Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (page 3)

any unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. He impressed it upon them as their special sacred duty, in a time of wicked enmity to religion, to cherish the faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife and daughters to live on here after his death, that they might be less in danger spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have more opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was also some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children for the godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach himself for having in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he might have helped to raise.’

‘Well, but,’ said Robert, ‘all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don’t see the father in the two younger girls.’

‘Ah, there is Catherine’s difficulty,’ said the vicar, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father’s death! She came down to see me in the dinning-room about some arrangement for the funeral. She was only sixteen, so pale and thin with nursing. I said something about the comfort she had been to her father. She took my hand and burst into tears. “He was so good!” she said; “I loved him so! Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others!” And that’s been her one thought since then–that, next to following the narrow road.’

The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally happened to him whenever he was beguiled into much speech about Catherine Leyburn. There must have been something great somewhere in the insignificant elderly man. A meaner soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with her inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his own, in his own domain.

‘I should like to know the secret of the little musician’s independence,’ said Robert, musing. ‘There might be no tie of blood at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that. There’s more than you think, or Catherine wouldn’t have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.’

‘And why shouldn’t she?’

‘Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you’re not, to remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would no more have admitted that a girl who hadn’t got her own bread or her family’s to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling than be would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard him take a text out of the “Imitation,” and lecture Rose when she was quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to give her music lessons. “Woe to them”–yes, that was it–“that inquire many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving Me.” However, he wasn’t consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs. Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow, and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I dare say poor man, it was one of the acts toward his children that tormented his mind in his last hour.’

‘She has certainly had her way about practising it; she plays superbly.’

‘Oh, yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is Rose. I see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then there is the beauty and refinement of bar mother’s side of the family. Lately she has got quite out of hand. She went to stay with some relations they have in Manchester, got drawn into a musical set there, took to these funny gowns, and now she and Catherine are, always half at war. Poor Catherine said to me the other day, with tears, in her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. “But I promised papa.” She makes herself miserable and it’s no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She’s not meant for this humdrum place and she may kick over the traces.’

‘She’s pretty enough for anything and anybody,’ said Robert.

The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man’s critical and meditative look reassured him.

The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the Vicarage garden. It was Mrs. Thornburgh’s accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.

‘My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from Randall’s–I’ve had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if we’d had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears–‘

The vicar’s wife paused. Her square, short figure was between the two girls; she had an arm of each, and she looked significantly, from one to another, her gray curls, flapping across her face as she did so.

‘Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,’ cried Rose. ‘You make us quite nervous.’

‘How do ypu like Mr. Elsmere?’ she inquired, solemnly.

‘Very much,’ said both, in chorus.

Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose’s smiling frankness with a little sigh. Things were going grandly, but she could imagine a disposition of affairs which would have given her personally more pleasure.

‘_How–would–you–like_–him for a brother-in-law?’ she inquired, beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose’s arm, and bringing out the last words with a rush.

‘Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose’s eye, but she answered for them both demurely.

‘We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.’

‘Explain!’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh. ‘I should think it explains itself. At least if you’d been in this house for the last twenty-four hours you’d think so. Since the moment when he first met her, it’s been “Miss Leyburn,” “Miss Leyburn,” all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye from the beginning.

Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness backward or forward.

‘He went to see you yesterday, didn’t he–yes, I know he did–and he overtook her in the pony-carriage–the vicar saw them from across the valley–and he brought her back from your house, and then he kept William up till nearly twelve talking of her. And now he wants a picnic. Oh, it’s plain as a pikestaff. And, my dears, _nothing_ to be said against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he’s a penny. A nice living, only his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever, stepped.’

Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls, who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat, looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting her have her budget out.

‘And now, of course,’ she resumed, taking breath, and chilled a little by their silence, ‘now, of course, I want to know about Catherine?’ She regarded them with anxious interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly shook her head.

‘What!’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, ‘Oh, you can’t know anything in two days.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Agnes, intervening; ‘we can’t know anything in two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes to anybody, till the list minute.’

Mrs. Thornburgh’s face fell. ‘It’s very difficult ‘when people will be so reserved,’ she said, dolefully.

The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out of it.

‘At any rate we can bring them together,’ she broke out, brightening again. ‘We can have picnics, you know, and teas, and all that–and watch. Now listen.’

And the vicar’s wife sketched out a programme of festivities for the next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive head, which took the sisters’ breath away. Rose bit her lip to keep in her laughter. Agnes, with vast self-possession, took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She pointed out firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine impracticable as fuss. ‘In vain is the net spread,’ etc. She preached from the text with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs. Thornburgh.

‘Well, _what_ am I to do, my dears?’ she said at last, helplessly. ‘Look at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it’s only to amuse Robert.’

Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence and a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes, having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they departed to their early dinner, leaving the vicar’s wife decidedly less self-confident than they found her.

‘The first matrimonial excitement of the family,’ cried Agnes, as they walked home. ‘So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been besieged!’

‘It will be all moonshine,’ Rose replied, decisively. ‘Mr. Elsmere may lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air of an angel, to give him his _coup de grace_. As I said before–poor fellow!’

Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she understood that there was a soreness at the bottom of Rose’s heart that was always showing itself in unexpected connections.

There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for assisting Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her expeditions, but without them Robert Elsmere would have been still man enough to see Catherine Leyburn every day. He loitered about the roads along which she must needs pass to do her many offices of charity; he offered the vicar to take a class in the school, and was naively exultant that the vicar curiously happened to fix an hour when he must needs see Miss Leyburn going or coming on the same errand; he dropped into Burwood on any conceivable pretext, till Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his pastoral services in one or two of the cases of sickness or poverty under their care. Catherine, with a little more reserve than usual, took him one day to the Tysons’, and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was likely to live on paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover, of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson Kept her talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere’s face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things be said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped out while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.

As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The sensitive soul often reproached itself afterward for having juggled in the matter. Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gayety for her sisters sometimes? Her mother could not undertake it, and was always plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a short week or two Catherine did her best to be young and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterward at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away. But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her perspicacity would have seen so readily in another’s case–the little arts and maneuvers of those about her. It did not strike her that Mrs. Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the vicar’s wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted effusion; or that Agnes and Rose, when they were in the wild heart of the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell to her. Nor did she ever analyze what would have been the attraction of those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when nature throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through a golden darkness.

Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learned with wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides, were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living–reading up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighborhood, plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so much of her own life to anyone; her consciousness of it sometimes filled her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading as it were, for her own advantage, on the sacred things of God. But he would have it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften! With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-by!

And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his future relations toward a personality so marked, and so important to every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.

