Robert Elsmere
amused, 'and yet what a child it looks.'
He threw himself into a war of words with her, and enjoyed it extremely.
Her brilliant colouring, her gestures as fresh and untamed as the
movements of the leaping river outside, the mixture in her of girlish
pertness and ignorance with the promise of a remarkable general
capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs.
Thornburgh--much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the
pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the
superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign
cooks--watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and
more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased her. Why
should people always talk of Catherine; Mrs. Thornburgh stood in awe of
Catherine and had given her up in despair. It was the other two whose
fortunes, as possibly directed by her, filled her maternal heart with
sympathetic emotion.
Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude shock. What on
earth was the vicar doing? After they had got through better than any
one could have hoped, thanks to a discreet silence and Sarah's
makeshifts, there was the master of the house pouring the whole tale of
his wife's aspirations and disappointment into Mrs. Seaton's ear! If it
were ever allowable to rush upon your husband at table and stop his
mouth with a dinner napkin, Mrs. Thornburgh could at this moment have
performed such a feat. She nodded and coughed and fidgeted in vain!
The vicar's confidences were the result of a fit of nervous
exasperation. Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an account of 'our
charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleckwood was a distant
cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the neighbourhood,
not, however, a very respectable magnate. Mr. Thornburgh had heard
accounts of Lupton Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least half a dozen
different occasions. Privately he believed them all to refer to one
visit, an event of immemorial antiquity periodically brought up to date
by Mrs. Seaton's imagination. But the vicar was a timid man, without the
courage of his opinions, and in his eagerness to stop the flow of his
neighbour's eloquence he could think of no better device, or more
suitable rival subject, than to plunge into the story of the drunken
carrier, and the pastry still reposing on the counter at Randall's.
He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife's horrified
countenance embarrassed him. But anything was better than Lord
Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him with the slightest smile on her
formidable lip. The story was pleasing to her.
'At least, my dear sir,' she said when he paused, nodding her diademed
head with stately emphasis, 'Mrs. Thornburgh's inconvenience may have
one good result. You can now make an example of the carrier. It is our
special business, as my husband always says, who are in authority, to
bring their low vices home to these people.'
The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What ineptitude had he been guilty of
now! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood he might have started Mrs. Seaton
on teetotalism. Now if there was one topic on which this awe-inspiring
woman was more awe-inspiring than another it was on the topic of
teetotalism. The vicar had already felt himself a criminal as he drank
his modest glass of claret under her eye.
'Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,' said Dr. Baker, from the
other end of the table. 'But there are plenty of worse things in these
valleys. Besides, what person in his senses would think of trying to
disestablish John Backhouse? He and his queer brother are as much a
feature of the valley as High Fell. We have too few originals left to be
so very particular about trifles.'
'Trifles?' repeated Mrs. Seaton in a deep voice, throwing up her eyes.
But she would not venture an argument with Dr. Baker. He had all the
cheery self-confidence of the old established local doctor, who knows
himself to be a power, and neither Mrs. Seaton nor her restless
intriguing little husband had ever yet succeeded in putting him down.
'You must see these two old characters,' said Dr. Baker to Elsmere
across the table. 'They are relics of a Westmoreland which will soon
have disappeared. Old John, who is going on for seventy, is as tough an
old dalesman as ever you saw. He doesn't measure his cups, but he would
scorn to be floored by them. I don't believe he does drink much, but if
he does there is probably no amount of whisky that he couldn't carry.
Jim, the other brother, is about five years older. He is a kind of
softie--all alive on one side of his brain, and a noodle on the other. A
single glass of rum and water puts him under the table. And as he never
can refuse this glass, and as the temptation generally seizes him when
they are on their rounds, he is always getting John into disgrace. John
swears at him and slangs him. No use. Jim sits still, looks--well,
nohow. I never saw an old creature with a more singular gift of denuding
his face of all expression. John vows he shall go to the "house"; he has
no legal share in the business; the house and the horse and cart are
John's. Next day you see them on the cart again just as usual. In
reality neither brother can do without the other. And three days after,
the play begins again.'
'An improving spectacle for the valley,' said Mrs. Seaton drily.
'Oh, my dear madam,' said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders, 'we can't
all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a drunkard, he has got a heart of his
own somewhere, and can nurse a dying niece like a woman. Miss Leyburn
can tell us something about that.'
And he turned round to his neighbour with a complete change of
expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate
respect. Catherine coloured as if she did not like being addressed on
the subject, and just nodded a little with gentle affirmative eyes.
