Robert Elsmere

When tea was over they lounged out on the bridge. There was to be no long lingering, however. The clouds were deepening, the rain could not be far off. But if they started soon they could probably reach home before it came down. Elsmere and Rose hung over the gray stone parapet, mottled with the green and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down through a fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into the clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one elbow, and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and Catherine were standing in front of the inn, touched for an instant by a beam of fitful light slipping between two great rain-clouds.

'How well that hat and dress become your sister!' he said, the words breaking, as it were, from his lips.

'Do you think Catherine pretty?' said Rose with an excellent pretence of innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it harmlessly at a water-wagtail balancing on a stone below.

He flushed. 'Pretty! You might as well apply the word to your mountains, to the exquisite river, to that great purple peak!'

'Yes,' thought Rose, 'she is not unlike that high cold peak!' But her girlish sympathy conquered her; it was very exciting, and she liked Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face overspread with a quite irrepressible smile. He reddened still more, then they stared into each other's eyes, and without a word more understood each other perfectly.

Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque _bon camarade_ gesture. He pressed it warmly in his.

'That was nice of you!' he cried. 'Very nice of you! Friends then?'

She nodded, and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the vicar disturbed them.

Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony carriage, watching Mrs. Thornburgh's preparations.

'You're sure you don't mind driving home alone?' she said in a troubled voice. 'Mayn't I go with you?'

'My dear, certainly not! As if I wasn't accustomed to going about alone at my time of life! No, no, my dear, you go and have your walk; you'll get home before the rain. Ready, James.'

The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his charge so anxious to be off. She actually took the whip out of his hand and gave a flick to the pony, who swerved and started off in a way which would have made his mistress clamorously nervous under any other circ.u.mstances.

Catherine stood looking after her.

'Now, then, right about face and quick march!' exclaimed the vicar.

'We've got to race that cloud over the Pike. It'll be up with us in no time.'

Off they started, and were soon climbing the slippery green slopes, or crus.h.i.+ng through the fern of the fell they had descended earlier in the afternoon. Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.

'You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully into his pocket-book; 'but it is worth while to be crushed by any one who can give so much ground for their knowledge. How you do know your mountains--from their peasants to their plants!'

'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among them,' she said, smiling.

'Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?'

'Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the winter. And

'Do you go on with that night-school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?' he said, with another note in his voice.

Catherine looked at him and coloured. 'Rose has been telling tales,' she said. 'I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the ground, and Bob is always with me; aren't you, Bob?'

And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her, blinking with a proudly confidential air as though to remind her that there were a good many such secrets between them.

'I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, the hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing about you, the black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream, perhaps, running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good angels going with you.'

She flushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her strangely.

'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elsmere; the rain has beaten us!'

He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side gleamed green and vivid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness; children with their petticoats over their heads ran homewards along the road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading broadly through the fields, s.h.i.+vered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it came, and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was beating in their faces.

'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'

He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackintosh. The vicar in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair, then hurried after the others, evidently with the view of performing for them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.

Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides.

He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form and his big umbrella as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty gra.s.s over which the rain streams were running, that his heart filled with the shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace suns.h.i.+ne of their valley life?

Suddenly he heard an exclamation, and saw her run on in front of him.

What was the matter? Then he noticed for the first time that Rose, far ahead, was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was Catherine stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, b.u.t.toned up before she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by some shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it.

'Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?'

'Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said briefly. 'She has a very thin dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.'

'You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once.

She laughed in his face.

'As if I should do anything of the sort!'

'You must,' he said, quietly stripping it off. 'Do you think that you are always to be allowed to go through the world taking thought of other people and allowing no one to take thought for you?'

He held it out to her.

'No, no! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong yet. And I have often told you that nothing hurts me.'

He hung it deliberately over his arm. 'Very well, then, there it stays!'

And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the point of laughter.

'Mr. Elsmere, be sensible!' she said presently, her look changing to one of real distress. 'I should never forgive myself if you got a chill after your illness!'

'You will not be called upon,' he said in the most matter-of-fact tone.

'Men's coats are made to keep out weather,' and he pointed to his own, closely b.u.t.toned up. 'Your dress--I can't help being disrespectful under the circ.u.mstances--will be wet through in ten minutes.'

Another silence. Then he overtook her.

'Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her.

There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain splashed on the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest, most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he joined.

'Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!'

But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man, as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth's 'Louisa,'

and the poet's cry of longing.

And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something--what was it?--drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of her mingled with his rising pa.s.sion. Let him not risk too much too soon.