Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

the sense that she was speaking to a man of distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full of soul.

The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candies and music-stools, preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed vicar of Shanmoor, and the room seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton's strident voice. Her strong natural reserve asserted itself, and her face settled again into the slight rigidity of expression characteristic of it. She rose and prepared to move farther into the room.

'We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder.

And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn. He had a momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive, sympathetic, felt in the woman the presence of a strength, a self-sufficingness which was not all attractive. His vanity, if he had cherished any during their conversation, was not flattered by its close. But as he leant against the window-frame waiting for the music to begin, he could hardly keep his eyes from her. He was a man who, by force of temperament, made friends readily with women, though except for a passing fancy or two he had never been in love; and his sense of difficulty with regard to this stiffly-mannered deep-eyed country girl brought with it an unusual stimulus and excitement.

Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her. Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He was a powerful swarthy man who said little, and was generally alarming to the ladies of the neighborhood. To propitiate him they asked him to bring his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower's name and position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with all his taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend himself.

'Has it begun?' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and turning, he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's cheeks flushed by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head.

She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of her wrists and the vicarage piano.

The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs. Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton, motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against the wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.

It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning, the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very fast, which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped her little foot.

'Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, 'three bars this; will no one stop her!'

But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was to end, and who was to be victor.

Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have, been in any doubt as to that! Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute, nearly half a page behind, was left shrilly hanging, in mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an object of derision to gods and men.

'Ah! I took it a little fast!' said the lady, triumphantly looking up at the discomfited clergyman.

'Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window-curtain beside him, that she might have her laugh in safety, 'do they play like that in Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?'

But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl.

'Rose! Rose! Don't go out again! It is your turn next!'

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical power, supposed that she felt it an indignity to be asked to play in such company.

Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. Leyburn, a summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, as it brought him once more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn's oldest daughter.

'Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere?' asked Mrs. Leyburn in her little mincing voice, making room for his chair beside them. 'If you are, I am sure my youngest daughter's playing, will please you.'

Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some pleasant answer, divined that the reserved and stately daughter must be often troubled by the mother's expansiveness.

Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to, listen. Mrs. Seaton was severely turning over a photograph book. In her opinion the violin was an unbecoming instrument for young women. Miss Barks sat upright with the studiously neutral expression which befits the artist asked to listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him, good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after routing out from her music a couple of _Fantasie-Stuecke_, which she had wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to the 'rubbish' played by the preceding performers. She stood with her lithe figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot advanced, the ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and arm, beautifully formed but still wanting the roundness of womanhood, raised high for action, the lightly poised head thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a bewitching, half-grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future brilliance and empire.

Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial maiden learned to play with this intelligence, this force, this delicate command of her instrument? He was not a musician, and therefore could not gauge her exactly, but he was more or less familiar with music and its standards, as all people become nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society, and he knew enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident was this, when from the humorous piece with which the sisters led off--a dance of clowns, but clowns of Arcady--they slid into a delicate rippling _chant d'amour_, the long-drawn notes of the violin rising and falling on the piano accompaniment with an exquisite plaintiveness. Where did a _fillette_, unformed, inexperienced, win the secret of so much eloquence--only from the natural dreams of a girl's heart as to 'the lovers waiting in the hidden years?'

But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look which had piqued his curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the compliments of Dr. Baker.

'Excellent!' cried Elsmere. 'How in the name of fortune, Miss Leyburn, if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on so far in this remote place?'

'She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we have there,' said Catherine quietly; 'I believe she has been very well taught.'

'But surely,' he said warmly, 'it is more than teaching--more even than talent--there is something like genius in it?'

She did not answer very readily.

'I don't know,' she said at last. 'Everyone says it is very good.'

He would have been repelled by her irresponsiveness but that her last words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, as though the subject were connected with an inner debate not yet solved which troubled her. He was puzzled, but certainly not repelled.

Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons went first, and the other guests lingered awhile afterward to enjoy the sense of freedom left by their departure. But at last the Mayews, father and son, set off on foot to walk home over the moonlit mountains; the doctor tucked himself and his daughter into his high gig and drove off with a sweeping ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps teasing him to the last; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort the Miss Leyburns and their mother home.

Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar's incredulous ears that never--never as long as she lived--would she have Mrs. Seaton inside her doors again.

'Her manners'--cried the vicar's wife, fuming-'her manners would disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none-positively none!'

Then suddenly her round, comfortable face brightened and broadened out into a beaming smile--

'But, after all, William, say what you will--and you always do say the most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success. I know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him _looking_--_looking_--at that little minx Rose while she was playing as if he couldn't take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be sure!'

The vicar, who had been standing with his back to fireplace and his hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks first of all with lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half compassionate, which made her start in her chair.

'Rose?' he said, impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?'

It was very rarely indeed, that on her own ground, so to speak, the vicar ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him in amazement.

'Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, 'that you didn't notice that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn, he had practically no attention for anybody else?'

Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening-and her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to ejaculate--

'Catherine!' she said feebly. 'Catherine! how absurd!'

But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of the window after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that night an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely indispensable, more of a personage.


CHAPTER IV.

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little more closely into the antecedents of the man who had suddenly roused so much activity in her contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents are