Robert Elsmere
by
Mrs. Humphry Ward

Part 1 out of 16

Produced by Andrew Templeton

[Italics are indicated by underscores.]

[Transcriber's note: In one section, marked by **, two Greek letters,
delta and epsilon, are transcribed as de. The allusion is to a poem by
Browning -- 'A Grammarian's Funeral']

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Robert Elsmere

by

Mrs. Humphrey Ward

Author of "Miss Bretherton"

BOSTON:
DeWOLFE, FISKE & CO.,
365 Washington Street

Dedicated to the memory
Of
MY TWO FRIENDS

SEPARATED, IN MY THOUGHT OF THEM, BY MUCH DIVERSITY OF
CIRCUMSTANCE AND OPINION; LINKED, IN MY FAITH ABOUT
THEM, TO EACH OTHER, AND TO ALL THE SNINING
ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD
AND THE SERVICE OF MAN:

THOMAS HILL GREEN

(LAYE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD)

Died March 26, 1882

AND

LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON

Died Easter Eve, 1886
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BOOK I.

WESTMORELAND.

CHAPTER I.

It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The spring had
been unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general
aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of Long Whindale that
warmth and sunshine had only just penetrated to its bare, green
recesses, where the few scattered trees were fast rushing into their
full summer dress, while at their feet, and along the bank of the
stream, the flowers of March and April still lingered, as though
they found it impossible to believe that their rough brother, the
east wind, had at last deserted them. The narrow road, which was
the only link between the farm-houses sheltered by the crags at the
head of the valley, and those far away regions of town and civilization
suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the southern
horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or bird-cherry,
and ran, an arrowy line of white through the greenness of the sloping
pastures. The sides of some of the little books running down into
the main river and, many of the plantations round the farms were
gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed and
gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and
there to have been robbed of all their natural austerity of aspect,
and to be masquerading in a dainty garb of white and green imposed
upon them by the caprice of the spring.

During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whindale
is tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are low and
rounded, and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes unbroken
either by wood or rock. The fields are bare and close shaven by the
flocks which feed on them; the walls run either perpendicularly in
many places up the fells or horizontally along them, so that, save
for the wooded course of the tumbling river and the bush-grown
hedges of the road, the whole valley looks like a green map divided
by regular lines of grayish black. But as the walker penetrates
further, beyond a certain bend which the stream makes half-way from
the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the breadth between
them contracts, the enclosure lines are broken and deflected by
rocks and patches of plantation, and the few farms stand more boldly
and conspicuously forward, each on its spur of land, looking up to
or away from the great masses of frowning crag which close in the
head of the valley, and which from the moment they come into sight
give it dignity and a wild beauty.

On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend
before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from
Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing,
bringing out the whitewashed porch and the broad bands of white
edging the windows, into relief against the gray stone of the main
fabric, the gray roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores
and Scotch firs which protected it from the cold east and north.
The Western light struck full on a copper beech, which made a welcome
patch of warm color in front of a long gray line of outhouses
standing level with the house, and touched the heckberry blossom
which marked the upward course of the little lane connecting the
old farm with the road; above it rose the green fell, broken here
and there by jutting crags, and below it the ground sank rapidly
through a piece of young hazel plantation, at this present moment
a sheet of bluebells, toward the level of the river. There was a
dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer
in the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is
elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendor
and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green
valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer;
the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these
wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable
walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines
in which the shrunken brooks trickle musically down through the
_debris_ of innumerable Decembers. The country is blithe, but
soberly blithe. Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there
is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about her. Man is still well
able to defend himself against her, to live his own independent
life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity of hidden
feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so often
wiled out of him by the spells of the South.

The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that
of the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered
beside the river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But
as one came nearer certain signs of difference became visible. The
garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes,
lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas
grass, with which the farmers' wives of Long Whindale loved to fill
their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted
with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we are writing of with
orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, wallflowers, and
pansies. At the side of the house a new bow window, modest enough
in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to another close-shaven
piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant sophisticated
order of things disturbed the homely impression left by the untouched
ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide slate-window sills
of the front. And evidently the line of sheds standing level with
the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or
the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer.
The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely
shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in
what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to
a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single
footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was,
had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new
and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once
been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through
it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another
and a milder race than once possessed it.

In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this
particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a
vanishing past produced by the slight but significant modifications
it had undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain
sounds which were streaming out on to the evening air from one of
the divisions of that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling
we have already described. Some indefatigable musician inside was
practising the violin with surprising energy and vigor, and within
the little garden the distant murmur of the river and the gentle
breathing of the West wind round the fell were entirely conquered
and banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, or by the
flourishes and the broad _cantabile_ passages of one of Spohr's
Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower and lower toward the
Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all his, or her, own way;
the valley and its green spaces seemed to be possessed by this
stream of eddying sound, and no other sign of life broke the gray
quiet of the house. But at last, just as the golden ball touched
the summit of the craggy fell, which makes the western boundary of
the dale at its higher end, the house-door opened, and a young girl,
shawled and holding some soft burden in her arms, appeared on the
threshold, and stood there for a moment, as though trying the quality
of the air outside. Her pause of inspection seemed to satisfy her,
for she moved forward, leaving the door open behind her, and,
stepping across the lawn, settled herself in a wicker chair under
an apple-tree, which had only just shed its blossoms on the turf
below. She had hardly done so when one of the distant doors opening
on the gravel path flew open, and another maiden, a slim creature
garbed in aesthetic blue, a mass of reddish brown hair flying back
from her face, also stepped out into the garden.

'Agnes!' cried the new-comer, who had the strenuous and dishevelled
air natural to one just emerged from a long violin practice. 'Has
Catherine come back yet?'

'Not that I know of. Do come here and look at pussy; did you ever
see anything so comfortable?'

'You and she look about equally lazy. What have you been doing all
the afternoon?'

'We look what we are, my dear. Doing? Why, I have been attending
to my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, mending my pink dress
for to-morrow night, and helping to keep mamma in good spirits; she
is depressed because she has been finding Elizabeth out in some
waste or other, and I have been preaching to her to make Elizabeth
uncomfortable if she likes, but not to worrit herself. And after
all, pussy and I have come out for a rest. We've earned it, haven't
we, Chattie? And as for you, Miss Artistic, I should like to know
what you've been doing for the good of your kind since dinner. I
suppose you had tea at the vicarage?'

The speaker lifted inquiring eyes to her sister as she spoke, her
cheek plunged in the warm fur of a splendid Persian cat, her whole
look and voice expressing the very highest degree of quiet, comfort,
and self-possession. Agnes Leyburn was not pretty; the lower part
of the face was a little heavy in outline and moulding; the teeth
were not as they should have been, and the nose was unsatisfactory.
But the eyes under their long lashes were shrewdness itself, and
there was an individuality in the voice, a cheery even-temperediness
in look and tone, which had a pleasing effect on the bystander.
Her dress was neat and dainty; every detail of it bespoke a young
woman who respected both herself and the fashion.

Her sister, on the other hand, was guiltless of the smallest trace
of fashion. Her skirts were cut with the most engaging naivete, she
was much adorned with amber beads, and her red brown hair had been
tortured and frizzled to look as much like an aureole as possible.
But, on the other hand, she was a beauty, though at present you
felt her a beauty in disguise, a stage Cinderella as it were, in
very becoming rags, waiting for the fairy godmother.

'Yes, I had tea at the vicarage,' said this young person, throwing
herself on the grass in spite of a murmured protest from Agnes, who
had an inherent dislike of anything physically rash, 'and I had the
greatest difficulty to get away. Mrs. Thornburgh is in such a flutter
about this visit! One would think it was the Bishop and all his
Canons, and promotion depending on it, she has baked so many cakes
and put out so many dinner napkins! I don't envy the young man.
She will have no wits left at all to entertain him with. I actually
wound up by administering some sal-volatile to her.'

'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out
of her on the subject of the young man?'

'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only
remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow.
In between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to
college, we had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making
of them and the, cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to
her black sheep of a young man, the price of tea when she married,
Mr. Thornburgh's singular preference of boiled mutton to roast, the
poems she had written to her when she was eighteen, and I can't
tell you what else besides. But I held fast, and every now and
then I brought her up to the point again, gently but firmly, and
now I think I know all I want to know about the interesting stranger.'

'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek
gently up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be
much order in them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has
been to the Holy Land, and his hair has been out close after a
fever. It sounds odd, but I am not curious. I can very well wait
till to-morrow evening.'

'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't got that sort
of thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he
went to college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his
mother's peculiarities which seem to be Irish and curious, where
his living is, how much it is worth, likewise the color of his eyes,
as near as Mrs. Thornburgh can get.'

'What a start you have been getting!' said Agnes lazily. 'But what
is it makes the poor old thing so excited?'

Rose sat up and began to fling the fir-cones lying about her at a
distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical perfections and
the aesthetic freedom of her attire.

'Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment is always
seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand before a
mine. Mr. Elsmere is the match--we are the mine.'

Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright
rippling laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own value,
and in no hurry to force an estimate of it on the male world.

