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 Phoebus.
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 you know, of those nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me to go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man, Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter. I haven’t said a word about it—what’s the use? I know all Catherine’s arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to live in Whindale; I am not somebody else and needn’t earn my bread; and art is not religion; and—’
‘Wheels!’ exclaimed Agnes. ‘Catherine, I suppose, home from Whinborough.’
Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the wall which shut them off from the road.
‘Catherine and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot’s pace, and the unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course—Mr. Elsmere. He will come in to tea, so I’ll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us to-day.’
When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert Elsmere were coming up the drive. Something had given Catherine more color than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the young clergyman her mother’s eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter. ‘After all she is as handsome as Rose,’ she said to herself-’though it is quite a different style.’
Rose, who was always tea-maker, dispensed her wares; Catherine took her favorite low seat beside her mother, clasping Mrs. Leyburn’s thin mittened hand a while tenderly in her own; Robert and Agnes set up a lively gossip on the subject of the Thornburghs’ guests, in which Rose joined, while Catherine looked smiling on. She seemed apart from the rest, Robert thought; not, clearly, by her own will, but by virtue of a difference of temperament which could not but make itself felt. Yet once as Rose passed her Robert saw her stretch out her hand and touch her sister caressingly, with a bright upward look and smile, as though she would say, ‘Is all well? have you had a good time this afternoon, Röschen?’ Clearly, the strong contemplative nature was not strong enough to dispense with any of the little wants and cravings of human affection. Compared to the main impression she was making on him, her suppliant attitude at her mother’s feet and her caress of her sister were like flowers breaking through the stern March soil and changing the whole spirit of the fields.
Presently he said something of Oxford, and mentioned, Merton. Instantly Mrs. Leyburn fell upon him. Had he ever seen Mr. S—, who had been a Fellow there, and Rose’s godfather?
‘I don’t acknowledge him,’ said Rose, pouting. ‘Other people’s godfathers give them mugs and corals. Mine never gave me anything but a Concordance.’
Robert laughed, and proved to their satisfaction that Mr. S— had been extinct before his day. But could they ask him any other questions? ‘Mrs. Leyburn became quite animated, and, diving into her memory, produced a number of fragmentary reminiscences of her husband’s Queen’s friends, asking him information about each and all of them. The young man disentangled all her questions, racked his brains to answer, and showed all through a quick friendliness, a charming deference as of youth to age, which confirmed the liking of the whole party for him. Then the mention of an associate of Richard Leyburn’s youth, who had been one of the Tractarian leaders, led him into talk of Oxford changes and the influences of the present. He drew for them the famous High Church preacher of the moment, described the great spectacle of his Bampton Lectures, by which Oxford had been recently thrilled, and gave a dramatic account of a sermon on evolution preached by the hermit-veteran Pusey, as though by another Elias returning to the world to deliver a last warning message to men. Catherine listened absorbed, her deep eyes fixed upon him. And though all he said was pitched in a vivacious narrative key and addressed as much to the others as to her, inwardly it seemed to him that his one object all through was to touch and keep her attention.
Then, in answer to inquiries about himself, he fell to describing St. Anselm’s with enthusiasm,—its growth its Provost, its effectiveness as a great educational machine, the impression it had made on Oxford and the country. This led him naturally to talk of Mr. Grey, then, next to the Provost, the most prominent figure in the college; and once embarked on this theme be became more eloquent and interesting than ever. The circle of women listened to him as to a voice from the large world. He made them feel the beat of the great currents of English life and thought; he seemed to bring the stir and rush of our central English society into the deep quiet of their valley. Even the bright-haired Rose, idly swinging her pretty foot, with a head full of dreams and discontent was beguiled, and for the moment seemed to lose her restless self in listening.
He told an exciting story of a bad election riot in Oxford, which had been quelled at considerable personal risk by Mr. Grey, who had gained his influence in the town by a devotion of years to the policy of breaking down as far as possible the old venomous feud between city and university.
When he paused Mrs. Leyburn said, vaguely, ‘Did you say he was a canon of somewhere?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Robert, smiling, ‘he is not a clergyman.’
‘But you said he preached,’ said Agnes.
‘Yes—but lay sermons—addresses. He is not one of us even, according to your standard and mine.’
A Nonconformist?’ sighed Mrs. Leyburn. ‘Oh, I know they have let in everybody now.’
‘Well, if you like,’ said Robert. ‘What I meant was that his opinions are not orthodox. He could not be a clergyman, but he is one of the noblest of men!’
