Читать книгу Robert Elsmere - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 14

'Yet tears to human suffering are due,

And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown

Are mourned by man, and not by man alone

As fondly we believe.'

Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?

'Was he happy in his school life?' he asked gently. 'Was teaching what he liked?'

'Oh yes—only—' Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest, purest, most devoted——'

She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now after this lapse of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life—even by her—even by religion?—was that the sting?

'Oh, I can understand!' he said reverently—'I can understand. I have come across it once or twice, that fierce self-judgment of the good. It is the most stirring and humbling thing in life.' Then his voice dropped. 'And after the last conflict—the last "quailing breath"—the last onslaughts of doubt or fear—think of the Vision waiting—the Eternal Comfort—

'"Oh, my only Light!

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom Thy tempests fell all night!"'

The words fell from the softened voice like noble music.

There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eyes to his. They swam in tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were radiance itself. It seemed to him as though she came closer to him like a child to an elder who has soothed and satisfied an inward smart.

They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the swollen river which roared below them. On the opposite bank two umbrellas were vanishing through the field gate into the road, but the vicar had turned and was waiting for them. They could see his becloaked figure leaning on his stick through the light wreaths of mist that floated above the tumbling stream. The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds seemed to be dragging along the very floor of the valley.

The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first and held out his hand to her. When they started she would have refused his help with scorn. Now, after a moment's hesitation she yielded, and he felt her dear weight on him as he guided her carefully from stone to stone. In reality it is both difficult and risky to be helped over stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his; and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown water, was never seen in Westmoreland wilds before.

'It is clearing,' he cried, with ready optimism, as they reached the bank. 'We shall get our picnic to-morrow after all—we must get it! Promise me it shall be fine—and you will be there!'

The vicar was only fifty yards away waiting for them against the field gate. But Robert held her eagerly, imperiously—and it seemed to her, her head was still dizzy with the water.

'Promise!' he repeated, his voice dropping.

She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising for Westmoreland weather. She could only say faintly 'Yes!' and so release her hand.

'You are pretty wet!' said the vicar, looking from one to the other with a curiosity which Robert's quick sense divined at once was directed to something else than the mere condition of their garments. But Catherine noticed nothing; she walked on wrestling blindly with she knew not what till they reached the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs. Thornburgh, the light drizzle into which the rain had declined beating unheeded on her curls and ample shoulders. She stared at Robert's drenched condition, but he gave her no time to make remarks.

'Don't take it off,' he said with a laughing wave of the hand to Catherine; 'I will come for it to-morrow morning.'

And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be prudent to get himself into something less spongelike than his present attire as quickly as possible.

The vicar followed him.

'Don't keep Catherine, my dear. There's nothing to tell. Nobody's the worse.'

Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate she went through it on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both her hands on Catherine's shoulders, and looked her straight in the eyes. The vicar's anxious hint was useless. She could contain herself no longer. She had watched them from the vicarage come down the fell together, had seen them cross the stepping stones, lingeringly, hand in hand.

'My dear Catherine!' she cried, effusively kissing Catherine's glowing cheek under the shelter of the laurustinus that made a bower of the gate. 'My dear Catherine!'

Catherine gazed at her in astonishment. Mrs. Thornburgh's eyes were all alive, and swarming with questions. If it had been Rose she would have let them out in one fell flight. But Catherine's personality kept her in awe. And after a second, as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on Catherine's face, and an expression of half-frightened apology dawned in Mrs. Thornburgh's.

Catherine drew herself away. 'Will you please give Mr. Elsmere his mackintosh?' she said, taking it off; 'I shan't want it this little way.'

And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh's arm she turned away, walking quickly round the bend of the road.

Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved slowly back to the house in a state of complete collapse.

'I always knew'—she said with a groan—'I always knew it would never go right if it was Catherine! Why was it Catherine?'

And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vindictive query.

Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush leaving a sudden pallor behind it, was twisting her hands before her in a kind of agony.

'What have I been doing?' she said to herself. 'What have I been doing?'

At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She saw the girls in their own room—Agnes was standing behind, Rose had evidently rushed forward to see Catherine come in, and now retreated as suddenly when she saw her sister look up.

Catherine understood it all in an instant. 'They, too, are on the watch,' she thought to herself bitterly. The strong reticent nature was outraged by the perception that she had been for days the unconscious actor in a drama of which her sisters and Mrs. Thornburgh had been the silent and intelligent spectators.

She came down presently from her room very white and quiet, admitted that she was tired, and said nothing to anybody. Agnes and Rose noticed the change at once, whispered to each other when they found an opportunity, and foreboded ill.

After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out of the little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the house leading on to the fell. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung low and threatening, and the close air was saturated with moisture. As she gained the bare fell, sounds of water met her on all sides. The river cried hoarsely to her from below, the becks in the little ghylls were full and thunderous; and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a new-born rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to vanish with the night. Catherine's soul went out to welcome the gray damp of the hills. She knew them best in this mood. They were thus most her own.

She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the ridge. Behind her lay the valley, and on its further side the fells she had crossed in the afternoon. Before her spread a long green vale, compared to which Whindale with its white road, its church, and parsonage, and scattered houses, was the great world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a single house. As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of human life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the long June twilight; the blackish walls ran down and up again, dividing the green hollow with melancholy uniformity. Here and there was a sheepfold, suggesting the bleakness of winter nights; and here and there a rough stone barn for storing fodder. And beyond the vale, eastwards and northwards, Catherine looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and inkiest over the high points of the Ullswater mountains.

