Читать книгу Robert Elsmere - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 7

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford, having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary to pay his college valuation—a sum which wild horses could not have dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and drink.

From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen's, his ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till, in the very last year of his father's life, the eldest son, who had a shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest, applied to 'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick's wife and children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one of themselves.

'Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. 'It happened the year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. It was kept up in the old style. Three of Leyburn's sons were there: two of them farmers like himself, one a clerk from Manchester, a daughter married to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under the table before supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But I was new to the place,' said the vicar, flushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes, which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of some one that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and had gone seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but between us we couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in. "I haven't breathed this air for five-and-twenty years," he said. "I thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there, it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel, after all, that I have the fells in my blood." He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had made a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering about the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife and children here in the holidays," he said, "and the money will set George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and got possession of the old house, in which, I should think, he had passed about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There's no accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs. Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the blues to look at.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in that house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days—the savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately brought-up children going in and out of the parlour where old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had belaboured him when he was a boy at the village school—it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and then he died and the family lived on?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in these valleys,' said the vicar, smiling. 'I don't count for much, she counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me their secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they take it from her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whisky-drinking stock should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling. His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine. People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye commanded the whole of the upper end of the valley—a bare, desolate recess filled with evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and purple crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell marked the course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater district. Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled babbling river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted imperceptibly into the browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most of the scene, except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut out the sun, was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on the farmhouses, the heckberry trees along the river and the road, caught and emphasised the golden rays which were flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green cup. Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit trees in blossom; the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young man from the warmer south there was still a bracing quality in the soft western breeze which blew about him.

He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature going out to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace of the scene. Lines of Wordsworth were on his lips; the little well-worn volume was in his pocket, but he did not need to bring it out; and his voice had all a poet's intensity of emphasis as he strolled along, reciting under his breath—

'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration!'

Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Burwood, lying beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one white life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the idea of her seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to see her.