He spoke with affectionate warmth. Then suddenly Catherine’s eyes met his and he felt an involuntary start. A veil had fallen over them; her sweet moved sympathy was gone; she seemed to have shrunk into herself.
She turned to Mrs. Leyburn. ‘Mother, do you know, I have all sorts of messages from Aunt Ellen’—and in an under-voice she began to give Mrs. Leyburn the news of her afternoon expedition.
Rose and Agnes soon plunged young Elsmere into another stream of talk. But he kept his feeling of perplexity. His experience of other women seemed to give him nothing to go upon with regard to Miss Leyburn.
Presently Catherine got up and drew her plain little black cape round her again.
‘My dear!’ remonstrated Mrs. Leyburn. ‘Where are you off to now?’
‘To the Backhouses, mother,’ she said, in a low voice; ‘I have not been there for two days. I must go this evening.’
Mrs. Leyburn said no more. Catherine’s ‘musts were never disputed. She moved toward Elsmere with out-stretched hand. But he also sprang up.
‘I too must be going,’ he said; ‘I have paid you an unconscionable visit. If you are going past the Vicarage, Miss Leyburn, may I escort you so far?’
She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Agnes, whose eye fell on her sister during the pause, was struck with a passing sense of something out of the common. She could hardly have defined her impression, but Catherine seemed more alive to the outer world, more like other people, less nun-like, than usual.
When they had left the garden together, as they had come into it, and Mrs. Leyburn, complaining of chilliness, had retreated to the drawing-room, Rose laid a quick hand on her sister’s arm.
‘You say Catherine likes him? Owl! What is a great deal more certain is that he likes her.’
‘Well,’ said Agnes, calmly, ‘well, I await your remarks.’
‘Poor fellow!’ said Rose grimly, and removed her hand.
Meanwhile Elsmere and Catherine walked along the valley road toward the Vicarage. He thought, uneasily, she was a little more reserved with him than she had been in those pleasant moments after he had overtaken her in the pony-carriage; but still she was always kind, always courteous. And what a white hand it was, hanging ungloved against her dress! What a beautiful dignity and freedom, as of mountain winds and mountain streams, in every movement!
‘You are bound for High Ghyll?’ he said to her as they neared the Vicarage gate. ‘Is it not a long way for you? You have been at a meeting already, your sister said, and teaching this morning!’
He looked down on her with a charming diffidence, as though aware that their acquaintance was very young, and yet with a warm eagerness of feeling piercing through. As she paused under his eye the slightest flush rose to Catherine’s cheek. Then she looked up with a smile. It was amusing to be taken care of by this tall stranger!
‘It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,’ she said, but I couldn’t be tired if I tried.’
Elsmere grasped her hand.
‘You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking-example,’ he said, letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of his own renunciation was still keen in him. She lingered a moment, could find nothing to say, threw him a look all shy sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone.
In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden stiffening in his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed him. He and the vicar were sitting smoking in the study after dinner, and the ingenious young man managed to shift the conversation on to the Leyburns, as he had managed to shift it once or twice before that day, flattering himself, of course, on each occasion that his manoeuvres were beyond detection. The vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, detected them all, and with a sense of appropriation in the matter, not at all unmixed with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., kept the ball rolling merrily.
‘Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,’ said Robert, à propos of some remark of the vicar’s as to the assistance she was to him in the school.
‘Ah, she is her father’s daughter,’ said the vicar, genially. He had his oldest coat on, his favorite pipe between his lips, and a bit of domestic carpentering on his knee at which he was fiddling away; and, being perfectly happy, was also perfectly amiable. ‘Richard Leyburn was a fanatic—as mild as you please, but immovable.’
‘What line?’
‘Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me Madame Guyon’s Life once to read. I didn’t appreciate it. I told him that for all her religion she seemed to me to have a deal of the vixen in her. He could hardly get over it; it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was very like her, except that—in my opinion—his nature was sweeter. He was a fatalist—saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and all, his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with a start, as though you belonged to another world than the one, he was walking in.’
‘And his eldest daughter was much with him?’
‘The apple of his eye. She understood him. He could talk his soul out to her. The others, of course, were children; and his wife—well, his wife was just what you see her now, poor thing. He must have married her when she was very young and very pretty. She was a squire’s daughter some where near the school of which he was master—a good family, I believe—she’ll tell you so, in a ladylike way. He was always fidgety about her health. He loved her, I suppose, or had loved her. But it was Catherine who had his mind, Catherine who was his friend. She adored him. I believe there was always a sort of pity in her heart for him too. But at any rate he made her and trained her. He poured all his ideas and convictions into her.’
