Robert Elsmere Part 19

She a.s.sented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding back some young hazel saplings and breaking others, made an opening for her through which she scrambled with bent head; then, stretching out his hand to her, he made her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on his cheek.

'You talk of baseness and treason,' he began pa.s.sionately, conscious of a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her light weight upon his arm. 'Life is not so simple. It is so easy to sacrifice others with one's self, to slay all claims in honour of one, instead of knitting the new ones to the old. Is life to be allowed no natural expansion? Have you forgotten that, in refusing the new bond for the old bond's sake, the child may be simply wronging the parents, depriving them of another affection, another support, which ought to have been theirs?'

His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that she grew suddenly white, and he grasped her more firmly still. She reached the level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, and for a moment their eyes met, her pale face raised to his. It seemed an age, so much was said in that look. There was appeal on her side, pa.s.sion on his. Plainly she implored him to say no more, to spare her and himself.

'In some cases,' she said, and her voice sounded strained and hoa.r.s.e to both of them, 'one cannot risk the old bond. One dare not trust one's self--or circ.u.mstance. The responsibility is too great; one can but follow the beaten path, cling to the one thread. But don't let us talk of it any more. We must make for that gate, Mr. Elsmere. It will bring us out on the road again close by home.'

He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. He was struck again with that sense of a will firmer and more tenacious than his own, which had visited him in a slight pa.s.sing way on the first evening they ever met, and now filled him with a kind of despair. As they pushed silently along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang that the stepping-stones lay just below them. The gleam of sun had died away, the aerial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a fresh storm of rain brought back the colour to Catherine's cheek. On their left hand was the roaring of the river, on their right they could already hear the wind moaning and tearing through the trees which sheltered Burwood. The nature which an hour ago had seemed to him so full of stimulus and exhilaration had taken to itself a note of gloom and mourning; for he was at the age when Nature is the mere docile responsive mirror of the spirit, when all her forces and powers are made for us, and are only there to play chorus to our story.

They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. She paused at the foot of it.

'You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?'

Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. 'Your pardon, your friendship,' it cried, with the usual futility of all good women under the circ.u.mstances. But as he met it for one pa.s.sionate instant, he recognised fully that there was not a trace of yielding in it. At the bottom of the softness there was the iron of resolution.

'No, no; not now,' he said involuntarily: and she never forgot the painful struggle of the face; 'good-bye.' He touched her hand without another word, and was gone.

She toiled up to the gate with difficulty, the gray rain-washed road, the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes.

In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her with a start.

'My dear Cathie! you have been walking yourself to death. You look like a ghost. Come and have some tea at once.'

And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine submitted with all her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at her sister's onslaught. But she would not let Agnes put her down on the sofa. She stood with her hand on the back of a chair.

'The weather is very close and exhausting,' she said, gently lifting her hand to her hat. But the hand dropped, and she sank heavily into the chair.

'Cathie, you are faint,' cried Agnes, running to her.

Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which none but she would have been capable, mastered the physical weakness.

'I have been a long way, dear,' she said, as though in apology, 'and there is no air. Yes, I will go upstairs and lie down a minute or two.

Oh no, don't come, I will be down for tea directly.'

And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, her face the colour of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes stood dumfoundered. Never in her life before had she seen Catherine betray any such signs of physical exhaustion.

Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, and rushing up to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders.

'He has proposed to her, and she has said no!'

'He? What, Mr. Elsmere? How on earth can you know?'

'I saw them from upstairs come to the bottom of the lane. Then he rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It's as plain as the nose on your face.'

Agnes sat down bewildered.

'It is hard on him,' she said at last.

'Yes, it is _very_ hard on him!' cried Rose, pacing the room, her long thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, 'for she loves him!'

'Rose!'

'She does, my dear, she does,' cried the girl, frowning. 'I know it in a hundred ways.'

Agnes ruminated.

'And it's all because of us?' she said at last reflectively.

'Of course! I put it to you, Agnes'--and Rose stood still with a tragic air--'I put it to you, whether it isn't too bad that three unoffending women should have such a role as this a.s.signed them against their will!'

The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her head in the sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless laughter. Rose meanwhile stood in the window, her thin form drawn up to its full height, angry with Agnes, and enraged with all the world.

'It's absurd, it's insulting,' she exclaimed. 'I should imagine that you and I, Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to look after mamma, put out the stores, say our prayers, and prevent each other from running away with adventurers! I won't be always in leading-strings. I won't acknowledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.'

And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, a pa.s.sion of manifold protest in the girlish looks.

'It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one's own case,' replied Agnes calmly, recovering herself. 'Suppose you tell Catherine some of these home truths?'

Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and fell, head drooping, into a moody silence. Agnes watched her with a kind of triumph. When it came to the point, she knew perfectly well that there was not a will among them that could measure itself with any chance of success against that lofty but unwavering will of Catherine's. Rose was violent, and there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she preferred not to dash her head against stone walls.

'Well, then, if you won't say them to Catherine, say them to mamma,' she suggested presently, but half ironically.

'Mamma is no good,' cried Rose angrily; 'why do you bring her in?

Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.'

Long after every one else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy north-west wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low chair, her head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand hung down beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her cheeks. It was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew why she wept, she only knew that there was something within her which must have its way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the self against the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it? It was as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral world whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she knew; and now the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and strange lights, strange voices, strange colours were breaking through.

All the sayings of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for years, to-night for the first time seem to her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but sayings of fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and thought. We recite so glibly, 'He that loseth his life shall save it;' and when we come to any of the common crises of experience which are the source and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid deeps of the soul are breaking up.

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.

Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.

'Why, why am I so weak?' she cried in utter abas.e.m.e.nt of soul, and knew not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.

CHAPTER IX

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's study afterwards, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase of hers which had pa.s.sed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was intangible. '_We are not here only to be happy_,' she had said to him, with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.

The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting, torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them, all would be well?

As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment.

No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it as a binding obligation upon her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.

But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter! He realised with despair the brooding scrupulous force of moral pa.s.sion to which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father's nature working in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realised to their pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds!