BOOK VII. GAIN AND LOSS.
CHAPTER XLVI.
A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon himself were becoming so absorbing, he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on him from day to day. One was Charles Richards’ widow. The poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere’s hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skillfully treated, and after six weeks’ abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbor, whom he had succeeded in interesting in the case.
Another was a young ‘secret springer,’ to use the mysterious terms of the trade—Robson by name—whom Elsmere had originally known as a clever workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumor in the throat, and had become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills with a mixture of savage humor and clear-eyed despair. In general outlook he was much akin to the author of the ‘City of Dreadful Night,’ whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours, startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere, struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck, began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that virtue had gone out of him and, that in some subtle way yet another life had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength and comfort.
His lecturing and teaching also was becoming more and more the instrument of far-reaching change, and thereafter, more and more, difficult to leave. The thoughts of God, the image of Jesus which were active and fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually passing from the one into the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble prostration of soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly describe. With and ever increasing detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, he felt himself a tool, in the Great Workman’s hand, ‘Accomplish Thy purposes in me,’ was the cry of his whole heart and life; ‘use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O “Thou who mouldest men!”’
But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain memorable Saturday evening brought it about. It had been his custom of late, to spend an occasional evening hour after the night-school work in the North R—— Club, of which he was now by invitation a member. Here, in one of the inner rooms, he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting, smoking often with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed; And Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive intercourse. The mere orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never have gained any permanent hold; but the life behind gave weight to every acute or eloquent word, and importance even to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which were still common enough in him.
He had already visited the club once during the week preceding this Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk of the growing popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street work, of the numbers attending the lectures, the story-telling, the Sunday-school, and of the way in which the attractions of it had spread into other quarters of the parish, exciting there, especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid’s, an anxious and critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night, however, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curious note of responsibility. The men present were evidently beginning to regard the work as their work also, and its success as their interest. It was perfectly natural, for not only had most of them been his supporters and hearers from the beginning, but some of them were now actually teaching in the night-school or helping in the various branches of the large and overflowing boys’ club. He listened to them for a while in his favorite attitude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing in a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of the work might be mended or expanded. Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to pass from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new departure.
‘Suppose I drop my dictatorship,’ he said; ‘suppose we set up parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to turn this work into something lasting and organic?’
The men gathered round him, smoked on in silence for a minute. Old Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification—in broad Berwickshire—of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself further.
Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye kindling.
But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking rapid gestures characteristic of him.
‘But no mere social and educational body, mind you!’ and his bright commanding look swept round the circle. ‘A good thing, surely, “yet is there better than it.” The real difficulty of every social effort—you know it and I know it—lies not in the planning of the work, but in the kindling of will and passion enough to carry it through. And that can only be done by religion—by faith.’
He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men gazed at him—at the slim figure, the transparent changing face—with a kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly, taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat—
‘You’ll be aboot starrtin’ a new church, I’m thinkin’, Misther Elsmere?’
‘If you like,’ said Robert impetuously. ‘I have no fear of the great words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if it must, and never mince words. Be content to be a new “sect,” “conventicle,” or what not, so long as you feel that you are something with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.’
Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert’s next words.
‘However, I don’t imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these suggestions of mine. “Association,” “society,” “brotherhood,” what you will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it, life rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested, on trust and memory!—trust in the God of experience and history; memory of that God’s work in man, by which alone we know Him, and can approach Him. Well, of that work—I have tried to prove it to you a thousand times—Jesus of Nazareth has become to us, by the evolution of circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and epitomes. We have made our protest—we are daily making it—in the face of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present time are excluding Him more and more from human love. But now, suppose we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of faith, the gathering and organizing of a new Company of Jesus!’
Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines and groups of workingmen in every sort of working-dress, the occasional rumbling of huge wagons past the window, the click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of the world.
After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up. He was commonly known among his fellow potters as ‘the hartist,’ because of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his æsthetic susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him, their target, but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.
‘I dun know,’ he said in a high, treble voice, ‘I dun know whether I speak for anybody but myself—very likely not; but what I do know,’ and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious felicity, ‘is this,—what Mr. Elsmere starts I’ll join,—‘where he goes I’ll go—what’s good enough for him’s good enough, for me. He’s put a new heart and a new stomach into me and what I’ve got he shall have, whenever it pleases ‘im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with it—I don’t know as I’m very clear what he’s driving at, nor what good I can do ‘im—but when Tom Wheeler’s asked for he’ll be there!’