But it was when he turned to larger things–to books, movements, leaders, of the day–that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed. Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established order in the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation? When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome speech and his clergyman’s dress.

And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He was merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation; whereas she, the child of a mystic–solitary, intense, and deeply reflective from her earliest Youth–was still thinking and speaking in the language of her father’s generation.

But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, conscious that here was the one profound difference between them; it was clear to him that insensibly she had moved further than she knew from her father’s standpoint. Even among these solitudes, far from men and literature, she had unconsciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he penetrated deeper into the nature, he found it honeycombed as it were, here and there, with beautiful, unexpected softnesses and diffidences. Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homeward under a cloudy evening sky, he came upon the great problem of her life–Rose and Rose’s art. He drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill. She had laid it bare, and was blushing to think bow she had asked his counsel, almost before she knew where their talk was leading. How was it lawful for the Christian to spend the few short years of the earthly combat in any pursuit however noble and exquisite, which merely aimed at the gratification of the senses, and implied in the pursuer the emphasizing rather than the surrender of self?

He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, tried to lift her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious work, dwelling on the function of pure beauty in life, and on the influence of beauty on character, pointing out the value to the race of all individual development, and pressing home on her the natural religious question: How are the artistic aptitudes to be explained unless the Great Designer meant them to have a use and function in His world? She replied doubtfully that she had always supposed they were lawful for recreation, and like any other trade for bread-winning, but–

Then he told her much that he knew about the humanizing effect of music on the poor. He described to her the efforts of a London society, of which he was a subscribing member, to popularize the best music among the lowest class; he dwelt almost with passion on the difference between the joy to be got out of such things and the common brutalizing joys of the workman. And you could not have art without artists. In this again he was only talking the commonplaces of his day. But to her they were not commonplaces at all. She looked at him from time to time, her great eyes lightening and deepening as it seemed with every fresh thrust of his.

‘I am grateful to you,’ she said at last, with an involuntary outburst, ‘I am _very_ grateful to you!’

And she gave a long sigh, as if some burden she had long borne in patient silence had been loosened a little, if only by the fact of speech about it. She was not convinced exactly. She was too strong a nature to relinquish a principle without a period of meditative struggle in which conscience should have all its dues. But her tone made his heart leap. He felt in it a momentary self-surrender that, coming from a creature of so rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of power, and yet at the same time with a strange humility beyond words.

A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little scene. An aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came to see them. She was their father’s youngest sister, and the wife of a man who had made some money as a builder in Whinborough. When Robert came in he found her sitting on the sofa having tea, a large homely-looking woman with gray hair, a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had unfastened her bonnet strings, and a clean white handkerchief lay spread out on her lap. When Elsmere was introduced to her, she got up, and said with some effusiveness, and a distinct Westmoreland accent:

‘Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,’ while she enclosed his fingers in a capacious hand.

Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sitting near her, and Catherine, the only member of the party who showed no sign of embarrassment when Robert entered was superintending her aunt’s tea and talking busily the while.

Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and Rose, who were chattering together a little artificially and of set purpose, as it seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be ignored. She talked too loud not to be overheard, and Agnes inwardly noted that as soon as Robert Elsmere appeared she talked louder than before. He gathered presently that she was an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in describing to Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic exploits of her oldest son, who had recently obtained his first circuit as a Wesleyan minister. He was shrewd enough, too, to guess, after a minute or two, that his presence and probably his obnoxious clerical dress gave additional zest to the recital.

‘Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin’ marvellous,’ he heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, ‘”some-thin” marvellous. The Lord has blessed him indeed! It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s meetin’s, or sermons, or parlor work, or just faithful dealin’s with souls one by one. Satan has no cleverer foe than Edward. He never shuts his eyes; as Edward says himself, it’s like trackin’ for game is huntin’ for souls. Why, the other day he was walkin’ out from Coventry to a service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit of grass by the road-side, mendin’ his cart. And he stopped did Edward, and gave him the Word _strong_. The man seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm. “No harm!” says Edward, “when you’re just doin’ the devil’s work every nail you put in, and hammerin’ away, mon, at your own damnation.” But here’s his letter.’ And while Rose turned away to a far window to hide an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag, took out a treasured paper, and read with the emphasis and the unction peculiar to a certain type of revivalism:–

‘”Poor sinner! He was much put about. I left him, praying the Lord my shaft might rankle in him; ay, might fester and burn in him till he found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed very dark and destitute–no respect for the Word or its ministers. A bit farther I met a boy carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went on, taking without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag. Glorious work! If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways for God, sin will skulk yet.”‘

A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put it back into her bag.

‘There’s your true minister,’ she said, with a large judicial utterance as she closed the snap. ‘Wherever he goes Edward must have souls!’

And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman in the window.

‘He must have very hard work with so much walking and preaching,’ said Catherine, gently.

Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd little scene with other eyes.

‘His work is just wearin’ him out,’ said the mother, fervently; ‘but a minister doesn’t think of that. Wherever he goes there are sinners saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nuneaton. At family prayer alone there were five saved. And at the prayer-meetin’s on the Sabbath such outpourin’s of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells me, just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,’ she added, turning suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation, ‘with the labors of our Wesleyan ministers?’

‘No,’ said Robert, with his pleasant smile, ‘not personally. But I have the greatest respect for them as a body of devoted men.’

The look of battle faded from the woman’s face. It was not an unpleasant face. He even saw strange reminiscences of Catherine in it at times.

‘You’re aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take any credit to themselves–it’s grace, sir, all grace.’

‘Aunt Ellen,’ said Catherine, while a sudden light broke over her face; ‘I just want you to take Edward a little story from me. Ministers are good things, but God can do without them.’

And she laid her hand on her aunt’s knee with a smile in which there was the slightest touch of affectionate satire.

‘I was up among the fells the other day’–she went on–‘I met an elderly man cutting wood in a plantation, and I stopped and asked him how he was. “Ah, miss,” he said, “verra weel, verra weel. And yet it was nobbut Friday morning lasst, I cam oop here, awfu’ bad in my sperrits like. For my wife she’s sick an a’ dwinnelt away, and I’m gettin’ auld, and can’t wark as I’d used to, and it did luke to me as thoo there was naethin’ afore us nobbut t’ Union. And t’ mist war low on t’ fells, and I sat oonder t’ wall, wettish and broodin’ like. And theer–all ov a soodent the Lord found me! Yes, puir Reuben Judge, as dawn’t matter to naebody, the Lord found un. It war leyke as thoo His feeace cam a glisterin’ an’ a shinin’ through t’ mist. An’ iver sense then, miss, aa’ve jest felt as thoo aa could a’ cut an’ stackt all t’ wood on t’ fell in naw time at a’!” And he waved his hand round the mountain side which was covered with plantation. And all the way along the path for ever so long I could hear him singing, chopping away, and quavering out “Rock of Ages.”‘

‘She paused; her delicate face, with just a little quiver in the lip, turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hidden fire had leapt suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, the attitude, was simplicity and unconsciousness itself. Robert had never heard her say anything so intimate before. Nor had he ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She had transmuted the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous prose; she had turned it into purest poetry. Only the noblest souls have such an alchemy as this at command, thought the watcher on the other side, of the room, with a passionate reverence.