'Well,' said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed with her
gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, 'there is no saying. "Propinquity
does it"--as Mrs. Thornburgh is always reminding us. But where
_can_ Catherine be? She went out directly after lunch.'

'She has, gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at the
Tysons--at least I heard her talking to mamma about him, and she
went out with a basket that looked like beef-tea.'

Rose frowned a little.

'And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see Mrs.
Robson instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I dare say I ought--only
unfortunately I like my fiddle, and I don't like stuffy cottages,
and as for the goody books, I read them so badly that the old women
themselves come down upon me.'

'I seem to have been making the best of both worlds,' said Agnes
placidly. 'I haven't been doing anything I don't like, but I got
hold of that dress she brought home to make for little Emma Payne
and nearly finished the skirt, so that I feel as good as when one
has been twice to church on a wet Sunday. Ah, there is Catherine,
I heard the gate.'

As she spoke steps were heard approaching through the clump of trees
which sheltered the little entrance gate, and as Rose sprang to her
feet a tall figure in white and gray appeared against the background
of the sycamores, and came quickly toward the sisters.

'Dears, I am so sorry; I am afraid you have been waiting for me.
But poor Mrs. Tyson wanted me so badly that I could not leave her.
She had no one else to help her or to be with her till that eldest
girl of hers came home from work.'

'It doesn't matter,' said, Rose, as Catherine put her arm round her
shoulder; 'mamma has been fidgeting, and as for Agnes, she looks
as if she never wanted to move again.'

Catherine's clear eyes, which at the moment seemed to be full of
inward light, kindled in them by some foregoing experience, rested
kindly, but only half consciously, on her younger sister as Agnes
softly nodded and smiled to her. Evidently she was a good deal
older than the other two--she looked about six-and-twenty, a young
and vigorous woman in the prime of health and strength. The lines
of the form were rather thin and spare, but they were softened by
the loose bodice and long full skirt of her dress, and by the folds
of a large, white muslin handkerchief which was crossed over her
breast. The face, sheltered by the plain shady hat was also a
little spoilt from the point of view of beauty by the sharpness of
the lines about the chin and mouth, and by a slight prominence of
the cheek-bones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish gray, were fine,
the nose delicately cut, the brow smooth and beautiful, while the
complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air
and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate
austere charm, something which harmonized with the bare stretches
and lonely crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her
a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once of their gentleness
and their severity. _She_ was in her place here, beside the homely
Westmoreland house, and under the shelter of the fells. When you
first saw the other sisters you wondered what strange chance had
brought them into that remote sparely peopled valley; they were
plainly exiles, and conscious exiles, from the movement and
exhilarations of a fuller social life. But Catherine impressed you
as only a refined variety of the local type; you could have found
many like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced serious women of
the neighboring farms.

Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting lightly
on the other's shoulder, a question from Agnes banished the faint
smile on her lips, and left, only the look of inward illumination,
the expression of one who had just passed, as it were, through a
strenuous and heroic moment of life, and was still living in the
exaltation of memory.

'So the poor fellow is worse?'

'Yes. Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-day, says the spine is
hopelessly injured. He may live on paralyzed for a few months or
longer, but there is no hope of cure.'

Both girls uttered a shocked exclamation. 'That fine strong young
man!' said Rose under her breath. 'Does he know?'

'Yes; when I got there the doctor had just gone, and Mrs. Tyson,
who was quite unprepared for anything so dreadful, seemed to have
almost lost her wits, poor thing! I found her in the front kitchen
with her apron over her head, rocking to and fro, and poor Arthur
in the inner room--all alone--waiting in suspense.'

'And who told him? He has been so hopeful.'

'I did,' said Catherine, gently; 'they made me. He _would_ know,
and she couldn't--she ran out of the room. I never saw anything
so pitiful.'

'Oh, Catherine!' exclaimed Rose's moved voice, while Agnes got up,
and Chattie jumped softly down from her lap unheeded.

'How did he bear it?'

'Don't ask me,' said Catherine, while the quiet tears filled her
eyes and her voice broke, as the hidden feeling would have its way.
'It was terrible. I don't know how we got through that half-hour--his
mother and I. It was like wrestling with someone in agony. At last
he was exhausted--he let me say the Lord's Prayer; I think it soothed
him, but one couldn't tell. He seemed half asleep when I left.
Oh!' she cried, laying her hand in a close grasp on Rose's arm, 'if
you had seen his eyes, and his poor hands--there was such despair
in them! They say, though he was so young, he was thinking of
getting married; and he was so steady, such a good son!'

A silence fell upon the three. Catherine stood looking out across
the valley toward the sunset. Now that the demand upon her for
calmness and fortitude was removed, and that the religious exaltation
in which she had gone through the last three hours was becoming
less intense, the pure human pity of the scene she had just witnessed
seemed to be gaining upon her. Her lip trembled, and two or three
tears silently overflowed. Rose turned and gently kissed her cheek,
and Agnes touched her hand caressingly. She smiled at them, for
it was not in her nature to let any sign of love pass unheeded, and
in a few more seconds she had mastered herself.

'Dears, we must go in. Is mother in her room? Oh, Rose! in that
thin dress on the grass; I oughtn't to have kept you out. It is
quite cold by now.'

And, she hurried them in, leaving them to superintend the preparations
for supper downstairs while she ran up to her mother.

A quarter of an hour afterward they were all gathered round the
supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May twilight.
At Catherine's right hand sat Mrs. Leyburn, a tall delicate-looking
woman, wrapped in a white shawl, about whom there were only three
things to be noticed--an amiable temper, a sufficient amount of
weak health to excuse her all the more tiresome duties of life, and
an incorrigible tendency to sing the praises of her daughters at
all times and to all people. The daughters winced under it:
Catherine, because it was a positive pain to her to bear herself
brought forward and talked about; the others, because youth infinitely
prefers to make its own points in its own way. Nothing, however,
could mend this defect of Mrs. Leyburn's. Catherine's strength of
will could keep it in check sometimes, but in general it had to be
borne with. A sharp word would have silenced the mother's well-meant
chatter at any time--for she was a fragile nervous woman, entirely
dependent on her surroundings--but none of them were capable of it,
and their mere refractoriness counted for nothing.

The dining room in which they were gathered had a good deal of
homely dignity, and was to the Leyburns full of associations. The
oak settle near the fire, the oak sideboard running along one side
of the room, the black oak table with carved legs at which they
sat, were genuine pieces of old Westmoreland work, which had belonged
to their grandfather. The heavy carpet covering the stone floor
of what twenty years before had been the kitchen of the farm-house
was a survival from a south-country home, which had sheltered their
lives for eight happy years. Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait
of the girls' father, a long serious face, not unlike Wordsworth's
face in outline, and bearing a strong resemblance to Catherine; a
line of silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece; on the walls were
prints of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals, photographs of Greece,
and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and Milton; while a
bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college books and
college prizes and the favorite authors--mostly poets, philosophers,
and theologians--of his later years, gave a final touch of habitableness
to the room. The little meal and its appointments--the eggs, the
home-made bread and preserves, the tempting butter and old-fashioned
silver gleaming among the flowers which Rose arranged with fanciful
skill in Japanese pots of her own providing--suggested the same
family qualities as the room. Frugality, a dainty personal
self-respect, a family consciousness, tenacious of its memories and
tenderly careful of all the little material objects, which were to
it the symbols of those memories--clearly all these elements entered
into the Leyburn tradition.

And of this tradition, with its implied assertions and denials,
clearly Catherine Leyburn, the eldest sister, was, of all the persons
gathered in this little room, the most pronounced embodiment. She
sat at the head of the table, the little basket of her own and her
mother's keys beside her. Her dress was a soft black brocade, with
lace collar and cuff, which had once belonged to an aunt of her
mother's. It was too old for her both in fashion and material, but
it gave her a gentle, almost matronly dignity, which became her.
Her long thin hands, full of character and delicacy, moved nimbly
among the cups; all her ways were quiet and yet decided. It was
evident that among this little party she, and not the plaintive
mother, was really in authority. To-night, however, her looks were
specially soft. The scene she had gone through in the afternoon
had left her pale, with traces of patient fatigue round the eyes
and mouth, but all her emotion was gone, and she was devoting herself
to the others, responding with quick interest and ready smiles to
all they had to say, and contributing the little experiences of her
own day in return.

Rose sat on her left hand in yet another gown of strange tint and
archaic outline. Rose's gowns were legion. They were manufactured
by a farmer's daughter across the valley, under her strict and
precise supervision. She was accustomed, as she boldly avowed, to
shut herself up at the beginning of each season of the year for two
days' meditation on the subject. And now, thanks to the spring
warmth, she was entering at last with infinite zest on the results
of her April vigils.

Catherine had surveyed her as she entered the room with a smile,
but a smile not altogether to Rose's taste.

'What, another, Roeschen?' she had said with the slightest lifting
of the eyebrows. 'You never confided that to me. Did you think I
was unworthy of anything so artistic?'

'Not at all,' said Rose calmly, seating herself. 'I thought you
were better employed.'

But a flush flew over her transparent cheek, and she presently threw
an irritated look at Agnes, who had been looking from her to Catherine
with amused eyes.

