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Robert Elsmere

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #8737 · 1,645,297 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Robert Elsmere

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: August 1, 2005 [eBook #8737]
                Most recently updated: July 2, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT ELSMERE ***




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 SINNING
               ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD
                      AND THE SERVICE OF MAN:

                         THOMAS HILL GREEN

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

                        Died March 26, 1882

                              AND

                   LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON

                       Died Easter Eve, 1886



[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’]

[Italics are indicated by underscores.]




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 becks 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 _débris_ 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 naïveté, 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 cut 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, Röschen?’ 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 head?’

‘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, Röschen?’

‘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, less 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 he 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 _naïveté_ 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’æil_ 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, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.

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

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

But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly well aware that
she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, an Oxford man, and a
member, besides, of a well-known Sussex county family. She was a large
and commanding person, clad in black _moiré_ 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
he had just been appointed. Mrs. Seaton then graciously informed him
that long ago--‘when I was a girl in my native Hampshire’--her family
and Sir Mowbray Elsmere had been on intimate terms. Her father had been
devoted to Sir Mowbray. ‘And I,’ she added with an evident though lofty
desire to please, ‘retain an inherited respect, sir, for your name.’

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

Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton did not
enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and proceeding in a more
neutral tone than before, she proceeded to put him through a catechism
on Oxford, alternately cross-examining him and expounding to him her own
views and her husband’s on the functions of 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 mothers of England would refuse to send their sons to
these ancient but deadly resorts. She looked at him sternly as she
spoke, as though defying him to be flippant in return. And he, indeed,
did his polite best to be serious.

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

But, instead, he made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was soon engaged
in giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, an experience which
generally, ended by the appearance of certain truculent elements in one
of the mildest of men. So Robert was free to turn to his girl 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
the wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth
expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.

It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which
flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning,
the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very
fast, which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing
performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the
resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line
with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the
wilder grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules
performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped
her little foot.

‘Two bars ahead last page,’ she murmured, ‘three bars this; will no one
stop her!’

But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a
sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the
room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was
to end, and who was to be victor.

Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have, been in any doubt as to that!
Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute, nearly half a
page behind, was left shrilly hanging, in mid-air, forsaken and
companionless, an object of derision to gods and men.

‘Ah! I took it a little fast!’ said the lady, triumphantly looking up at
the discomfited clergyman.

‘Mr. Elsmere,’ said Rose, hiding herself in the window-curtain beside
him, that she might have her laugh in safety, ‘do they play like that in
Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?’

But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl.

‘Rose! Rose! Don’t go out again! It is your turn next!’

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering
something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical power,
supposed that she felt it an indignity to be asked to play in such
company.

Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. Leyburn, a
summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, as it brought him once
more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn’s oldest daughter.

‘Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere?’ asked Mrs. Leyburn in her little
mincing voice, making room for his chair beside them. ‘If you are, I am
sure my youngest daughter’s playing, will please you.’

Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some pleasant answer,
divined that the reserved and stately daughter must be often troubled by
the mother’s expansiveness.

Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to, listen. Mrs. Seaton was
severely turning over a photograph book. In her opinion the violin was
an unbecoming instrument for young women. Miss Barks sat upright with
the studiously neutral expression which befits the artist asked to
listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the
other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him,
good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for
Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after
routing out from her music a couple of _Fantasie-Stücke_, which she had
wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to
the ‘rubbish’ played by the preceding performers. She stood with her
lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black
coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot advanced, the
ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and arm, beautifully formed but
still wanting the roundness of womanhood, raised high for action,
the lightly poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a
bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future
brilliance and empire.

Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial maiden learned
to play with this intelligence, this force, this delicate command of
her instrument? He was not a musician, and therefore could not gauge her
exactly, but he was more or less familiar with music and its standards,
as all people become nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society,
and he knew enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was
remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident was this,
when from the humorous piece with which the sisters led off--a dance of
clowns, but clowns of Arcady--they slid into a delicate rippling _chant
d’amour_, the long-drawn notes of the violin rising and falling on
the piano accompaniment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did
a _fillette_, unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much
eloquence--only from the natural dreams of a girl’s heart as to ‘the
lovers waiting in the hidden years?’

But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the
room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure
beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an
impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look which had piqued his
curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr.
Baker.

‘Excellent!’ cried Elsmere. ‘How in the name of fortune, Miss Leyburn,
if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on so far in this remote
place?’

‘She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we have there,’
said Catherine quietly; ‘I believe she has been very well taught.’

‘But surely,’ he said warmly, ‘it is more than teaching--more even than
talent--there is something like genius in it?’

She did not answer very readily.

‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘Everyone says it is very good.’

He would have been repelled by her irresponsiveness but that her last
words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, as though
the subject were connected with an inner debate not yet solved which
troubled her. He was puzzled, but certainly not repelled.

Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons went first, and
the other guests lingered awhile afterward to enjoy the sense of freedom
left by their departure. But at last the Mayews, father and son, set
off on foot to walk home over the moonlit mountains; the doctor tucked
himself and his daughter into his high gig and drove off with a sweeping
ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps teasing him to the
last; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort the Miss Leyburns and their
mother home.

Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar’s incredulous ears that
never--never as long as she lived--would she have Mrs. Seaton inside her
doors again.

‘Her manners’--cried the vicar’s wife, fuming--‘her manners would
disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none--positively none!’

Then suddenly her round, comfortable face brightened and broadened out
into a beaming smile--

‘But, after all, William, say what you will--and you always do say the
most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success. I
know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him
_looking_--_looking_--at that little minx Rose while she was playing
as if he couldn’t take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be
sure!’

The vicar, who had been standing with his back to fireplace and his
hands in his pockets, received his wife’s remarks first of all with
lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half
compassionate, which made her start in her chair.

‘Rose?’ he said, impatiently. ‘Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?’

It was very rarely indeed, that on her own ground, so to speak, the
vicar ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh
looked at him in amazement.

‘Do you mean to say,’ he asked, in raised tones, ‘that you didn’t notice
that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn,
he had practically no attention for anybody else?’

Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening-and
her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to
ejaculate--

‘Catherine!’ she said feebly. ‘Catherine! how absurd!’

But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of the window
after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that
night an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely
indispensable, more of a personage.



CHAPTER IV.

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure
of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little
more closely into the antecedents of the man who had suddenly roused so
much activity in her contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents
are important to us. For the interest of an uncomplicated story will
entirely depend upon the clearness with which the reader may have
grasped the general outlines of a quick soul’s development. And
this development had already made considerable progress before Mrs.
Thornburgh set eyes upon her husband’s cousin, Robert Elsmere.

Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well provided with this
world’s goods; up to a certain moderate point, indeed, a favorite of
fortune in all respects. His father belonged to the younger line of an
old Sussex family, and owed his pleasant country living to the family
instincts of his uncle, Sir William Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines and
Conservative traditions were pretty evenly mixed, with a result of the
usual respectable and inconspicuous kind. His virtues had descended
mostly to his daughters, while all his various weaknesses and fatuities
had blossomed into vices in the person of his eldest son and heir, the
Sir Mowbray Elsmere of Mrs. Seaton’s early recollections.

