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

perhaps forgotten that her mother too had a heart!

'Yes, it all sounds very well' said Mrs. Leyburn at last, sighing, 'but, you know, Catherine isn't easy to manage.'

'Could you talk to her--find out a little?'

'Well, not to-day; I shall hardly see her. Doesn't it seem to you that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine's she hasn't time for thinking about the young men? Why, she's as full of business all day long as an egg's full of meat. Well, it was my poor Richard's doing--it was his doing, bless him! I am not going to say anything against it but it was different--once.'

'Yes, I know,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, thoughtfully. 'One had plenty of time, when you and I were young, to sit at home and think what one was going to wear, and how one would look, and whether he had been paying attention to any one else; and if he had, why; and all that. And now the young women are so superior. But the marrying has got to be done somehow all the same. What is she doing to-day?'

'Oh, she'll be busy all to-day and to-morrow; I hardly expect to see her till Saturday.'

Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay.

'Why, what is the matter now?' she cried in her most aggrieved tones. 'My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one would think we had the cholera in the parish. Catherine just spoils the people.'

'Don't you remember,' said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her turn, and drawing herself up a little, 'that to-morrow is Midsummer Day, and that Mary Backhouse is as bad as she can be?'

'Mary Backhouse! Why I had forgotten all about her!' cried the vicar's wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pensively eyeing the carpet awhile.

Then she got what particulars she could out of Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, it appeared, was at this moment at High Ghyll, was not to return till late and would be with the dying girl through the greater part of the following day, returning for an hour or two's rest in the afternoon, and staying in the evening till the twilight, in which the ghost always made her appearances, should have passed into night.

Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind working the while at railway speed on the facts presented to her.

'How do you get her home tomorrow night?' she asked, with sudden animation.

'Oh, we send our man Richard at ten. He takes a lantern if it's dark.'

Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures were all alive again with energy and hope. She had given her shake to Mrs. Leyburn's mind. Much good might it do! But, after all, she had the poorest opinion of the widow's capacities as an ally.

She and her companion said a few more excited, affectionate, and apologetic things to one another, and then she departed.

Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an hour later in a state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Leyburn kept her own counsel, having resolved for once, with a timid and yet delicious excitement, to act as the head of the family.

Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans on her own account.

'Ten o'clock-moonlight,' said that contriving person to herself going home--'at least if the clouds hold up--that'll do--couldn't be better.'

To any person familiar with her character the signs of some unusual preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn during this Thursday evening. Catherine noticed them at once when she got back from High Ghyll about eight o'clock, and wondered first of all what was the matter; and then, with more emphasis, why the trouble was not immediately communicated to her. It had never entered into her head to take her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate nervous mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was at system in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there was good news, it was presented in its most sugared form to Mrs. Leyburn; but the moment any element of pain and difficulty cropped up in the common life, it was pounced upon and appropriated by Catherine, aided and abetted by the girls, and Mrs. Leyburn knew no more about it than an unweaned babe.

So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct of a Perth dyer with regard to her mother's best gray poplin, when one of the greatest surprises of her life burst upon her.

She was in Mrs. Leyburn's bedroom that night, helping to put away her mother's things as her custom was. She had just taken off the widow's cap, caressing as she did so the brown hair underneath, which was still soft and plentiful, when Mrs. Leyburn turned upon her. 'Catherine!' she said in an agitated voice, laying a thin hand on her daughter's arm. 'Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you!'

Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother's side and put her arms round her waist.

'Yes mother darling,' she said, half smiling.

'Oh, Catherine! If--if--you like Mr. Elsmere--don't mind--don't think--about us, dear. We can manage--we can manage, dear!'

The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn's face is indescribable. She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, her beautiful brows drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn, looked up at her with a pathetic mixture of helplessness, alarm, entreaty.

'Mother, who hag been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?' demanded Catherine.

'Oh, never mind, dear, never mind,' said the widow hastily; 'I should have seen it myself--oh, I know I should; but I'm a bad mother, Catherine!' and she caught her daughter's dress and drew her toward her. _Do_ you care for him?'

Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid her head on her mother's hands.

'I want nothing,' she said presently in a low voice of intense emotion--'I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my life--I ask for nothing more. I am abundantly--content.'

Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. The brown hair, escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still pretty neck, a pink spot of excitement was on each gently hollowed cheek; she looked almost younger than her pale daughter.

'But--he is very nice,' she said timidly. 'And he has a good living. Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman's wife.'

'I ought to be, and I am your daughter,' said Catherine smiling, a little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand.

Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps in imagination she saw the vicar's wife. 'I think--I think,' she said very seriously, 'I should like it.'

Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as though she had felt a blow.

'Mother!' she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet still trying to smile, 'do you want to send me away?'

'No-no!' cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. 'But if a nice man wants you to marry him, Catherine? Your father would have liked him--oh! I know your father would have liked him. And his manners to me are so pretty, I shouldn't mind being _his_ mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother, you know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.'

She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imaginations--the pallor, the latent storm of Catherine's look--exciting her more and more.

Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother's hand again.

'Dear little mother--dear, kind little mother! You are an angel--you always are. But I think, if you'll keep me, I'll stay.'

And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Leyburn's knee.

But _do_ you--'_do_ you love him, Catherine?'

'I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.'

'Oh dear,' sighed Mrs. Leyburn, as though addressing a third person, the tears, in her mild eyes, 'she won't; and she _would_ like it--and so should I!'

Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing.

'And I count for nothing to you, mother!'--her deep voice quivering; 'you could put me aside--you and the girls, and live as though I had never been!'

'But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, Catherine!' cried Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pettishness. 'People have to do without their daughters. There's Agnes--I often think, as it is, you might let her do more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it might be a good thing--a very good thing if there were a man to take her in hand!'

'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, choked.

'Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening. 'They say it _is_ such a nice house, Catherine, and such pretty country, and I'm sure I should like his mother, though she _is_ Irish!'

It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn's life. In it the heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling ironic touch of circumstance laid upon it made it look even in her own eyes almost ridiculous. What had she been living for, praying for, all these years? She threw herself down by the widow's side, her face working with a passion that terrified Mrs. Leyburn.

'Oh, mother, say you would miss me--say you would miss me if I went!'

Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women clung to each other, weeping. Catherine's sore heart was soothed a little by her mother's tears, and by the broken words of endearment that were lavished on her. But through it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. It was the cheapening--the vulgarizing, so to speak, of her whole existence.

In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall various items of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her mother, and one of which startled her.

'He comes back tonight, my dear--and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and, Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. Poor young man!'

And Mrs. Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.

'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornbourgh than I am already.'

Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left her at last to sleep.

'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed widow to herself, 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!'

Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.

As a matter of fact, owing