'I met Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Elsmere driving from the station,'
Catherine announced presently; 'at least there was a gentleman in
a clerical wideawake with a portmanteau behind, so I imagine it
must have been he.'

'Did he look promising?' inquired Agnes.

'I don't think I noticed,' said Catherine simply, but with a momentary
change of expression. The sisters, remembering how she had come
in upon them with that look of one 'lifted up,' understood why she
had not noticed, and refrained from further questions.

'Well, it is to be hoped the young man is recovered enough to stand
Long Whindale festivities,' said Rose. 'Mrs. Thornburgh means to
let them loose on his devoted head to-morrow night.'

'Who are coming?' asked Mrs. Leyburn eagerly. The occasional tea
parties of the neighborhood were an unfailing excitement to her,
simply because, by dint of the small adornings, natural to the
occasion, they showed her daughters to her under slightly new
aspects. To see Catherine, who never took any thought for her
appearance, forced to submit to a white dress, a line of pearls
round the shapely throat, a flower in the brown hair, put there by
Rose's imperious fingers; to sit in a corner well out of draughts,
watching the effect of Rose's half-fledged beauty, and drinking in
the compliments of the neighborhood on Rose's playing or Agnes's
conversation, or Catherine's practical ability--these were Mrs.
Leyburn's passions, and a tea-party always gratified them to the
full.

'Mamma asks as if really she wanted an answer,' remarked Agnes
dryly. 'Dear mother, can't you by now make up a tea-party at the
Thornburghs out of your bead?'

'The Seatons?' inquired Mrs. Leyburn.

'_Mrs._ Seaton and Miss Barks,' replied Rose. 'The rector won't
come. And I needn't say that, having moved heaven, and earth to
get Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Thornburgh is now miserable because she has
got her. Her ambition is gratified, but she knows that she has
spoilt the party. Well, then, Mr. Mayhew, of course, his son, _and_
his flute.'

'You to play his accompaniments?' put in Agnes slyly. Rose's lip
curled.

'Not if Miss Barks knows it,' she said emphatically, 'nor if I know
it. The Bakers, of course, ourselves, and the unknown.'

'Dr. Baker is always pleasant,' said Mrs. Leyburn, leaning back and
drawing her white shawl languidly round her. 'He told me the other
day, Catherine, that if it weren't for you he should have to retire.
He regards you as his junior partner. "Marvellous nursing gift
your eldest daughter has, Mrs. Leyburn," he said to me the other
day. A most agreeable man.'

'I wonder if I shall be able to get any candid opinions out of Mr.
Elsmere the day after to-morrow?' said Rose, musing. 'It is difficult
to avoid having an opinion of some sort about Mrs. Seaton.'

'Oxford dons don't gossip and are never candid,' remarked Agnes
severely.

'Then Oxford dons must be very dull,' cried Rose. 'However,' and
her countenance brightened, 'if he stays here four weeks we can
teach him.'

Catherine, meanwhile, sat watching the two girls with a soft elder
sister's indulgence. Was it in connection with their bright
attractive looks that the thought flitted through her head, 'I
wonder what the young man will be like?'

'Oh, by the way,' said Rose presently, 'I had nearly forgotten Mrs.
Thornburgh's two messages. I informed her, Agnes, that you had
given up water color and meant to try oils, and she told me to
implore you not to, because "water color is so _much_ more lady-like
than oils." And as for you, Catherine, she sent you a most special
message. I was to tell you that she just _loved_ the way you had
taken to plaiting your hair lately--that it was exactly like the
picture of Jeanie Deans she has in the drawing-room, and that she
would never forgive you if you didn't plait it so to-morrow night.'

Catherine flushed faintly as she got up from the table.

'Mrs. Thornburgh has eagle-eyes,' she said, moving away to give her
arm to her mother, who looked fondly at her, making some remark in
praise of Mrs. Thornburgh's taste.

'Rose!' cried Agnes indignantly, when the other two had disappeared,
'you and Mrs. Thornburgh have not the sense you were born with.
What on earth did you say that to Catherine for?'

Rose stared; then her face fell a little.

'I suppose it was foolish,' she admitted. Then she leant her head
on one hand and drew meditative patterns on the tablecloth with the
other. 'You know, Agnes,' she said presently, looking up, 'there
are drawbacks to having a St. Elizabeth for a sister.'

Agnes discreetly made no reply, and Rose was left alone. She sat
dreaming a few minutes, the corners of the red mouth drooping.
Then she sprang up with a long sigh. 'A little life!' she said
half-aloud, 'A little _wickedness!_' and she shook her curly head
defiantly.

A few minutes later, in the little drawing-room on the other side
of the hall, Catherine and Rose stood together by the open window.
For the first time in a lingering spring, the air was soft and
balmy; a tender grayness lay over the valley; it was not night,
though above the clear outline's of the fell the stars were just
twinkling in the pale blue. Far away under the crag on the further
side of High Fell a light was shining. As Catherine's eyes caught
it there was a quick response in the fine Madonna-like face.

'Any news for me from the Backhouses this afternoon?' she asked
Rose.

'No, I heard of none. How is she?'

'Dying,' said Catherine simply, and stood a moment looking out.
Rose did not interrupt her. She knew that the house from which the
light was shining sheltered a tragedy; she guessed with the vagueness
of nineteen that it was a tragedy of passion and sin; but Catherine
had not been communicative on the subject, and Rose had for some
time past set up a dumb resistance to her sister's most characteristic
ways of life and thought, which prevented her now from asking
questions. She wished nervously to give Catherine's extraordinary
moral strength no greater advantage over her than she could help.

Presently, however, Catherine threw her arm round her with a tender
protectingness.

'What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Roeschen?'

'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two hours
this morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.'

'And you didn't look into the school?' asked Catherine, hesitating;
'I know Miss Merry expected you.'

'No, I didn't. When one can play the violin and can't teach, any
more than a cuckatoo, what's the good of wasting one's time in
teaching?'

Catherine did not reply. A minute after Mrs. Leyburn called her,
and she went to sit on a stool at her mother's feet, her hands
resting on the elder woman's lap, the whole attitude of the tall
active figure one of beautiful and childlike abandonment. Mrs.
Leyburn wanted to confide in her about a new cap, and Catherine
took up the subject with a zest which kept her mother happy till
bedtime.

'Why couldn't she take as much interest in my Spohr? thought Rose.

Late that night, long after she had performed all a maid's offices
for her mother, Catherine Leyburn was busy in her own room arranging
a large cupboard containing medicines and ordinary medical necessaries,
a storehouse whence all the simpler emergencies of their end of the
valley were supplied. She had put on a white flannel dressing-gown
and moved noiselessly about in it, the very embodiment of order,
of purity, of quiet energy. The little white-curtained room was
bareness and neatness itself. There were a few book-shelves along
the walls, holding the books which her father had given her. Over
the bed were two enlarged portraits of her parents, and a line of
queer little faded monstrosities, representing Rose and Agnes in
different stages of childhood. On the table beside the bed was a
pile of well-worn books--Keble, Jeremy Taylor, the Bible--connected
in the mind of the mistress of the room with the intensest moments
of the spiritual life. There was a strip of carpet by the bed, a
plain chair or two, a large press; otherwise no furniture that was
not absolutely necessary, and no ornaments. And yet, for all its
emptiness, the little room in its order and spotlessness had the
look and spell of a sanctuary.

When her task was finished Catherine came forward to the infinitesimal
dressing-table, and stood a moment before the common cottage
looking-glass upon it. The candle behind her showed her the outlines
of her head and face in shadow against the white ceiling. Her soft
brown hair was plaited high above the broad white brow, giving to
it an added stateliness, while it left unmasked the pure lines of
the neck. Mrs. Thornburgh and her mother were quite right. Simple
as the new arrangement was, it could hardly have been more effective.

But the looking-glass got no smile in return for its information.
Catherine Leyburn was young; she was alone; she was being very
plainly told that, taken as a whole, she was, or might be at any
moment, a beautiful woman. And all her answer was a frown and a
quick movement away from the glass. Putting up her hands she began
to undo the plaits with haste, almost with impatience; she smoothed
the whole mass then set free into the severest order, plaited it
closely together, and then, putting out her light, threw herself
on her knees beside the window, which was partly open to the starlight
and the mountains. The voice of the river far away, wafted from
the mist-covered depths of the valley, and the faint rustling of
the trees just outside, were for long after the only sounds which
broke the silence.

When Catherine appeared at breakfast next morning her hair was
plainly gathered into a close knot behind, which had been her way
of dressing it since she was thirteen. Agnes threw a quick look
at Rose; Mrs. Leyburn, as soon as she had made out through her
spectacles what was the matter, broke into warm expostulations.

'It is more comfortable, dear mother, and takes much less time,'
said Catherine, reddening.

'Poor Mrs. Thornburgh!' remarked Agnes dryly.

'Oh, Rose will make up!' said Catherine, glancing, not without a
spark of mischief in her gray eyes, at Rose's tortured locks; 'and
mamma's new cap, which will be superb!'

CHAPTER II.