Edward Elsmere, rector of Murewell in Surrey, and father of Robert, had
died before his uncle and patron; and his widow and son had been left to
face the world together. Sir William Elsmere and his nephew’s wife had
not much in common, and rarely concerned themselves with each other.
Mrs. Elsmere was an Irishwoman by birth, with irregular Irish ways,
and a passion for strange garments, which made her the dread of the
conventional English squire; and, after she left the vicarage with her
son, she and her husband’s uncle met no more. But when he died it
was found that the old man’s sense of kinship, acting blindly and
irrationally, but with a slow inevitableness and certainty, had stirred
in him at the last in behalf of his great-nephew. He left him a money
legacy, the interest of which was to be administered by his mother till
his majority, and in a letter addressed to his heir he directed that,
should the boy on attaining manhood show any disposition to enter the
Church, all possible steps were to be taken to endow him with the family
living of Murewell, which had been his father’s, and which at the time
of the old Baronet’s death was occupied by another connection of the
family, already well stricken in years.

Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with his cousin
Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, but his father knew that
the tenacious Elsmere instinct was to be depended on for the fulfillment
of his wishes. And so it proved. No sooner was his father dead, than
Sir Mowbray curtly communicated his instructions to Mrs. Elsmere, then
living at the town of Harden for the sake of the great public school
recently transported there. She was to inform him, when the right moment
arrived, if it was the boy’s wish, to enter the Church, and meanwhile he
referred her to his lawyers for particulars of such immediate benefits
as were secured to her under the late Baronet’s will.

At the moment when Sir Mowbray’s letter reached her, Mrs. Elsmere was
playing a leading part in the small society to which circumstances had
consigned her. She was the personal friend of half the masters and their
wives, and of at least a quarter of the school, while in the little town
which stretched up the hill covered by the new school buildings, she
was the helper, gossip, and confident of half the parish. Her vast hats,
strange in fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls of many colors,
hitched now to this side now to that, her swaying gait and looped-up
skirts, her spectacles, and the dangling parcels in which her soul
delighted, were the outward signs of a personality familiar to all.
For under those checked shawls which few women passed without an inward
marvel, there beat one of the warmest hearts that ever animated mortal
clay, and the prematurely wrinkled face, with its small quick eyes
and shrewd indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature as responsive as it was
vigorous.

Their owner was constantly in the public eye. Her house, during the
hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, was little else than a
halting place between two journeys. Visits to the poor, long watches by
the sick; committees, in which her racy breadth of character gave her
always an important place; discussions with the vicar, arguments with
the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that--these were
the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life was delightful
to her; action, energy, influence, were delightful to her; she could
only breathe freely in the very thick of the stirring, many-colored
tumult of existence. Whether it was a pauper in the workhouse, or boys
from the school, or a girl caught in the tangle of a love-affair, it was
all the same to Mrs. Elsmere. Everything moved her, everything appealed
to her. Her life was a perpetual giving forth, and such was the inherent
nobility and soundness of the nature, that in spite of her curious Irish
fondness for the vehement romantic sides of experience, she did
little harm, and much good. Her tongue might be over-ready and her
championships indiscreet, but her hands were helpful, and her heart was
true. There was something contagious in her enjoyment of life, and with
all her strong religious faith, the thought of death, of any final
pulse and silence in the whirr of the great social machine was to her
a thought of greater chill and horror than to many a less brave and
spiritual soul.

Till her boy was twelve years old, however, she had lived for him first
and foremost. She had taught him, played with him, learnt with him,
communicating to him through all his lessons her own fire and eagerness
to a degree which every now and then taxed the physical powers of the
child. Whenever the signs of strain appeared, however, the mother would
be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together
Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, storyteller,
and romp; and forget all his precocious interest in history or vulgar
fractions. In after years when Robert looked back upon his childhood,
he was often reminded of the stories of Goethe’s bringing-up. He could
recall exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes,--mother and child
sitting together in the gloaming, the mother’s dark eyes dancing with
fun or kindling with dramatic fire, as she carried an imaginary hero
or heroine through a series of the raciest adventures; the child all
eagerness and sympathy, now clapping his little hands at the fall of the
giant, or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting
in ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus to the mother’s
inventiveness. He could see her dressing up with him on wet days,
reciting King Henry to his Prince Hal, or Prospero to his Ariel, or
simply giving free vent to her own exuberant Irish fun till both he and
she, would sink exhausted into each other’s arms, and end the evening
with a long croon, sitting curled up together in a big armchair in front
of the fire. He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for
poetry one week, for natural history the next, now spending all his
spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now forgetting everything
but the delights of tree-climbing and bird-nesting.

And through it all he had the quiet memory of his mother’s
companionship, he could recall her rueful looks whenever the eager
inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradicable tendencies
of her own, had lost him a school advantage; he could remember her
exhortations, with the dash in them of humorous self-reproach which made
them so stirring to the child’s affection; and he could realize their
old far-off life at Murewell, the joys and the worries of it, and see
her now gossiping with the village folk, now wearing herself impetuously
to death in their service, and now roaming with him over the Surrey
heaths in search of all the dirty delectable things in which a
boy-naturalist delights. And through it all he was conscious of the same
vivid energetic creature, disposing with some difficulty and _fracas_ of
its own excess of nervous life.

To return, however, to this same critical moment of Mowbray’s offer.
Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, doing very well at school, a
favorite both with boys and masters. But as to whether his development
would lead him in the direction of taking Orders, his mother had not the
slightest idea. She was not herself very much tempted by the prospect.
There were recollections connected with Murewell, and with the long
death in life which her husband had passed through there, which were
deeply painful to her; and, moreover, her sympathy with the clergy as a
class was by no means strong. Her experience had not been large, but
the feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a favorite
prejudice. Fortune had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist
vicar. Mrs. Elsmere’s inherited Evangelicalism--she came from an Ulster
county--rebelled against his doctrine, but the man himself was too
lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him. And
in his own narrow way, the small-headed emaciated vicar was a hero, and
he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other’s quality, and formed a
curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference.

But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with all the
more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were the chief crook
in Mrs. Elsmere’s otherwise tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought
her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their
cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-woman’s
sense of humor at every turn. The individuals came and went, but
the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made their
peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of the
English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very
broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in
general to see all the world’s good points, was almost blind when it was
a curate’s virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all
her persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as an
essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no yearning
for a clerical son. The little accidents of a personal experience had
led to wide generalizations, as is the way with us mortals, and the
position of the young parson in these days of increased parsonic
pretensions was, to Mrs. Elsmere, a position in which there was an
inherent risk of absurdity. She wished her son to impose upon her when
it came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for nothing
better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to bow the motherly
knee to him in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat
moments, a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense of
the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions.

Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only reflected that
it would certainly be better to say nothing of it to Robert until he
should be at college. His impressionable temperament, and the power
he had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject till it
produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavorable to
health and nervous energy, all warned her not to supply him, at a period
of rapid mental and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense
of responsibility. As a boy he had always shown himself religiously
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother’s religious likes and
dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and chivalrous support.
He was content to be with her, to worship with her, and to feel that no
reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had
been nothing specially noteworthy or precocious about his religious
development, and at sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate
compliance, and his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in
authority, his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in
his life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him.