‘Which were strong?’
‘Uncommonly. For all his gentle ethereal look, you could neither bend nor break him. I don’t believe anybody but Richard Leyburn could have gone through Oxford at the height of the Oxford Movement, and, so to speak, have known nothing about it, while living all the time for religion. He had a great deal in common with the Quakers, as I said; a great deal in common with the Wesleyans; but he was very loyal to the Church all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. George Herbert was his favorite poet. He used to carry his poems about with him on the mountains, and an expurgated “Christian Year”—the only thing he ever took from the High Churchmen—which he had made for himself, and which he and Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a bigot at all. He would have had the Church make peace with the Dissenters; he was all for up setting tests so far as Nonconformity was concerned. But he drew the most rigid line between belief and unbelief. He would not have dined at the same table with a Unitarian if he could have helped it. I remember a furious article of his in the “Record” against admitting Unitarians to the Universities or allowing them to sit in Parliament. England is a Christian State, he said; they are not Christians—they have no right in her except on sufferance. Well, I suppose he was about right,’ said the vicar, with a sigh. ‘We are all so halfhearted nowadays.’
‘Not he,’ cried Robert, hotly. ‘Who are we that because a man differs from us in opinion who are to shut him out from the education of political and civil duty? But never mind, Cousin William. Go on.’
‘There’s no more that I remember, except that of course Catherine took all these ideas from him. He wouldn’t let his children know any unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. He impressed it upon them as their special sacred duty, in a time of wicked enmity to religion, to cherish the faith and the whole faith. He wished his wife and daughters to live on here after his death, that they might be less in danger spiritually than in the big world, and that they might have more opportunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was also some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children for the godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach himself for having in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he might have helped to raise.’
‘Well, but,’ said Robert, ‘all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don’t see the father in the two younger girls.’
‘Ah, there is Catherine’s difficulty,’ said the vicar, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father’s death! She came down to see me in the dinning-room about some arrangement for the funeral. She was only sixteen, so pale and thin with nursing. I said something about the comfort she had been to her father. She took my hand and burst into tears. “He was so good!” she said; “I loved him so! Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others!” And that’s been her one thought since then—that, next to following the narrow road.’
The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally happened to him whenever he was beguiled into much speech about Catherine Leyburn. There must have been something great somewhere in the insignificant elderly man. A meaner soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with her inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his own, in his own domain.
‘I should like to know the secret of the little musician’s independence,’ said Robert, musing. ‘There might be no tie of blood at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.’
‘Oh, I don’t know that. There’s more than you think, or Catherine wouldn’t have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.’
‘And why shouldn’t she?’
‘Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you’re not, to remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would no more have admitted that a girl who hadn’t got her own bread or her family’s to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard him take a text out of the “Imitation,” and lecture Rose when she was quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to give her music lessons. “Woe to them”—yes, that was it—“that inquire many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving Me.” However, he wasn’t consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs. Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow, and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I dare say poor man, it was one of the acts toward his children that tormented his mind in his last hour.’
‘She has certainly had her way about practising it; she plays superbly.’
‘Oh, yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is Rose. I see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then there is the beauty and refinement of bar mother’s side of the family. Lately she has got quite out of hand. She went to stay with some relations they have in Manchester, got drawn into a musical set there, took to these funny gowns, and now she and Catherine are, always half at war. Poor Catherine said to me the other day, with tears, in her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. “But I promised papa.” She makes herself miserable and it’s no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She’s not meant for this humdrum place and she may kick over the traces.’
‘She’s pretty enough for anything and anybody,’ said Robert.
The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man’s critical and meditative look reassured him.
The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the Vicarage garden. It was Mrs. Thornburgh’s accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.
‘My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from Randall’s—I’ve had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if we’d had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears—’
The vicar’s wife paused. Her square, short figure was between the two girls; she had an arm of each, and she looked significantly, from one to another, her gray curls, flapping across her face as she did so.
‘Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,’ cried Rose. ‘You make us quite nervous.’
‘How do ypu like Mr. Elsmere?’ she inquired, solemnly.
‘Very much,’ said both, in chorus.
Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose’s smiling frankness with a little sigh. Things were going grandly, but she could imagine a disposition of affairs which would have given her personally more pleasure.
‘How—would—you—like—him for a brother-in-law?’ she inquired, beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose’s arm, and bringing out the last words with a rush.
‘Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose’s eye, but she answered for them both demurely.
‘We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.’
