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Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.

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




He stood still, and with an effort of iron resolution put from him the
fancies that were thronging on the brain. If it were possible for him to
conquer her, conceivable that he might win her--such a dream was
forbidden to him, Alan Helbeck, a thousandfold! Such a marriage would be
the destruction of innumerable schemes for the good of the Church, for
the perfecting of his own life. It would be the betrayal of great trusts,
the abandonment of great opportunities. "My life would centre in her. She
would come first--the Church second. Her nature would work on mine--not
mine on hers. Could I ever speak to her even of what I believe?--the very
alphabet of it is unknown to her. I shrink from proselytism. God forgive
me!--it is her wild pagan self that I love--that I desire----"

The blast of human longing, human pain, was hard to meet--hard to subdue.
But the Catholic fought--and conquered.

"I am not my own--I have taken tasks upon me that no honest man could
betray. There are vows on me also, that bind me specially to our Lord--to
his Church. The Church frowns on such a love--such marriages. She does
not forbid them--but they pain her heart. I have accepted her judgment
till now, without difficulty, without conflict. Now to obey is hard. But
I can obey--we are not asked impossibilities."

He walked to the crucifix, and threw himself down before it. A midnight
stillness brooded over the house.

* * * * *

But far away, in an upper room, Laura Fountain had cried herself to
sleep--only to wake again and again, with the tears flooding her cheeks.
Was it merely a disagreeable and exciting scene she had gone through?
What was this new invasion of her life?--this new presence to the inward
eye of a form and look that at once drew her and repulsed her. A hundred
alien forces were threatening and pressing upon her--and out from the
very heart of them came this strange drawing--this magnetism--this
troubling misery.

To be prisoned in Bannisdale--under Mr. Helbeck's roof--for months and
months longer--this thought was maddening to her.

But when she imagined herself free to go--and far away once more from
this old and melancholy house--among congenial friends and scenes--she
was no happier than before. A little moan of anger and pain came, that
she stifled against her pillow, calling passionately on the sleep that
would, that must, chase all these phantoms of fatigue or excitement--and
give her back her old free self.




BOOK III




CHAPTER I

"We shall get there in capital time--that's nice!" said Polly Mason,
putting down the little railway guide she had just purchased at Marsland
Station, with a general rustle of satisfaction.

Polly indeed shone with good temper and new clothes. Her fringe--even
halved--was prodigious. Her cheap lemon-coloured gloves were cracking on
her large hands; and round her beflowered hat she had tied clouds on
clouds of white tulle, which to some extent softened the tans and
crimsons of her complexion. Her dress was of a stiff white cotton stuff,
that fell into the most startling folds and angles; and at every movement
of it, the starch rattled.

On the opposite seat of the railway carriage was Laura Fountain--an open
book upon her knee that she was not reading. She made no answer, however,
to Polly's remark; the impression left by her attitude was that she took
no interest in it. Miss Fountain herself hardly seemed to have profited
much by that Westmoreland air whereof the qualities were to do so much
for Augustina. It was now June, the end of June, and Laura was certainly
paler, less blooming, than she had been in March. She seemed more
conscious; she was certainly less radiant. Whether her prettiness had
gained by the slight change, might be debated. Polly's eyes, indeed, as
they sped along, paid her cousin one long covetous tribute. The
difficulty that she always had in putting on her own clothes, and
softening her own physical points, made her the more conscious of Laura's
delicate ease, of all the yielding and graceful lines into which the
little black and white muslin frock fell so readily, of all that natural
kinship between Laura and her hats, Laura and her gloves, which poor
Polly fully perceived, knowing well and sadly that she herself could
never attain to it.

Nevertheless--pretty, Miss Fountain might be; elegant she certainly was;
but Polly did not find her the best of companions for a festal day. They
were going to Froswick--the big town on the coast--to meet Hubert and
another young man, one Mr. Seaton, foreman in a large engineering
concern, whose name Polly had not been able to mention without bridling,
for some time past.

It was more than a fortnight since the sister, driven by Hubert's
incessant letters, had proposed to Laura that they two should spend a
summer day at Froswick and see the great steel works on which the fame of
that place depended, escorted and entertained by the two young men. Laura
at first had turned a deaf ear. Then all at once--a very flare of
eagerness and acceptance!--a sudden choosing of day and train. And now
that they were actually on their way, with everything arranged, and a
glorious June sun above their heads, Laura was so silent, so reluctant,
so irritable--you might have thought----

Well!--Polly really did not know what to think. She was not quite happy
herself. From time to time, as her look dwelt on Laura, she was conscious
of certain guilty reserves and concealments in her own breast. She wished
Hubert had more sense--she hoped to goodness it would all go off nicely!
But of course it would. Polly was an optimist and took all things simply.
Her anxieties for Laura did not long resist the mere pleasure of the
journey and the trip, the flatteries of expectation. What a very
respectable and, on the whole, good-looking young man was Mr. Seaton!
Polly had met him first at the Browhead dance; so that what was a mere
black and ugly spot in Laura's memory shone rosy-red in her cousin's.

Meanwhile Laura, mainly to avoid Polly's conversation, was looking hard
out of window. They were running along the southern shore of a great
estuary. Behind the loitering train rose the hills they had just left,
the hills that sheltered the stream and the woods of Bannisdale. That
rich, dark patch beneath the further brow was the wood in which the house
stood. To the north, across the bay, ran the line of high mountains, a
dim paradise of sunny slopes and steeps, under the keenest and brightest
of skies--blue ramparts from which the gently opening valleys flowed
downwards, one beside the other, to the estuary and the sea.