A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent, ran through the little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was ‘the personal estimate,’ after all, that was shaping their future and his, and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power and place.
A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible outlines of a possible organization, and as to the observances which might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new passion, though still timid and awe-struck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men, standing or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.
He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death. How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.
And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.
‘Rest—strength,’ he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, ‘for the work’s sake!’
He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her. The contrast, however between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one Sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer hers—as though a craving, hungry world, whose needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind and delicate frame.
As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in, whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long enough.
There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort—the vigil before the tourney; and the eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.
Three or four days later, he, Catherine, and Mary were at Petites Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near Fécamp, with which he had first made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.
Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered ‘a sea change,’ and became so much matter for physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o’clock, Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a quivering, changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of the day was always Mary’s bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of the two-year-old English bébé. By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back—father and mother, and trailing child—past the hotels on the plage, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary’s nurse and a French bonne to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the déjeuner waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a humble but perpetual warfare. Then afterward Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one story from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety arm-chair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing, till dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comédie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.
Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the Collège de France, as good as any at Étretat, a tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among them, more suo, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new acquaintances.
But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the bean-stalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all around them—the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.
One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar and immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.
Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert’s. The sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks.
‘Did you hear it, Robert?’
He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her always smote him to the heart.
‘I am not unhappy, Robert,’ she said at last, raising her head. ‘No; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for myself, but——’
For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?—of youth, of hope, of memory?
Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-colored waves while he held her hand close and tenderly. No—she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone forever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things. It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment from a special series of religious formulæ which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of our day. ‘Unbelief,’ says the orthodox preacher, ‘is sin, and implies it:’ and while he speaks, the saint in the unbeliever gently smiles down his argument; and suddenly, in the rebel of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose’s summer, indeed, was much varied by visits to country houses—many of them belonging to friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family—by concerts, and the demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was seldom loath to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her as in past days.
The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence of her trouble in the spring, but a painful ennui she could hardly disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision, curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of Obermann, ‘Man, is not made for enjoyment only—la tristesse fait aussi partie de ses vastes besoins.’
What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or streamlet, while the sheets of swept by her, or the great clouds dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of Langham—of that first thrill of passion which had passed through her, delusive and abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which bring out the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her again, ‘a moral east; wind was blowing.’ The passion was gone. The thought of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her heartstrings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have left so little trace behind?
And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to the blind friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. Little vignettes of London would come and go on the inner retina, smiles and sighs would follow one another.
‘How kind he was that time! how amusing this!’
Or, ‘How provoking he was that afternoon! how cold, that Evening!’
Nothing else:—the pronoun remained ambiguous.
‘I want a friend!’ she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in the bosom of High Fill, ‘I want a friend badly. Yet my lover deserts me, and I send away my friend!’
One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the Vicar, and Rose were wandering round the churchyard together, enjoying a break of sunny weather after days of rain. Mrs. Thornburgh’s personal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps a little more defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first knew her. The Vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But the performance through which his wife was now taking him tried him exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with difficulty. She had had an attack of bronchitis in the spring, and was still somewhat delicate—a fact which to his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him. For she would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas which he disliked, and in which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming pleasure. The Vicar was of opinion that when his latter end overtook him he should meet it on the whole as courageously as other men. But he was altogether averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it, beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to that inquisitive affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the Vicar.
At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the precise spots in the little churchyard where it seemed to her it would be pleasant to rest. There was one corner in particular which attracted her, and she stood now looking at it with measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth.
‘William, I wish you would come here and help me!’
The Vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose.
‘William!’ imperatively.
The Vicar turned unwillingly.
‘You know, William, if you wouldn’t mind lying with your foot that way, there would be just room for me. But of course if you will have them the other way——’ The shoulders in the old black silk mantle went up, and the gray curls shook dubiously.
The Vicar’s countenance showed plainly that he thought the remark worse than irrelevant.
‘My dear,’ he said crossly, ‘I am not thinking of those things, nor do I wish to think of them. Everything has its time and place. It is close on tea, and Miss Rose says we must be going home.’
Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a disapproving sigh.
‘You talk, William,’ she said severely, ‘as if you were a young man, instead of being turned sixty-six last birthday.’
And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking the results aloud. But the Vicar was obdurately deaf. He strolled on with Rose, who was chattering to him about a visit to Manchester, and the little church gate clicked behind them. Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her measurements. They were only really interesting to her after all when the Vicar was by. She hurried after them as fast as her short squat figure would allow, and stopped midway to make an exclamation.
‘A carriage!’ she said, shading her eyes with a very plump hand, ‘stopping at Greybarns!’
The one road of the valley was visible from the churchyard, winding along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at least two miles. Greybarns was a farmhouse just beyond Burwood, about half a mile away.
Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with interest.
‘Mary Jenkinson taken ill!’ she said. ‘Of course, that’s Doctor Baker! Well, it’s to be hoped it won’t be twins this time. But, as I told her last Sunday, “It’s constitutional, my dear.” I knew a woman who had three pairs! Five o’clock now. Well, about seven it’ll be worth while sending to inquire.’
When she overtook the Vicar and his companion, she began to whisper certain particulars into the ear that was not on Rose’s side. The Vicar, who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of a fine natural modesty, would have preferred that his wife should refrain from whispering on these topics in Rose’s presence. But he submitted lest opposition should provoke her into still more audible improprieties; and Rose walked on a step or two in front of the pair, her eyes twinkling a little. At the Vicarage gate she was let off without the customary final gossip. Mrs. Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate hanging over Mary Jenkinson that she, for once, forgot to catechize Rose, as to any marriageable young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great country-house of the neighborhood; an operation which formed the invariable pendant to any of Rose’s absences.
So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homeward. As she did so she became aware of a man’s figure walking along the space of road between Graybarns and Burwood, the western light behind it.
Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had brought him five miles on a false alarm, in the provoking manner of matrons, the shortest professional visit could not be over in this time.
She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the gate of Burwood, and involuntarily slackened step. The man who was approaching, catching sight of the slim girlish figure in the broad hat and pink and white cotton dress, hurried up. The color rushed to Rose’s cheek. In another minute she and Hugh Flaxman were face to face.
She could not hide her astonishment.
‘Why are you not in Scotland?’ she said after she had given him her hand. ‘Lady Helen told me last week she expected you in Ross-shire.’
Directly the word left her mouth she felt she had given him an opening. And why had Nature plagued her with this trick of blushing?
‘Because I am here!’ he said smiling, his keen dancing eyes looking down upon her. He was bronzed as she had never seen him. And never had he seemed to bring with him such an atmosphere of cool pleasant strength. ‘I have slain so much since the first of July that I can slay no more. I am not like other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and goes to sleep after a while. So this is Burwood?’
He had caught her just on the little sweep, leading to gate, and now his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, with its trim garden, its overgrown porch and open casement windows. She dared not ask him again why he was there. In the properest manner she invited him ‘to come in and see Mamma.’
‘I hope Mrs. Leyburn is better than she was in town? I shall be delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon? I left my carriage half a mile below, and have been reveling in the sun and air. I am loath to go indoors yet awhile. Are you busy? Would it trouble you to put me in the way to the head of the valley? Then if you will allow me, I will present myself later.’
Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of things as his appearance. But she turned and walked beside him pointing out the crags at the head, the great sweep of High Fell, and the pass over to Ullswater with as much sang-froid as she was mistress of.
He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he had bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that he had stopped at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the High Fell pass to Ullswater, and making his way thence to Ambleside, Grasmere, and Keswick.
‘But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater?’ cried Rose incautiously.
‘Certainly. You see my hotel,’ and he pointed, smiling, to a white farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where the road turned toward Whinborough. ‘I persuaded the good woman there to give me a bed for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had friends in these parts, I came on to explore.’
Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.
‘You are the first tourist,’ she said coolly, ‘who has ever stayed in Whindale.’
‘Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my Murray in the railway carriage.’
He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to be anything but natural—the child of the moment!
‘You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you last’, she said demurely. ‘When did you leave Norway?’
They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown by the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in vicarage hedge, laughing and chatting, Rose became aware of a window and a gray head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash, instantly suppressed, that shoot across her face.
Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bed-ridden Jim still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the hazel plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or another till they were at the top.
Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the valley, the white sparkle of the river.
‘It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and frugal beauty—the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no peaks, no fiords!’
‘No!’ said Rose scornfully, ‘we are not Norway, and we are not Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once inform you that we have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps only one place in the district where a man who is not an idiot could succeed in killing himself.’
He looked at her, calmly smiling.
‘You are angry,’ he said, ‘because I make comparisons. You are wholly on a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world that pleased me half as much as this bare valley, that gray roof’—and he pointed to Burwood among its trees-’and this knoll of rocky ground.’
His look traveled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. He threw himself down on the short grass beside her.
‘It rained this morning,’ she still had the spirit to murmur under her breath.
He took not the smallest heed.
‘Do you know,’ he said—and his voice dropped—‘can you guess at all why I am here to-day?’
‘You had never seen the Lakes,’ she repeated in a prim voice, her eyes still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. ‘You stopped at Whinborough, intending to take the pass over to Ullswater, thence to make your way to Ambleside and Keswick—or was it to Keswick and Ambleside?’
She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met abashed her again.
‘Taquine!’ he said, ‘but you shall not laugh me out of countenance. If I said all that to you just now, may I be forgiven. One purpose, one only, brought me from Norway, forbade me to go to Scotland, drew me to Whinborough, guided me up your valley—the purpose of seeing your face!’
It could not be said at that precise moment that he had attained it. Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite away from him. It seemed to him an age before, drawn by the magnetism of his look, her hands dropped, and she faced him, crimson, her breath fluttering a little. Then she would have spoken, but he would not let her. Very tenderly and quietly his hand possessed itself of hers as he knelt beside her.
‘I have been in exile for two months—you sent me. I saw that I troubled you in London. You thought I was pursuing you—pressing you. Your manor said “Go!” and I went. But do you think that for one day, or hour, or moment I have thought of anything else in those Norway woods but of you and of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as I am now?’
She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze melted, enwrapped her. He bent forward. In another moment her silence would have so answered for her that his covetous arms would have stolen about her for good and ill. But suddenly a kind of shiver ran through her—a shiver which was half memory, half shame. She drew back violently, covering her eyes with her hand.
‘Oh no, no!’ she cried, and her other hand struggled to get free, ‘don’t, don’t talk to me so—I have a—a—confession.’
He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the most exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his eyes. Was she going to confess to him what he knew so well already? If he could only force her to say it on his breast.
But she held him at arm’s length.
‘You remember—you remember Mr. Langham?’
‘Remember him!’ echoed Mr. Flaxman fervently.
‘That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte’s, on the way home, he spoke to me. I said I loved him. I did love him; I let him kiss me!’
Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether she was yielding or defiant as the words burst from her.
An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into his face.
‘I knew,’ he said, very low; ‘or rather, I guessed.’ And for an instant it occurred to him to unburden himself, to ask her pardon for that espionage of his. But no, no; not till he had her safe. ‘I guessed, I mean, that there had been something grave between you. I saw you were sad. I would have given the world to comfort you.’
Her lip quivered childishly.
‘I said I loved him that night. The next morning he wrote to me that it could never be.’
He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation was not easy. Then the smile broke once more.
‘And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I was not sure of that I could wish him all the tortures of the Inferno! As it is, I cannot think of him; I cannot let you think of him. Sweet, do you know that ever since I first saw you the one thought of my days, the dream of my nights, the purpose of my whole life, has been to win you? There was another in the field; I knew it. I stood by and waited. He failed you—I knew he must in some form or other. Then I was hasty, and you resented it. Little tyrant, you made yourself a Rose with many thorns! But, tell me, tell me, its all over—your pain, my waiting. Make yourself sweet to me! unfold to me at last!’
An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. Then she sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by her, rebuffed and surprised.
‘No, no!’, she cried, holding out her hand to him though all the time. ‘Oh, it is too soon! I should despise myself, I do despise myself. It tortures me that I can change and forget so easily; it ought to torture you. Oh don’t ask me yet to—to—’
‘To be my wife,’ he said calmly, his cheek, a little flushed, his eye meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard for self-control it was almost sternness.