‘Explain!’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh. ‘I should think it explains itself. At least if you’d been in this house for the last twenty-four hours you’d think so. Since the moment when he first met her, it’s been “Miss Leyburn,” “Miss Leyburn,” all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye from the beginning.
Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness backward or forward.
‘He went to see you yesterday, didn’t he—yes, I know he did—and he overtook her in the pony-carriage—the vicar saw them from across the valley—and he brought her back from your house, and then he kept William up till nearly twelve talking of her. And now he wants a picnic. Oh, it’s plain as a pikestaff. And, my dears, nothing to be said against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he’s a penny. A nice living, only his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever, stepped.’
Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls, who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat, looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting her have her budget out.
‘And now, of course,’ she resumed, taking breath, and chilled a little by their silence, ‘now, of course, I want to know about Catherine?’ She regarded them with anxious interrogation. Rose, still smiling, slowly shook her head.
‘What!’ cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, ‘Oh, you can’t know anything in two days.’
‘That’s just it,’ said Agnes, intervening; ‘we can’t know anything in two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes to anybody, till the list minute.’
Mrs. Thornburgh’s face fell. ‘It’s very difficult ‘when people will be so reserved,’ she said, dolefully.
The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out of it.
‘At any rate we can bring them together,’ she broke out, brightening again. ‘We can have picnics, you know, and teas, and all that—and watch. Now listen.’
And the vicar’s wife sketched out a programme of festivities for the next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive head, which took the sisters’ breath away. Rose bit her lip to keep in her laughter. Agnes, with vast self-possession, took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She pointed out firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine impracticable as fuss. ‘In vain is the net spread,’ etc. She preached from the text with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs. Thornburgh.
‘Well, what am I to do, my dears?’ she said at last, helplessly. ‘Look at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it’s only to amuse Robert.’
Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence and a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes, having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they departed to their early dinner, leaving the vicar’s wife decidedly less self-confident than they found her.
‘The first matrimonial excitement of the family,’ cried Agnes, as they walked home. ‘So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been besieged!’
‘It will be all moonshine,’ Rose replied, decisively. ‘Mr. Elsmere may lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air of an angel, to give him his coup de grâce. As I said before—poor fellow!’
Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she understood that there was a soreness at the bottom of Rose’s heart that was always showing itself in unexpected connections.
There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for assisting Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her expeditions, but without them Robert Elsmere would have been still man enough to see Catherine Leyburn every day. He loitered about the roads along which she must needs pass to do her many offices of charity; he offered the vicar to take a class in the school, and was naïvely exultant that the vicar curiously happened to fix an hour when he must needs see Miss Leyburn going or coming on the same errand; he dropped into Burwood on any conceivable pretext, till Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his pastoral services in one or two of the cases of sickness or poverty under their care. Catherine, with a little more reserve than usual, took him one day to the Tysons’, and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was likely to live on paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover, of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson Kept her talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere’s face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped out while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.
As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The sensitive soul often reproached itself afterward for having juggled in the matter. Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gayety for her sisters sometimes? Her mother could not undertake it, and was always plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a short week or two Catherine did her best to be young and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterward at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away. But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her perspicacity would have seen so readily in another’s case—the little arts and maneuvers of those about her. It did not strike her that Mrs. Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the vicar’s wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted effusion; or that Agnes and Rose, when they were in the wild heart of the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell to her. Nor did she ever analyze what would have been the attraction of those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when nature throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through a golden darkness.
Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learned with wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides, were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living—reading up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighborhood, plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so much of her own life to anyone; her consciousness of it sometimes filled her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading as it were, for her own advantage, on the sacred things of God. But he would have it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften! With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-by!
And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his future relations toward a personality so marked, and so important to every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.
But it was when he turned to larger things—to books, movements, leaders, of the day—that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed. Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established order in the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation? When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome speech and his clergyman’s dress.
And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He was merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation; whereas she, the child of a mystic—solitary, intense, and deeply reflective from her earliest Youth—was still thinking and speaking in the language of her father’s generation.
But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, conscious that here was the one profound difference between them; it was clear to him that insensibly she had moved further than she knew from her father’s standpoint. Even among these solitudes, far from men and literature, she had unconsciously felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he penetrated deeper into the nature, he found it honeycombed as it were, here and there, with beautiful, unexpected softnesses and diffidences. Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering homeward under a cloudy evening sky, he came upon the great problem of her life—Rose and Rose’s art. He drew her difficulty from her with the most delicate skill. She had laid it bare, and was blushing to think how she had asked his counsel, almost before she knew where their talk was leading. How was it lawful for the Christian to spend the few short years of the earthly combat in any pursuit however noble and exquisite, which merely aimed at the gratification of the senses, and implied in the pursuer the emphasizing rather than the surrender of self?