About four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be
marked in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh's
'high tea,' that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her
spectacles on her nose, a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and
the Whinborough newspaper on her lap. The neighborhood of this
last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading; but
in reality the energies of her house-wifely mind were taken up with
quite other things. The vicar's wife was plunged in a housekeeping
experiment of absorbing interest. All her _solid_ preparations for
the evening were over, and in her own mind she decided that with
them there was no possible fault to be found. The cook, Sarah, had
gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish and fastidious,
breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no plumper
chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were to
be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And
so with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the
hostess felt no anxieties.

But a 'tea' in the north-country depends for distinction, not on
its solids or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural hostess
earns her reputation, not by a discriminating eye for butcher's-meat,
but by her inventiveness in cakes and custards. And it was just
here, with regard to this 'bubble reputation,' that the vicar's
wife of Long Whindale was particularly sensitive. Was she not
expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of Whinborough--odious
woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent on her to do well, nay to do
brilliantly, in the eyes of this local magnate? And how was it
possible to do brilliantly in this matter with a cook whose recipes
were hopelessly old-fashioned, and who had an exasperating belief
in the sufficiency of buttered 'whigs' and home-made marmalade for
all requirements?

Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. Thornburgh had gone prowling about
the neighboring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain
newly arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with
the most airy and appetizing trifles--of a make and coloring quite
metropolitan. She had flattened her gray curls against the window
for one deliberative moment; had then rushed in; and as soon as the
carrier's cart of Long Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting,
should have arrived, bearing with it the produce of that adventure,
Mrs. Thornburgh would be a proud woman, prepared to meet a legion
of rectors' wives without flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects
a woman at peace with herself and the world. In the country, where
every household should be self-contained, a certain discredit
attaches in every well-regulated mind to 'getting things in.' Mrs.
Thornburgh was also nervous at the thought of the bill. It would
have to be met gradually out of the weekly money. For 'William'
was to know nothing of the matter, except so far as a few magnificent
generalities and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes might inform
him. But after all, in this as in everything else, one must suffer
to be distinguished.

The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have described,
and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped unheeded to her feet. The
vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new
gray-stone building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what
had once been the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the
primitive dwelling house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after
sundry augmentations, amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year.
The modern house, though it only contained sufficient accommodation
for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one guest and two maids, would have
seemed palatial to those rustic clerics of the past from whose
ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its spiritual sustenance
in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to another race--a
race sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole of life
in very close contact and very homely intercourse with their mother
earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few years
before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and
who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways,
had only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one,
of what these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange
social status and unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there
were one or two old men still lingering in the dale who could have
told him a great deal about them, whose memory went back to the
days when the relative social importance of the dale parsons was
exactly expressed by the characteristic Westmoreland saying: 'Ef
ye'll nobbut send us a gude schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson
'ull dea!' and whose slow minds, therefore, were filled with a
strong inarticulate sense of difference as they saw him pass along
the road, and recalled the incumbent of their childhood, dropping
in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this or that farm-house
on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his sheep to Whinborough
market with his own hands like any other peasant of the dale.

Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining survivors
of this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland and Cumberland
valleys have dropped into their quiet, unremembered graves, and new
men of other ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead.
And as at Long Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been
emphasized by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with
their stone floors, their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest
or dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in
favor of an upgrowth of new trim mansions designed to meet the
needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks.

And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of
transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century
has worried its will even in the remotest corners of the Cambrian
country, and soon not a vestige of the homely worshipping-places
of an earlier day will remain. Across the road, in front of the
Long Whindale parsonage, for instance, rose a freshly built church,
also peaked and gabled, with a spire and two bells and a painted
east window, and Heaven knows what novelties besides. The primitive
whitewashed structure it replaced had lasted long, and in the course
of many generations time had clothed its moss-grown walls, its
slated porch, and tombstones worn with rain in a certain beauty of
congruity and association, linking it with the purple distances of
the fells, and the brawling river bending round the gray enclosure.
But finally, after a period of quiet and gradual decay, the ruin
of Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and hurrying ruin that
would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the roof came
dropping on the farmers heads, and the oak benches beneath offered
gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully learnt by the
substantial persons who sat on them, lest they should be overtaken
by undignified disaster; when the rain poured in on the Communion
Table and the wind raged through innumerable mortarless chinks,
even the slowly-moving folk of the valley came to the conclusion
that 'summat 'ull hev to be deun.' And by the help of the Bishop
and Queen Anne's Bounty, and what not, aided by just as many
half-crowns as the valley found itself unable to defend against the
encroachments of a new and 'moiderin' parson, 'summat' was done,
whereof the results--namely, the new church, vicarage, and
school-house--were now conspicuous.

This radical change, however, had not been the work of Mr. Thornburgh,
but of his predecessor, a much more pushing and enterprising man,
whose successful efforts to improve the church accommodation in
Long Whindale had moved such deep and lasting astonishment in the
mind of a somewhat lethargic bishop, that promotion had been readily
found for him. Mr. Thornburgh was neither capable of the sturdy
begging which had raised the church, nor was he likely on
other lines to reach preferment. He and his wife, who possessed
much more salience of character than he, were accepted in the dale
as belonging to the established order of things. Nobody wished
them any harm, and the few people they had specially befriended,
naturally, thought well of them.

But the old intimacy of relation which had once subsisted between
the clergyman of Long Whindale and his parishioners was wholly gone.
They had sunk in the scale; the parson had risen. The old statesmen
or peasant proprietors of the valley had for the most part succumbed
to various destructive influences, some social, some economical,
added to a certain amount of corrosion from within; and their place
had been taken by leaseholders, lets drunken perhaps, and better
educated, but also far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in
the rude dignity of their predecessors.

And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place of the
dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and Parsonage had got
themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income raised, had let
off his glebe to a neighboring farmer, kept two maids, and drank
claret when he drank anything. His flock were friendly enough, and
paid their commuted tithes without grumbling. But between them and
a perfectly well-meaning but rather dull man, who stood on his
dignity and wore a black coat all the week, there was no real
community. Rejoice in it as we may, in this final passage of Parson
Primrose to social regions beyond the ken of Farmer Flamborough,
there are some elements of loss as there are in all changes.

Wheels on the road! Mrs. Thornburgh woke up with a start, and
stumbling over newspaper and _couvre-pied_, hurried across the lawn
as fast as her short, squat figure would allow, gray curls and
cap-strings flying behind her. She heard a colloquy in the distance
in broad Westmoreland dialect, and as she turned the corner of the
house she nearly ran into her tall cook, Sarah, whose impassive and
saturnine countenance bore traces of unusual excitement.

'Missis, there's naw cakes. They're all left behind on t' counter
at Randall's. Mr. Backhouse says as how he told old Jim to go fur
'em, and he niver went, and Mr. Backbouse he niver found oot till
he'd got past t' bridge, and than it wur too late to go back.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh pink color
slowly deserting her face as she realized the enormity of the
catastrophe. And was it possible that there was the faintest twinkle
of grim satisfaction on the face of that elderly minx, Sarah?

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, did, not stay to explore the recesses of
Sarah's mind, but ran with little pattering, undignified steps
across the front garden and down the steps to where Mr. Backhouse,
the carrier, stood, bracing himself for self-defense.

'Ya may weel fret, mum,' said Mr. Backhouse, interrupting the flood
of her reproaches, with the comparative _sang-froid_ of one who
knew that, after all, he was the only carrier on the road, and that
the vicarage was five miles from the necessaries of life; 'it's a
bad job, and I's not goin' to say it isn't. But; ya jest look 'ere,
mum, what's a man to du wi' a daft thingamy like _that_, as caan't
teak a plain order, and spiles a poor man's business as caan't help
hissel'?'

And Mr. Backhouse pointed with withering scorn to a small, shrunken
old man, who sat dangling his legs on the shaft of the cart, and
whose countenance wore a singular expression of mingled meekness
and composure, as his partner flourished an indignant finger toward
him.

'Jim,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh reproachfully, 'I did think you would
have taken more pains about my order!'

'Yis, mum,'said the old man, placidly, 'ya might 'a' thowt it. I's
reet sorry, but ya caan't help these things _sum_times--an' it's
naw gud hollerin' ower 'em like a mad bull. Aa tuke yur bit paper
to Randall's and aa laft it wi' 'em to mek up, an' than, aa weel,
aa went to a frind, an' ee _may_ hev giv' me a glass of yale, aa
doon't say ee _dud_--but ee may, I ween't sweer. Hawsomiver, aa
niver thowt naw mair aboot it, nor mair did John, so _ee_ needn't
taak--till we wur jest two mile from 'ere. An' ee's a gon' on
sence! My! an' a larroping the poor beast like onything.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this audacious
recital. As for John, he looked on, surveying his brother's
philosophical demeanor at first with speechless wrath, and then
with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, in which, however, any
one accustomed to his weather-beaten countenance would have probably
read a hidden admiration.

'Weel, aa niver!' he exclaimed, when Jim's explanatory remarks had
come to an end, swinging himself up on to his seat and gathering
up the reins. 'Yur a boald 'un to tell the missus theer to hur
feeace as how ya wur' tossicatit whan yur owt ta been duing yur
larful business. Aa've doon wi' yer. Aa aims to please ma coostomers,
an' aa caan't abide sek wark. Yur like an oald kneyfe, I can mak'
nowt o' ya', nowder back nor edge.'

