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

come back to that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!'

'There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come back,' said Langham, reflectively, 'But how she pined for her wilds all through! I am afraid you don't find your wilds as interesting as she found hers?'

His question and his smile startled her.

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so personal, so manly. Instead, 'Villette' slid a little further from her hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back against the cushion.

'No, I don't find my wilds interesting at all,' she said forlornly. 'You are not fond of the people, as your sister is?'

'Fond of them?' cried Rose hastily. 'I should think not; and what is more, they don't like me. It is quite intolerable since Catherine left. I have so much more to do with them. My other sister and I have to do all her work. It is dreadful to have to work after somebody who has a genius for doing just what you do worst.'

The young girl's hands fell across one another with a little impatient gesture. Langham had a movement of the most delightful compassion toward the petulant, childish creature. It was as though their relative positions had been in some mysterious way reversed. During their two days together she had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the mercy of her scornful, sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why, Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man's natural advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to use it.

'Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity?' he said.

'Oh dear, yes,' said Rose irritably; 'anything that has two legs and is ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.'

'And _you_ want something quite different, something more exciting?' he asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he dared something in thus pressing her, but dared it at least with his, wits about him. Rose met his look irresolutely, a little tremor of self-consciousness creeping over her.

'Yes, I want something different,' she said in a low voice and paused; then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her hands round her knees. 'But it is not idleness I want. I want to work, but at things I was born for; I can't have patience with old women, but I could slave all day and all night to play the violin.'

You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?' he said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play with her rings.

That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine's sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness.

'But it is all so difficult, you see,' she said despairingly. 'Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.'

'He would have changed with the times,' said Langham.

'I know he would,' cried Rose. 'I have told Catherine so a hundred times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don't they, Mr. Langham?

She spoke with perfect _naivete_. He saw more and more of the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.

'They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling.

Rose made a little face.

'I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. 'But then there's something else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What's to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa died I've just been plotting and planning to get away. But there's the difficulty,'--and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. 'That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee.

'Had he been so happy there?'

'Happy!--and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made him so fond of it?'

And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off perversity of her father's.

'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves in the oddest ways.'

'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought'--and her voice dropped--'he wasn't going to live long--he wasn't well when he gave up the school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.'

Then she broke off suddenly.

'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her companion, 'after all, he gave me my first violin?'

Langham smiled.

'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.

'Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion, and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn't have it. Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed again-on Sundays!'

Her companion's eyes were not quite as clear as before.

'Poor little naughty child,' he said, bending over to her. 'I think your father must have been a man to be loved.'

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft remorse.

'Oh, so he was--so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see what a chain it's been--what a weight! And as I must struggle--_must_, because I was I--to get back into the world on the other side of the mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn't exhilarating always.'

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick, over-tragic emotion of nineteen.

'I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play yesterday,' he said gently.

She started.

'_Did_ you hear me--that Wagner?'

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.

'Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.'

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say 'I am not quite the mummy you thought me, after all!' And she colored slightly.

'I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play often; and it seemed to me that with time--and work--you might play as well as any of them.'

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.

'And I can't help thinking,' he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own _role_ of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, 'that if your father had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.'

'Catherine hasn't moved with the times,' said Rose dolefully.

Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently emphatic.

'And you think,' she went on, 'you _really_ think, without being too ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts'--and a little laugh danced through the vibrating voice--'I might try and get them to give up Burwood--I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one can't help having qualms, though one doesn't tell them to one's sisters and cousins and aunts. And sometimes'--she turned her chin round on her hand and looked at him with a delicious, shy impulsiveness--'sometimes a stranger sees clearer. Do _you_ think me a monster, as Catherine does?'

Even as she spoke her own words startled her--the confidence, the abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely; only her eyelids quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, and there was a warm penitence in her heart. How kind he had been, how sympathetic!

He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it seemed to her, of her friend, her confessor. Her white childish brow, the little curls of bright hair upon her temples, her parted lips, the pretty folds of the muslin dress the little foot on the fender--every detail of the picture impressed itself once for all. Langham will carry it with him to his grave.

'Tell me,' she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage him--'tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what you think?'

The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a gust of wind sweeping through the house--voices and steps approaching. Rose sprang up, and for the first time during all the latter part of their conversation felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.

'How early you are, Robert!' she exclaimed, as the study door opened and Robert's wind-blown head and tall form wrapped in an Inverness cape appeared on the threshold. 'Is Catherine tired?'

'Rather,' said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betraying itself on his face. 'She has gone to bed, and told me to ask you to come and say good-night to her.'

'You got my message about not coming from old Martha?' asked