‘I wasn’t thinkin’ of narrowin’ the Lord down to ministers; said Mrs. Fleming, with a certain loftiness. ‘We all know He can do without us puir worms.’

Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to go. Much of her apparel had slipped away from her in the fervors of revivalist anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves and reticule–officiously helped by the younger girls–Robert crossed over to Catherine.

‘You lifted us on to your own high places!’ he said, bending down to her; ‘I shall carry your story with me through the fells.’

She looked up, and as she met his warm, moved look a little glow and tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted expression. He broke the spell; she sank from the poet into the embarrassed woman.

‘You must see my old man,’ she said, with an effort; ‘he is worth a library of sermons. I must introduce him to you.’

He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could only stand impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming’s disappearance, that he might somehow appropriate her eldest niece. But alas! when she went, Catherine went out with her, and reappeared no more, though he waited some time.

He walked home in a whirl of feeling; on the way he stopped, and leaning over a gate which led into one of the river-fields, gave himself up to the mounting tumult within. Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos of hope and memory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost manhood.

‘In her and her only is my heart’s desire! She and she only if she will, and God will, shall be my wife!’

He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the evening beauty of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change:–

Tears
Were in his eyes, and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years.

He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never felt before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, be had sprung suddenly into maturity–entered at last into the full human heritage. But the very intensity and solemnity of his own feeling gave him a rare clear-sightedness. He realized that he had no certainty of success, scarcely even an entirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they not together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? Would they not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after? Were not time and opportunity all his own? How kind her looks are even now! Courage! And through that maidenly kindness his own passion shall send the last, transmuting glow.

CHAPTER VII.

The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing class at the school, closed the school door behind her with a sigh of relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood.

‘How abominably they sang this morning!’ she said to herself, with curving lip. ‘Talk of the natural north-country gift for music! What ridiculous fictions people set up! Dear me, what clouds! Perhaps we shan’t got our walk to Shanmnoor after all, and if we don’t, and if-if–‘ her cheek flashed with a sudden excitement-‘if Mr. Elsmere doesn’t propose, Mrs. Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes and I can do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if something doesn’t come off to-day, she’ll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and asking Catherine her intentions, which would ruin everything.’

Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged curtain was already lowering.

‘It will hold up yet a while,’ she thought, ‘and if it rains later we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.’

And she walked on homeward meditating, her thin fingers clasped before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in an artistic many-colored turmoil about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full of artistic odds and ends–her fiddle, of course, and piles of music, her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood photographs of musicians and friends–the spoils of her visits to Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points in the girl’s memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighborhood, and paid for it with her own money. There a group of unfinished, headlong sketches of the most fiercely-impressionist description–the work and the gift of a knot of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her heart’s content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young artists dub themselves ‘a school,’ study in Paris, and when they come home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north. Rose’s uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad enough to befriend his dear brother’s children, who wanted nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris, and Italy, and set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone apparently of all artists was destined never to know.

For she was an artist–she would be an artist–let Catherine say what she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what, thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free, reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and found Burwood waiting for her, Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled–the most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most determined sacrificing of ‘this warm kind world,’ with all its indefensible delights, to a cold other-world, with its torturing, inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere as they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair. And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the verge of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in resisting, but resist she must by the law of her nature.

Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon her violin, and rushed through a Brahms’ ‘Liebeslied,’ her eyes dancing, her whole light form thrilling with the joy of it; and then with a sudden revulsion she stopped playing, and threw herself down listlessly by the open window. Close by against the wall was a little looking-glass, by which she often arranged her ruffled locks; she glanced at it now, it showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping lips, and eyes darkened with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen.

‘It is come to a pretty pass,’ she said to herself, ‘that I should be able to think of nothing but schemes for getting Catherine married and out of my way! Considering what she is and what I am, and how she has slaved for us all her life, I seem to have descended pretty low. Heigho!’

And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her hand. She was half acting, acting to herself. Life was not really quite unbearable, and she knew it. But it relieved her to overdo it.

‘I wonder how much chance there is,’ she mused, presently. ‘Mr. Elsmere will soon be ridiculous. Why, _I_ saw him gather up those violets she threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don’t believe she has realized the situation a bit. At least, if she has she is as unlike other mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does–‘

She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie jumped up on the windowsill, with her usual stealthy _aplomb_, and rubbed herself against the girl’s face.

‘Oh, Chattie!’ cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, ‘if Catherine ‘ll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, nay dear, and be happy ever afterward, and set me free to live my own life a bit, I’ll be _so_ good, you won’t know me, Chattie. And you shall have a new collar, my beauty, and cream till you die of it!’

And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a scarlet anemone from a bunch on the table, stood opposite Chattie, who stood slowly waving her magnificent tail from side to side, and glaring as though it were not at all to her taste to be hustled and bustled in this way.

‘Now, Chattie, listen! Will she?’

A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie’s nose.

‘Won’t she? Will she? Won’t she? Will–Tiresome flower, why did Nature give it such a beggarly few petals? ‘If I’d had a daisy it would have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz; and let’s forgot this wicked world!’

And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss waltz, dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her pretty feet twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks blazed with a double intoxication–the intoxication of movement, and the intoxication of sound–the cat meanwhile following her with little mincing, perplexed steps, as though not knowing what to make of her.

‘Rose, you madcap!’ cried Agnes, opening the door.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Rose calmly, stopping to take breath. ‘Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and see!’

The weather held up in a gray, grudging, sort of way, and Mrs. Thornburgh especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with the expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others would be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage ‘man,’ in a most delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the neighborhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh’s state is easier imagined than described.

The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together. Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so, it did not disquiet him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a lovely gayety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.

And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even she had been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion. Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale, and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression, blown away by the winds–or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly presence, a keen responsive eye?

Elsmere, indeed, was gayety itself. He kept up an incessant war with Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar’s expense, which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way; he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form, and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted himself on Whindale.

‘How fine all this black purple is!’ he cried, as they topped the ridge, and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. ‘I had grown quite tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.’

‘Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?’ said Catherine, with a little mocking wonder. ‘How wanton how prodigal!’

‘Does it deserve a Nemesis?’ he said laughing. ‘Drowning from now till I depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On this enchanted soil all things are welcome!’

