Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to go. Much of her apparel had slipped away from her in the fervours of revivalist anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves and reticule--officiously helped by the younger girls--Robert crossed over to Catherine.
"You lifted us on to your own high places!" he said, bending down to her; "I shall carry your story with me through the fells."
She looked up, and as she met his warm moved look a little glow and tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted expression. He broke the spell; she sank from the poet into the embarra.s.sed woman.
"You must see my old man," she said, with an effort; "he is worth a library of sermons. I must introduce him to you."
He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could only stand impatiently wishing for Mrs. Fleming"s disappearance, that he might somehow appropriate her eldest niece. But alas! when she went, Catherine went out with her, and reappeared no more, though he waited some time.
He walked home in a whirl of feeling; on the way he stopped, and leaning over a gate which led into one of the river-fields gave himself up to the mounting tumult within. Gradually, from the half-articulate chaos of hope and memory, there emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost manhood.
"In her and her only is my heart"s desire! She and she only if she will, and G.o.d will, shall be my wife!"
He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the evening beauty of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change--
"Tears Were in his eyes, and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years."
He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never felt before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he had sprung suddenly into maturity--entered at last into the full human heritage.
But the very intensity and solemnity of his own feeling gave him a rare clear-sightedness. He realised that he had no certainty of success, scarcely even an entirely reasonable hope. But what of that? Were they not together, alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes? Would they not meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after? Were not time and opportunity all his own? How kind her looks are even now! Courage! And through that maidenly kindness his own pa.s.sion shall send the last, trans.m.u.ting glow.
CHAPTER VII
The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing cla.s.s at the school, closed the school door behind her with a sigh of relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood.
"How abominably they sang this morning!" she said to herself with curving lip. "Talk of the natural north-country gift for music! What ridiculous fictions people set up! Dear me, what clouds! Perhaps we shan"t get our walk to Shanmoor after all, and if we don"t, and if--if--" her cheek flushed with a sudden excitement--"if Mr. Elsmere doesn"t propose, Mrs. Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes and I can do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if _something_ doesn"t come off to-day, she"ll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and asking _Catherine_ her intentions, which would ruin everything."
Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged curtain was already lowering.
"It will hold up yet awhile," she thought, "and if it rains later we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road."
And she walked on homewards meditating, her thin fingers clasped before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty many-coloured turmoil about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full of artistic odds and ends--her fiddle, of course, and piles of music, her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood photographs of musicians and friends--the spoils of her visits to Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points in the girl"s memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighbourhood, and paid for it with her own money. There a group of unfinished headlong sketches of the most fiercely impressionist description--the work and the gift of a knot of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her heart"s content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young artists dub themselves "a school," study in Paris, and when they come home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north.
Rose"s uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad enough to befriend his dead brother"s children, who wanted nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris and Italy, and set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone apparently of all artists was destined never to know.
For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what, thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free, reckless, pa.s.sionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and found Burwood waiting for her--Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For Rose, what a mult.i.tude of a.s.sociations cl.u.s.tered round the name! To her it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most determined sacrificing of "this warm kind world," with all its indefensible delights, to a cold other-world with its torturing inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere as they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair.
And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the verge of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in resisting, but resist she must by the law of her nature.
Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon her violin, and rushed through a Brahms"s "Liebeslied," her eyes dancing, her whole light form thrilling with the joy of it; and then with a sudden revulsion she stopped playing, and threw herself down listlessly by the open window. Close by against the wall was a little looking-gla.s.s, by which she often arranged her ruffled locks; she glanced at it now, it showed her a brilliant face enough, but drooping lips, and eyes darkened with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen.
"It is come to a pretty pa.s.s," she said to herself, "that I should be able to think of nothing but schemes for getting Catherine married and out of my way! Considering what she is and what I am, and how she has slaved for us all her life, I seem to have descended pretty low. Heigh ho!"
And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her hand. She was half acting, acting to herself. Life was not really quite unbearable, and she knew it. But it relieved her to overdo it.
"I wonder how much chance there is," she mused presently. "Mr. Elsmere will soon be ridiculous. Why, _I_ saw him gather up those violets she threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And as for her, I don"t believe she has realised the situation a bit. At least, if she has, she is as unlike other mortals in this as in everything else. But when she does----"
She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. Chattie jumped up on the window-sill, with her usual stealthy _aplomb_, and rubbed herself against the girl"s face.
"Oh, Chattie!" cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, "if Catherine "ll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be happy ever afterwards, and set me free to live my own life a bit, I"ll be so good, you won"t know me, Chattie. And you shall have a new collar, my beauty, and cream till you die of it!"
And springing up she dragged in the cat, and s.n.a.t.c.hing a scarlet anemone from a bunch on the table, stood opposite Chattie, who stood slowly waving her magnificent tail from side to side, and glaring as though it were not at all to her taste to be hustled and bustled in this way.
"Now, Chattie, listen! Will she?"
A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie"s nose.
"Won"t she? Will she? Won"t she? Will---- Tiresome flower, why did Nature give it such a beggarly few petals? If I"d had a daisy it would have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz; and let"s forget this wicked world!"
And, s.n.a.t.c.hing up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss waltz, dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her pretty feet twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks blazed with a double intoxication--the intoxication of movement, and the intoxication of sound--the cat meanwhile following her with little mincing perplexed steps, as though not knowing what to make of her.
"Rose, you madcap!" cried Agnes, opening the door.
"Not at all, my dear," said Rose calmly, stopping to take breath.
"Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and see!"
The weather held up in a gray grudging sort of way, and Mrs. Thornburgh especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with the expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others would be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage "man" in a most delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the neighbourhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh"s state is easier imagined than described.
The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together.
Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so it did not disquiet him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a lovely gaiety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.
And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on a picnic the following day, but her conscience was p.r.i.c.king her. Twice this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even _she_ had been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale, and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression, blown away by the winds,--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly presence, a keen responsive eye?
Elsmere, indeed, was gaiety itself. He kept up an incessant war with Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar"s expense, which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way; he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form, and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted himself on Whindale.
"How fine all this black purple is!" he cried, as they topped the ridge, and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. "I had grown quite tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace."
"Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?" said Catherine, with a little mocking wonder. "How wanton, how prodigal!"
"Does it deserve a Nemesis?" he said, laughing. "Drowning from now till I depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On this enchanted soil all things are welcome!"
She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute to the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a little way off laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange new pulse leapt up in Catherine.
"The wind is very boisterous here," she said, with a shiver. "I think we ought to be going on."
And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and Mrs. Thornburgh"s gray curls shaking at the window.
"William!" she shouted, "bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr.
Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the visitors" book!"
While the girls went in Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right, the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighbourhood, and a tiny towered church--the scene on the Sabbath of Mr. Mayhew"s ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind the inn ma.s.ses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing.
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general, the colour was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple background. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix it there for ever.
Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread in a light upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors" book. The scrambling, chattering meal pa.s.sed like a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs.
Thornburgh"s small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face, as though to say, "What--_no_ news yet? Nothing happened?" As for Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest moments of existence, he remembered little afterwards but the scene: the peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose"s golden head and heavy amber necklace, and the figure at the vicar"s right, in a gown of a little dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.