He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen about
everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He was in the
sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed; that is to say, as soon
as he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected with the great
body which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded.
Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had always
been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to develop
by her own restless imaginative ways of approaching life and the world
made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before his
cousin’s letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English
poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favorite tutor would
probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion
as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager a ebullient
childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the
subject, of ‘The Faerie Queene’ to a school-friend, in which, with a
sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked--

‘I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me
extraordinary pleasure.’

And about the same time, a master who was much interested in the boy’s
prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, a subject for
which he had always shown a special aptitude, asked him anxiously,
after an Easter holiday, what he had been reading; the boy ran his hands
through his hair, and still keeping his finger between the leaves, shut
a book before him from which he had been learning by heart, and which
was, alas! neither Ovid nor Virgil.

‘I have just finished Belial! ‘he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
‘and am beginning Beelzebub.’

A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish period of
juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over with stanzas from
the opening canto of a great poem on Columbus, or with moral essays in
the manner of Pope, castigating the vices of the time with an energy
which sorely tried the gravity of the mother whenever she was called
upon, as she invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the
same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this fast
developing power. Virgil and Aeschylus appealed to the same fibres, the
same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shakspeare, and, the boy’s quick
imaginative sense appropriated Greek and Latin life with the same ease
which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence
sprung the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ or ‘As You Like It.’ So that his tutor,
who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects
in life to keep the boy’s aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiæ_, began about the time of Sir Mowbray’s letter to prophesy very
smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college,
the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm’s scholarship, and
so on.

Evidently such a youth, was not likely to depend for the attainment of
a foothold in life on a piece of family privileges. The world was all
before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere thought proudly to herself,
as her mother’s fancy wandered rashly through the coming years. And for
many reasons she secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find
for himself some other post of ministry in a very various world than the
vicarage of Murewell.

So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mowbray, informing
him that the intentions of his great-uncle should be communicated to the
boy when he should be of fit age to consider them, and that meanwhile
she was obliged to him for pointing out the procedure by which she might
lay hands on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the
income of which would now be doubly welcome in view of his college
expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, during the two
years which followed, thought little more about it. She became more
and more absorbed in her boy’s immediate prospects, in the care of his
health, which was uneven and tried somewhat by the strain of preparation
for an attempt on the St. Anselm’s scholarship, and in the demands which
his ardent nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was
constantly making upon her support and sympathy.

At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere and her son
left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and settled themselves early
in November in Oxford lodgings. Robert was to have a few days’ complete
holiday before the examination, and he and his mother spent it in
exploring the beautiful old town, now shrouded in the ‘pensive glooms’
of still gray autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the misty
reaches of the river; the trees in the Broad Walk were almost bare; the
Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches of delicate crimson on the
college walls; the gardens were damp and forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere
and Robert the place needed neither sun nor summer ‘for beauty’s
heightening.’ On both of them it laid its old irresistible spell; the
sentiment haunting its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious
chapels, stole into the lad’s heart and alternately soothed and
stimulated that keen individual consciousness which naturally
accompanies the first entrance into manhood. Here, on this soil,
steepest in memories, _his_ problems, _his_ struggles, were to be fought
out in their turn, ‘Take up thy manhood,’ said the inward voice, ‘and
show what is in thee. The hour and the opportunity have come!’

And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of an
expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was added by
the dumb influences of the old streets and weather-beaten stones. How
tenacious they were of the past! The dreaming city seemed to be still
brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The
continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort
of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were
the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary
shape, pervaded the boy’s sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother
from college to college.

Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her eager
interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her an under-mood
of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both had the impressionable
Celtic temperament, and both felt that a critical moment was upon them,
and that the Oxford air was charged with fate for each of them. For
the first time in their lives they were to be parted. The mother’s long
guardianship was coming to an end. Had she loved him enough? Had she so
far fulfilled the trust her dead husband had imposed upon her? Would her
boy love her in the new life as he had loved her in the old? And would
her poor craving heart bear to see him absorbed by fresh interests and
passions, in which her share could be only, at the best, secondary and
indirect?

One day--it was on the afternoon preceding the examination--she gave
hurried, half-laughing utterance to some of these misgivings of hers.
They were walking down the Lime-walk of Trinity Gardens: beneath their
feet a yellow fresh-strewn carpet of leaves, brown interlacing branches
overhead, and a red misty sun shining through the trunks. Robert
understood his mother perfectly, and the way she had of hiding a storm
of feeling under these tremulous comedy airs. So that, instead of
laughing too, he took her hand and, there being no spectators anywhere
to be seen in the damp November garden, he raised it to his lips with a
few broken words of affection and gratitude which very nearly overcame
the self-command of both of them. She crashed wildly into another
subject, and then suddenly it occurred to her impulsive mind that the
moment had come to make him acquainted with those dying intentions of
his great-uncle which we have already described. The diversion was a
welcome one, and the duty seemed clear. So, accordingly, she made him
give her all his attention while she told him the story and the terms of
Sir Mowbray’s letter, forcing herself the while to keep her own opinions
and predilections as much as possible out of sight.

Robert listened with interest and astonishment, the sense of a new-found
manhood waxing once more strong within him, as his mind admitted the
strange picture of himself occupying the place which had been his
father’s; master of the house and the parish he had wandered over with
childish steps, clinging to the finger or the coat of the tall, stooping
figure which occupied the dim background of his recollections. ‘Poor
mother,’ he said, thoughtfully, when she paused, ‘it would be hard upon
_you_ to go back to Murewell!’


‘Oh, you mustn’t think of me when the time comes,’ said Mrs. Elsmere,
sighing. ‘I shall be a tiresome old woman, and you will be a young man
a wife. There, put it out of your head, Robert. I thought I had better
tell you, for, after all, the fact may concern your Oxford life. But
you’ve got a long time yet before you need begin to worry about it.’

The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his tumbling
reddish hair back from his eyes. He was nearly six feet already, with
a long, thin body and head which amply justified his school nickname of
‘the darning-needle.’

‘Don’t you trouble either, mother,’ he said, with a tone of decision; I
don’t feel as if I should ever take Orders.’

Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to attach to the
trenchancy of eighteen, but still the words were pleasant to her.

The next day Robert went up for examination, and after three days of
hard work, and phases of alternate hope and depression, in which mother
and son excited one another to no useful purpose, there came the anxious
crowding round the college gate in the November twilight, and the
sudden flight of dispersing messengers bearing the news over Oxford. The
scholarship had been won by a precocious Etonian with an extraordinary
talent for ‘stems’ and all that appertaineth thereto. But the exhibition
fell to Robert, and mother and son were well content.

The boy was eager to come into residence at once, though he would
matriculate too late to keep the term. The college authorities were
willing, and on the Saturday following the announcement of his success
he was matriculated, saw the Provost, and was informed that rooms
would be found for him without delay. His mother and he gayly climbed
innumerable stairs to inspect the garrets of which he was soon to take
proud possession, sallying forth from them only to enjoy an agitated
delightful afternoon among the shops. Expenditure, always charming,
becomes under these circumstances a sacred and pontifical act. Never had
Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for herself with half the fervor which she
now threw into the purchase of Robert’s; and the young man, accustomed
to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies
of life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him into
a printseller’s, and added an engraving or two to the enticing
miscellaneous mass of which he was already master.