He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, tried to lift her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious work, dwelling on the function of pure beauty in life, and on the influence of beauty on character, pointing out the value to the race of all individual development, and pressing home on her the natural religious question: How are the artistic aptitudes to be explained unless the Great Designer meant them to have a use and function in His world? She replied doubtfully that she had always supposed they were lawful for recreation, and like any other trade for bread-winning, but—
Then he told her much that he knew about the humanizing effect of music on the poor. He described to her the efforts of a London society, of which he was a subscribing member, to popularize the best music among the lowest class; he dwelt almost with passion on the difference between the joy to be got out of such things and the common brutalizing joys of the workman. And you could not have art without artists. In this again he was only talking the commonplaces of his day. But to her they were not commonplaces at all. She looked at him from time to time, her great eyes lightening and deepening as it seemed with every fresh thrust of his.
‘I am grateful to you,’ she said at last, with an involuntary outburst, ‘I am very grateful to you!’
And she gave a long sigh, as if some burden she had long borne in patient silence had been loosened a little, if only by the fact of speech about it. She was not convinced exactly. She was too strong a nature to relinquish a principle without a period of meditative struggle in which conscience should have all its dues. But her tone made his heart leap. He felt in it a momentary self-surrender that, coming from a creature of so rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of power, and yet at the same time with a strange humility beyond words.
A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little scene. An aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came to see them. She was their father’s youngest sister, and the wife of a man who had made some money as a builder in Whinborough. When Robert came in he found her sitting on the sofa having tea, a large homely-looking woman with gray hair, a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had unfastened her bonnet strings, and a clean white handkerchief lay spread out on her lap. When Elsmere was introduced to her, she got up, and said with some effusiveness, and a distinct Westmoreland accent:
‘Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,’ while she enclosed his fingers in a capacious hand.
Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sitting near her, and Catherine, the only member of the party who showed no sign of embarrassment when Robert entered was superintending her aunt’s tea and talking busily the while.
Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and Rose, who were chattering together a little artificially and of set purpose, as it seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be ignored. She talked too loud not to be overheard, and Agnes inwardly noted that as soon as Robert Elsmere appeared she talked louder than before. He gathered presently that she was an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in describing to Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic exploits of her oldest son, who had recently obtained his first circuit as a Wesleyan minister. He was shrewd enough, too, to guess, after a minute or two, that his presence and probably his obnoxious clerical dress gave additional zest to the recital.
‘Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin’ marvellous,’ he heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, ‘“some-thin” marvellous. The Lord has blessed him indeed! It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s meetin’s, or sermons, or parlor work, or just faithful dealin’s with souls one by one. Satan has no cleverer foe than Edward. He never shuts his eyes; as Edward says himself, it’s like trackin’ for game is huntin’ for souls. Why, the other day he was walkin’ out from Coventry to a service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit of grass by the road-side, mendin’ his cart. And he stopped did Edward, and gave him the Word strong. The man seemed puzzled like, and said he meant no harm. “No harm!” says Edward, “when you’re just doin’ the devil’s work every nail you put in, and hammerin’ away, mon, at your own damnation.” But here’s his letter.’ And while Rose turned away to a far window to hide an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. Fleming opened her bag, took out a treasured paper, and read with the emphasis and the unction peculiar to a certain type of revivalism:—
‘“Poor sinner! He was much put about. I left him, praying the Lord my shaft might rankle in him; ay, might fester and burn in him till he found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed very dark and destitute—no respect for the Word or its ministers. A bit farther I met a boy carrying a load of turnips. To him, too, I was faithful, and he went on, taking without knowing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag. Glorious work! If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways for God, sin will skulk yet.”’
A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put it back into her bag.
‘There’s your true minister,’ she said, with a large judicial utterance as she closed the snap. ‘Wherever he goes Edward must have souls!’
And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman in the window.
‘He must have very hard work with so much walking and preaching,’ said Catherine, gently.
Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd little scene with other eyes.
‘His work is just wearin’ him out,’ said the mother, fervently; ‘but a minister doesn’t think of that. Wherever he goes there are sinners saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nuneaton. At family prayer alone there were five saved. And at the prayer-meetin’s on the Sabbath such outpourin’s of the Spirit! Edward comes home, his wife tells me, just ready to drop. Are you acquainted, sir,’ she added, turning suddenly to Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation, ‘with the labors of our Wesleyan ministers?’