She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute to the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a little way off, laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange new pulse leapt up in Catherine.

‘The wind is very boisterous here,’ she said, with a shiver. ‘I think we ought to be going on.’

And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and Mrs. Thornburgh’s gray curls shaking at the window.

‘William!’ she shouted, ‘bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr. Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the visitors’ book!’

While the girls went in, Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right, the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighborhood, and a tiny towered church–the scene on the Sabbath of Mr. Mayhew’s ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind the inn masses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing. There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general, the color was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple background. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix it there forever.

Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread in a light-upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors’ book. The scrambling, chattering meal passed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs. Thornburgh’s small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face, as though to say, ‘What–_no_ news yet? Nothing happened?’ As for Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest moments of existence, he remembered little afterward but the scene: the peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose’s golden head, and heavy amber necklace, and the figure at the vicar’s right, in a gown of a little dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.

When tea was over they lounged out onto the bridge. There was to be no long lingering, however. The clouds were deepening, the rain could not be far off. But if they started soon they could probably reach home before it came down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet, mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down through a fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into the clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one elbow, and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and Catherine were standing in front of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful light slipping between two great rain-clouds.

‘How well that hat and dress become your sister!’ he said, the words breaking, as it were, from his lips.

‘Do you think Catherine pretty?’ said Rose, with an excellent pretence of innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it harmlessly at a water-wagtail balancing on a stone below.

He flushed. ‘Pretty! You might as well apply the word to your mountains, to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak!’

‘Yes,’ thought Rose, ‘she is not unlike that high cold peak!’ But her girlish sympathy conquered her; it was very exciting, and she liked Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face overspread with a quite irrepressible smile. He reddened still more, then they stared into each other’s eyes, and without a word more understood each other perfectly.

Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque _bon camarade_ gesture. He pressed it warmly in his.

‘That was nice of you!’ he cried. ‘Very nice of you! Friend, then?’

She nodded and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the vicar disturbed them.

Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony carriage, watching Mrs. Thornburgh’s preparations.

‘You’re sure you don’t mind driving home alone?’ said, in a troubled voice. ‘Mayn’t I go with you?’

‘My dear, certainly not! As if I wasn’t accustomed to going about alone at my time of life! No, no, my dear, you go and have your walk; you’ll get home before the rain. Ready, James.’

The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his charge so anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out of his hand and gave a flick to the pony, who swerved and started off in a way which would have made his mistress clamorously nervous under any other circumstances. Catherine stood looking after her.

‘Now, then, right about face and quick march!’ exclaimed the vicar. ‘We’ve got to race that cloud over the Pike. It’ll be up with us in no time.’

Off they started and were soon climbing the slippery green slopes, or crushing through the fern of the fell they had descended earlier in the afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.

‘You have crushed me,’ he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully into his pocketbook; ‘but it is worth while to be crushed by anyone who can give so much ground for their knowledge. How you do know your mountains–from their peasants to their plants!’

‘I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among them,’ she said, smiling.

‘Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?’

‘Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the winter. And our winter is often not as hard as yours down south.’

‘Do yon go on with that night school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?’ he said, with another note in his voice.

Catherine looked at him and colored. ‘Rose has been telling tales,’ she said. ‘I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the ground, and Bob is always with me–aren’t you, Bob?’

And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her, blinking with a proudly confidential air, as though to remind her that there were a good many such secrets between them.

‘I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,’ he cried, the hidden emotion piercing through, ‘the night wind blowing about you, the black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream perhaps running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good Angels going with you.’

She blushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her strangely.

‘Don’t fancy it at all,’ she said, laughing. ‘It is a very small and very natural incident of one’s life here. Look back, Mr. Elemere; the rain has beaten us!’

He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side gleamed green and livid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness; children with their petticoats over their heads ran homeward along the road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it came and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was beating in their faces.

‘Caught!’ cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. ‘Let me help you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.’

He flung it around her and struggled into his own Mackintosh. The vicar in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair, then hurried after the others, evidently with a view of performing for them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.

Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides. He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form, and his big umbrella, as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over which the rain-streams were running, that his heart filled with the shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their valley life?

Suddenly he heard an exclamation and saw her run on in front of him. What was the matter? Then be noticed for the first time that Rose far ahead was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was Catherine stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister’s determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by same shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful to judge by the tone of it.

‘Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?’

‘Rose had forgotten her cloak,’ she said, briefly; ‘she has a very thin dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.’

‘You must take my mackintosh,’ he said at once.

She laughed in his face.

‘As if I should do anything of the sort!’

‘You must,’ he said, quietly stripping it off. ‘Do you think that you are always to be allowed to go through the world taking thought of other people and allowing no one to take thought of you?’

He held it out to her.

‘No, no! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong yet. And I have often told you that nothing hurts me.’

He hung it deliberately over his arm. ‘Very well, then, there it stays!’

And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the point of laughter.

‘Mr. Elsmere, be sensible!’ she said presently, her look changing to one of real distress. ‘I should never forgive myself if you got a chill after your illness!’

‘You will not be called upon,’ he said, in the most matter-of-fact tone. ‘Men’s coats are made to keep out weather,’ and he pointed to his own, closely buttoned up. ‘Your dress–I can’t help being disrespectful under the circumstances–will be wet through in ten minutes.’

Another silence. Then he overtook her.

‘Please, Miss Leyburn,’ he said, stopping her.

There was an instant’s mute contest between them. The rain splashed on the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest, most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he joined.

‘Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!’

But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man, as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth’s ‘Louisa,’ and the poet’s cry of longing.

And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something–what was it?–drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of her mingled with his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon.

They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side of the pass. To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten and dark, the river issuing from the heart of it like an angry voice.

What a change!’ he said, coming up with her as the path widened. ‘How impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises, watching the white butter-flies on the turf, and reading “Laodamia!”‘

‘”Laodamia!”‘ she said, half sighing as she caught the name. ‘Is it one of those you like best?’

‘Yes,’ he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the umbrella. How superb it is–the roll, the majesty of it; the severe, chastened beauty of the main feeling, the individual lines!’

And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.

‘It was my father’s favorite of all,’ she said, in the low vibrating voice of memory. ‘He said the last verse to me the day before be died.’

Robert recalled it–

‘Yet tears to human suffering are due, And mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone As fondly we believe.

Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?

‘Was he happy in his school life?’ he asked, gently. ‘Was teaching what he liked?’

Oh yes–only–‘, Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look-‘I never knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest, purest, most devoted–‘

She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child’s brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now after this lapse of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life–even by her–even by religion?–was that the sting?

