Robert Elsmere Part 100

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 loth 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 mist swept by her, or the great clouds dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of Langham--of that first thrill of pa.s.sion which had pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 p.r.o.noun remained ambiguous.

'I want a friend!' she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in the bosom of High Fell, '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 feet _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 she 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 s.p.a.ces 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 const.i.tutional, 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 catechise Rose as to any marriageable young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great country-house of the neighbourhood; an operation which formed the invariable pendant to any of Rose's absences.

So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homewards. As she did so she became aware of a man's figure walking along the s.p.a.ce of road between Greybarns 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 colour 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 words 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 the gate, and now his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, with its trim garden, its overgrown porch and open cas.e.m.e.nt 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 revelling in the sun and air. I am loth 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 pa.s.s over to Ullswater, with as much _sangfroid_ 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 pa.s.s 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 towards 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 t.i.tles shown by the primitive democrats of Norway. As they pa.s.sed a gap in the 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 shot across her face.