Robert Elsmere | Page 5

of
Westmoreland air and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure
there was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonized with
the bare stretches and lonely crags of the fells, something which
seemed to make her a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once
of their gentleness and their severity. She was in her place here, beside
the homely Westmoreland house, and 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