Robert Elsmere
glistened. On the hill leading to the rectory there was the flutter of a
woman's dress. As they hurried on, afraid of being late for luncheon,
they saw that it was Rose in front of them.
Langham started as the slender figure suddenly defined itself against
the road. A tumult within, half rage, half feeling, showed itself only
in an added rigidity of the finely-cut features.
Rose turned directly she heard the steps and voices, and over the
dreaminess of her face there flashed a sudden brightness.
'You _have_ been a long time!' she exclaimed, saying the first thing
that came into her head, joyously, rashly, like the child she in reality
was. 'How many halt and maimed has Robert taken you to see, Mr.
Langham?'
'We went to Murewell first. The library was well worth seeing. Since
then we have been a parish round, distributing stores.'
Rose's look changed in an instant. The words were spoken by the Langham
of her earliest acquaintance. The man who that morning had asked her to
play to him had gone--vanished away.
'How exhilarating!' she said scornfully. 'Don't you wonder how any one
can ever tear themselves away from the country?'
'Rose, don't be abusive,' said Robert, opening his eyes at her tone.
Then, passing his arm through hers, he looked banteringly down upon her.
'For the first time since you left the metropolis you have walked
yourself into a colour. It's becoming--and it's Murewell--so be civil!'
'Oh, nobody denies you a high place in milkmaids!' she said, with her
head in air--and they went off into a minute's sparring.
Meanwhile Langham, on the other side of the road, walked up slowly, his
eyes on the ground. Once, when Rose's eye caught him, a shock ran
through her. There was already a look of slovenly age about his stooping
bookworm's gait. Her companion of the night before--handsome, animated,
human--where was he? The girl's heart felt a singular contraction. Then
she turned and rent herself, and Robert found her more mocking and
sprightly than ever.
At the rectory gate Robert ran on to overtake a farmer on the road. Rose
stooped to open the latch; Langham mechanically made a quick movement
forward to anticipate her. Their fingers touched; she drew hers hastily
away and passed in, an erect and dignified figure, in her curving garden
hat.
Langham went straight up to his room, shut the door, and stood before
the open window, deaf and blind to everything save an inward storm of
sensation.
'Fool! Idiot!' he said to himself at last, with fierce stifled emphasis,
while a kind of dumb fury with himself and circumstance swept through
him.
That he, the poor and solitary student whose only sources of
self-respect lay in the deliberate limitations, the reasoned and
reasonable renunciations he had imposed upon his life, should have
needed the reminder of his old pupil not to fall in love with his
brilliant ambitious sister! His irritable self-consciousness enormously
magnified Elsmere's motive and Elsmere's words. That golden vagueness
and softness of temper which had possessed him since his last sight of
her gave place to one of bitter tension.
With sardonic scorn he pointed out to himself that his imagination was
still held by, his nerves were still thrilling under, the mental image
of a girl looking up to him as no woman had ever looked--a girl,
white-armed, white-necked--with softened eyes of appeal and confidence.
He bade himself mark that during the whole of his morning walk with
Robert down to its last stage, his mind had been really absorbed in some
preposterous dream he was now too self-contemptuous to analyse. Pretty
well for a philosopher, in four days! What a ridiculous business is
life--what a contemptible creature is man, how incapable of dignity, of
consistency!
At luncheon he talked rather more than usual, especially on literary
matters with Robert. Rose, too, was fully occupied in giving Catherine a
sarcastic account of a singing lesson she had been administering in the
school that morning. Catherine winced sometimes at the tone of it.
That afternoon Robert, in high spirits, his rod over his shoulder, his
basket at his back, carried off his guest for a lounging afternoon along
the river. Elsmere enjoyed these fishing expeditions like a boy. They
were his holidays, relished all the more because he kept a jealous
account of them with his conscience. He sauntered along, now throwing a
cunning and effectual fly, now resting, smoking, and chattering, as the
fancy took him. He found a great deal of the old stimulus and piquancy
in Langham's society, but there was an occasional irritability in his
companion, especially towards himself personally, which puzzled him.
After a while, indeed, he began to feel himself the unreasonably
cheerful person which he evidently appeared to his companion. A mere
ignorant enthusiast, banished for ever from the realm of pure knowledge
by certain original and incorrigible defects--after a few hours' talk
with Langham Robert's quick insight always showed him some image of
himself resembling this in his friend's mind.
At last he turned restive. He had been describing to Langham his
acquaintance with the Dissenting minister of the place--a strong
coarse-grained fellow of sensuous excitable temperament, famous for his
noisy 'conversion meetings,' and for a gymnastic dexterity in the
quoting and combining of texts, unrivalled in Robert's experience. Some
remark on the Dissenter's logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in the
tone of the Churchman conscious of University advantages, seemed to
irritate Langham.
'You think your Anglican logic in dealing with the Bible so superior! On
the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant.
Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are,
because Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory--like,
above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and
maintains you for its own purposes. But that is another matter.'