‘Oh, I can understand!’ he said, reverently–‘I can understand. I have come across it once or twice, that fierce self-judgment of the good. It is the most stirring and humbling thing in life.’ Then his voice dropped.–‘And after the last conflict–the last “quailing breath,”–the last onslaughts of doubt or fear–think of the Vision waiting–the Eternal Comfort–

“Oh, my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night!”

The words fell from the softened voice like noble music.

There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eye’s to his. They swam in tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were radiance itself. It seemed to him as though she came closer to him, like a child to an elder who has soothed and satisfied an inward smart.

They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the swollen river which roared below them. On the opposite bank two umbrellas were vanishing through the field gate into the road, but the vicar had turned and was waiting for them. They could see his becloaked figure leaning on his stick, through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the tumbling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the valley.

The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first and held out his hand to her. When they started she would have refused his help with scorn. Now, after a moment’s hesitation she yielded, and he felt her dear weight on him as he guided her carefully from stone to stone’ In reality it is both difficult and risky to be helped over stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way through, Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips, which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone to stone could have lasted forever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his; and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown water, was never seen in Westmoreland wilds before.

‘It is clearing,’ he cried, with ready optimism, as they reached the bank. ‘We shall get our picnic to-morrow after all–we _must_ get it! Promise me it shall be fine–and you will be there!’

The vicar was only fifty yards away, waiting for them against the field gate. But Robert held her eagerly, imperiously–and it seemed to her, her hold was still dizzy with the water.

‘Promise!’ he repeated, his voice dropping.

She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising for Westmoreland weather. She could only say faintly ‘Yes!’ and so release her hand.

‘You _are_ pretty wet!’ said the vicar, looking from one to the other with a curiosity which Robert’s quick sense divined at once was directed to something else than the mere condition of their garments. But Catherine noticed nothing; she walked on wrestling blindly with she knew not what, till they reached the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs. Thornburgh, the light drizzle into which the rain had declined beating unheeded on her curls and ample shoulders. She stared at Robert’s drenched condition, but he gave her no time to make remarks.

‘Don’t take it off,’ he said, with a laughing wave of the hand to Catherine; ‘I will come for it to-morrow morning.’

And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be prudent to get himself into something less spongelike than his present attire as quickly as possible.

The vicar followed him.

‘Don’t keep Catherine, my dear. There’s nothing to tell. Nobody’s the worse.’

Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate, she went through it on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both her hands on Catherine’s shoulders, and looked her straight in the eyes. The vicar’s anxious hint was useless. She could contain herself no longer. She had watched them from the vicarage come down the fell together, had seen cross the stepping stones, lingeringly, hand in hand.

‘My dear Catherine!’ she cried, effusively kissing Catherine’s glowing cheek under the shelter of the laurustinus that made a bower of the gate. ‘My _dear_ Catherine!’

Catherine gazed at her in astonishment Mrs. Thornburgh eyes were all alive, and swarming with questions. If it had been Rose she would have let them out in one fell flight. But Catherine’s personality kept her in awe. And after a second, as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on Catherine’s face, and an expression of half-frightened apology dawned in Mrs. Thornburgh’s.

Catherine drew herself away. ‘Will you please give Mr. EIsmere his mackintosh?’ she said, taking it off; ‘I shan’t want it this little way.’

And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh’s arm, she turned away, walking quickly round the bend of the road.

Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved slowly back to the house in a state of complete collapse.

‘I always knew’–she said with a groan-‘I always knew it would never go right if it was Catherine! _Why_ was it Catherine?’

And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vindictive query.

Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush leaving a sudden pallor behind it, was twisting her hands before her in a kind of agony.

‘What have I been doing?’ she said to herself. ‘What have I been doing?’

At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She saw the girls in their own room–Agnes was standing behind, Rose had evidently rushed forward to see Catherine come in, and now retreated as suddenly when she saw her sister look up.

Catherine understood it all in an instant. ‘They too are on the watch,’ she thought to herself, bitterly. The strong reticent nature was outraged by the perception that she had been for days the unconscious actor in a drama of which her sisters and Mrs. Thornburgh had been the silent and intelligent spectators.

She came down presently from her room, very white and quiet; admitted that she was tired, and said nothing to anybody. Agnes and Rose noticed the change at once, whispered to each other when they found an opportunity, and foreboded ill.

After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out of the little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the house leading on to the fell. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and threatening, and the close air was saturated with moisture. As she gained the bare fell, sounds of water met her on all sides. The river cried hoarsely to her from below, the becks in the little ghylls were full and thunderous; and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a new-born rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to vanish with the night. Catherine’s soul went out to welcome the gray damp of the hills. She knew them best in this mood. They were thus most her own.

She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the ridge. Behind her lay the valley, and on its further side the fells she had crossed in the afternoon. Before her spread a long green vale, compared to which Whindale with its white road, its church, and parsonage, and scattered houses, was the great world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a single house. As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of human life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the long June twilight; the blackish walls ran down and up again, dividing the green hollow with melancholy uniformity. Here and there was a sheepfold, suggesting the bleakness of winter nights; and here and there a rough stone barn for storing fodder. And beyond the vale, eastward and northward, Catherine looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and inkiest over the high points of the Ullswater mountains.

When she was once below the pass, man and his world were shut out. The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was absolutely alone. She descended till she reached a point where a little stream had been turned into a stone trough for cattle. Above it stood a gnarled and solitary thorn. Catherine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was a seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father; she had thought and prayed there as girl and woman; she had wrestled there often with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual temptations which were all her pure youth had known, till the inner light had dawned again, and the humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and the clouds, the white stores and ‘sleeping wings’ of ministering spirits.

But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with what fierce suddenness had it come upon her! She looked back over the day with bewilderment. She could see dimly that the Catherine who had started on that Shanmoor walk had been full of vague misgivings other than those concerned with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and Robert Elsmere apart.

And then; beyond the departure from Shanmoor she seemed to lose the thread of her own history. Memory was drowned in a feeling to which the resisting soul as yet would have no name. She laid her head on her knees trembling. She heard again the sweet imperious tones with which he broke down her opposition about the cloak; she felt again the grasp of his steadying hand on hers.

But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted thus. She raised her head again, scourging herself in shame and self-reproach, recapturing the empire of the soul with a strong effort. She set herself to a stern analysis of the whole situation. Clearly Mrs. Thornburgh and her sisters had been aware for some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had been showing a peculiar interest in her. _Their_ eyes had been open. She realized now with hot cheeks how many meetings and _tete-a-tetes_ had been managed for her and Elsmere, and how complacently she had fallen into Mrs. Thornburgh’s snares.

‘Have I encouraged him?’ she asked herself, sternly.

‘Yes,’ cried the smarting conscience.