‘Not yet!’ she pleaded, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, she broke into the most appealing smiles, though the tears were in her eyes, hurrying out the broken beseeching words. ‘I want a friend so much—a real friend. Since Catherine left I have had no one. I have been running riot. Take me in hand. Write to me, scold me, advise me, I will be your pupil, I will tell you everything. You seem to me so fearfully wise, so much older. Oh, don’t be vexed. And—and—in six months——’
She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so rigidly that her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the hat fell over her eyes; the delicate outlines of the neck and shoulders in the pretty pale dress were defined against the green hill background. He studied her deliberately, a hundred different expressions sweeping across his face. A debate of the most feverish interest was within him. Her seriousness at the moment, the chances of the future, her character, his own—all these knotty points entered into it, had to be weighed and decided with lightning rapidity. But Hugh Flaxman was born under a lucky star, and the natal charm held good.
At last he gave a long breath; he stooped and kissed her hands.
‘So be it. For, six months I will be your guardian, your friend, your teasing, implacable censor. At the end of that time I will be—well, never mind what. I give you fair warning.’
He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and stood, drooping. Now that she had gained her point, all her bright mocking independence seemed to have vanished. She might have been in reality the tremulous, timid child she seemed. His spirits rose; he began to like the rôle she had assigned to him. The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said and did, acted with exhilarating force on his fastidious romantic sense.
‘Now, then,’ he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, ‘you have given me my rights; I will begin to exercise them at once. I must take you home, the clouds are coming up again, and on the way will you kindly give me a full, true, and minute account of these two months during which you have been so dangerously left to your own devices?’
She hesitated, and began to speak with difficulty, her eyes on the ground. But by the time they were in the main Shanmoor path again, and she was not so weakly dependent on his physical aid, her spirits too returned. Pacing along with her hands behind her, she began by degrees to throw into her accounts of her various visits and performances plenty of her natural malice.
And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had assailed her on the mountain top abated something of its bewildering force, certain old grievances began to raise very lively heads in her. The smart of Lady Fauntleroy’s ball was still there; she had not yet forgiven him all those relations; and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her.
‘It seems to me’ he said at last dryly, as he opened a gate for her not far from Burwood, ‘that you have been making yourself agreeable to a vast number of people. In my new capacity of censor, I should like to warn you that there is nothing so bad for the character as universal popularity.’
‘I have not got a thousand and one important cousins!’ she exclaimed, her lip curling. ‘If I want to please, I must take pains, else “nobody minds me.”’
He looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with animation.
‘What can you mean by that?’ he said slowly.
But she was quite silent, her head well in air.
‘Cousins?’ he repeated. ‘Cousins? And clearly meant as a taunt at me! Now when did you see my cousins? I grant that I possess a monstrous and indefensible number. I have it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy’s ball I devoted myself too much to my family, and too little to—’
‘Not at all!’ cried Rose hastily, adding, with charming incoherence, while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in hex restless fingers, ‘Some cousins of course are pretty.’
He paused an instant; then a light broke over his face, and his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. Rose got redder and redder. She realized dimly that she was hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that he was studying her with eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating.
‘Shall I quote to you,’ he said, ‘a sentence of Sterne’s? If it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. Strerne is admonishing a young friend as to his manners in society: “You are in love,” he says. “Tant mieux. But do not imagine that the fact bestows on you a license to behave like a bear toward all the rest of the world. Affection may surely conduct thee through an avenue of women to her who possesses thy heart without tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats”—not even those of little cousins of seventeen! I say this, you will observe, in the capacity you have assigned me. In another capacity I venture to think I could justify myself still better.’
‘My guardian and director,’ cried Rose, ‘must not begin his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from the classics!’
He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of Burwood, under a thick screen of wild-cherry trees. The gate was half open, and his hand was on it.
‘And my pupil,’ he said, bending to her, ‘must not begin by challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will not answer for the consequences!’
His words were threatening, but his voice, his fine expressive face, were infinitely sweet. By a kind of fascination she never afterward understood, Rose for answer startled him and herself. She bent her head; she laid her lips on the hand which held the gate, and then she was through it in an instant. He followed her in vain. He never overtook her till at the drawing-room door she paused with amazing dignity.
‘Mamma,’ she said, throwing it open, ‘here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to Margaret about tea.’