Robert Elsmere | Page 5

under the shelter of the fells. When you first saw the other sisters you wondered what strange chance had brought them into that remote sparely peopled valley; they were plainly exiles, and conscious exiles, from the movement and exhilarations of a fuller social life. But Catherine impressed you as only a refined variety of the local type; you could have found many like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced serious women of the neighboring farms.
Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting lightly on the other's shoulder, a question from Agnes banished the faint smile on her lips, and left, only the look of inward illumination, the expression of one who had just passed, as it were, through a strenuous and heroic moment of life, and was still living in the exaltation of memory.
'So the poor fellow is worse?'
'Yes. Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-day, says the spine is hopelessly injured. He may live on paralyzed for a few months or longer, but there is no hope of cure.'
Both girls uttered a shocked exclamation. 'That fine strong young man!' said Rose under her breath. 'Does he know?'
'Yes; when I got there the doctor had just gone, and Mrs. Tyson, who was quite unprepared for anything so dreadful, seemed to have almost lost her wits, poor thing! I found her in the front kitchen with her apron over her head, rocking to and fro, and poor Arthur in the inner room--all alone--waiting in suspense.'
'And who told him? He has been so hopeful.'
'I did,' said Catherine, gently; 'they made me. He would know, and she couldn't--she ran out of the room. I never saw anything so pitiful.'
'Oh, Catherine!' exclaimed Rose's moved voice, while Agnes got up, and Chattie jumped softly down from her lap unheeded.
'How did he bear it?'
'Don't ask me,' said Catherine, while the quiet tears filled her eyes and her voice broke, as the hidden feeling would have its way. 'It was terrible. I don't know how we got through that half-hour--his mother and I. It was like wrestling with someone in agony. At last he was exhausted--he let me say the Lord's Prayer; I think it soothed him, but one couldn't tell. He seemed half asleep when I left. Oh!' she cried, laying her hand in a close grasp on Rose's arm, 'if you had seen his eyes, and his poor hands--there was such despair in them! They say, though he was so young, he was thinking of getting married; and he was so steady, such a good son!'
A silence fell upon the three. Catherine stood looking out across the valley toward the sunset. Now that the demand upon her for calmness and fortitude was removed, and that the religious exaltation in which she had gone through the last three hours was becoming less intense, the pure human pity of the scene she had just witnessed seemed to be gaining upon her. Her lip trembled, and two or three tears silently overflowed. Rose turned and gently kissed her cheek, and Agnes touched her hand caressingly. She smiled at them, for it was not in her nature to let any sign of love pass unheeded, and in a few more seconds she had mastered herself.
'Dears, we must go in. Is mother in her room? Oh, Rose! in that thin dress on the grass; I oughtn't to have kept you out. It is quite cold by now.'
And, she hurried them in, leaving them to superintend the preparations for supper downstairs while she ran up to her mother.
A quarter of an hour afterward they were all gathered round the supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May twilight. At Catherine's right hand sat Mrs. Leyburn, a tall delicate-looking woman, wrapped in a white shawl, about whom there were only three things to be noticed--an amiable temper, a sufficient amount of weak health to excuse her all the more tiresome duties of life, and an incorrigible tendency to sing the praises of her daughters at all times and to all people. The daughters winced under it: Catherine, because it was a positive pain to her to bear herself brought forward and talked about; the others, because youth infinitely prefers to make its own points in its own way. Nothing, however, could mend this defect of Mrs. Leyburn's. Catherine's strength of will could keep it in check sometimes, but in general it had to be borne with. A sharp word would have silenced the mother's well-meant chatter at any time--for she was a fragile nervous woman, entirely dependent on her surroundings--but none of them were capable of it, and their mere refractoriness counted for nothing.
The dining room in which they were gathered had a good deal of homely dignity, and was to the Leyburns full of associations.