‘Can I marry him?’

‘No,’ said conscience again; ‘not without deserting your post, not without betraying your trust.’

What post? What trust? Ah, conscience was ready enough with the answer. Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of sixteen, prematurely old and thoughtful, she had sat beside her father’s deathbed, while her delicate, hysterical mother in a state of utter collapse was kept away from him by the doctors? She could see the drawn face, the restless, melancholy eyes. ‘Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They will look to you. Support them.’ And she could see in imagination her own young face pressed against the pillows. ‘Yes, father, always–always!’ ‘Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower than ever. I die’–and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn breath by which the voice was broken–‘in much–much perplexity about many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them safe to the Day of account.’ ‘Yes, father, with God’s help. Oh, with God’s help!’

That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the spirit of her father’s life and beliefs.

Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that her work is done, her promise kept?

Oh, no–no–she cries to herself, with vehemence. Her mother depends on her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life–Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all experience to come. And Rose–Ah! at the thought of Rose Catherine’s heart sinks deeper and deeper–she feels a culprit before her father’s memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of the child? Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and here is Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father’s wishes, from the galling pressure of the family tradition!

No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical, moment. How can she leave it? Impossible.

What claim can she put against these supreme claims of her promise, her mother’s and sisters’ need?

_His_ claim? Oh, no–no! She admits with soreness and humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them, Catherine Leyburn knew of no supreme right but the right of God to the obedience of man.

Oh, and besides–besides–it is impossible that he should care so very much. The time is so short–there is so little in her, comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such attainments, such access to the best things of life.

She cannot–in a kind of terror–she _will_ not, believe in her own love-worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting wound.

Then her _own_ claim? Has she any claim, has the poor bounding heart that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?

She locks here hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the worst struggle is _here_, the quickest agony _here_. But she does not waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.

‘_Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort._’

‘_If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with greater abundance of grace._’

‘_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is withdrawn from thee._’

‘_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy Creator . . ._’

She presses the sentences she has so often meditated in her long solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of George Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally:

‘_Thy Saviour sentenced joy!_’

Ah, sentenced it forever–the personal craving, the selfish need, that must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her young, new-born joy at the feet of the Master.

She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity. Then there was a curious little epilogue.

‘It is all over,’ she said to herself, tenderly. ‘But he has taught me so much–he has been so good to me–he is so good! Let me take to my heart some counsel–some word of his, and obey it sacredly–silently–for these, days’ sake.’

Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose. How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he, with his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? ‘I have tried to stifle her passion,’ she thought; ‘to push it out of the way as a hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in the ladder–to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh, let me take his word for it–be ruled by him in this one thing, once!’

She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had thrown herself at Elsmere’s feet, that her cheek was pressed against that young brown hand of his. How long the moment lasted she never knew. When at last she rose, stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the lingering northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on the moors; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly white; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted valley and the scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the dale, they moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied them a troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who were bearing it away to burial.

As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale side of the fell, a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had talked to her only that morning of Rose and Rose’s desire, and she had received the news with her habitual silence.

The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had gone up-stairs. Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn discovered that she looked worn out, and she was sent off to bed. She went along the passage quickly to Rose’s room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was inside, crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and went in.

Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing-gown over her shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all about her. She was swaying backward and forward dreamily singing, and she started up when she saw Catherine.

‘Roeschen,’ said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor of heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden hair and the half-covered shoulders, ‘you never told me of that letter from Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, Roeschen, I would never let you have your way? Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong–I think I have been wrong; you shall do what you will, Roeschen. If you want to go, I will ask mother.’

Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. She was struck dumb by this sudden breaking down of Catherine’s long resistance. And what a strange white Catherine! What did it mean? Catherine withdrew her arms with a little sigh and moved away.

‘I just came to tell you that, Roeschen,’ she said, ‘but I am very tired and must not stay.’

Catherine ‘very tired!’ Rose thought the skies must be falling.

‘Cathie!’ she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained the door. ‘Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty odious little wretch. But oh, tell me, what is the matter?’

And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate strength.

The elder sister struggled to release herself.

‘Let me go, Rose,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Oh, you must let me go!’

And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes as though trying to drive away the mist from them.

‘Good-night! Sleep well.’

And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. Rose stood staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a flood of many feelings–remorse, love, fear, sympathy–threw herself face downward on her bed and burst into a passion of tears.

CHAPTER VIII.

Catherine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out her resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without a scene, without a definite proposal and a definite rejection. It was no use letting things drift. Something brusque and marked there must be. She quietly made her dispositions.

It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her one supreme moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she knew in the neighborhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of them, too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed indeed?

All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride in her own spiritual strength. ‘It was not mine,’ she would have said with perfect sincerity, ‘but God’s.’ Still, whatever its source, it had been there at command, and the reflection carried with it a sad sense of security. It was as though a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate himself on being bullet-proof.

To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the thought that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again probably many times. The period of his original invitation had been warmly extended by the Thornburghs. She believed he meant to stay another week or ten days in the valley. But in the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those of some old sepulchral monument.

The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the barometer with abnormal interest. The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar’s wife. She was all sighs and flightiness. She ‘supposed they could go,’ and ‘didn’t, see what good it would do them;’ she had twenty different views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household, and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way. T hen she pursued him into the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously, with many sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could, have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an extraordinary person it was!

Off he went, however, with his _Spectator_ under his arm, whistling. Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open window, and tore the flannel across she was preparing for a mothers’ meeting, with a noise like the rattle of musketry. Whistling! She would like to know what grounds he had for it, indeed! She always knew–she always said–and she would go on saying–that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid.

Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the lightest heart. By way of keeping all his anticipations within the bounds of strict reason, he told himself that it was impossible he should see ‘her’ in the morning. She was always busy in the morning.

He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a shrine. That was her window, that upper casement with the little Banksia rose twining round it. One night, when he and the vicar had been out late on the hills, he had seen a light streaming from it across the valley, and had thought how the mistress of the maiden solitude within shone ‘in a naughty world.’

In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about the garden. She at once informed him, with much languid plaintiveness, that Catherine had gone to Whinborough for the day, and would not be able to join the picnic.

Elsmere stood still.

‘_Gone!_’ he cried. ‘But it was all arranged with her yesterday!’ Mrs. Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was evidently much put out.

‘So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere’–and the gentle widow dropped her voice as though communicating a secret–‘when Catherine’s once made up her mind, you may as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She asked me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh–will you please?–that she found it was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of business, and she must go.’

‘_Mrs. Thornburqh!_’ And not a word for him, for him to whom she had given her promise? She had gone to Whinborough to avoid him, and she had gone in the brusquest way, that it might be unmistakable.

The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his long coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. Leyburn was making to him about the picnic. Was the wretched thing to come off after all?

He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But Mrs. Thornburgh managed that for him. When he got back he told the vicar in the hall of Miss Leyburn’s flight in the fewest possible words, and then his long legs vanished up the stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room shut behind him. A few minutes afterward Mrs. Thornburgh’s shrill voice was heard in the hall, calling to the servant.

‘Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.’

And a minute after the vicar came up to his door.

‘Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain; better put it off.’

To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. The vicar slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to have established herself for the morning in his sanctum, though the parish accounts were clamoring to be done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by immemorial usage.

But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite to him with one hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him if _he_ knew what was to be done with young women nowadays, because _she_ didn’t.

The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a subject, recommended patience, declared that it might all be a mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the consideration of _2s. 8d. plus 2s. 11d. minus 9d_.

‘And I suppose, William,’ said his wife to hint at last, with withering sarcasm, ‘that you’d sit by and see Catherine break that young man’s heart, and send him back to big mother no better than he came here, in spite of all the beef-tea and jelly Sarah and I have been putting into him, and never lift a finger; you’d see his life _blasted_ and you’d do nothing–nothing, I suppose.’

And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye.

‘Of course,’ cried the vicar, roused; ‘I should think so. What good did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? Take care of yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn’t care for him, you can’t make her.’

The vicar’s wife rose the upturned corners of her mouth saying unutterable things.

‘Doesn’t care for him!’ she echoed, in a tone which implied that her husband’s headpiece was past praying for.

‘Yes, doesn’t care for him!’ said the vicar, nettled. ‘What else should make her give him a snub like this?’

Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious expression stole into her eyes.

‘Oh, the Lord only knows!’ she said, with a hasty freedom of speech which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable, as she shut the door after her.

However, if the Higher Powers alone knew, Mrs. Thornburgh was convinced that she could make a very shrewd guess at the causes of Catherine’s behavior. In her opinion it was all pure ‘cussedness.’ Catherine Leyburn had always conducted her life on principles entirely different from those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make yourself and other people uncomfortable. ‘Yet this was what this perverse young woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous, devoted ways. Catherine encourages him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three weeks more gay and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever been known to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly awaiting the natural _denouement_, goes off to spend the day that should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan asylums;–leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her–none at all. It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but must needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and go into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what to be at.

Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere had been talking in the garden, she had been discreetly waiting in the back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off she followed him with eager, sympathetic eyes.

‘Poor fellow!’ she said to herself, but this time with the little tone of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good looks, never shrinks from assuming toward an elder male, especially a male in love with someone else. ‘I wonder whether he thinks he knows anything about Catherine.’

But her own feeling, to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better known to her than anyone else.

‘Oh, of course it’s our salvation in this world and the next that’s in the way,’ thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. ‘I wish to goodness Catherine wouldn’t think so much about mine, at any rate. I hate,’ added this incorrigible young person, ‘I hate being the third part of a “moral obstacle” against my will. I declare I don’t believe we should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh, dear, I wish she’d let me do something for her; I wish she’d ask me to black her boots for her, or put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse still, and I’d do it and welcome!’

It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. But there was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, and that was Mrs. Leyburn’s unconsciousness.

‘Mamma, is too good,’ thought the girl, with a little ripple of laughter. ‘She takes it as a matter of course that all the world should admire us, and she’d scorn to believe that anybody did it from interested motives.’

Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted to her daughters to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. Of course the most eligible persons would be only too thankful to marry them when the moment came. Meanwhile her devotion was in no need of the confirming testimony of lovers. It was sufficient in itself and kept her mind gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred to her to notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special attention to anyone in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naivete that it was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and consideration, and she was of opinion that ‘poor Richard’s views’ of the degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen this particular specimen.

Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, while Agnes drove with her mother. On the way home she overtook Elsmere returning from an errand for the vicar.

‘It is not so bad,’ she said to him, laughing, pointing to the sky; ‘we really might have gone.’

‘Oh, it would have been cheerless,’ he said, simply. His look of depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sympathy, a wild wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she could just have shown him Catherine as she looked last night! Why couldn’t she talk it out with him? Absurd conventions! She had half a mind to try.

But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her young half-childish audacity.

‘Catherine will have a good day for all her business,’ she said, carelessly.

He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge yesterday she could not stand it–she must give him hint how the land lay.

‘I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. Elsmere, what do you think of Aunt Ellen?’

Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young girl’s beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun.

‘A most estimable person,’ he said. ‘Are you on good terms with her, Miss Rose?’

‘Oh dear, no!’ she said, with a little face. ‘I’m not a Leyburn; I wear aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has “special leadings of the spirit” to the effect that the violin is a soul-destroying instrument. Oh, dear!’–and the girl’s mouth twisted–‘it’s alarming to think, if Catherine hadn’t been Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might, have been!’

She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she caught the sudden change of expression in his face.

‘Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her–one can see that,’ he said, evidently speaking with some difficulty.

‘Strength! Oh, yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,’ cried Rose, and then was silent a moment. ‘You know, Mr. Elsmere,’ she went on at last, obeying some inward impulse–‘or perhaps you don’t know–that at home we are all Catherine’s creatures. She does exactly what she likes with us. When my father died she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was eight. We came here to live–we were not very rich, of course, and mamma wasn’t strong. Well, she did everything: she taught us–we have scarcely had any teacher but her since then; she did most of the housekeeping; and you can see for yourself what she does for the neighbors and poor folk. She is never ill, she is never idle, she always knows her own mind. We owe everything we are, almost everything we have, to her. Her nursing has kept mamma alive through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says he never knew any business affairs better managed than ours, and Catherine manages them. The one thing she never takes any care or thought for is herself. What we should do without her I can’t imagine; and yet sometimes I think if it goes on much longer none of us three will have any character of our own left. After all, you know, it may be good for the weak people to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong people _needn’t_ be always trampling on themselves–if they only knew—-‘

She stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. Her eyes were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under a strange mixture of feelings–sympathy, reverence, and a passionate inner admiration struggling with rebellion and protest.

They had reached the gate of the Vicarage. Elsmere stopped and looked at his companion with a singular lightening of expression. He saw perfectly that the young impetuous creature understood him, that she felt his cause was not prospering and that she wanted to help him. He saw that what she meant by this picture of their common life was, that no one need expect Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey; that she wanted to impress on him in her eager way that such lives as her sister’s were not to be gathered at a touch, without difficulty, from the branch that bears them. She was exhorting him to courage–nay he caught more than exhortation–a sort of secret message from her bright, excited looks and incoherent speech–that made his heart leap. But pride and delicacy forbade him to put his feelings into words.