Mrs. Thornburgh wrung her fat short hands in despair, making little
incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him about to depart,
of which John at last gathered the main purport to be that she
wished him to go back to Whinborough for her precious parcel.

He shook his head compassionately over the preposterous state of
mind betrayed by such a demand, and with a fresh burst of abuse of
his brother, and an assurance to the vicar's wife that he meant to
'gie that oald man nawtice when be got haum; he wasn't goan to hev
his bisness spiled for nowt by an oald ijiot wi' a hed as full o'
yale as a hayrick's full o' mice,' he raised his whip and the
clattering vehicle moved forward; Jim meanwhile preserving through
all his brother's wrath and Mrs. Thornburgh's wailings the same
mild and even countenance, the meditative and friendly aspect of
the philosopher letting the world go 'as e'en it will.'

So Mrs. Thornburgh was left gasping, watching the progress of the
lumbering cart along the bit of road leading to the hamlet at the
head of the valley, with so limp and crestfallen an aspect that
even the gaunt and secretly jubilant Sarah was moved to pity.

'Why, missis, we'll do very well. I'll hev some scones in t'oven
in naw time, an' theer's finger biscuits, an' wi' buttered toast
an' sum o' t'best jams, if they don't hev enuf to eat they ought
to.' Then, dropping her voice, she asked with a hurried change of
tone, 'Did ye ask un' hoo his daater is?'

Mrs. Thornburgh started. Her pastoral conscience was smitten. She
opened the gate and waved violently after the cart. John pulled
his horse up, and with a few quick steps she brought herself within
speaking, or rather shouting, distance.

'How's your daughter to-day, John?'

The old man's face peering round the oilcloth hood of the cart was
darkened by a sudden cloud as he caught the words. His stern lips
closed. He muttered something inaudible to Mrs. Thornburgh and
whipped up his horse again. The cart started off, and Mrs. Thornburgh
was left staring into the receding eyes of 'Jim the Noodle,' who,
from his seat on the near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had
passed from benevolence into a preternatural solemnity.

'He's sparin' ov 'is speach, is John Backhouse,' said Sarah grimly,
as her mistress returned to her. 'Maybe ee's aboot reet. It's a
bad business au' ee'll not mend it wi' taakin.'

Mrs. Thornburgh, however, could not apply herself to the case of
Mary Backhouse. At any other moment it would have excited in her
breast the shuddering interest, which, owing to certain peculiar
attendant circumstances, it, awakened in every other woman in Long
Whindale. But her mind--such are the limitations of even clergymen's
wives--was now absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings
seemed to hang limp with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly
into the kitchen, and gave what attention she could to, those
second-best arrangements so depressing to the idealist temper.

Poor soul! All the charm and glitter of her little social adventure
was gone. When she once more emerged upon the lawn, and languidly
readjusted her spectacles, she was weighed down by the thought that
in two hours Mrs. Seaton would be upon her. Nothing of this kind
ever happened to Mrs. Seaton. The universe obeyed her nod. No
carrier conveying goods to her august door ever got drunk or failed
to deliver his consignment. The thing was inconceivable. Mrs.
Thornburgh was well aware of it.

Should William be informed? Mrs. Thornburgh had a rooted belief
in the brutality of husbands in all domestic crises, and would have
preferred not to inform him. But she had also a dismal certainty
that the secret would burn a hole in her till it was confessed-bill
and all. Besides--frightful thought!--would they have to eat up
all those _meringues_ next day?

Her reflections at last became so depressing that, with a natural
epicurean instinct, she tried violently to turn her mind away from
them. Luckily she was assisted by a sudden perception of the roof
and chimneys of Burwood, the Leyburns' house, peeping above the
trees to the left. At sight of them a smile overspread her plump
and gently wrinkled face. She fell gradually into a train of
thought, as feminine as that in which she had been just indulging,
but infinitely more pleasing.

For, with regard to the Leyburns, at this present moment Mrs.
Thornburgh felt herself in the great position of tutelary divinity
or guardian angel. At least if divinities and guardian angels do
not concern themselves with the questions to which Mrs. Thornburgh's
mind was now addressed, it would clearly have been the opinion of
the vicar's wife that they ought to do so.

'Who else is there to look after these girls, I should like to
know,' Mrs. Thornburgh inquired of herself, 'if I don't do it? As
if girls married themselves! People may talk of their independence
nowadays as much as they like--it always has to be done for them,
one way or another. Mrs. Leyburn, poor lackadaisical thing! is no
good whatever. No more is Catherine. They both behave as if
husbands tumbled into your mouth for the asking. Catherine's too
good for this world--but if she doesn't do it, I must. Why, that
girl Rose is a beauty--if they didn't let her wear those ridiculous
mustard-colored things, and do her hair fit to frighten the crows!
Agnes too--so ladylike and well mannered; she'd do credit to any
man. Well, we shall see, we shall see!'

And Mrs. Thornburgh gently shook her gray curls from side to side,
while, her eyes, fixed on the open spare room window, shone with
meaning.

'So eligible, too--private means, no encumbrances, and as good as
gold.'

She sat lost a moment in a pleasing dream.

'Shall I bring oot the tea to you theer, mum?' called Sarah gruffly,
from the garden door. 'Master and Mr. Elsmere are just coomin'
down t' field by t' stepping-stones.' Mrs. Thornburgh signalled
assent and the tea-table was brought. Afternoon tea was by no means
a regular institution at the vicarage of Long Whindale, and Sarah
never supplied it without signs of protest. But when a guest was
in the house Mrs. Thornburgh insisted upon it; her obstinacy in the
matter, like her dreams of cakes and confections, being part of her
determination to move with the times, in spite the station to which
Providence had assigned her.

A minute afterward the vicar, a thick-set gray-haired man of sixty,
accompanied by a tall younger man in clerical dress, emerged upon
the lawn.

'Welcome sight!' cried Mr. Thornburgh; 'Robert and I have been
coveting that tea for the last hour. You guessed very well, Emma,
to have it just ready for us.'

'Oh, that was Sarah. She saw you coming down to the stepping-stones,'
replied his wife, pleased, however, by any talk of appreciation
from her mankind, however small. 'Robert, I hope you haven't been
walked off your legs?'

'What, in this air, cousin Emma? I could walk from sunrise to
sundown. Let no one call me an invalid any more. Henceforth I
am a Hercules.'

And he threw himself on the rug which Mrs. Thornburgh's motherly
providence had spread on the grass for him, with a smile and a look
of supreme physical contentment, which did indeed almost efface the
signs of recent illness in the ruddy boyish face.

Mrs. Thornburgh studied him; her eye caught first of all by the
stubble of reddish hair which as he shook off his hat stood up
straight and stiff all over his head with an odd wildness and
aggressiveness. She involuntarily thought, basing her inward comment
on a complexity of reasons-'Dear me, what a pity; it spoils his
appearance!'

'I apologize, I apologize, cousin Emma, once for all,' said the
young, man, surprising her glance, and despairingly smoothing down
his recalcitrant locks. 'Let us hope that mountain air will quicken
the pace of it before it is necessary for me to present a dignified
appearance at 'Murewell.'

He looked up at her with a merry flash in his gray eyes, and her
old face brightened visibly as she realized afresh that in spite
of the grotesqueness of his cropped hair, her guest was a most
attractive creature. Not that he could boast much in the way of
regular good looks: the mouth was large, the nose of no particular
outline, and in general the cutting of the face, though strong and
characteristic, had a bluntness and _naivete_ like a vigorous
unfinished sketch. This bluntness of line, however, was balanced
by a great delicacy of tint--the pink and white complexion of a
girl, indeed--enhanced by the bright reddish hair, and quick gray
eyes.

The figure was also a little out of drawing, so to speak; it was
tall and loosely-jointed. The general impression was one of agility
and power. But if you looked closer you saw that the shoulders
were narrow, the arms inordinately long, and the extremities too
small for the general height. Robert Elsmere's hand was the hand
of a woman, and few people ever exchanged a first greeting with its
very tall owner without a little shock of surprise.

Mr. Thornburgh and his guest had visited a few houses in the course
of their walk, and the vicar plunged for a minute or two into some
conversation about local matters with his wife. But Mrs. Thornburgh,
it was soon evident; was giving him but a scatterbrained attention.
Her secret was working in her ample breast. Very soon she could
contain it no longer, and breaking in upon her husband's parish
news, she tumbled it all out pell-mell with a mixture of discomfiture
and defiance infinitely diverting. She could not keep a secret,
but she also could not bear to give William an advantage.

William certainly took his advantage. He did what his wife in her
irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. He first stared,
then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as soon as he had recovered
breath, into a series of unfeeling comments which drove Mrs.
Thornburgh to desperation.

'If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain folks can
do perfectly well without'--et cetera, et cetera--the husband's
point of view can be imagined. Mrs. Thornburgh could have shaken
her good man, especially as there was nothing new to her in his
remarks; she had known to a T beforehand exactly what he would say.
She took up her knitting in a great hurry, the needles clicking
angrily, her gray curls quivering under the energy of her hands and
arms, while she launched at her husband various retorts as to his
lack of consideration for her efforts and her inconvenience, which
were only very slightly modified by the presence of a stranger.

Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face discreetly
turned away, an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of his
mouth. Everything was fresh and piquant up here in this remote
corner of the north country, whether the mountain air or the windblown
streams, or the manners and customs of the inhabitants. His cousin's
wife, in spite of her ambitious conventionalities, was really the
child of Nature to a refreshing degree. One does not see these
types, he said to himself, in the cultivated monotony of Oxford or
London. She was like a bit of a bygone world--Miss Austen's or
Miss Ferrier's--unearthed for his amusement. He could not for the
life of him help taking the scenes of this remote rural existence,
which was quite new to him, as though they were the scenes of some
comedy of manners.

Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the passage of arms
between himself and his spouse was becoming just a little indecorous.
He got up with a 'hem!' intended to put an end to it, and deposited
his cup.

'Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of your
determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn't you just ask the
Leyburns and let us enjoy ourselves?'

With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little maid
whom Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the
evening's festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper
basket. His wife looked after him with eyes that spoke unutterable
things.

'You would never think,' she said in an agitated voice to Young
Elsmere, 'that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to every invitation,
that he entirely agreed with me that one _must_ be civil to Mrs.
Seaton, considering that she can make anybody's life a burden to
them about here that isn't; but it's no use.'

And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her face
full of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere
restrained a strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead
to distract and console her. He expressed sympathy with her
difficulties, he talked to her about her party, he got from her the
names and histories of the guests. How Miss Austenish it sounded;
the managing rector's wife, her still more managing old maid of a
sister, the neighboring clergyman who played the flute, the local
doctor, and a pretty daughter just out--'Very pretty' sighed 'Mrs.
Thornburgh, who was now depressed all round, 'but all flounces and
frills and nothing to say'--and last of all those three sisters,
the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different level, and whom he
had heard mentioned so often since his arrival by both husband and
wife.

'Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,' he said presently. 'You and
cousin William seem to have a great affection for them. Do they
live near?'

'Oh, quite close,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh brightening at last, and
like a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the more
ardently to take up another. 'There is the house,' and she pointed
out Burwood among its trees. Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon
him she fell into a more or less incoherent account of her favorites.
She laid on hot colors thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed
extravagance.

'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!'
he said laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a
widow and three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement
surely, though you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest
airs in England.'

'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think
it very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything
on a carrier that gets drunk, too! Why you know they belong here.
They're real Westmoreland people.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the common
farmers about. Only his land was his own and theirs isn't.'

'He was one of the last of the statesmen,' interposed Mr.
Thornburgh--who, having rescued his sermon from Jane's tender
mercies, and put out his modest claret and sherry for the evening,
had strolled out again and found himself impelled as usual to put
some precision into his wife's statements--'one of the small
freeholders who have almost disappeared here as elsewhere. The
story of the Leyburns always seems to me typical of many things.'

Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first
picked up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was
loftily accepted--launched into a narrative which way be here
somewhat condensed.

The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it
was the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. 'The people about
here' said the vicar, 'say he drank away an acre a year. He had
some fifty acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.'

Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons
and daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters,
were brutal and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead,
it was reported that, having on one occasion discovered her father,
then an old infirm man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the
prostrate form of his wife whom he had just felled with his crutch,
she had taken off her wooden shoe and given her father a clout on
the head, which left his gray hair streaming with blood; after which
she had calmly put the horse into the cart, and driven off to fetch
the doctor to both her parents. But among this grim and earthy
crew, there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin,' of whom all the
rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard, who showed such
a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin', 'and such a persistent
idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing was left
to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the grammar
school at Whinborough. From the moment the boy got a footing in
the school he hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local
bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove
or failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which
carried him triumphantly to Queen's College.

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary
to pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not
have dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt
and drink.

From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the
class list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father;
in the same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at
Queen's, his ordination and his appointment to the headmastership
of a south-country grammar school. None of his communications were
ever answered till, in the very last year of his father's life, the
eldest son, who had a shrewder eye all round to the main chance
than the rest applied to 'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of
the family necessities. The money was promptly sent, together with
photographs of Dick's wife and children. These last were not taken
much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, limited, incurious
set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one of themselves.

'Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. 'It happened
the year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and
came. I never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper.
It was kept up in the old style. Three of Leyburn's sons were
there: two of them farmers like himself, one a clerk, from Manchester,
a daughter married to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the
old man, who was under the table before supper was half over, and
so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to ask me to come, and I went to
support his cloth. But I was new to the place,' said the vicar,
flushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race that had never been
used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man among the
rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had all
the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression
of someone that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and
had gone seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but
between us we couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when
the orgie had gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into
the air. It was an August night. I remember Leyburn threw back
his head and drank it in. "I haven't breathed this air for
five-and-twenty years;" he said. "I thought I hated the place, and
in spite of that drunken crew in there, it draws me to it like a
magnet. I feel after all that I have the fells in my blood." He
was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy creature, with a
face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish ways, except
to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had
made a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering
about the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost.
And George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched
him without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and
at last offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price.
I told him it was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain.
"I shall bring my wife and children here in the holidays," he said,
"and the money will set George up in California." So he paid through
the nose, and got possession of the old house, in which I should
think he had passed about as miserable a childhood as it was possible
to pass. There's no accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read
aloud to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You
used to see her everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always
exciting her brain too much, but he was a man you could not say a
word to. I don't care what William says about his being like
Wordsworth; he just gave you the blues to look at.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in
that house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old
days--the savages that lived there. And then to see those three
delicately brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where
old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn
walking about in a white tie, and the same men touching their hats
to him who had belabored him when he was a boy at the village
school--it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and
then he died and the family lived on?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the
most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah
in these valleys,' said the vicar smiling. 'I don't count for much,
she counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me
their secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between
them and her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to
them, and they take it from her when they won't take it from us.
Perhaps it is the feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as
mysterious a dispensation of Providence as I do that that brutal,
swearing, whiskey-drinking stock should have ended in anything so
saintly and so beautiful as Catherine Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of
feeling. His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied
expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and
the young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the
point where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From
here his eye commanded the whole of upper end of the valley--a bare
desolate recess filled evening shadow, and walled round by masses
of gray and purple crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening
fell marked the course of the pass connecting the dale with the
Ullswater district. Below him were church and parsonage; beyond,
the stone-filled babbling river, edged by intensely green fields,
which melted imperceptibly into the browner stretches of the opposite
mountain. Most of the scene, except where the hills at the end
rose highest and shut out the sun, was bathed in quiet light. The
white patches on the farm-houses, the heckberry trees along the
river and the road, emphasized the golden rays which were flooding
into the lower valley as into a broad green cup. Close by, in the
little vicarage orchard, were fruit-trees in blossom; the air was
mild and fragrant, though to the young man from the warmer south
there was still a bracing quality in the soft western breeze which
blew about him.

He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature going
out to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace of the
scene. Lines of Wordsworth were on his lips; the little well-worn
volume was in his pocket, but he did not need to bring it out; and
his voice had all a poet's intensity of emphasis as he strolled
along, reciting under his breath--

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless; with adoration!

Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Burwood, lying
beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its
protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious
association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one
white life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the
idea of her seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give
it added poetry and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong
curiosity to see her.

CHAPTER III.

The festal tea had begun and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite
to her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's wife.
Poor Mrs. Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered the room
on the arm of Mr. Mayhew, the incumbent of the neighboring valley
of Shanmoor, that the first _coup d'aeil_ was good. The flowers
had been arranged in the afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had
made the silver shine again; a pleasing odor of good food underlay
the scent of the bluebells and fern; and what with the snowy
table-linen, and the pretty dresses and bright faces of the younger
people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant play of crisp
and delicate color.

But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with a little
sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of an
eye-glass at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a large
and jewelled hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled
round the table, lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited
consciousness, on every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_
should have been and was not. When it dropped with a harsh little
click, the hostess, unable to restrain herself, rushed into desperate
conversation with Mr. Mayhew, giving vent to incoherencies in the
course of the first act of the meal which did but confirm her
neighbor--a grim uncommunicative person--in his own devotion to a
policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was grappling on very unequal
terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had fallen to young Elsmere.
Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr. Baker, Agnes with Mr.
Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately an unattached
student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an invincible antipathy
to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some opening into the great
world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a
white dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and
she was like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash
ribbon, her slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast
many curious glances at the Thornburgh's guest. 'Not a prig, at
any rate,' she thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is
quite wrong.'

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which
so often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light
seems brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at
other times, he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had
not been romancing. The vivid creature at his elbow with her still
unsoftened angles and movements was in the first dawn of an exceptional
beauty; the plain sister had struck him before supper in the course
of twenty minutes' conversation as above the average in point of
manners and talk. As to Miss Leyburn, be had so far only exchanged
a bow with her, but he was watching her now, as he sat opposite to
her, out of his quick observant eyes.