They only just left themselves time to rush back to their lodgings and
dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The
dinner, however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their
white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere’s racy,
unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had
more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the
Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she
must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like
the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could
not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe
of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the
thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the
arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and a
centre of influence over thousands of English lives.

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner’s
gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young
faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost’s
sermon, with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and
phrase--simplicities suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined
experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--completed
the general impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She came out,
tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son’s arm. She, too, like the
generations before her, had launched her venture into the deep. Her boy
was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she could but watch
him from the shore. Brought into contact with this imposing University
organization, with all its suggestions of virile energies and functions,
the mother suddenly felt herself insignificant and forsaken. He had been
her all, her own, and now on this training-ground of English youth, it
seemed to her that the great human society had claimed him from her.



CHAPTER V.

In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most
stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He
was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural gift of sympathy,
which was no doubt often abused, and by no means invariably profitable
to its owner, but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows,
like the power of half the potent men in the world’s history always
lay rooted. He had his mother’s delight in living. He loved the
cricket-field, he loved the river; his athletic instincts and his
athletic friends were always fighting in him with his literary instincts
and the friends who appealed primarily to the intellectual and moral
side of him. He made many mistakes alike in friends and in pursuits; in
the freshness of a young and roving curiosity he had great difficulty
in submitting himself to the intellectual routine of the University, a
difficulty which ultimately cost him much; but at the bottom of the lad,
all the time, there was a strength of will, a force and even tyranny
of conscience, which kept his charm and pliancy from degenerating into
weakness, and made it not only delightful, but profitable to love him.
He knew that his mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to
satisfy, so far as he could, all her honorable ambitions.

His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence must have been
in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us here. His
future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably affected by two
men older than himself, and belonging to the dons--both of them fellows
and tutors of St. Anselm’s, though on different planes of age.

The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert’s tutor, and about seven years
older than himself. He was a man about whom, on entering the college,
Robert heard more than the usual crop of stories. The healthy young
English barbarian has an aversion to the intrusion of more manner into
life than is absolutely necessary. Now Langham was overburdened with
manner, though it was manner of the deprecating and not of the arrogant
order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts were abominable to him. To
help a friend he had once consented to be Pro-proctor. He resigned in a
month, and none of his acquaintances ever afterward dared to allude
to the experience. If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was
affirmed, the persons most obnoxious there would have been found to be
the scout, who intrusively asked him every morning what he would
have for breakfast, and the college cook, who, till such a course was
strictly forbidden him, mounted to his room at half-past nine to inquire
whether he would “dine in.” Being a scholar of considerable eminence,
it pleased him to assume on all questions an exasperating degree of
ignorance; and the wags of the college averred that when asked if it
rained, or if collections took place on such and such a day, it was pain
and grief to him to have to affirm positively, without qualifications,
that so it was.

Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, to captivate
an ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward Langham, however,
notwithstanding undergraduate tales, was a very remarkable person. In
the first place, he was possessed of exceptional personal beauty. His
coloring was vividly black and white, closely curling jet-black hair
and fine black eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even,
white teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain Irishmen
share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iberian brilliance was
balanced by a classical delicacy and precision of feature. He had the
brow, the nose, the upper lip, the finely-molded chin, which belong to
the more severe and spiritual Greek type. Certainly of Greek blitheness
and directness there was no trace. The eye was wavering and profoundly
melancholy; all the movements of the tall, finely-built frame were
hesitating and doubtful. It was as though the man were suffering from
paralysis of some moral muscle or other; as if some of the normal
springs of action in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened.

He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor in a
Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict
provincial ways, ignoring the boy’s idiosyncrasies as much as possible.
They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put
down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common,
middle-class Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however,
the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to
the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion. Poems were
sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals,
with their son’s initials appended, and articles of philosophical
art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which
seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and
subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question,
and showed especially scant respect for the “Protestantism of the
Protestant religion.” The father warned him grimly that he was not
going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he had taken
a double first in Greats. Then the publication of an article in one of
the leading Reviews on “The Ideals of Modern Culture,” not only brought
him a furious letter from home stopping all supplies, but also lost him
a probable fellowship. His college was one of the narrowest and most
backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him before the
fellowship examination that he would not be elected.

He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a vacant
fellowship at St. Anselm’s, the Liberal headquarters, and got it with
flying colors.

Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favorable
mental development was secured to him. Not at all. The moment of his
quarrel with his father and his college had, in fact, represented a
moment of energy, of comparative success, which never recurred. It Was
as though this outburst of action and liberty had disappointed him, as
if some deep-rooted instinct--cold, critical, reflective--had reasserted
itself, condemning him and his censors equally. The uselessness of
utterance, the futility of enthusiasm, the inaccessibility of the ideal,
the practical absurdity of trying to realize any of the mind’s inward
dreams: these were the kind of considerations which descended upon him,
slowly and fatally, crushing down the newly springing growths of
action or of passion. It was as though life had demonstrated to him the
essential truth of a childish saying of his own which had startled and
displeased his Calvinist mother years before. “Mother,” the delicate,
large-eyed child had said to her one day in a fit of physical weariness,
“how is it I dislike the things I dislike so much more than I like the
things I like?”

So he wrote no more, he quarreled no more, he meddled with the great
passionate things of life and expression no more. On his taking up
residence in St. Anselm’s, indeed, and on his being appointed first
lecturer and then tutor, he had a momentary pleasure in the thought of
teaching. His mind was a storehouse of thought and fact, and to the
man brought up at a dull provincial day-school and never allowed to
associate freely with his kind, the bright lads fresh from Eton and
Harrow about him were singularly attractive. But a few terms were enough
to scatter this illusion too. He could not be simple, he could not
be spontaneous; he was tormented by self-consciousness; and it was
impossible to him to talk and behave as those talk and behave who have
been brought up more or less in the big world from the beginning. So
this dream too faded, for youth asks before all things simplicity and
spontaneity in those who would take possession of it. His lectures,
which were at first brilliant enough to attract numbers of men from
other colleges, became gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without
life or feeling. It was possible to learn a great deal from him; it
was not possible to catch from him any contagion of that _amor
intellectualis_ which had flamed at one moment so high within him.
He ceased to compose; but as the intellectual faculty must have some
employment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries, a
microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything beyond,
but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking.

The only survival of that moment of glow and color in his life was
his love of music and the theatre. Almost every year he disappeared
to France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fortnight; to Berlin or
Bayreuth to drink his fill of music. He talked neither of music nor of
acting; he made no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did enjoy. It was
simply his way of cheating his creative faculty, which, though it
had grown impotent, was still there, still restless. Altogether
a melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going sceptic and
thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical sense which says
‘No’ to every impulse, and is always restlessly and yet hopelessly,
seeking the future through the neglected and outraged present.

