Robert Elsmere
savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately
brought-up children going in and out of the parlour where old Leyburn
used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a
white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had
belaboured him when he was a boy at the village school--it was queer.'
'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and then
he died and the family lived on?'
'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the most
interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in
these valleys,' said the vicar, smiling. 'I don't count for much, she
counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me their
secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and
her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they
take it from her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the
feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of
Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whisky-drinking stock
should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine
Leyburn.'
The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling.
His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.
'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'
'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.
Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the
young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point where
only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye
commanded the whole of the upper end of the valley--a bare, desolate
recess filled with evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray
and purple crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell
marked the course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater
district. Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled
babbling river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted
imperceptibly into the browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most
of the scene, except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut
out the sun, was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on the
farmhouses, the heckberry trees along the river and the road, caught and
emphasised the golden rays which were flooding into the lower valley as
into a broad green cup. Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were
fruit trees in blossom; the air was mild and fragrant, though to the
young man from the warmer south there was still a bracing quality in the
soft western breeze which blew about him.
He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature going out
to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace of the scene. Lines
of Wordsworth were on his lips; the little well-worn volume was in his
pocket, but he did not need to bring it out; and his voice had all a
poet's intensity of emphasis as he strolled along, reciting under his
breath--
'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration!'
Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Burwood, lying
beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its
protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious
association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one white
life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the idea of her
seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry
and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to see her.
CHAPTER III
The festal tea had begun, and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite to
her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's wife. Poor Mrs.
Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered the room on the arm of Mr.
Mayhew, the incumbent of the neighbouring valley of Shanmoor, that the
first _coup d'oeil_ was good. The flowers had been arranged in the
afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again; a
pleasing odour of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and
fern; and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses and
bright faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full of an
incessant play of crisp and delicate colour.
But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with a little
sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of an eye-glass
at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a large and jewelled
hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled round the table,
lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited consciousness, on
every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_ should have been and was
not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to
restrain herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew,
giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the meal
which did but confirm her neighbour--a grim, uncommunicative person--in
his own devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had
fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Dr.
Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately
an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an
invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some other
opening into the great world should be discovered for him.
Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white
dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was
like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon, her
slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious
glances at the Thornburghs' guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she
thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'
As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so
often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems
brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times,
he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow, with her still unsoftened angles and
movements, was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain
sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes'
conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk. As to
Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.
She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her side,
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and
perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The hollows in the
cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead
somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face,
though still quite young, and expressing a perfect physical health, had
the look of having been polished and refined away to its foundations.
There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on it, and not a vestige of
Rose's peach-like bloom. Her profile, as he saw it now, had the
firmness, the clear whiteness, of a profile on a Greek gem.
She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk! Robert, who, out
of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, had an abundant
compassion for and understanding of such beings as young Mayhew, watched
her with a pleased amusement, wondering how she did it. What? Had she
got him on carpentering, engineering--discovered his weak point?
Water-wheels, inventors, steam-engines--and the lumpish lad all in a
glow, talking away nineteen to the dozen. What tact, what kindness in
her gray-blue eyes!
But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly well aware that
she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, an Oxford man, and a
member, besides, of a well-known Sussex county family. She was a large
and commanding person, clad in black _moire_ silk. She wore a velvet
diadem, Honiton lace lappets, and a variety of chains, beads, and
bangles bestrewn about her that made a tinkling as she moved. Fixing her
neighbour with a bland majesty of eye, she inquired of him if he were
'any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere?' Robert replied that Sir Mowbray
Elsmere was his father's cousin, and the patron of the living to which
he had just been appointed. Mrs. Seaton then graciously informed him
that long ago--'when I was a girl in my native Hampshire'--her family
and Sir Mowbray Elsmere had been on intimate terms. Her father had been
devoted to Sir Mowbray. 'And I,' she added, with an evident though lofty
desire to please, 'retain an inherited respect, sir, for your name.'
Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the rector's wife
had made an impression. His general conception of his relative and
patron Sir Mowbray--who had been for many years the family black
sheep--was, indeed, so far removed from any notions of 'respect,' that
he had some difficulty in keeping his countenance under the lady's look
and pose. He would have been still more entertained had he known the
nature of the intimacy to which she referred. Mrs. Seaton's father, in
his capacity of solicitor in a small country town, had acted as
electioneering agent for Sir Mowbray (then plain Mr.) Elsmere on two
occasions--in 18--, when his client had been triumphantly returned at a
bye-election; and two years later, when a repetition of the tactics, so
successful in the previous contest, led to a petition, and to the
disappearance of the heir to the Elsmere property from parliamentary
life.
Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton did not
enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and proceeding in a more
neutral tone than before, she proceeded to put him through a catechism
on Oxford, alternately cross-examining him and expounding to him her own
views and her husband's on the functions of Universities. She and the
Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly occupied in
ruining the young men's health by over-examination, and poisoning their
minds by free-thinking opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the
mothers of England would refuse to send their sons to these ancient but
deadly resorts. She looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though
defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his polite
best to be serious.
But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find Miss Leyburn's
eyes upon him. And undeniably there was a spark of laughter in them,
quenched, as soon as his glance crossed hers, under long lashes. How
that spark had lit up the grave, pale face! He longed to provoke it
again, to cross over to her and say, 'What amused you? Do you think me
very young and simple? Tell me about these people.'
But, instead, he made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was soon engaged in
giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, an experience which
generally ended by the appearance of certain truculent elements in one
of the mildest of men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl neighbour
and ask her what people meant by calling the Lakes rainy.
'I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky here has been
without a cloud, and your rivers are running dry.'
'And you have mastered our climate in twenty-four hours, like the
tourists--isn't it?--that do the Irish question in three weeks?'
'Not the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,' he thought to himself,