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Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.




And yet, no sooner did he come back from service in the chapel, or from
talk of Church matters with Catholic friends, than he found himself
suddenly full of expectation. Was Miss Fountain in the hall, in the
garden? or was she gone to those people at Browhead? If she was not in
the house--above all, if she was with the Masons--he would find it hard
to absorb himself again in the thoughts that had held him before. If she
was there, if he found her sitting reading or working by the hall fire,
with the dogs at her feet, he seldom indeed went to speak to her. He
would go into his library, and force himself to do his business, while
Father Leadham talked to her and Augustina. But the library opened on the
hall, and he could still hear that voice in the distance. Often, when she
caressed the dogs, her tones had the note in them which had startled him
on her very first evening under his roof. It was the emergence of
something hidden and passionate; and it awoke in himself a strange and
troubling echo--the passing surge of an old memory long since thrust down
and buried. How fast his youth was going from him! It was fifteen years
since a woman's voice, a woman's presence, had mattered anything at all
to him.

So it came about that, in some way or other, he knew, broadly, all that
Miss Fountain did, little as he saw of her. It appeared that she had
discovered a pony carriage for hire in the little village near the
bridge, and once or twice during this fortnight, he learned from
Augustina that she had spent the afternoon at Browhead Farm, while the
Bannisdale household had been absorbed in some function of the season.

Augustina disliked the news as much as he did, and would throw up her
hands in annoyance.

"What _can_ she be doing there? They seem the roughest kind of people.
But she says the son plays so wonderfully. I believe she plays duets with
him. She goes out with the cart full of music."

"Music!" said Helbeck, in frank amazement. "That lout!"

"Well, she says so," said Augustina crossly, as though it were a personal
affront. "And what do you think, Alan? She talks of going to a dance up
there after Easter--next Thursday, I think."

"At the farm?" Helbeck's tone was incredulous.

"No; at the mill--or somewhere. She says the schoolmaster is giving it,
or something of that sort. Of course it's most unsuitable. But what am I
to do, Alan? They _are_ her relations!"

"At the same time they are not her class," said Helbeck decidedly. "She
has been brought up in a different way, and she cannot behave as though
she belonged to them. And a dance, with that young man to look after her!
You ought to stop it."

Augustina said dismally that she would try, but her head shook with more
feebleness than usual as she went back to her knitting.

* * * * *

Next day Helbeck made a point of finding his sister alone. But she only
threw him a deprecatory look.

"I tried, Alan--indeed I did. She says that she wants some
amusement--that it will do her good--and that of course her father would
have let her go to a dance with his relations. And when I say anything to
her about not being quite like them, she fires up. She says she would be
ashamed to be thought any better than they, and that Hubert has a great
deal more good in him than some people think."

"Hubert!" exclaimed Mr. Helbeck, raising his shoulders in disgust. After
a little silence he turned round as he was leaving the room, and said
abruptly: "Is she to stay the night at the farm?"

"No! oh, no! She wants to come home. She says she won't be late; she
promises not to be late."

"And that young fellow will drive her home, of course?"

"Well, she couldn't drive home alone, Alan, at that time of night. It
wouldn't be proper."

Mr. Helbeck smiled rather sourly. "One may doubt where the propriety
comes in. Well, she seems determined. We must just arrange it. There is
the tower door. Kindly tell her, Augustina, that I will let her have the
key of it. And kindly tell her also--as from yourself, of course--that
she will be treating us all with courtesy if she does come home at a
reasonable hour. We have been a very quiet, prim household all these
years, and Mrs. Denton, for all her virtues, has a tongue."

"So she has," said Augustina, sighing. "And she doesn't like Laura--not
at all."

Helbeck raised his head quickly. "She does nothing to make Miss Fountain
uncomfortable, I trust?"

"Oh--no," said Augustina undecidedly. "Besides, it doesn't matter. Laura
has got Ellen under her thumb."

Helbeck's grave countenance showed a gleam of amusement.

"How does Mrs. Denton take that?"

"Oh! she has to bear it. Haven't you seen, Alan, how the girl has
brightened up? Laura has shown her how to do her hair; she helped her to
make a new frock for Easter; the girl would do anything in the world for
her. It's like Bruno. Do you notice, Alan--I really thought you would be
angry--that the dog will hardly go with you when Laura's there?"

"Oh! Miss Fountain is a very attractive young lady--to those she likes,"
said Helbeck dryly.

And on that he went away.

On Good Friday afternoon Laura, in a renewed passion of revolt against
all that was going on in the house, went to her room and wrote to her
friend. Litanies were being said in the chapel. The distant, melancholy
sounds mounted to her now and then. Otherwise the house was wrapped in a
mourning silence; and outside, trailing clouds hung round the old walls,
making a penitential barrier all about it.

"After this week," wrote Laura to her friend, "I shall always feel kindly
towards 'sin'--and the 'world'! How they have been scouted and scourged!
And what, I ask you, would any of us do without them? The 'world,'
indeed! I seem to hear it go rumbling on, the poor, patient, toiling
thing, while these people are praying. It works, and makes it possible
for them to pray--while they abuse and revile it.

"And as to 'sin,' and the gloom in which we all live because of it--what
on earth does it really mean to any decently taught and brought-up
creature? You are greedy, or selfish, or idle, or ill-behaved. Very well,
then--nature, or your next-door neighbor, knocks you down for it, and
serve you right. Next time you won't do it again, or not so badly, and by
degrees you don't even like to think of doing it--you would be 'ashamed,'
as people say. It's the process that everybody has to go through, I
suppose--being sent into the world the sort of beings we are, and without
any leave of ours, altogether. But why make such a wailing and woe and
hullabaloo about it! Oh--such a waste of time! Why doesn't Mr. Helbeck go
and learn geology? I vow he hasn't an idea what the rocks of his own
valley are made of!

"Of course there are the _very_ great villains--I don't like to think
about them. And the people who are born wrong and sick. But by-and-by we
shall have weeded them out, or improved the breed. And why not spend your
energies on doing that, instead of singing litanies, and taking
ridiculous pains not to eat the things you like?

"...I shall soon be in disgrace with Augustina and Mr. Helbeck, about the
Masons--worse disgrace, that is to say. For now that I have found a pony
of my own, I go up there two or three times a week. And really--in spite
of all those first experiences I told you of--I like it! Cousin Elizabeth
has begun to talk to me; and when I come home, I read the Bible to see
what it was all about. And I don't let her say too bad things about Mr.
Helbeck--it wouldn't be quite gentlemanly on my part. And I know most of
the Williams story now, both from her and Augustina.

"Imagine, my dear!--a son not allowed to come and see his mother before
she died, though she cried for him night and day. He was at a Jesuit
school in Wales. They shilly-shallied, and wrote endless letters--and at
last they sent him off--the day she died. He arrived three hours too
late, and his father shut the door in his face. 'Noa yo' shan't see her,'
said the grim old fellow--'an if there's a God above, yo' shan't see her
in heaven nayder!' Augustina of course calls it 'holy obedience.'

"The painting in the chapel is really extraordinary. Mr. Helbeck seems to
have taught the young man, to begin with. He himself used to paint long
ago--not very well, I should think, to judge from the bits of his work
still left in the chapel. But at any rate the youth learnt the rudiments
from him, and then of course went far beyond his teacher. He was almost
two years here, working in the house--tabooed by his family all the time.
Then there seems to have been a year in London, when he gave Mr. Helbeck
some trouble. I don't know--Augustina is vague. How it was that he joined
the Jesuits I can't make out. No doubt Mr. Helbeck induced them to take
him. But _why_--I ask you--with such a gift? They say he will be here in
the summer, and one will have to set one's teeth and shake hands with
him.

"Oh, that droning in the chapel--there it is again! I will open the
window and let the howl of the rain in to get rid of it. And yet I can't
always keep myself away from it. It is all so new--so horribly intimate.
Every now and then the music or a prayer or something sends a stab right
down to my heart of hearts.--A voice of suffering, of torture--oh! so
ghastly, so _real_. Then I come and read papa's note-books for an hour to
forget it. I wish he had ever taught me anything--strictly! But _of
course_ it was my fault.

"... As to this dance, why shouldn't I go?--just tell me! It is being
given by the new schoolmaster, and two or three young farmers, in the big
room at the old mill. The schoolmaster is the most tiresomely virtuous
young man, and the whole thing is so respectable, it makes me yawn to
think of it. Polly implores me to go, and I like Polly. (Very soon she'll
let me halve her fringe!) I gave Hubert a preliminary snub, and now he
doesn't dare implore me to go. But that is all the more engaging. I
_don't_ flirt with him!--heavens!--unless you call bear-taming
flirtation. But one can't see his music running to waste in such a bog of
tantrums and tempers. I must try my hand. And as he is my cousin I can
put up with him."