Robert smoked on a moment in silence. Then he flushed and laid down his
pipe.
'We are all fools in your eyes, I know! _A la bonne heure!_ I
have been to the University, and talk what he is pleased to call
"philosophy"--therefore Mr. Colson denies me faith. You have always, in
your heart of hearts, denied me knowledge. But I cling to both in spite
of you.'
There was a ray of defiance, of emotion, in his look. Langham met it in
silence.
'I deny you nothing,' he said at last, slowly. 'On the contrary, I
believe you to be the possessor of all that is best worth having in life
and mind.'
His irritation had all died away. His tone was one of indescribable
depression, and his great black eyes were fixed on Robert with a
melancholy which startled his companion. By a subtle transition Elsmere
felt himself touched with a pang of profound pity for the man who an
instant before had seemed to pose as his scornful superior. He stretched
out his hand, and laid it on his friend's shoulder.
* * * * *
Rose spent the afternoon in helping Catherine with various parochial
occupations. In the course of them Catherine asked many questions about
Long Whindale. Her thoughts clung to the hills, to the gray farmhouses,
the rough men and women inside them. But Rose gave her small
satisfaction.
'Poor old Jim Backhouse!' said Catherine, sighing. 'Agnes tells me he is
quite bedridden now.'
'Well, and a good thing for John, don't you think,' said Rose briskly,
covering a parish library book the while in a way which made Catherine's
fingers itch to take it from her, 'and for us? It's some use having a
carrier now.'
Catherine made no reply. She thought of the 'noodle' fading out of life
in the room where Mary Backhouse died; she actually saw the white hair,
the blurred eyes, the palsied hands, the poor emaciated limbs stretched
along the settle. Her heart rose, but she said nothing.
'And has Mrs. Thornburgh been enjoying her summer?'
'Oh! I suppose so,' said Rose, her tone indicating a quite measureless
indifference. 'She had another young Oxford man staying with her in
June--a missionary--and it annoyed her very much that neither Agnes nor
I would intervene to prevent his resuming his profession. She seemed to
think it was a question of saving him from being eaten, and apparently
he would have proposed to either of us.'
Catherine could not help laughing. 'I suppose she still thinks she
married Robert and me.'
'Of course. So she did.'
Catherine coloured a little, but Rose's hard lightness of tone was
unconquerable.
'Or if she didn't,' Rose resumed, 'nobody could have the heart to rob
her of the illusion. Oh, by the way, Sarah has been under warning since
June! Mrs. Thornburgh told her desperately that she must either throw
over her young man, who was picked up drunk at the vicarage gate one
night, or vacate the vicarage kitchen. Sarah cheerfully accepted her
month's notice, and is still making the vicarage jams and walking out
with the young man every Sunday. Mrs. Thornburgh sees that it will
require a convulsion of nature to get rid either of Sarah or the young
man, and has succumbed.'
'And the Tysons? And that poor Walker girl?'
'Oh, dear me, Catherine!' said Rose, a strange disproportionate flash of
impatience breaking through. 'Every one in Long Whindale is always just
where and what they were last year. I admit they are born and die, but
they do nothing else of a decisive kind.'
Catherine's hands worked away for a while, then she laid down her book
and said, lifting her clear large eyes on her sister,--
'Was there _never_ a time when you loved the valley, Rose?'
'Never!' cried Rose.
Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on the table
turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was frank mutiny in it.
'By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma from letting me
go to Berlin for the winter?'
'And after Berlin, Rose?' said Catherine, presently, her gaze bent upon
her work.
'After Berlin? What next?' said Rose recklessly. 'Well, after Berlin I
shall try to persuade mamma and Agnes, I suppose, to come and back me up
in London. We could still be some months of the year at Burwood.'
Now she had said it out. But there was something else surely goading the
girl than mere intolerance of the family tradition. The hesitancy, the
moral doubt of her conversation with Langham, seemed to have vanished
wholly in a kind of acrid self-assertion.
Catherine felt a shock sweep through her. It was as though all the
pieties of life, all the sacred assumptions and self-surrenders at the
root of it, were shaken, outraged by the girl's tone.
'Do you ever remember,' she said, looking up, while her voice trembled,
'what papa wished when he was dying?'
It was her last argument. To Rose she had very seldom used it in so many
words. Probably, it seemed to her too strong, too sacred, to be often
handled.
But Rose sprang up, and pacing the little workroom with her white wrists
locked behind her, she met that argument with all the concentrated
passion which her youth had for years been storing up against it.
Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, bewildered. This language of a
proud and tameless individuality, this modern gospel of the divine right
of self-development--her soul loathed it! And yet, since that night in
Marrisdale, there had been a new yearning in her to understand.
Suddenly, however, Rose stopped, lost her thread. Two figures were
crossing the lawn, and their shadows were thrown far beyond them by the
fast disappearing sun.
She threw herself down on her chair again with an abrupt--
'Do you see they have come back? We must go and dress.'
And as she spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether--the