Robert Elsmere. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously with many sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an extraordinary person it was!
Off he went, however, with his Spectator under his arm, whistling. Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open window, and tore the flannel across she was preparing for a mothers' meeting with a noise like the rattle of musketry. Whistling! She would like to know what grounds he had for it, indeed! She always knew—she always said, and she would go on saying—that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid.
Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the lightest heart. By way of keeping all his anticipations within the bounds of strict reason, he told himself that it was impossible he should see 'her' in the morning. She was always busy in the morning.
He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a shrine. That was her window, that upper casement with the little Banksia rose twining round it. One night, when he and the vicar had been out late on the hills, he had seen a light streaming from it across the valley, and had thought how the mistress of the maiden solitude within shone 'in a naughty world.'
In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about the garden. She at once informed him with much languid plaintiveness that Catherine had gone to Whinborough for the day, and would not be able to join the picnic.
Elsmere stood still.
'Gone!' he cried. 'But it was all arranged with her yesterday!' Mrs. Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was evidently much put out.
'So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere'—and the gentle widow dropped her voice as though communicating a secret—'when Catherine's once made up her mind, you may as well try to dig away High Fell as move her. She asked me to tell Mrs. Thornburgh—will you, please?—that she found it was her day for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of business, and she must go.'
'Mrs. Thornburgh!' And not a word for him—for him to whom she had given her promise? She had gone to Whinborough to avoid him, and she had gone in the brusquest way, that it might be unmistakable.
The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his long coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. Leyburn was making to him about the picnic. Was the wretched thing to come off after all?
He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But Mrs. Thornburgh managed that for him. When he got back, he told the vicar in the hall of Miss Leyburn's flight in the fewest possible words, and then his long legs vanished up the stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room shut behind him. A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Thornburgh's shrill voice was heard in the hall calling to the servant.
'Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.'
And a minute after the vicar came up to his door.
'Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain; better put it off.'
To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. The vicar slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to have established herself for the morning in his sanctum, though the parish accounts were clamouring to be done, and this morning in the week belonged to them by immemorial usage.
But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite to him with one hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him if he knew what was to be done with young women nowadays, because she didn't.
The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a subject, recommended patience, declared that it might be all a mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the consideration of 2s. 8d. plus 2s. 11d. minus 9d.
'And I suppose, William,' said his wife to him at last, with withering sarcasm, 'that you'd sit by and see Catherine break that young man's heart, and send him back to his mother no better than he came here, in spite of all the beef-tea and jelly Sarah and I have been putting into him, and never lift a finger. You'd see his life blasted and you'd do nothing—nothing, I suppose.'
And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye.
'Of course,' cried the vicar, roused; 'I should think so. What good did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? Take care of yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn't care for him, you can't make her.'
The vicar's wife rose, the upturned corners of her mouth saying unutterable things.
'Doesn't care for him!' she echoed in a tone which implied that her husband's headpiece was past praying for.
'Yes, doesn't care for him!' said the vicar, nettled. 'What else should make her give him a snub like this?'
Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. Then a curious expression stole into her eyes.
'Oh, the Lord only knows!' she said, with a hasty freedom of speech which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable as she shut the door after her.
However, if the Higher Powers alone knew, Mrs. Thornburgh was convinced that she could make a very shrewd guess at the causes of Catherine's behaviour. In her opinion it was all pure 'cussedness.' Catherine Leyburn had always conducted her life on principles entirely different from those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make yourself and other people uncomfortable. Yet this was what this perverse young woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous devoted ways. Catherine encourages him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three weeks more gay and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever been known to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly awaiting the natural dénouement, goes off to spend the day that should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan asylums, leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her—none at all. It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but must needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and go into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what to be at.
Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere had been talking in the garden she had been discreetly waiting in the back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off she followed him with eager sympathetic eyes.
'Poor fellow!' she said to herself, but this time with the little tone of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good looks, never shrinks from assuming towards an elder male, especially a male in love with some one else. 'I wonder whether he thinks he knows anything about Catherine.'
But her own feeling to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better known to her than any one else.
'Oh, of course it's our salvation in this world and the next that's in the way,' thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. 'I wish to goodness Catherine wouldn't think so much about mine, at any rate. I hate,' added this incorrigible young person—'I hate being the third part of a "moral obstacle" against my will. I declare I don't believe we should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh dear,