Robert Elsmere

Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Mary drank mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. When Catherine put down the gla.s.s the eyes followed her with a question which the lips had no power to frame.

'Leave her now a little,' said Catherine to the others. 'The fewer people and the more air the better. And please let the door be open; the room is too hot.'

They went out silently, and Catherine sank down beside the bed. Her heart went out in unspeakable longing towards the poor human wreck before her. For her there was no morrow possible, no dawn of other and softer skies. All was over: life was lived, and all its heavenly capabilities missed for ever. Catherine felt her own joy hurt her, and her tears fell fast.

'Mary,' she said, laying her face close beside the chill face on the pillow, 'Mary, I went out; I climbed all the path as far as Shanmoss.

There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must tell you! _Can_ I make you understand? I want you to feel that it is only G.o.d and love that are real. Oh, think of them! He would not let you be hurt and terrified in your pain, poor Mary. He loves you. He is waiting to comfort you--to set you free from pain for ever; and He has sent you a sign by me.'... She lifted her head from the pillow, trembling and hesitating. Still that feverish questioning gaze on the face beneath her, as it lay in deep shadow cast by a light on the window-sill some paces away.

'You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the thought of which has been tormenting and torturing you. You thought G.o.d would let a dark lost spirit trouble you and take you away from Him--you, His child, whom He made and whom He loves! And listen! While you thought you were sending me out to face the evil thing, you were really my kind angel--G.o.d's messenger--sending me to meet the joy of my whole life!

'There was some one waiting here just now,' she went on hurriedly, breathing her sobbing words into Mary's ear. 'Some one who has loved me, and whom I love. But I had made him sad, and myself; then when you sent me out he came too; we walked up that path, you remember, beyond the larchwood, up to the top, where the stream goes under the road. And there he spoke to me, and I couldn't help it any more. And I promised to love him and be his wife. And if it hadn't been for you, Mary, it would never have happened. G.o.d had put it into your hand, this joy, and I bless you for it! Oh, and Mary--Mary--it is only for a little little while this life of ours! Nothing matters--not our worst sin and sorrow--but G.o.d, and our love to Him. I shall meet you some day--I pray I may--in His sight and all will be well, the pain all forgotten--all!'

She raised herself again and looked down with yearning pa.s.sionate pity on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer of heart to heart! There were tears forming under the heavy lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed and soft. Slowly the feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an intense expectant silence.

There was a faint breathing from the lips; she stooped and caught it.

'Kiss me!' said the whisper; and she laid her soft fresh lips to the parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her head again Mary still held her hand; Catherine softly stretched out hers for the opiate Dr.

Baker had left; it was swallowed without resistance, and a quiet to which the invalid had been a stranger for days stole little by little over the wasted frame. The grasp of the fingers relaxed, the laboured breath came more gently, and in a few more minutes she slept. Twilight was long over. The ghost-hour was past, and the moon outside was slowly gaining a wider empire in the clearing heavens.

It was a little after ten o'clock when Rose drew aside the curtain at Burwood and looked out.

'There is the lantern,' she said to Agnes, 'just by the vicarage. How the night has cleared!'

She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. Mrs. Leyburn was sitting by the bit of fire that was generally lit for her benefit in the evenings, her white shawl dropping gracefully about her,

'There is some one with Catherine!' cried Rose, starting up. Agnes suspended her letter.

'Perhaps the vicar,' said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh.

A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the doorway stood Elsmere.

Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the little stairs behind him.

Elsmere's look was enough for the two girls. They understood in an instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact with love is intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though the romance be not hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat bewildered.

Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand.

'Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn?' he said, his boyish looks aglow, his voice unsteady. 'Will you let me be a son to you?'

Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked up at him helplessly.

'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, where is Catherine?'

'I brought her home,' he said gently. 'She is mine, if you will it. Give her to me again!'

Mrs. Leyburn's face worked pitifully. The rectory and the wedding dress, which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts since her last sight of Catherine, sank out of them altogether.

'She has been everything in the world to us, Mr. Elsmere.'

'I know she has,' he said simply. 'She shall be everything in the world to you still. I have had hard work to persuade her. There will be no chance for me if you don't help me.'

Another breathless pause. Then Mrs. Leyburn timidly drew him to her, and he stooped his tall head and kissed her like a son.

'Oh, I must go to Catherine!' she said, hurrying away, her pretty withered cheeks wet with tears.

Then the girls threw themselves on Elsmere. The talk was all animation and excitement for the moment, not a tragic touch in it. It was as well perhaps that Catherine was not there to hear!

'I give you fair warning,' said Rose, as she bade him good-night, 'that I don't know how to behave to a brother. And I am equally sure that Mrs.

Thornburgh doesn't know how to behave to a _fiance_.'

Robert threw up his arms in mock terror at the name, and departed.

'We are abandoned,' cried Rose, flinging herself into the chair again--then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness--'and we are free! Oh, I hope she will be happy!'

And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she would drown her first words in her last.

'Madcap!' cried Agnes, struggling. 'Leave me at least a little breath to wish Catherine joy!'

And they both fled upstairs.

There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs.

Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation downstairs she could not persuade herself to go to bed. She first knocked up Sarah and communicated the news; then she sat down before a pier-gla.s.s in her own room studying the person who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband.

'My doing from beginning to end,' she cried with a triumph beyond words.

'William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There's no one but Providence could have foreseen it--they're so different. And after all it's _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?'

BOOK II

SURREY

CHAPTER XI

Farewell to the mountains!

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant, and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man's grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we next meet with Robert and Catherine Elsmere. The rectory of Murewell occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the south, and climbed away on the north towards the long chalk ridge of the Hog's Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch of gra.s.s and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down towards the village at its foot--a garden chiefly noticeable for its gra.s.s walks, the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the ma.s.ses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village--roofs and gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, s.h.i.+ning whitewash, and mellowed brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house, now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the squire of the day had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished the rectory; so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.

Altogether a quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it commanded a world of loveliness. All around it--north, south, and west--there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood and gra.s.sy common, in which the few workaday patches of hedge and ploughed land seemed ingulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the largest and fruitfulest of the neighbourhood. At the present moment it was just ready for the reaper--the golden ears had clearly but a few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue pointed hill, which seemed to be there only to attract and make a centre for the sunsets.