* * * * *

After High Mass on Easter Sunday Helbeck walked home from Whinthorpe
alone, as his companion Father Leadham had an engagement in the town.

Through the greater part of Holy Week the skies had been as grey and
penitential as the season. The fells and the river flats had been
scourged at night with torrents of rain and wind, and in the pale
mornings any passing promise of sun had been drowned again before the day
was high. The roofs and eaves, the small panes of the old house, trickled
and shone with rain; and at night the wind tore through the gorge of the
river with great boomings and onslaughts from the west. But with Easter
eve there had come appeasement--a quiet dying of the long storm. And as
Helbeck made his way along the river on Easter morning, mountain and
flood, grass and tree, were in a glory of recovered sun. The distant
fells were drawn upon the sky in the heavenliest brushings of blue and
purple; the river thundered over its falls and weirs in a foamy
splendour; and the deer were feeding with a new zest amid the
fast-greening grass.

He stopped a moment to rest upon his stick and look about him. Something
in his own movement reminded him of another solitary walk some five weeks
before. And at the same instant he perceived a small figure sitting on a
stone seat in front of him. It was Miss Fountain. She had a book on her
knee, and the two dogs were beside her. Her white dress and hat seemed to
make the centre of a whole landscape. The river bent inward in a great
sweep at her feet, the crag rose behind her, and the great prospect
beyond the river of dale and wood, of scar and cloud, seemed spread there
for her eyes alone. A strange fancy seized on Helbeck. This was his
world--his world by inheritance and by love. Five weeks before he had
walked about it as a solitary. And now this figure sat enthroned, as it
were, at the heart of it. He roughly shook the fancy off and walked on.

Miss Fountain greeted him with her usual detachment. He stood a minute or
two irresolute, then threw himself on the slope in front of her.

"Bruno will hardly look at his master now," he said to her pleasantly,
pointing to the dog's attitude as it lay with its nose upon the hem of
her dress.

Laura closed her book in some annoyance. He usually returned by the other
side of the river, and she was not grateful to him for his breach of
habit. Why had he been meddling in her affairs? She perfectly understood
why Augustina had been making herself so difficult about the dance, and
about the Masons in general. Let him keep his proprieties to himself.
She, Laura, had nothing to do with them. She was hardly his guest--still
less his ward. She had come to Bannisdale against her will, simply and
solely as Augustina's nurse. In return, let Mr. Helbeck leave her alone
to enjoy her plebeian relations as she pleased.

Nevertheless, of course she must be civil; and civil she intermittently
tried to be. She answered his remark about Bruno by a caress to the dog
that brought him to lay his muzzle against her knee.

"Do you mind? Some people do mind. I can easily drive him away."

"Oh, no! I reckon on recovering him--some day," he said, with a frank
smile.

Laura flushed.

"Very soon, I should think. Have you noticed, Mr. Helbeck, how much
better Augustina is already? I believe that by the end of the summer, at
least, she will be able to do without me. And she tells me that the
Superior at the orphanage has a girl to recommend her as a companion when
I go."

"Rather officious of the Reverend Mother, I think," said Helbeck sharply.
He paused a moment, then added with some emphasis, "Don't imagine, Miss
Fountain, that anybody else can do for my sister what you do."

"Ah! but--well--one must live one's life--mustn't one, Fricka?"--Fricka
was by this time jealously pawing her dress. "I want to work at my
music--hard--this winter."

"And I fear that Bannisdale is not a very gay place for a young lady
visitor?"

He smiled. And so did she; though his tone, with its shade of proud
humility, embarrassed her.

"It is as beautiful as a dream!" she said, with sudden energy, throwing
up her little hand. And he turned to look, as she was looking, at the
river and the woods.

"You feel the beauty of it so much?" he asked her, wondering. His own
strong feeling for his native place was all a matter of old habit and
association. The flash of wild pleasure in her face astounded him. There
was in it that fiery, tameless something that was the girl's
distinguishing mark, her very soul and self. Was it beginning to speak
from her blood to his?

