Robert Elsmere. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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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 eldest 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. 'Every one 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 afterwards to enjoy the sense of freedom left by their departure. But at last the Mayhews, 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 the 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 favourite 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