‘You don’t hope to persuade me that your sister reckons you among the weak persons of the world?’ he said, laughing, his hand on the gate. Rose could have blessed him for thus turning the conversation. What on earth could she have said next?

She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with Bob.

Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering meditatively over the cloudy fells. After all he was only where he was before the blessed madness, the upflooding hope, nay, almost certainty, of yesterday. His attack had been for the moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose’s manner that Catherine’s action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying to persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be ominous. Well, then, at worst, when they met they would meet on a different footing, with a sense of something critical between them. Oh, if he did but know a little more clearly how he stood! He spent a noonday hour on a gray rock on the side of the fell, between Whindale and Marrisdale, studying the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the bit of white road. The minutes passed in a kind of trance of memory. Oh, that soft, childlike movement to him, after his speech about her father! that heavenly yielding and self-forgetfulness which shone in her every look and movement as she stood balancing on the stepping-stones! If after all she should prove cruel to him, would he not have a legitimate grievance, a heavy charge to fling against her maiden gentleness? He trampled on the notion. Let her do with him as she would, she would be his saint always, unquestioned, unarraigned.

But with such a memory in his mind it was impossible that any man, least of all a man of Elsmere’s temperament, could be very hopeless. Oh, yes, he had been rash, foolhardy. Do such divine creatures stoop to mortal men as easily as he had dreamt? He recognizes all the difficulties, he enters into the force of all the ties that bind her–or imagines that he does. But he is a man and her lover’; and if she loves him, in the end love will conquer–must conquer. For his more modern sense, deeply Christianized as it is, assumes almost without argument the sacredness of passion and its claim–wherein a vast difference between himself and that solitary wrestler in Marrisdale.

Meanwhile he kept all his hopes and fears to himself. Mrs. Thornburgh was dying to talk to him; but though his mobile, boyish temperament made it impossible for him to disguise his change of mood, there was in him a certain natural Dignity which life greatly developed, but which made it always possible for him to hold his own against curiosity and indiscretion. Mrs. Thornburgh had to hold her peace. As for the vicar, he developed what were for him a surprising number of new topics of conversation, and in the late afternoon took Elsmere a run up the fells to the nearest fragment of the Roman road which runs, with such magnificent disregard of the humors of Mother Earth, over the very top of High Street toward Penrith and Carlisle.

Next day it looked as though after many waverings, the characteristic Westmoreland weather had descended upon them in good earnest. From early morn till late evening the valley was wrapped in damp clouds or moving rain, which swept down from the west through the great basin of the hills, and rolled along the course of the river, wrapping trees and fells and houses in the same misty, cheerless drizzle. Under the outward pall of rain, indeed, the valley was renewing its summer youth; the river was swelling with an impetuous music through all its dwindled channels; the crags flung out white waterfalls again, which the heat had almost dried away; and by noon the whole green hollow was vocal with the sounds of water–water flashing and foaming in the river, water leaping downward from the rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and sycamores and the slate-eaves of the houses.

Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish system of Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner of the study, where he and the vicar protected each other against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good woman would open the door once and again in the morning and put her head through in search of prey; but on being confronted with two studious men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might be doing that morning. Judging a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous Southern standard, be found himself glorying in the weather. She could not wander far from him to-day.

After the early dinner he escaped, just as the vicar’s wife was devising an excuse on which to convey both him and herself to Burwood, and sallied forth with a mackintosh for a rush down the Whinborough road. It was still raining, but the clouds showed a momentary lightening, and a few gleams of watery sunshine brought out every now and then that sparkle on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and atmosphere which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator forget the petulant abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere passed Burwood with a thrill. Should he or should he not present himself? Let him push on a bit and think. So on he swung, measuring his tall frame against the gusts, spirits and masculine energy rising higher with every step. At last the passion of his mood had wrestled itself out with the weather, and he turned back once more determined to seek and find her, to face his fortunes like a man. The warm rain beating from the west struck on his uplifted face. He welcomed it as a friend. Rain and storm had opened to him the gates of a spiritual citadel. What could ever wholly close it against him any more? He felt so strong, so confident! Patience and courage!

Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming out from the white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight lay across its upper end, and he caught a marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a white thread of steam wavering through it, and all around it and below it the rolling rain-clouds.

Suddenly, between him and that enchanter’s vision he saw a dark slim figure against the mists, walking before him along the road. It was Catherine–Catherine just emerged from a footpath across the fields, battling with wind and rain, and quite unconscious of any spectator. Oh, what a sudden thrill was that! What a leaping together of joy and dread, which sent the blood to his heart! Alone–they two alone again-in the wild Westmoreland mists–and half a mile at least of winding road between them and Burwood. He flew after her, dreading, and yet longing for the moment when he should meet her eyes. Fortune had suddenly given this hour into his hands; he felt it open upon him like that mystic valley in the clouds.

Catherine heard the hurrying steps behind her and turned. There was an evident start when she caught sight of her pursuer–a quick change of expression. She wore a close-fitting waterproof dress and cap. Her hair was loosened, her cheek freshened by the storm. He came up with her; he took her hand, his eyes dancing with the joy he could not hide.

‘What are you made of, I wonder?’ he said, gayly. ‘Nothing, certainly, that minds weather.’

‘No Westmoreland native thinks of staying at home for this,’ she said, with her quiet smile, moving on beside him as she spoke.

He looked down upon her with an indescribable mixture of feelings. No stiffness, no coldness in her manner–only the even gentleness which always marked her out from others. He felt as though yesterday were blotted out, and would not for worlds have recalled it to her or reproached her with it. Let it be as though they were but carrying on the scene of the stepping-stones.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the west; ‘have you been watching that magical break in the clouds?’

Her eyes followed his to the delicate picture hung high among the moving mists.

‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, her face kindling, ‘that is one of our loveliest effects, and one of the rarest. You are lucky to have seen it.’

‘I am conceited enough,’ he said, joyously, ‘to feel as if some enchanter were at work up there drawing pictures on the mists for my special benefit. How welcome the rain is! As I am afraid you have heard me say before, what new charm it gives to your valley!’

There was something in the buoyancy and force of his mood that seemed to make Catherine shrink into herself. She would not pursue the subject of Westmoreland. She asked with a little stiffness whether he had good news from Mrs. Elsmere.

‘Oh, yes. As usual, she is doing everything for me,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is disgraceful that I should be idling here while she is struggling with carpenters and paperers, and puzzling out the decorations of the drawing-room. She writes to me in a fury about the word “artistic.” She declares even the little upholsterer at Churton hurls it at her every other minute, and that if it weren’t for me she would select everything as frankly, primevally hideous as she could find, just to spite him. As it is, he has so warped her judgment that she has left the sitting-room papers till I arrive.