She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her
side. Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually
clear and perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The
hollows in the cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth
of the forehead somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and
chin. The face, though still quite young and expressing a perfect
physical health, had the look of having been polished and refined
away to its foundations. There was not an ounce of superfluous
flesh on it, and not a vestige of Rose's peach-like bloom. Her
profile, as he saw it now, had the firmness, the clear whiteness
of a profile on a Greek gem.

She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk! Robert who,
out of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, had an abundant
compassion for and understanding of such beings as young Mayhew,
watched her with a pleased amusement, wondering how she did it.
What? Had she got him on carpentering, engineering--discovered his
weak point? Water-wheels, investors, steam-engines--and the lumpish
lad all in a glow, talking away nineteen to the dozen. What tact,
what kindness in her gray-blue eyes!

But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly well aware
that she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, an Oxford man,
and a member, besides, of a well-known Sussex county family. She
was a large and commanding person, clad in black _moire_ silk.
She wore a velvet diadem, Honiton lace lappets, and a variety of
chains, beads, and bangles bestrewn about her that made a tinkling
as she moved. Fixing her neighbor with a bland majesty of eye, she
inquired of him if he were 'any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere?'
Robert replied that Sir Mowbray Elsmere was his 'father's cousin,
and the patron of the living to which be had just been, appointed.
Mrs. Seaton then graciously informed him that long ago-'when I was
a girl in my native Hampshire'--her family and Sir Mowbray Elsmere
had been on intimate terms. Her father had been devoted to Sir
Mowbray. 'And I,' she added with an evident though lofty desire
to please, 'retain an inherited respect, sir, for your name.'

Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the rector's
wife had made an impression. His general conception of his relative
and patron Sir Mowbray--who had been for many years the family black
sheep--was, indeed, so far removed from any notions of 'respect,'
that he had some difficulty in keeping his countenance under the
lady's look and pose. He would have been still more entertained
had he known the nature of the intimacy to which she referred.
Mrs. Seaton's father, in his capacity of solicitor in a small country
town, had acted as electioneering agent for Sir Mowbray (then plain
Mr.) Elsmere on two occasions--in 18__, when his client had been
triumphantly returned at a bye-election; and two years later, when
a repetition of the tactics, so successful in the previous contest,
led to a petition, and to the disappearance of the heir to the
Elsmere property from parliamentary life.

Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton did not
enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and proceeding in a
more neutral tone than before, she proceeded to put him through a
catechism on Oxford, alternately cross-examining him and expounding
to him her own views and her husband's on the functions of the
Universities. She and the Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford
authorities were mainly occupied in ruining the young men's health
by over-examination, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking
opinions. In her belief, if it went on, the motherly of England
would refuse to send their sons to these ancient but deadly resorts.
She looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though defying him to
be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his polite best to be
serious.

But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find Miss Leyburn's
eyes upon him. And undeniably there was spark of laughter in them,
quenched, as soon as his glance crossed hers, under long lashes.
How that spark had lit up the grave, pale face! He longed to provoke
it again, to cross over to her and say, 'What amused you? Do you
think me very young and simple? Tell me about these people.'

But, instead, ho made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was soon
engaged in giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, an
experience which generally, ended by the appearance of certain
truculent elements in one of the mildest of men. So Robert was
free to turn to his girl neighbor and ask her what people meant by
calling the Lakes rainy.

'I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky has been
without a cloud, and your rivers are running dry.'

'And you have mastered our climate in twenty-four hours, like the
tourists--isn't it?--that do the Irish question in three weeks?'

'Not the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,' he thought to himself,
amused, 'and yet what a child it looks.'

He threw himself into a war of words with her, and enjoyed it
extremely. Her brilliant coloring, her gestures as fresh and untamed
as the movements of the leaping river outside, the mixture in her
of girlish pertness and ignorance with the promise of a remarkable
general capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs.
Thornburgh--much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the
pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the
superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign
cooks--watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more
and more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased
her. Why should people always talk of Catherine; Mrs. Thornburgh
stood in awe of Catherine and had given her up in despair. It was
the other two whose fortunes, as possibly directed by her, filled
her maternal heart with sympathetic emotion.

Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude shock.
What on earth was the vicar doing? After they had got through
better than anyone could have hoped, thanks to a discreet silence
and Sarah's makeshifts, there was the master of the house pouring
the whole tale of his wife's aspirations and disappointment into
Mrs. Seaton's ear! If it were ever allowable to rush upon your
husband at table and stop his mouth with a dinner napkin, Mrs.
Thornburgh could at this moment have performed such a feat. She
nodded and coughed and fidgeted in vain!

The vicar's confidences were the result of a fit of nervous
exasperation. Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an account of
'our charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleckwood was a
distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the
neighborhood--not, however, a very respectable magnate. Mr. Thornburgh
had heard accounts of Lupton Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least
half a dozen different occasions. Privately he believed them all
to refer to one visit, an event of immemorial antiquity periodically
brought up to date by Mrs. Seaton's imagination. But the vicar was
a timid man, without the courage of his opinions, and in his eagerness
to stop the flow of his neighbor's eloquence he could think of no
better device, or more suitable rival subject, than to plunge into
the story of the drunken carrier, and the pastry still reposing on
the counter at Randall's.

He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife's horrified
countenance embarrassed him. But anything was better than Lord
Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him with the slightest smile
on her formidable lip. The story was pleasing to her.

'At least, my dear sir,' she said when he paused, nodding her
diademed head with stately emphasis, 'Mrs. Thornburgh's inconvenience
may have one good result. You can now make an example of the
carrier. It is our special business, as my husband always says,
who are in authority, to bring their low vices home to these people.'

The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What ineptitude had he been guilty
of now! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood he might have started
Mrs. Seaton on teetotalism. Now if there was one topic on which
this awe-inspiring woman was more awe-inspiring than another it was
on the topic of teetotalism. The vicar had already felt himself a
criminal as he drank his modest glass of claret under her eye.

'Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,' said Dr. Baker from
the other end of the table. 'But there are plenty of worse things
in these valleys. Besides, what person in his senses would think
of trying to disestablish John Backhouse? He and his queer brother
are as much a feature of the valley as High Fell. We have too few
originals left to be so very particular about trifles.'

'Trifles?' repeated Mrs. Seaton in a deep voice, throwing up her
eyes. But she would not venture an argument with Dr. Baker. He
had all the cheery self-confidence of the old established local
doctor, who knows himself to be a power, and neither Mrs. Seaton
nor her restless, intriguing little husband had ever yet succeeded
in putting him down.

'You must see these two old characters,' said Dr. Baker to Elsmere
across the table. 'They are relics of Westmoreland which will soon
have disappeared. Old John, who is going on for seventy, is as
tough an old dalesman as ever you saw. He doesn't measure his cups,
but he would scorn to be floored by them. I don't believe he does
drink much, but if he does there is probably no amount of whiskey
that he couldn't carry. Jim, the other brother, is about five years
older. He is a kind of softie--all alive on one side of his brain,
and a noodle on the other. A single glass of rum and water puts
him under the table. And as he never can refuse this glass, and
as the temptation generally seizes him when they are on their rounds,
he is always getting John into disgrace. John swears at him and
slangs him. No use. Jim sits still, looks--well, nohow. I never
saw an old creature with a more singular gift of denuding his face
of all expression. John vow's he shall go to the "house;" he has
no legal share in the business; the house and the horse and cart
are John's. Next day you see them on the cart again just as usual.
In reality neither brother can do without the other. And three
days after, the play begins again.'

'An improving spectacle for the valley,' said Mrs. Seaton dryly.

'Oh, my dear madam,' said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders, 'we
can't all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a drunkard, he has got a
heart of his own somewhere, and can nurse a dying niece like a
woman. Miss Leyburn can tell us something about that.'

And he turned round to his neighbor with a complete change of
expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate
respect. Catherine colored as if she did not like being addressed
on the subject, and just nodded a little with gentle affirmative
eyes.

'A strange case.' said Dr. Baker again looking at Elsmere. It is
a family that is original and old-world even in its ways of dying.
I have been a doctor in these parts for five-and-twenty years. I
have seen what you may call old Westmoreland die out--costume,
dialect, superstitions. At least, as to dialect, the people have
become bilingual. I sometimes think they talk it to each other as
much as ever, but some of them won't talk it to you and me at all.
And as to superstitions, the only ghost story I know that still
has some hold on popular belief is the one which attaches to this
mountain here, High Fell, at the end of this valley.'

He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to penetrate even
modern provincial society, that no man may tell a ghost story without
leave. Rose threw a merry glance at him. They two were very old
friends. Dr. Baker had pulled out her first teeth and given her a
sixpence afterward for each operation. The pull was soon forgotten;
the sixpence lived on gratefully in a child's warm memory.

'Tell it,' she said; 'we give you leave. We won't interrupt you
unless you put in too many inventions.'

'You invite me to break the first law of storytelling, Miss Rose,'
said the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is bound to
leave a story better than he found it. However, I couldn't tell
it if I would. I don't know what makes the poor ghost walk; and
if you do, I shall say you invent. But at any rate there is a
ghost, and she walks along the side of High Fell at midnight every
Midsummer day. If you see her and she passes you in silence, why
you only got a fright for your pains. But if she speaks to you,
you die within the year. Old John Backhouse is a widower with one
daughter. This girl saw the ghost last Midsummer day, and Miss
Leyburn and I are now doing our best to keep her alive over the
next; but with very small prospect of success.'