She nodded, then laughed.

"But, of course, it isn't my business to live here. I have a great
friend--a Cambridge girl--and we have arranged it all. We are to live
together, and travel a great deal, and work at music."

"That is what young ladies do nowadays, I understand."

"And why not?"

He lifted his shoulders, as though to decline the answer, and was
silent--so silent that she was forced at last to take the field.

"Don't you approve of 'new women,' Mr. Helbeck? Oh! I wish I was a new
woman," she threw out defiantly. "But I'm not good enough--I don't know
anything."

"I wasn't thinking of them," he said simply. "I was thinking of the life
that women used to live here, in this place, in the past--of my mother
and my grandmother."

She could not help a stir of interest. What might the Catholic women of
Bannisdale have been like? She looked along the path that led downward to
the house, and seemed to see their figures upon it--not short and sickly
like Augustina, but with the morning in their eyes and on their white
brows, like the Romney lady. Helbeck's thoughts meanwhile were peopled by
the more solid forms of memory.

"You remember the picture?" he said at last, breaking the silence. "The
husband of that lady was a boor and a gambler. He soon broke her heart.
But her children consoled her to some extent, especially the daughters,
several of whom became nuns. The poor wife came from a large Lancashire
family, but she hardly saw her relations after her marriage; she was
ashamed of her husband's failings and of their growing poverty. She
became very shy and solitary, and very devout. These rock-seats along the
river were placed by her. It is said that she used in summer to spend
long hours on that very seat where you are sitting, doing needlework, or
reading the Little Office of the Virgin, at the hours when her daughters
in their French convent would be saying their office in chapel. She died
before her husband, a very meek, broken creature. I have a little book of
her meditations, that she wrote out by the wish of her confessor.

"Then my grandmother--ah! well, that is too long a story. She was a
Frenchwoman--we have some of her books in my study. She never got on with
England and English people--and at last, after her husband's death, she
never went outside the house and park. My father owed much of his shyness
and oddity to her bringing up. When she felt herself dying she went over
to her family to die at Nantes. She is buried there; and my father was
sent to the Jesuit school at Nantes for a long time. Then my mother--But
I mustn't bore you with these family tales."

He turned to look at his listener. Laura was by this time half
embarrassed, half touched.

"I should like to hear about your mother," she said rather stiffly.

"You may talk to me if you like, but don't, pray, presume upon it!"--that
was what her manner said.

Helbeck smiled a little, unseen, under his black moustache.

"My mother was a great lover of books--the only Helbeck, I think, that
ever read anything. She was a friend and correspondent of Cardinal
Wiseman's--and she tried to make a family history out of the papers here.
But in her later years she was twisted and crippled by rheumatic
gout--her poor fingers could not turn the pages. I used to help her
sometimes; but we none of us shared her tastes. She was a very happy
person, however."

Happy! Why? Laura felt a fresh prick of irritation as he paused. Was she
never to escape--not even here, in the April sun, beside the river bank!
For, of course, what all this meant was that the really virtuous and
admirable woman does not roam the world in search of art and friendship;
she makes herself happy at home with religion and rheumatic gout.

But Helbeck resumed. And instantly it struck her that he had dropped a
sentence, and was taking up the thread further on.

"But there was no priest in the house then, for the Society could not
spare us one; and very few services in the chapel. Through all her young
days nothing could be poorer or raggeder than English Catholicism. There
was no church at Whinthorpe. Sunday after Sunday my father used to read
the prayers in the chapel, which was half a lumber-room. I often think no
Dissent could have been barer; but we heard Mass when we could, and that
was enough for us. One of the priests from Stonyhurst came when she died.
This is her little missal."

He raised it from the grass--a small volume bound in faded morocco--but
he did not offer to show it to Miss Fountain, and she felt no inclination
to ask for it.

"Why did they live so much alone?" she asked him, with a little frown. "I
suppose there were always neighbours?"

He shook his head.

"A difference that has law and education besides religion behind it, goes
deep. Times are changed, but it goes deep still."

There was a pause. Then she looked at him with a whimsical lifting of her
brows.

"Bannisdale was not amusing?" she said.

He laughed good-humouredly. "Not for a woman, certainly. For a man, yes.
There was plenty of rough sport and card-playing, and a good deal of
drinking. The men were full of character, often full of ability. But
there was no outlet--and a wretched education. My great-grandfather might
have been saved by a commission in the army. But the law forbade it him.
So they lived to themselves and by themselves; they didn't choose to live
with their Protestant neighbours--who had made them outlaws and
inferiors! And, of course, they sank in manners and refinement. You may
see the results in all the minor Catholic families to this day--that is,
the old families. The few great houses that remained faithful escaped
many of the drawbacks of the position. The smaller ones suffered, and
succumbed. But they had their compensations!"

As he spoke he rose from the grass, and the dogs, springing up, barked
joyously about him.

"Augustina will be waiting dinner for us, I think."

Laura, who had meant to stay behind, saw that she was expected to walk
home with him. She rose unwillingly, and moved on beside him.

"Their compensations?" That meant the Mass and all the rest of this
tyrannous clinging religion. What did it honestly mean to Mr. Helbeck--to
anybody? She remembered her father's rough laugh. "There are twelve
hundred men, my dear, belonging to the Athenaeum Club. I give you the
bishops. After them, what do you suppose religion has to say to the rest
of the twelve hundred? How many of them ever give a thought to it?"

She raised her eyes, furtively, to Helbeck's face. In spite of its
melancholy lines, she had lately begun to see that its fundamental
expression was a contented one. That, no doubt, came from the
"compensations." But to-day there was more. She was positively startled
by his look of happiness as he strode silently along beside her. It was
all the more striking because of the plain traces left upon him by Lenten
fatigue and "mortification."

It was Easter day, and she supposed he had come from Communion.

A little shiver passed through her, caused by the recollection of words
she had heard, acts of which she had been a witness, in the chapel during
the foregoing week--words and acts of emotion, of abandonment--love
crying to love. A momentary thirst seized her--an instant's sense of
privation, of longing, gone almost as soon as it had come.

Helbeck turned to her.

"So this dance you are going to is on Thursday?" he said pleasantly.

She came to herself in a moment.

"Yes, on Thursday, at eight. I shall go early. I have engaged a fly to
take me to the farm--thank you!--and my cousins will see me home. I am
obliged to you for the key. It will save my giving any trouble."

"If you did we should not grudge it," he said quietly.

She was silent for a few more steps, then she said:

"I quite understand, Mr. Helbeck, that you do not approve of my going.
But I must judge for myself. The Masons are my own people. I am sorry
they should have---- Well--I don't understand--but it seems you have
reason to think badly of them."

"Not of _them_," he said with emphasis.

"Of my cousin Hubert, then?"

He made no answer. She coloured angrily, then broke out, her words
tumbling childishly over one another:

"There are a great many things said of Hubert that I don't believe he
deserves! He has a great many good tastes--his music is wonderful. At any
rate, he is my cousin; they are papa's only relations in the world. He
would have been kind to Hubert; and he would have despised me if I turned
my back on them because I was staying in a grand house with grand
people!"

"Grand people!" said Helbeck, raising his eyebrows. "But I am sorry I led
you to say these things, Miss Fountain. Excuse me--may I open this gate
for you?"

She reached her own room as quickly as possible, and dropped upon the
chair beside her dressing-table in a whirl of angry feeling. A small and
heated face looked out upon her from the glass. But after the first
instinctive moment she took no notice of it. With the mind's eye she
still saw the figure she had just parted from, the noble poise of the
head, thrown back on the broad shoulders, the black and greys of the
hair, the clear penetrating glance--all the slight signs of age and
austerity that had begun to filch away the Squire's youth. It was at
least ten minutes before she could free herself enough from the unwelcome
memories of her walk to find a vindictive pleasure in running hastily to
look at her one white dress--all she had to wear at the Browhead dance.

* * * * *

On Thursday afternoon Helbeck was fishing in the park. The sea-trout were
coming up, the day was soft, and he had done well. But just as the
evening rise was beginning he put up his rod and went home. Father
Leadham had taken his departure. Augustina, Miss Fountain, and he were
again alone in the house.

He went into his study, and left the door open, while he busied himself
with some writing.

Presently Augustina put her head in. She looked dishevelled, and rather
pinker than usual, as always happened when there was the smallest
disturbance of her routine.

"Laura has just gone up to dress, Alan. Is it fine?"

"There is no rain," he said, without turning his head. "Don't shut the
door, please. This fire is oppressive."

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