And yet the man’s instincts, at this period of his life at any rate,
were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women, and
was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression
on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was always seeking
in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always
escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the
first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck
at some favorable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective
tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one
else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to
take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in
passing, by weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous
tone of the college toward him. He showed his liking impetuously,
boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career
Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto
might have been that dismal one--‘The small things of life are odious
to me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are
eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;’ but
for the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his
eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable
mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the
roving mind, to infuse into the boy’s literary temper the delicacy, the
precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of
work supplied exactly the antidote which Elsmere’s main faults of haste
and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the
inexhaustible patience and labor involved in all true knowledge; and it
was to the germs of critical judgment so planted in him that Elsemere
owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we
have not yet to concern ourselves.

And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment
of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening, in the
summer term following the boy’s matriculation, Elsmere brought him an
essay after Hall, and they sat on talking afterward. It was a rainy,
cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed
in cold wind and sheet; a dreary blast whistled through the college.
Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. ‘I have had an
offer, Elsmere,’ he said, abruptly.

And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch
professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it.
The last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence.
Langham’s contributions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford
recommendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, coming
from one who was himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms
flattering to any young man’s vanity.

Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had finished the
letter.

‘I congratulate you, sir.’

‘I have refused it,’ said Langham, abruptly.

His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he know perfectly well
that this particular appointment was one of the blue ribbons of British
scholarship.

‘Do you think--’ said the other in a tone of singular vibration, which
had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation--‘do you think _I_
am the man to get and keep a hold on a rampageous class of hundreds
of Scotch lads? Do you think _I_ am the man to carry on what Reid
began--Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant
dogmas?’

He looked at Elsmere under his straight, black brows, imperiously. The
youth felt the nervous tension in the elder man’s voice and manner, was
startled by a confidence never before bestowed upon him, close as that
unequal bond between them had been growing during the six months of his
Oxford life, and plucking up courage hurled at him a number of frank,
young expostulations, which really put into friendly shape all that was
being said about Langham in his College and in the University. Why was
he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent
on hiding his great gifts under a bushel?

The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands
and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a
hand toward a book which lay on a table near. It was the ‘Reveries’ of
Senancour. ‘My answer is written _here_,’ he said. ‘It will seem to
you now, Elsmere, mere Midsummer madness. May it always seem so to you.
Forgive me. The pressure of solitude sometimes is too great.’

Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate smiles, and
took the book from Langham’s hand. He found on the open page a marked
passage:

“Oh swiftly passing seasons of life! There was a time when men seemed
to be sincere; when thought was nourished on friendship, kindness, love;
when dawn still kept its brilliance, and the night its peace. _I can_,
the soul said to itself, and _I will_; I will do all that is right--all
that is natural. But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we
know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy
on our necks; Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe.
Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realize their
impotence: we have time and strength to do what we _must_, never what we
will. Men go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools! Will
all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves,
enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering
forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens?”

Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. The words
sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, to crave.

Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him almost with violence.

‘Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is
not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They
would request me to resign in a week.’

Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking awhile on other things, had
gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty grate.

‘Corrupter of youth!’ he said to himself once, bitterly. And perhaps
it was to a certain remorse in the tutor’s mind that Elsmere owed an
experience of great importance to his afterlife.

The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his entry at
Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert’s ears as that of a person
of great influence and consideration at St. Anselm’s. His tutor at
Harden had spoken of him in the boy’s hearing as one of the most
remarkable men of the generation, and had several times impressed upon
his pupil that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the
friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview
with the Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was
first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember a short dark
man standing beside the Provost, who had been introduced to him by that
name, but the nervousness of the moment had been so great that the boy
had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention.

During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occasionally met
Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and the tutor, remembering
the thin, bright-faced youth, would return his salutations kindly,
and sometimes stop to speak to him, to ask him if he were comfortably
settled in his rooms, or make a remark about the boats. But the
acquaintance did not seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats
tutor, and Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as work
was concerned.

However, a day or two after the conversation we have described, Robert,
going to Langham’s rooms late in the afternoon to return a book which
had been lent to him, perceived two figures standing talking on the
hearth-rug and by the western light beating in recognized the thickset
frame and broad brow of Mr. Grey.

‘Come in, Elsmere,’ said Langham, as he stood hesitating on the
threshold. ‘You have met Mr. Grey before, I think?’

‘We first met at an anxious moment,’ said Mr. Grey, smiling and shaking
hands with the boy. ‘A first interview with the Provost is always
formidable. I remember it too well myself. You did very well, I
remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, Langham, I must be off. I shall be late for
my meeting as it is. I think we have settled our business. Good night.’

Langham stood a moment after the door closed, eyeing Elsmere. There was
a curious struggle going on in the tutor’s mind.

‘Elsmere,’ he said at last, abruptly, ‘would you like to go tonight and
hear Grey preach?’

‘Preach!’ exclaimed the lad. ‘I thought he was a layman.’

So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the custom here with
the clerical tutors to address their men once a term before Communion
Sunday, and some years ago, when Grey first became tutor, he
determined, though he was a layman, to carry on the practice. It was an
extraordinary effort, for he is a man to whom words on such a subject
are the coining of his heart’s blood, and he has repeated it very
rarely. It is two years now since his last address.’

Of course I should like to go,’ said Robert, with eagerness. Is it
open?’

‘Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. It is
hardly meant for freshmen; but--well, you are far enough on to make it
interesting to you.’

‘The lad will take to Grey’s influence like a fish to water,’ thought
the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without strange reluctance.
‘Well, no one can say I have not given him his opportunity to be
“earnest.”’

The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm which a man of his
type in an earlier generation might have applied to the ‘earnestness’ of
an Arnoldian Rugby.

At eight o’clock that evening Robert found himself crossing the
quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the larger lecture-rooms,
which was to be the scene of the address. The room when they got in
was already nearly full, all the working fellows of the college were
present, and a body of some thirty men besides, most of them already
far on in their University career. A minute or two afterward Mr.
Grey entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees,
undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut; and the
little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey’s voice with its broad intonation,
in which a strong native homeliness lingered under the gentleness of
accent, recited the collect ‘Lord of all power and might,’ a silent
pause following the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and
Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him,
began his address.

All the main points of the experience which followed stamped themselves
on Robert’s mind with extraordinary intensity. Nor did he ever lose the
memory of the outward scene. In after-years, memory could always recall
to him at will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb
and feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude
strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility,
the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation
of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed
of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kindling and
enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, filled with a
fervor and an admiration which he was too young and immature to analyze,
but which was to be none the less potent and lasting.

Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning
of St. Paul’s great conception, ‘Death unto sin and a new birth unto
righteousness.’ What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self?
What were the precise ideas attached to the words ‘risen with Christ?’
Are this, death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain
alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they
not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process
perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the
veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting Witness of
the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or
the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much
Importance?

Mr. Grey’s treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh from
school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow with
any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere.
It was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit selfishness, vice--how,
as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the
‘pitiful, earthy self’ with its passions and its cravings sank into
nothingness beside the ‘great ideas’ and the ‘great causes’ for which,
as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion.

To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face
supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker,
it seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless
curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from
this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the
world had been shaped and inspired, he felt brought near to the great
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of
natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him
suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. ‘Axioms are not axioms,’
said poor Keats, ‘till they have been proved upon our pulses;’ and the
old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man
and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May
night, in the hush of that quiet lecture-room.

As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to
their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment
in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy
moon.

