Robert Elsmere
it all out pell-mell, with a mixture of discomfiture and defiance
infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, but she also could
not bear to give William an advantage.
William certainly took his advantage. He did what his wife in her
irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. He first stared,
then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as soon as he had recovered
breath, into a series of unfeeling comments which drove Mrs. Thornburgh
to desperation.
'If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain folks can do
perfectly well without'--et cetera, et cetera--the husband's point of
view can be imagined. Mrs. Thornburgh could have shaken her good man,
especially as there was nothing new to her in his remarks; she had known
to a T beforehand exactly what he would say. She took up her knitting in
a great hurry, the needles clicking angrily, her gray curls quivering
under the energy of her hands and arms, while she launched at her
husband various retorts as to his lack of consideration for her efforts
and her inconvenience, which were only very slightly modified by the
presence of a stranger.
Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face discreetly turned
away, an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of his mouth.
Everything was fresh and piquant up here in this remote corner of the
north country, whether the mountain air or the wind-blown streams, or
the manners and customs of the inhabitants. His cousin's wife, in spite
of her ambitious conventionalities, was really the child of Nature to a
refreshing degree. One does not see these types, he said to himself, in
the cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. She was like a bit of a
bygone world--Miss Austen's or Miss Ferrier's--unearthed for his
amusement. He could not for the life of him help taking the scenes of
this remote rural existence, which was quite new to him, as though they
were the scenes of some comedy of manners.
Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the passage of arms
between himself and his spouse was becoming just a little indecorous.
He got up with a 'Hem!' intended to put an end to it, and deposited his
cup.
'Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of your
determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn't you just ask the
Leyburns and let us enjoy ourselves?'
With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little maid whom
Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the evening's
festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper basket. His wife
looked after him with eyes that spoke unutterable things.
'You would never think,' she said in an agitated voice to young Elsmere,
'that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to every invitation, that he
entirely agreed with me that one _must_ be civil to Mrs. Seaton,
considering that she can make anybody's life a burden to them about here
that isn't; but it's no use.'
And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her face full
of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere restrained a
strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead to distract and
console her. He expressed sympathy with her difficulties, he talked to
her about her party, he got from her the names and histories of the
guests. How Miss Austenish it sounded: the managing rector's wife, her
still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighbouring clergyman who
played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just
out--'Very pretty,' sighed Mrs. Thornburgh, who was now depressed all
round, 'but all flounces and frills and nothing to say'--and last of
all, those three sisters, the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different
level, and whom he had heard mentioned so often since his arrival by
both husband and wife.
'Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,' he said presently. 'You and cousin
William seem to have a great affection for them. Do they live near?'
'Oh, quite close,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh, brightening at last, and like
a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the more ardently to
take up another. 'There is the house,' and she pointed out Burwood among
its trees. Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon him, she fell into a
more or less incoherent account of her favourites. She laid on her
colours thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.
'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!' he
said, laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a widow
and three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement surely,
though you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in
England.'
'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think it
very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a
carrier that gets drunk, too! Why, you know they belong here. They're
real Westmoreland people.'
'What does that mean exactly?'
'Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the common
farmers about. Only his land was his own, and theirs isn't.'
'He was one of the last of the statesmen,' interposed Mr.
Thornburgh--who, having rescued his sermon from Jane's tender mercies,
and put out his modest claret and sherry for the evening, had strolled
out again and found himself impelled as usual to put some precision into
his wife's statements--'one of the small freeholders who have almost
disappeared here as elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns always seems to
me typical of many things.'
Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first picked
up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was loftily
accepted--launched into a narrative which may be here somewhat
condensed.
The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was
the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. 'The people about here,'
said the vicar, 'say he drank away an acre a year. He had some fifty
acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.'
Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons and
daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters, were brutal
and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead, it was reported
that, having on one occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm
man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife,
whom he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden
shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his gray hair
streaming with blood; after which she had calmly put the horse into the
cart, and driven off to fetch the doctor to both her parents. But among
this grim and earthy crew there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin,'
of whom all the rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard, who
showed such a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin',' and such a
persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing
was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the
grammar school at Whinborough. From the moment the boy got a footing in
the school he hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local
bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or
failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which
carried him triumphantly to Queen's College.
His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary to
pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not have
dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and
drink.
From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class
list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the
same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen's, his
ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country
grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till, in
the very last year of his father's life, the eldest son, who had a
shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest, applied to
'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The
money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick's wife and
children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were
a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one
of themselves.
'Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. 'It happened the
year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I
never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. It was kept up
in the old style. Three of Leyburn's sons were there: two of them
farmers like himself, one a clerk from Manchester, a daughter married to
a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under the
table before supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to
ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But I was new to the
place,' said the vicar, flushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race
that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man
among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had
all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of
some one that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and had gone
seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but between us we
couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had gone
on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an
August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in. "I
haven't breathed this air for five-and-twenty years," he said. "I
thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there,
it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel, after all, that I have the
fells in my blood." He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy
creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish
ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'
'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had made
a very considerable success of it!'
'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering about
the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And
George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him
without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last
offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it
was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife
and children here in the holidays," he said, "and the money will set
George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and got
possession of the old house, in which, I should think, he had passed
about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There's no
accounting for tastes.'
'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud
to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her
everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain
too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care
what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the
blues to look at.'
'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in that
house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days--the