'A strange case,' said Dr. Baker, again looking at Elsmere. 'It is a
family that is original and old-world even in its ways of dying. I have
been a doctor in these parts for five-and-twenty years. I have seen what
you may call old Westmoreland die out--costume, dialect, superstitions.
At least, as to dialect, the people have become bi-lingual. I sometimes
think they talk it to each other as much as ever, but some of them won't
talk it to you and me at all. And as to superstitions, the only ghost
story I know that still has some hold on popular belief is the one which
attaches to this mountain here, High Fell, at the end of this valley.'
He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to penetrate even modern
provincial society, that no man may tell a ghost story without leave.
Rose threw a merry glance at him. They two were very old friends. Dr.
Baker had pulled out her first teeth and given her a sixpence afterwards
for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten; the sixpence lived on
gratefully in a child's warm memory.
'Tell it,' she said; 'we give you leave. We won't interrupt you unless
you put in too many inventions.'
'You invite me to break the first law of story-telling, Miss Rose,' said
the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is bound to leave a
story better than he found it. However, I couldn't tell it if I would. I
don't know what makes the poor ghost walk; and if you do, I shall say
you invent. But at any rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the
side of High Fell at midnight every Midsummer day. If you see her and
she passes you in silence, why you only get a fright for your pains. But
if she speaks to you, you die within the year. Old John Backhouse is a
widower with one daughter. This girl saw the ghost last Midsummer day,
and Miss Leyburn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the
next; but with very small prospect of success.'
'What is the girl dying of?--fright?' asked Mrs. Seaton harshly.
'Oh no!' said the doctor hastily, 'not precisely. A sad story; better
not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time of her death
seems likely to be determined by the strength of her own and other
people's belief in the ghost's summons.'
Mrs. Seaton's grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. She put up her
eye-glass and looked at Catherine. 'An unpleasant household, I should
imagine,' she said shortly, 'for a young lady to visit.'
Doctor Baker looked at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame came into
his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a
quick-tempered mercurial sort of man.
'I presume that one's guardian angel may have to follow one sometimes
into unpleasant quarters,' he said hotly. 'If this girl lives, it will
be Miss Leyburn's doing; if she dies, saved and comforted, instead of
lost in this world and the next, it will be Miss Leyburn's doing too.
Ah, my dear young lady, let me alone! You tie my tongue always, and I
won't have it.'
And the doctor turned his weather-beaten elderly face upon her with a
look which was half defiance and half apology. She, on her side, had
flushed painfully, laying her white finger-tips imploringly on his arm.
Mrs. Seaton turned away with a little dry cough, so did her spectacled
sister at the other end of the table. Mrs. Leyburn, on the other hand,
sat in a little ecstasy, looking at Catherine and Dr. Baker, something
glistening in her eyes. Robert Elsmere alone showed presence of mind.
Bending across to Dr. Baker, he asked him a sudden question as to the
history of a certain strange green mound or barrow that rose out of a
flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his
whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance, and replied. Thenceforward
he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the traces of Norse
settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till the ladies left
the dining-room.
As Catherine Leyburn went out Elsmere stood holding the door open. She
could not help raising her eyes upon him, eyes full of a half-timid,
half-grateful friendliness. His own returned her look with interest.
'"A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a new-born
thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She had not yet said a
direct word to him, and yet he was curiously convinced that here was one
of the most interesting persons, and one of the persons most interesting
to _him_, that he had ever met. What mingled delicacy and strength in
the hand that had lain beside her on the dinner-table--what potential
depths of feeling in the full dark-fringed eye!
Half an hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing-room, he found
Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French window that looked out on
the lawn, and on the dim rocky face of the fell. Adeline Baker, a
stooping red-armed maiden, with a pretty face, set off, as she imagined,
by a vast amount of cheap finery, was sitting beside her, studying her
with a timid adoration. The doctor's daughter regarded Catherine
Leyburn, who during the last five years had made herself almost as
distinct a figure in the popular imagination of a few Westmoreland
valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall miners, as a being of a totally
different order from herself. She was glued to the side of her idol, but
her shy and awkward tongue could find hardly anything to say to her.
Catherine, however, talked away, gently stroking the while the girl's
rough hand which lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and bliss of its
owner, who was outraged by the contrast between her own ungainly member
and Miss Leyburn's delicate fingers.
Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply avenging
herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might have received at
tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with a face that seemed to be
perpetually peering forward, light colourless hair surmounted by a cap