When she was once below the pass, man and his world were shut out. The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was absolutely alone. She descended till she reached a point where a little stream had been turned into a stone trough for cattle. Above it stood a gnarled and solitary thorn. Catherine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was a seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father; she had thought and prayed there as girl and woman; she had wrestled there often with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual temptations which were all her pure youth had known, till the inner light had dawned again, and the humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and the clouds, the white stoles and 'sleeping wings' of ministering spirits.

But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with what fierce suddenness had it come upon her! She looked back over the day with bewilderment. She could see dimly that the Catherine who had started on that Shanmoor walk had been full of vague misgivings other than those concerned with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and Robert Elsmere apart.

And then; beyond the departure from Shanmoor she seemed to lose the thread of her own history. Memory was drowned in a feeling to which the resisting soul as yet would give no name. She laid her head on her knees trembling. She heard again the sweet imperious tones with which he broke down her opposition about the cloak; she felt again the grasp of his steadying hand on hers.

But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted thus. She raised her head again, scourging herself in shame and self-reproach, recapturing the empire of the soul with a strong effort. She set herself to a stern analysis of the whole situation. Clearly Mrs. Thornburgh and her sisters had been aware for some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had been showing a peculiar interest in her. Their eyes had been open. She realised now with hot cheeks how many meetings and tête-à-têtes had been managed for her and Elsmere, and how complacently she had fallen into Mrs. Thornburgh's snares.

'Have I encouraged him?' she asked herself sternly.

'Yes,' cried the smarting conscience.

'Can I marry him?'

'No,' said conscience again; 'not without deserting your post, not without betraying your trust.'

What post? What trust? Ah, conscience was ready enough with the answer. Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of sixteen, prematurely old and thoughtful, she had sat beside her father's deathbed, while her delicate hysterical mother, in a state of utter collapse, was kept away from him by the doctors? She could see the drawn face, the restless melancholy eyes. 'Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They will look to you. Support them.' And she could see in imagination her own young face pressed against the pillows. 'Yes, father, always—always!'—'Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower than ever. I die'—and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn breath by which the voice was broken—'in much—much perplexity about many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them safe to the day of account.'—'Yes, father, with God's help. Oh, with God's help!'

That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the spirit of her father's life and beliefs.

Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that her work is done, her promise kept?

Oh, no—no! she cries to herself with vehemence. Her mother depends on her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life—Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all experience to come. And Rose—— Ah! at the thought of Rose, Catherine's heart sinks deeper and deeper—she feels a culprit before her father's memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of the child? Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and here is Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father's wishes, from the galling pressure of the family tradition!

No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical, moment. How can she leave it? Impossible.

What claim can she put against these supreme claims—of her promise, her mother's and sisters' need?

His claim? Oh, no—no! She admits with soreness and humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them. Catherine Leyburn knew of no supreme right but the right of God to the obedience of man.

Oh, and besides—besides—it is impossible that he should care so very much. The time is so short—there is so little in her, comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such attainments, such access to the best things of life.

She cannot—in a kind of terror—she will not, believe in her own love-worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting wound.

Then her own claim? Has she any claim, has the poor bounding heart that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?

She locks her hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the worst struggle is here, the quickest agony here. But she does not waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.

'Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort.'

'If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with greater abundance of grace.'

'When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is withdrawn from thee.'

'Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy Creator. …'

She presses the sentence she has so often meditated in her long solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of George Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally—

'Thy Saviour sentenced joy!'

Ay, sentenced it for ever—the personal craving, the selfish need, that must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her young new-born joy at the feet of the Master.

She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity. Then there was a curious little epilogue.

'It is all over,' she said to herself tenderly. 'But he has taught me so much—he has been so good to me—he is so good! Let me take to my heart some counsel—some word of his, and obey it sacredly—silently—for these days' sake.'

Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose. How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he with his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? 'I have tried to stifle her passion,' she thought, 'to push it out of the way as a hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in the ladder—to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh, let me take his word for it—be ruled by him in this one thing, once!'

She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had thrown herself at Elsmere's feet, that her cheek was pressed against that young brown hand of his. How long the moment lasted she never knew. When at last she rose stiff and weary, darkness was overtaking even the lingering northern twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on the moors; a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly white; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted valley and the scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay along the hollow of the dale; they moved weirdly under the breeze. She could have fancied them a troop of wraiths to whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who were bearing it away to burial.

As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale side of the fell a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had talked to her only that morning of Rose and Rose's desire, and she had received the news with her habitual silence.

The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had gone upstairs. Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn discovered that she looked worn out, and she was sent off to bed. She went along the passage quickly to Rose's room, listening a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was inside, crooning some German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and went in.

Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing-gown over her shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all about her. She was swaying backwards and forwards dreamily singing, and she started up when she saw Catherine.

'Röschen,' said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor of heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden hair and the half-covered shoulders, 'you never told me of that letter from Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, Röschen, I would never let you have your way? Oh, I am not so hard! I may have been wrong—I think I have been wrong; you shall do what you will, Röschen. If you want to go, I will ask mother.'

Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. She was struck dumb by this sudden breaking down of Catherine's long resistance. And what a strange white Catherine! What did it mean? Catherine withdrew her arms with a little sigh and moved away.

'I just came to tell you that, Röschen,' she said, 'but I am very tired and must not stay.'

Catherine 'very tired'! Rose thought the skies must be falling.

'Cathie!' she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained the door. 'Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty, odious little wretch. But oh, tell me, what is the matter?'

And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate strength.

The elder sister struggled to release herself.

'Let me go, Rose,' she said in a low voice. 'Oh, you must let me go!'

And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes as though trying to drive away the mist from them.

'Good-night! Sleep well.'

And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. Rose stood staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a flood of many feelings—remorse, love, fear, sympathy—threw herself face downwards on her bed and burst into a passion of tears.