‘Thank you, thank you, sir!’ said the lad, eager and yet afraid to
speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. ‘I should be sorry
indeed to have missed that!’

‘Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever given, I
think. Good night.’

And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, his hands behind
him. Robert went to his room conscious of a momentary check of feeling.
But it soon passed, and he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or
pouring out in a letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his
mind was full.

A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the junior
exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey’s house. Elsmere went in a
state of curious eagerness and trepidation, and came away with a number
of fresh impressions which, when he had put them into order, did but
quicken his new-born sense of devotion. The quiet unpretending house,
with its exquisite neatness and its abundance of books, the family life,
with the heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust and courtesy
on the surface, the little touches of austerity which betrayed
themselves here and there in the household ways--all these surroundings
stole into the lad’s imagination, touched in him responsive fibres of
taste and feeling.

But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. He came, still
shaken, as it were, by the power of the sermon, expecting to see in the
preacher of it the outward and visible signs of a leadership which, as
he already knew, was a great force in Oxford life. His mood was that of
the disciple only eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet,
friendly host, surrounded by a group of men talking the ordinary
pleasant Oxford chit-chat--the river, the schools, the Union, the
football matches, and so on. Every now and then, as Elsmere stood at the
edge of the circle listening, the rugged face in the centre of it
would break into a smile, or some boyish speaker would elicit the low
spontaneous laugh in which there was such a sound of human fellowship,
such a genuine note of self-forgetfulness. Sometimes the conversation
strayed into politics, and then Mr. Grey, an eager politician, would
throw back his head, and talk with more sparkle and rapidity, flashing
occasionally into grim humor which seemed to throw light on the innate
strength and pugnacity of the peasant and Puritan breed from which
he sprang. Nothing could be more unlike the inspired philosopher, the
mystic surrounded by an adoring school, whom Robert had been picturing
to himself in his walk up to the house, through the soft May twilight.

It was not long before the tutor had learned to take much kindly notice
of the ardent and yet modest exhibitioner, in whose future it was
impossible not to feel a sympathetic interest.

‘You will always find us on Sunday afternoons, before chapel,’ he said
to him one day as they parted after watching a football match in the
damp mists of the Park, and the boy’s flush of pleasure showed how much
he valued the permission.

For three years those Sunday half-hours were the great charm of Robert
Elsmere’s life. When he came to look back upon them, he could remember
nothing very definite. A few interesting scraps of talk about books; a
good deal of talk about politics, showing in the tutor a living interest
in the needs and training of that broadening democracy on which the
future of England rests; a few graphic sayings about individuals; above
all, a constant readiness on the host’s part to listen, to sit quiet,
with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent of
a strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that
sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say--these were
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, reinforced always,
indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great soul speaking with
difficulty and labor, but still clearly, still effectually, through an
unblemished series of noble acts and efforts.

Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more and more proud
of her boy, and more and more assured that her years of intelligent
devotion to him had won her his entire love and confidence, ‘so long as
they both should live;’ she came up to him once or twice, making Lagham
almost flee the University because she would be grateful to him in
public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she had
devoted the most anxious attention for Robert’s sake, and which made
her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all observers. When
she came, she and Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and
most of the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion; and she
soon gathered with that solemn, half-tragic sense of change which besets
a mother’s heart at such a moment, that there were many new forces at
work in her boy’s mind, deep undercurrents of feeling, stirred in him
by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise powerfully to the
surface.

He was passing from a bright, buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardor
and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr.
Grey.

Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final schools were
a different matter. In the first days of his, return to Oxford, in the
October of his third year, while he was still making up his lecture
list, and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him,
before plunging definitely into it, he was oppressed with a sense that
the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be
harder to solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in
a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been
growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far too many
camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all those
midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which Oxford was preparing
for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence with minds as
eager and as crude as his own, and of all the delightful dipping into
the very latest literature, which such moments encouraged and involved,
seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy’s will that it was not
equal to the situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for
a striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from attempting
impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity? He felt a dismal
certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will
and curiosity, now into this path, now into that; and a still stronger
and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets
up the Ethics or the Annals.

Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In spite of the
paralysis of all natural ambitious in himself, he was illogically keen
that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the place. He, the most
laborious, the most disinterested of scholars, turned himself almost
into a crammer for Elsmere’s benefit. He abused the lad’s multifarious
reading, declared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached
to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts
to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some triumphant
retort drawn from his own utterances at some sincerer and less discreet
moment. In vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks were
over that Elsmere would miss his First in Greats. He was too curious,
too restless, too passionate about many things. Above all he was
beginning, in the tutor’s opinion, to concern himself disastrously
early with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing of all human
interests--the interest of religion. Grey had made him ‘earnest’ with a
vengeance.

Elsmere was now attending Grey’s philosophical lectures, following them
with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as so often happens, for the
defence and fortification of views quite other than his teacher’s. The
whole basis of Grey’s thought was ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had
broken with the popular Christianity, but for him, God, consciousness,
duty, were the only realities. None of the various forms of materialist
thought escaped his challenge; no genuine utterance of the spiritual
life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It was known that after having
prepared himself for the Christian ministry, he had remained a layman
because it had become impossible to him to accept miracle; and it
was evident that the commoner type of Churchmen regarded him as an
antagonist all the more dangerous because he was to sympathetic. But the
negative and critical side of him was what in reality told least upon
his pupils. He was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect
for the immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that
what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a
well-known rationalist about him: ‘The Tories were always carrying off
his honey to their hive.’ Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey
had to give, drank in all the ideal fervor, the spiritual enthusiasm of
the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty
years earlier, carried his religious passion so stimulated into the
service of the great positive tradition around him.

And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from
philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian
system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in
the world that a young man of Elsmere’s temperament should rally to the
Church. The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of
reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with
tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity.
It had begun to be recognized with a great burst of enthusiasm and
astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said
the last word on all things in heaven and earth. And now there was
exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast
gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place
which Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once more
popular among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large
proportion of the nobler ones.

With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself in
close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impression left upon his
boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden curates, and
by his mother’s shifts of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of
him by the stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was
revealed to him at Oxford. The religious air, the solemn beauty of
the place itself, its innumerable associations with an organized and
venerable faith, the great public functions and expressions of that
faith, possessed the boy’s imagination more and more. As he sat in the
undergraduates’ gallery at St. Mary’s on the Sundays, when the great
High Church preacher of the moment occupied the pulpit, and looked down
on the crowded building, full of grave black-gowned figures and framed
in one continuous belt of closely packed boyish faces; as he listened
to the preacher’s vibrating voice, rising and falling with the
orator’s instinct for musical effect; or as he stood up with the great
surrounding body of undergraduates to send the melody of some Latin hymn
rolling into the far recesses of the choir, the sight and the experience
touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic
instincts of a passionate nature. The system behind the sight took
stronger and stronger hold upon him; he began to wish ardently and
continuously to become a part of it, to cast in his lot definitely with
it.

One May evening he was wandering by himself along the towing-path which
skirts the upper river, a prey to many thoughts, to forebodings about
the schools which were to begin in three weeks, and to speculations
as to how his mother would take the news of the second class, which he
himself felt to be inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there
flashed into his mind the little conversation with his mother, which
had taken place nearly four years before, in the garden at Trinity. He
remembered the antagonism which the idea of a clerical life for him
had raised in both of them, and a smile at his own ignorance and his
mother’s prejudice passed over his quick young face. He sat down on the
grassy bank, a mass of reeds at his feet, the shadows of the poplars
behind him lying across the still river; and opposite, the wide green
expanse of the great town-meadow, dotted with white patches of geese
and herds of grazing horses. There, with a sense of something solemn and
critical passing over him, he began to dream out his future life.

And when he rose half an hour afterward, and turned his steps homeward,
he knew with an inward tremor of heart that the next great step of the
way was practically taken. For there by the gliding river, and in view
of the distant Oxford spires, which his fancy took to witness the act,
he had vowed himself in prayer and self-abasement to the ministry of the
Church.

During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to
make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he
had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous
succession of enthusiasms and now at the critical moment his stock of
nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired,
his friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic
paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm caught
by Mr. Grey.

‘Come with me for a walk, Elsmere; you look as if some air would do you
good.’

Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passageway leading
out on to Radcliffe Square.

‘I have done for myself, sir,’ said the youth, with a sigh, half
impatience, half depression. ‘It seems to me to-day that I had neither
mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be lucky.’

‘Oh, you will get your second whatever happens,’ said Mr. Grey, quietly,
‘and you mustn’t be too much cast down about it if you don’t get your
first.’

This implied acceptance of his partial defeat, coming from another’s
lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was only what he had
been saying to himself, but in the most pessimist forecasts we make for
ourselves, there is always an under-protest of hope.

‘I have been wasting my time here lately,’ he said, hurriedly raising
his college cap from his brows as if it oppressed them, and pushing his
hair back with a weary, restless gesture.

‘No,’ said Mr. Grey, turning his kind, frank eyes upon him. ‘As far as
general training goes, you have not wasted your time at all. There are
many clever men who don’t get a first class, and yet it is good for them
to be here--so long as they are not loungers and idlers, of course.
And you have not been a lounger; you have been headstrong and a little
over-confident, perhaps,’--the speaker’s smile took all the sting out
of the words--‘but you have grown into a man, you are fit now for man’s
work. Don’t let yourself be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better in
life than you have done in examination.’

The young man was deeply touched. This tone of personal comment and
admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He felt a sudden consciousness
of a shared burden which was infinity soothing, and though he made no
answer, his face lost something of its harassed look, as the two walked
on together down Oriel Street and into Merton Meadows.

‘Have you any immediate plans?’ said Mr. Grey, as they turned into the
Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June, and rustling under a brisk
western wind blowing from the river.

‘No; at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a fellowship.
But I meant to tell you, Sir, of one, thing-I have, made up my mind to
take Orders.’

‘You have? When?’

‘Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back for divinity
lectures in the autumn.’

Mr. Grey said nothing for a while, and they strolled in and out of the
great shadows thrown by the elms across their path.

‘You feel no difficulties in the way?’ he asked at last, with a certain
quick brusqueness of manner.

‘No,’ said Robert, eagerly. ‘I never had any. Perhaps,’ he added with
a sudden humility, ‘it is because I have never gone deep enough. What
I believe might have been worth more if I had had more struggle; but it
has all seemed so plain.’

The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and yet with a
deep inner, conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. Grey turned toward it,
and the great eyes under the furrowed brow had a peculiar gentleness of
expression.

‘You will probably be very happy in the life,’ he said. ‘The Church
wants men of your sort.’

But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was conscious of a veil
between them. He knew, of course, pretty much what it was, and with a
sudden impulse he felt that he would have given worlds to break through
it and talk frankly with this man whom he revered beyond all others,
wide as was the intellectual difference between them. But the tutor’s
reticence and the younger man’s respect prevented it.

When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to the world,
Langham took it to heart perhaps more than either Elsmere or his mother.
No one knew better than he what Elsmere’s gifts were. It was absurd
that he should not have made more of them in sight of the public. ‘_Le
cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!_’ was about the gist of Langham’s mood
during the days that followed on the class list.

Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking Orders to
him till ten days afterward, when he had carried off Langham to stay
at Harden, and he and his old tutor were smoking in his mother’s little
garden one moonlit night.

When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a moment,
watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious
interest in Elsmere’s career, which during a certain number of months
had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was
his own languid, paradoxical self.

‘Well, after all,’ he said at last, very slowly, ‘the difficulty lies
in preaching anything. One may as well preach a respectable mythology as
anything else.’

‘What do you mean by a mythology?’ cried Robert, hotly.

‘Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,’ said Langham, puffing away.
‘I take it they are the subject-matter of all theologies.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Robert, flushing. ‘To the Christian,
facts have been the medium by which ideas the world could not otherwise
have come at have been communicated to man. Christian theology is a
system of ideas indeed, but of ideas realized, made manifest in facts.’

Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided; then that suppressed
irritation we have already spoken of broke through. ‘How do you know
they are facts?’ he said, dryly.

The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural eagerness,
and the conversation resolved itself into a discussion of Christian
evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and Langham kept him going by
an occasional remark which acted like the prick of a spur. The tutor’s
psychological curiosity was soon satisfied. He declared to himself that
the intellect had precious little to do with Elsmere’s Christianity. He
had got hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his
companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely
the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something
wholly distinct from intellectual conviction--by moral passion, by love,
by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy youth should
be without.

‘He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,’ was the inward comment
of one of the most melancholy of sceptics, ‘and he has never so much as
exerted it. What a brute protest!’

And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out his hand to his
companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in his black eyes, such as on
one or two critical occasions before had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere.

‘No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of course, and
you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging away at reforming and
enlightening the world, don’t trample too much on the people who have
more than enough to do to enlighten themselves.’

As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this now turn of her son’s fortunes she realized
with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been
educating her as well as himself. Her old rebellious sense of something
inherently absurd in the clerical status had been gradually slain in her
by her long contact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects
of church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the Harden
curates, and at times she would flame out into the wildest, wittiest
threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfaction of her own essentially
lay instincts; but at bottom she knew perfectly well that, when the
moment came, no mother could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon,
than she would be.

‘I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before very
long,’ she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him the while out
of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there was already in the young
lightly-built frame! What frankness and character in the irregular,
attractive face!

‘Mother,’ cried Elsmere, indignantly, ‘what do you take line for? Do
you imagine I am going to bury myself in the country at five or
six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing to do for it? That
would be a deserter’s act indeed.’

Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, I supposed you would insist on
killing yourself, to begin with. To most people nowadays that seems to
be the necessary preliminary of a useful career.’

Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred him so
much that he sat down that very evening to write to his cousin Mowbray
Elsmere. He announced to him that he was about to read for Orders,
and that at the same time he relinquished all claim on the living of
Murewell. ‘Do what you like with it when it falls vacant,’ he wrote,
‘without reference to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in
health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows himself
the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years at any
rate, to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the fight is
hardest-among our English town population.’

Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two, to the effect that
Robert’s letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir. Mowbray, had nothing
to do with his cousin’s views. When the living was vacant--the present
holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying--he should
follow out the instructions of his father’s will, and if Robert did not
want the thing he could say so.

