CHAPTER IX
Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's study afterwards, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was intangible. 'We are not here only to be happy,' she had said to him, with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria. The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting, torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them, all would be well?
As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment. No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it as a binding obligation upon her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.
But the obstacle of character—ah, there was a different matter! He realised with despair the brooding scrupulous force of moral passion to which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father's nature working in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realised to their pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds! Robert's heart sank before the memory of that frail indomitable look, that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him farewell. And yet, surely—surely under the willingness of the spirit there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely, now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white—trembling: her hand had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh, why had he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her personality produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not boldly caught her to himself, and, with all the eloquence of a passionate nature, trampled on her scruples, marched through her doubts, convinced—reasoned her into a blessed submission!
'And I will do it yet!' he cried, leaping to his feet with a sudden access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile looking out into the rainy evening, all the keen irregular face and thin pliant form hardening into the intensity of resolve, which had so often carried the young tutor through an Oxford difficulty, breaking down antagonism and compelling consent.
At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the household he was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got out of him that he had been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, but for all her ingenuities of cross-examination she got nothing more. Afterwards, when he and the vicar were smoking together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater.
'I want to go away,' he said, with a hand on the vicar's shoulder, 'and I want to come back.' The deliberation of the last words was not to be mistaken. The vicar emitted a contented puff, looked the young man straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk to Patterdale viâ High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by Haweswater.
To Mrs. Thornburgh Robert announced that he must leave them on the following Saturday, June 24.
'You have given me a good time, Cousin Emma,' he said to her, with a bright friendliness which dumbfoundered her. A good time, indeed! with everything begun and nothing finished; with two households thrown into perturbation for a delusion, and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for want of a little common sense and plain speaking, which one person at least in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been ignored and brow beaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, in his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the privacy of the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife so exasperated. To think what might have been, what she might have done for the race, but for the whims of two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons, that would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people to manage them for them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret of Elsmere's remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself certain counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into well-simulated slumber. However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious that some time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of him peremptorily, 'When do you get back, William?' To the best of his memory the vicar had sleepily murmured, 'Thursday'; and had then heard, echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, 'He goes Saturday—one clear day!'
The following morning was gloomy but fine, and after breakfast the vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate farewell to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech in the garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.