't
they, Mr. Langham?'
She spoke with perfect _naivete_. He saw more and more of the child in
her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.
'They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling.
Rose made a little face.
'I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. 'But then there's something
else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles
from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What's
to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa
died I've just been plotting and planning to get away. But there's the
difficulty,' and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid
out her case. 'That house where we live has been lived in by Leyburns
ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't
ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa
retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a
dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall
over her knee.
'Had he been so happy there?'
'Happy!'--and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff
him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace
till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back
for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_
have made him so fond of it?'
And again looking despondently into the fire she pondered that far-off
perversity of her father's.
'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said Langham, seized as he spoke by the
pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves
in the oddest ways.'
'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He
went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated
other places. I think he must have thought'--and her voice dropped--'he
wasn't going to live long--he wasn't well when he gave up the
school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of
getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting
very wicked and dangerous and irreligious, and that it comforted him to
know that we should be out of it.'
Then she broke off suddenly.
'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her
companion, 'after all, he gave me my first violin?'
Langham smiled.
'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.
'Then of course I took to it, like a duck to water, and it began to
scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion,
and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated
Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself
nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor because I mightn't have it.
Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid round his
neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the
hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him
sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed
again--on Sundays!
Her companion's eyes were not quite as clear as before.
'Poor little naughty child' he said, bending over to her. 'I think your
father must have been a man to be loved.'
She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face all working with a
soft remorse.
'Oh, so he was--so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why, it
would have been much easier for _me_; but he was so good! And there was
Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see
what a chain it's been--what a weight! And as I must struggle--_must_,
because I was I--to get back into the world on the other side of the
mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why,
I have been a criminal all my life! And _that_ isn't exhilarating
always.'
And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick
over-tragic emotion of nineteen.
'I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play
yesterday,' he said gently.
She started.
'_Did_ you hear me--that Wagner?'
He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.
'Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.'
He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say, 'I am not quite the mummy
you thought me, after all!' And she coloured slightly.
'I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play
often; and it seemed to me that with time--and work--you might play as
well as any of them.'
The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she
gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.
'And I can't help thinking,' he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own
role of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, 'that if your father
had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must
have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and
to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.'
'Catherine hasn't moved with the times,' said Rose dolefully.
Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a
question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently
emphatic.
'And you think,' she went on, 'you _really_ think, without being too
ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts'--and a
little laugh danced through the vibrating voice--'I might try and get
them to give up Burwood--I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of
course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one
can't help having qualms, though one doesn't tell them to one's sisters
and cousins and aunts. And sometimes'--she turned her chin round on her
hand and looked at him with a delicious shy impulsiveness--'sometimes a
stranger sees clearer. Do _you_ think me a monster, as Catherine does?'
Even as she spoke her own words startled her--the confidence, the
abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely; only her eyelids
quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, and there was a warm
penitence in her heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic!
He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece,
looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it seemed to her, of her
friend, her confessor. Her white childish brow, the little curls of
bright hair upon her temples, her parted lips, the pretty folds of the
muslin dress, the little foot on the fender--every detail of the
picture impressed itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to
his grave.
'Tell me,' she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage
him--'tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what you think?'
The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a gust of wind
sweeping through the house, voices and steps approaching. Rose sprang
up, and, for the first time during all the latter part of their
conversation, felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.
'How early you are, Robert!' she exclaimed, as the study door opened,
and Robert's wind-blown head and tall form, wrapped in an Inverness
cape, appeared on the threshold. 'Is Catherine tired?'
'Rather,' said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betraying itself
on his face. 'She has gone to bed, and told me to ask you to come and
say good-night to her.'
'You got my message about not coming from old Martha?' asked Rose. 'I
met her on the common.'
'Yes, she gave it us at the church door.' He went out again into the
passage to hang up his greatcoat. She followed, longing to tell him that
it was pure accident that took her to the study, but she could not find
words in which to do it, and could only say good-night a little
abruptly.
'How tempting that fire looks!' said Robert, re-entering the study.
'Were you very cold, Langham, before you lit it?'
'Very,' said Langham, smiling, his arm behind his head, his eyes fixed
on the blaze; 'but I have been delightfully warm and happy since.'
CHAPTER XIV
Catherine stopped beside the drawing-room window with a start, caught by
something she saw outside.
It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Langham strolling
round the garden. A bystander would have been puzzled by the sudden
knitting of Catherine's brows over it.
Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees; Dandie leapt
about her, but she was too busy talking to take much notice of him.
Talking, chattering, to that cold cynic of a man, for whom only
yesterday she had scarcely had a civil word! Catherine felt herself a
prey to all sorts of vague unreasonable alarms.
Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look: 'Wifie, when
I came in I found Langham and Rose had been spending the evening
together in the study. And I don't know when I have seen Langham so
brilliant or so alive as in our smoking talk just now!'
Catherine had laughed him to scorn; but, all the same, she had been a
little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt herself almost as much
as ever the guardian of her sisters, and the old sensitive nerve was set
quivering. And now there could be no question about it--Rose had changed
her ground towards Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was
evidence enough of it.
Catherine's self-torturing mind leapt on for an instant to all sorts of
horrors. _That_ man!--and she and Robert responsible to her mother and
her dead father! Never! Then she scolded herself back to common sense.
Rose and he had discovered a common subject in music and musicians. That
would be quite enough to account for the new-born friendship on Rose's