In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following
spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a
Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the beat men
of his year, and in June he was ordained.

In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and
by Mr. Grey’s advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that
London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest
for which his soul was pining. ‘Stay here a year or two,’ Grey said,
bluntly; ‘you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you
are not one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the
better worth having afterward, and there is no lack of work here for a
man’s moral energies.’

Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three happy and
fruitful years followed. The young lecturer developed an amazing power
of work. That concentration which he had been unable to achieve for
himself his will was strong enough to maintain when it was a question
of meeting the demands of a college class in which he was deeply
interested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of
the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility toward
his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which he was constantly
physically unequal, and fill the vacations almost as full as the terms.
And as he was comparatively a man of means, his generous, impetuous
temper was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been
impossible to others. The story of his summer reading parties, for
instances, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be
one long string of acts of kindness toward men poorer and duller than
himself.

At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of
the religious party in Oxford. His mother’s Evangelical training of
him, and Mr. Grey’s influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts
of temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The
sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But
to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion
of God’s work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and
none coming close to him could mistake the fervor and passion of his
Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancor or
bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned
a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual,
perhaps a dangerous, amount of liking and affection. He threw himself
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church
vicar, and now toiling with Gray and one or two other Liberal fellows,
at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by
them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship
the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of
the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark.

So the three years passed--not, perhaps, of great intellectual advance,
for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly to the
fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and moral
experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer, and
it was accepted.

The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little
house in Morton Street where she had established herself, had watched
her boy’s meteoric career through those crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realized long before
he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end
for him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her
remonstrance, nor Mr. Grey’s common sense, nor Langham’s fidgety
protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter
came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he
was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only
to break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the
collapse became so decided, that he consented, bribed by the prospect
of the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East,
accompanied by his mother and a college friend.

Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the Rector
of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was feeling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within
him was a slowly emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labor and the
worst forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent’s death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.

But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.

‘You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,’ said the Liberal tutor, with
emphasis. ‘No one can say a living with 1,200 souls, and no curate, is
a sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd--you couldn’t stand it.
And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth saving out of the
towns.’

Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a corrupt and
indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly that they probably
were, but that the fact did not affect, so far as he could see,
Elsmere’s competence to fulfil all the duties of rector of Murewell.

‘After all, my dear fellow,’ he said, a smile breaking over his strong,
expressive face, ‘it is well even for reformers to be sane.’

Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had foreseen it all
along. She was miserable about his health, but she too had a moment of
superstition, and would not urge him. Murewell was no name of happy omen
to her--she had passed the darkest hours of her life there.

In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted
him. Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly
determined to get well and beat the fates. But, after a halcyon time
Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on
their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters.
Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled
out again into the hot Riviera sunshine, it was clear to himself and
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in
the Christian vineyard.

‘Mother,’ he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she sat near
him working, ‘can _you_ be happy at Murewell?’

There was a wistfulness in the long, thin face, and a pathetic accent of
surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother’s heart.

‘I can be happy wherever you are,’ she said, laying her brown nervous
hand on his blanched one.

‘Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray; I wonder
whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho! How is one to preach to
people who have stuffed you up with gooseberries, or swung you on gates,
or lifted you over puddles to save your petticoats? I wonder what has
become of that boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or
of that other lout who pummelled me into the middle of next week
for disturbing his bird-trap? By the way, is the Squire-is Roger
Wendover--living at the Hall now?’

He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest.

‘So I hear,’ said Mrs. Elsmere, dryly. ‘_He_ won’t be much good to you.’

He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He had forgotten
the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, the famous and eccentric
owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and scholar, possessed of one of the most
magnificent libraries in England, and author of books which had carried
a revolutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not a
figure to be overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one
possessed of Robert’s culture and imagination.

The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a sudden access
of interest in his new home that was to be.

Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now convalescent,
had accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long Whindale with his
mother’s cousins, the Thornburghs, who offered him quiet, and bracing
air. He was to enter on his duties at Murewell in July, the Bishop, who
had been made aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit
to the diocese with marked warmth of manner.



CHAPTER VI.

‘Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,’ cried Rose, calling from
outside through the dining-room window; ‘and tell mamma.’

It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert
Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent
foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed
that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer. Early
in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the color out of
the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous
gray-blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches, and the
birches, and the hawthorns were already sobered by a longer acquaintance
with life and Phœbus.

Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when in its proper
place served her, apparently, both as hat and as parasol. She seemed to
have been running races with a fine collie, who lay at her feet panting,
but studying her with his bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off
again at the first indication that his playmate had recovered her wind.
Chattie was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a model of
treacherous beauty.

‘Chattie, you fiend, come here!’ cried Rose, holding out a hand to her;
‘if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must have looked like you at this
moment.’

‘I won’t have Chattie put upon,’ said Agnes, establishing herself at the
other side of the little tea-table; ‘she has done you no harm. Come to
me, beastie. I won’t compare you to disagreeable old maids.’

The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking; then with a
sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes’s lap and curled herself up
there.

‘Nothing but cupboard love,’ said Rose scornfully, in answer to Agnes’s
laugh; ‘she knows you will give her bread and butter and I won’t, out
of a double regard for my skirts and her morals. Oh, dear me! Miss Barks
was quite seraphic last night; she never made a single remark about my
clothes, and she didn’t even say to me as she generally does, with an
air of compassion, that she “quite understands how hard it must be to
keep in tune.”’

‘The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,’ said Agnes. ‘I just
love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear her instructing other people in
their own particular trades. She didn’t get much change out of him.’

Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with one hand on her
heart, said in a stage whisper, with a dramatic glance round the garden,
‘My heart is whole. How is yours?’

‘_Intact_,’ said Agnes, calmly, as that French bric-a-brac man in the
Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he is very nice.’

‘Oh, charming! But when my destiny arrives’-and Rose, returning to her
tea, swept her little hand with a teaspoon in it eloquently round-’he
won’t have his hair cut close. I must have luxuriant locks, and I will
take _no_ excuse! _Une chevelure de poète_, the eye of an eagle, the
moustache of a hero, the hand of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him,
the temper of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the world
besides, except for me; and for me he will be heaven.’

She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a little flush
of something half real on her cheek.

‘No doubt,’ said Agnes, dryly. ‘But you can’t wonder if under the
circumstances I don’t pine for a brother-in-law. To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t count,’ replied Rose, discontentedly. Catherine likes
everybody--of a certain sort--and everybody likes Catherine.’

‘Does that mean, Miss Hasty,’ said her sister, ‘that you have made up
your mind Catherine will never marry?’

‘Marry!’ cried Rose. ‘You might as ‘well talk of marrying Westminster
Abbey.’

Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose’s fun had a decided lack of
sweetness. ‘After all,’ she said, demurely, ‘St. Elizabeth married.’

‘Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were
“her Royal Highness” it would be her duty to marry, which would just
make all the difference. Duty! I hate the word.’

And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the
collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking
and dignified protest against his mistress’s follies.

Agnes again studied her sister. ‘What’s the matter with you, Rose?’

‘The usual thing, my dear,’ replied Rose, curtly, ‘only more so. I had
a letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter

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