Robert Elsmere
adorned with artificial nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes armed with
spectacles, was having her way with Mrs. Leyburn, inquiring into the
household arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining power which
made the mild widow as pulp before her.
When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round hastily. She
herself had opened that door into the garden. A garden on a warm summer
night offers opportunities no schemer should neglect. Agnes and Rose
were chattering and laughing on the gravel path just outside it, their
white girlish figures showing temptingly against the dusky background of
garden and fell. It somewhat disappointed the vicar's wife to see her
tall guest take a chair and draw it beside Catherine--while Adeline
Baker awkwardly got up and disappeared into the garden.
Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong had been his
sense of attraction at tea; but like the rest of us he could find
nothing more telling to start with than a remark about the weather.
Catherine in her reply asked him if he were quite recovered from the
attack of low fever he was understood to have been suffering from.
'Oh yes,' he said brightly, 'I am very nearly as fit as I ever was, and
more eager than I ever was to get to work. The idling of it is the worst
part of illness. However, in a month from now I must be at my living,
and I can only hope it will give me enough to do.'
Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. What an eager
face it was! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be the note of the whole man,
of the quick eyes and mouth, the flexible hands and energetic movements.
Even the straight, stubbly hair, its owner's passing torment, standing
up round the high open brow, seemed to help the general impression of
alertness and vigour.
'Your mother, I hear, is already there?' said Catherine.
'Yes. My poor mother!' and the young man smiled half sadly. 'It is a
curious situation for both of us. This living which has just been
bestowed on me is my father's old living. It is in the gift of my
cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. My great-uncle'--he drew himself together
suddenly. 'But I don't know why I should imagine that these things
interest other people,' he said, with a little quick, almost comical,
accent of self-rebuke.
'Please go on,' cried Catherine hastily. The voice and manner were
singularly pleasant to her; she wished he would not interrupt himself
for nothing.
'Really? Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished me to have
it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time, took orders; but I
wanted something more stirring than a country parish. One has dreams of
many things. But one's dreams come to nothing. I got ill at Oxford. The
doctors forbade the town work. The old incumbent who had held the living
since my father's death died precisely at that moment. I felt myself
booked, and gave in to various friends; but it is second best.'
She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though his
talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past.
'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. Her cheek
was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual animation; and
her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save a small
old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a pair of hair
bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the nobleness and
simplicity of a Romney picture.
'_You_ do not find it so, I imagine,' he replied, bending forward to her
with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her to talk to
him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally compared her to
Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the dark red flowers in
her white lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than
Rose's.
However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which she
turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive confiding
nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the
moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighbourhood,
the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at
least as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength,
individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not
at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then,
indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an absence
of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary
south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.
'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said to him
once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told
him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to
him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life,
her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments
on her favourite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to
enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural
magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known
line of Shelley's she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him
deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and
knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The
thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now
wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she
was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!
Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.
'Were you ever there?' he asked her.
'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have only a
confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great
building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'
'Did your father often go back?'
'No; never towards the latter part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little; 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'
She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was
a little difficult. Then his face and clerical dress seemed somehow to
reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.
'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw
when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford
was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men
who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to
him.'
Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the
beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in
twenty years transformed the University.
'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little longer.
There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has
spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward
swell of a religious revival.'
Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to her
heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her seemed to
satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.
'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, hesitating;
'but I don't know whether father would have liked that much better.'
The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself suddenly.
Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, and afraid lest
she might have said something discourteous.
'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it is a
mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has brought about
the new state of things. Some of the factors in the change were hardly
Christian at all, by name, but they have all helped to make men think,
to stir their hearts, to win them back to the old ways.'
His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently the
matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt a deep and
loving interest. His young boyish face had grown grave; there was a
striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which suddenly
roused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of
distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things of
life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a
beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full of soul.
The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their
conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind them
Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candles and music-stools,
preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed
vicar of Shanmoor, and the room seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton's
strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted itself, and her face
settled again into the slight rigidity of expression characteristic of
it. She rose and prepared to move farther into the room.
'We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder.
And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn. He had a
momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive, sympathetic, felt
in the woman the presence of a strength, a self-sufficingness which was
not all attractive. His vanity, if he had cherished any during their
conversation, was not flattered by its close. But as he leant against
the window-frame waiting for the music to begin, he could hardly keep
his eyes from her. He was a man who, by force of temperament, made
friends readily with women, though except for a passing fancy or two he
had never been in love; and his sense of difficulty with regard to this
stiffly-mannered, deep-eyed country girl brought with it an unusual
stimulus and excitement.
Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with
bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her. Mr.
Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He was a
powerful swarthy man, who said little and was generally alarming to the
ladies of the neighbourhood. To propitiate him, they asked him to bring
his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss
Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who
regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower's name and
position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with all his
taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend himself.
'Has it begun?' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and turning
he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's cheeks flushed
by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head.
She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some
powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of
her wrists and the vicarage piano.
The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to fly
down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and the
mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs.
Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton
motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against the
wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth
expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.
It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which
flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning,
the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very fast,
which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing
performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the