'What is the girl dying of?--fright?' asked Mrs. Seaton harshly.

'Oh, no!' said the doctor hastily, 'not precisely. A sad story;
better not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time of
her death seeing likely to be determined by the strength of her own
and other people's belief in the ghost's summons.'

Mrs. Seaton's grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. She put
up her eye-glass and looked at Catherine. 'An unpleasant household,
I should imagine,' she said shortly, 'for a young lady to visit.'

Doctor Baker looked at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame came
into his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and he was a
quick-tempered mercurial sort of Man.

'I presume that one's guardian angel may have to follow one sometimes
into unpleasant quarters,' he said hotly. 'If this girl lives, it
will be Miss Leyburn's doing; if she dies, saved and comforted,
instead of lost in this world and the next, it will be Miss Leyburn's
doing too. Ah, my dear young lady, let me alone! You tie my tongue
always, and I won't have it.'

And the doctor turned his weather-beaten elderly face upon her with
a look which was half defiance and half apology. She, on her side,
had flushed painfully, laying her white fingertips imploringly on
his arm. Mrs. Seaton turned away with a little dry cough, so did
her spectacled sister at the other end of the table. Mrs. Leyburn,
on the other hand, sat in a little ecstasy, looking at Catherine
and Dr. Baker, something glistening in her eyes. Robert Elsmere
alone showed presence of mind. Bending across to Dr. Baker, he
asked him a sudden question as to the history of a certain strange
green mound or barrow that rose out of a flat field not far from
the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his whiskers, threw the
young man a queer glance, and replied. Thenceforward he and Robert
kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the traces of Norse settlement
in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till the ladies left the
dining-room.

As Catherine Leyburn went out Elsmere stood holding the door open.
She could not help raising her eyes upon him, eyes full of a
half-timid half-grateful friendliness. His own returned her look
with interest.

'"A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a new-born
thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She had not yet
said a direct word to him, and yet he was curiously convinced that
here was one of the most interesting persons, and one of the persons
most interesting to _him_, that he had ever met. What mingled
delicacy and strength in the hand that had lain beside her on the
dinner-table--what potential depths of feeling in the full dark
fringed eye!

Half-an-hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing room, he
found Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French window that looked
out on the lawn and on the dim rocky face of the fell. Adeline
Baker, a stooping, red-armed maiden, with a pretty face, set off,
as she imagined, by a vast amount, of cheap finery, was sitting
beside her, studying her with a timid adoration. The doctor's
daughter regarded Catherine Leyburn, who during the last five years
had made herself almost as distinct a figure in the popular imagination
of a few Westmoreland valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall
miners, as a being of a totally different Order from herself. She
was glued to the side of her idol, but her shy, and awkward tongue
could find hardly anything to say to her. Catherine, however,
talked away, gently stroking the while the girl's rough hand which
lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and bliss of its owner, who
was outraged by the contrast between her own ungainly member and
Miss Leyburn's delicate fingers.

Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply avenging
herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might have received
at tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with a face that seemed
to be perpetually peering forward, light colorless hair surmounted
by a cap adorned with artificial nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes
armed with spectacles, was having her way with Mrs. Leyburn, inquiring
into the household arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining
power which made the mild widow as pulp before her.

When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round hastily.
She herself had opened that door into the garden. A garden on a
warm summer night offers opportunities no schemer should neglect.
Agnes and Rose were chattering and laughing on the gravel path
just outside it, their white girlish figures showing temptingly
against the dusky background of garden and fell. It somewhat
disappointed the vicar's wife to see her tall guest take a chair
and draw it beside Catherine--while Adeline Baker awkwardly got up
and disappeared into the garden.

Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong had been
his sense of attraction at tea; but like the rest of us he could
find nothing more telling to start with than a remark about the
weather. Catherine in her reply asked him if he were quite recovered
from the attack of low fever he was understood to have been suffering
from.

'Oh, yes,' he said brightly, 'I am very nearly as fit as I ever
was, and more eager than I ever was, to got to work. The idling
of it is the worst part of illness. However, in a month from now
I must be at my living, and I can only hope it will give me enough
to do.'

Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. What
an eager face it was! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be the note of
the whole man, of the quick eyes and mouth, the flexible hands and
energetic movements. Even the straight, stubbly hair, its owner's
passing torment, standing up round the high, open brow, seemed to
help the general impression of alertness and vigor.

'Your mother, I hear, is already there?' said Catherine.

'Yes. My poor mother!' and the young man smiled half sadly. 'It
is a curious situation for both of us. This living which has just
been bestowed on me is my father's old living. It is in the gift
of my cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. My great-uncle'--he drew himself
together suddenly. 'But I don't know why I should imagine that
these things interest other people,' he said, with a little quick,
almost comical, accent of self-rebuke.

'Please go on,' cried Catherine hastily. The voice and manner were
singularly pleasant to her; she wished he would not interrupt himself
for nothing.

'Really? Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished me to
have it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time; took
Orders; but I wanted something more stirring than a country parish.
One has dreams of many things. But one's dreams come to nothing.
I got ill at Oxford. The doctors forbade the town work. The old
incumbent who had held the living since my father's death died
precisely at that moment. I felt myself booked, and gave in to
various friends; but it is second best.'

She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though
his talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past.

'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. Her
cheek was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual
animation; and her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save
a small old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a
pair of hair bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the
nobleness and simplicity of a Romney picture.

'_You_ do not find it so I imagine,' he replied, bending forward
to her with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her
to talk to him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally
compared her to Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the
dark red flowers in her white lap. But his comparison had another
basis of feeling than Rose's.

However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which
she turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive,
confiding nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her
which for the moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about
the neighborhood, the people and their ways, the impression vanished
again, so far at least, as there was anything repellent about it.
Austerity, strength, individuality, all these words indeed he was
more and more driven to apply to her. She was like no other woman
he had ever seen. It was not at all that she was more remarkable
intellectually. Every now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed
on, he noticed in what she said an absence of a good many interests
and attainments which in his ordinary south-country women friends
he would have assumed as a matter of course.

'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said
to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story
she had told him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry
novels. It seemed to him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart.
And her own mountain life, her own rich and meditative soul, had
taught her judgments and comments on her favorite poet which stirred
Elsmere every now and then to enthusiasm--so true they were and
pregnant, so full often of a natural magic of expression. On the
other hand, when he quoted a very well-known line of Shelley's she
asked him where it came from. She seemed to him deeper and simpler
at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and knowledge,
and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The thought
of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now wonder,
and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she was
the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.

'Were you ever there?' he asked her.

'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have
only, a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street,
a great building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'

'Did your father often go back?'

'No; never toward the later part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little, 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'

She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression
was a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed
somehow to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.

'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he
saw when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit
to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place
was full of men 'Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything
that was sacred to him.'

Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about
the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism,
and in twenty years transformed the University.

'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little
longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive
wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves
on the upward swell of a religious revival.'

Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near
to her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her
seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.

'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said,
hesitating; 'but I don't know whether father would have liked that
much 'better.'

The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself
suddenly. Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions,
and afraid lest she might have said something discourteous.

'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it
is a mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has
brought about the new state of things. Some of the factors in the
change were hardly Christian at all, by name, but they have all
helped to make men think, to stir their hearts, to win them back
to the old ways.'

His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently the
matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt a deep
and loving interest. His young boyish face had grown grave; there
was a striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which
suddenly aroused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a
man of distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large
things of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he
saw in them a beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full
of soul.

The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their
conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind
them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candies and music-stools,
preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the
black-browed vicar of Shanmoor, and the room seemed to be pervaded
by Mrs. Seaton's strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted
itself, and her face settled again into the slight rigidity of
expression characteristic of it. She rose and prepared to move
farther into the room.

'We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder.

And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn.
He had a momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive,
sympathetic, felt in the woman the presence of a strength, a
self-sufficingness which was not all attractive. His vanity, if
he had cherished any during their conversation, was not flattered
by its close. But as he leant against the window-frame waiting for
the music to begin, he could hardly keep his eyes from her. He was
a man who, by force of temperament, made friends readily with women,
though except for a passing fancy or two he had never been in love;
and his sense of difficulty with regard to this stiffly-mannered
deep-eyed country girl brought with it an unusual stimulus and
excitement.

Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with
bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her.
Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He
was a powerful swarthy man who said little, and was generally
alarming to the ladies of the neighborhood. To propitiate him they
asked him to bring his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music
he made on it. Miss Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments,
and there were many who regarded her assiduity as a covert attack
upon the widower's name and position. If so, it was Greek meeting
Greek, for with all his taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well
able to defend himself.

'Has it begun?' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and
turning, he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's
cheeks flushed by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round
her head.

She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some
powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength
of her wrists and the vicarage piano.

The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to
fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and
the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs.
Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton,
motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against

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Robert ElsmerebyMrs. Humphry Ward

Part 1 out of 16

Robert Elsmere
by
Mrs. Humphry Ward