Not that the great plunging sea itself was much to be seen as yet.
Immediately beyond the railway line stretched leagues of firm reddish
sand, pierced by the innumerable channels of the Greet. The sun lay hot
and dazzling on the wide flat surfaces, on the flocks of gulls, on the
pools of clear water. The window was open, and through the June heat
swept a sharp, salt breath. Laura, however, felt none of the physical
exhilaration that as a rule overflowed in her so readily. Was it because
the Bannisdale Woods were still visible? What made the significance of
that dark patch to the girl's restless eye? She came back to it again and
again. It was like a flag, round which a hundred warring thoughts had
come to gather.

Why?

Were not she and Mr. Helbeck on the best of terms? Was not Augustina
quite pleased--quite content? "I always knew, my dear Laura, that you and
Alan would get on, in time. Why, anyone could get on with Alan--he's so
kind!" When these things were said, Laura generally laughed. She did not
remind Mrs. Fountain that she, at one time of her existence, had not
found it particularly easy and simple to "get on with Alan"; but the girl
did once allow herself the retort--"It's not so easy to quarrel, is it,
when you don't see a person from week's end to week's end?" "Week's end
to week's end?" Mrs. Fountain repeated vaguely. "Yes--Alan is away a
great deal--people trust him so much--he has so much business."

Laura was of opinion that his first business might very well have been to
see a little more of his widowed sister! She and Augustina spent days and
days alone, while Mr. Helbeck pursued the affairs of the Church. One
precious attempt indeed had been made to break the dulness of Bannisdale.
Miss Fountain's cheeks burned when she thought of it. There had been an
afternoon party! though Augustina's widowhood was barely a year old! Mrs.
Fountain had been sent about the country delivering notes and cards. And
the result:--oh, such a party!--such an interminable afternoon! Where had
the people come from?--who were they? If Polly, full of curiosity, asked
for some details, Laura would toss her head and reply that she knew
nothing at all about it; that Mrs. Denton had provided bad tea and worse
cakes, and the guests had "filled their chairs," and there was nothing
else to say. Mr. Helbeck's shyness and efforts; the glances of appeal he
threw every now and then towards his sister; his evident depression when
the thing was done--these things were not told to Polly. There was a
place for them in the girl's sore mind; but they did not come to speech.
Anyway she believed--nay, was quite sure--that Bannisdale would not be so
tried a second time. For whose benefit was it done?--whose!

One evening----

As the train crossed the bridge of the estuary, from one stretch of hot
sand to another, Laura, staring at the view, saw really nothing but an
image of the mind, felt nothing except what came through the magic of
memory.

The hall of Bannisdale, with the lingering daylight of the north still
coming in at ten o'clock through the uncurtained oriel windows--herself
at the piano, Augustina on the settle--a scent of night and flowers
spreading through the dim place from the open windows of the drawing-room
beyond. One candle is beside her--and there are strange glints of
moonlight here and there on the panelling. A tall figure enters from the
chapel passage. Augustina makes room on the settle--the Squire leans back
and listens. And the girl at the piano plays; the stillness and the night
seem to lay releasing hands upon her; bonds that have been stifling and
cramping the soul break down; she plays with all her self, as she might
have talked or wept to a friend--to her father.... And at last, in a
pause, the Squire puts a new candle beside her, and his deep shy voice
commends her, asks her to go on playing. Afterwards, there is a pleasant
and gentle talk for half an hour--Augustina can hardly be made to go to
bed--and when at last she rises, the girl's small hand slips into the
man's, is lost there, feels a new lingering touch, from which both
withdraw in almost equal haste. And the night, for the girl, is broken
with restlessness, with wild efforts to draw the old fetters tight again,
to clamp and prison something that flutters--that struggles.

Then next morning, there is an empty chair at the breakfast table. "The
Squire left early on business." Without any warning--any courteous
message? One evening at home, after a long absence, and then--off again!
A good Catholic, it seems, lives in the train, and makes himself the
catspaw of all who wish to use him for their own ends!

... As to that old peasant, Scarsbrook, what could be more arbitrary,
more absurd, than Mr. Helbeck's behaviour? The matter turns out to be
serious. Fright blanches the old fellow's beard and hair; he takes to his
bed, and the doctor talks of severe "nervous shock"--very serious, often
deadly, at the patient's age. Why not confess everything at once, set
things straight, free the poor shaken mind from its oppression? Who's
afraid?--what harm is there in an after-dinner stroll?

But there!--truth apparently is what no one wants, what no one will
have--least of all, Mr. Helbeck. She sees a meeting in the park, under
the oaks--the same tall man and the girl--the girl bound impetuously for
confession, and the soothing of old Scarsbrook's terrors once for
all--the man standing in the way, as tough and prickly as one of his own
hawthorns. Courtesy, of course! there is no one can make courtesy so
galling; and then such a shooting out of will and personality, so sudden,
so volcanic a heat of remonstrance! And a woman is such a poor ill-strung
creature, even the boldest of them! She yields when she should have
pressed forward--goes home to rage, when she should have stayed to
wrestle.

Afterwards, another absence--the old house silent as the grave--and
Augustina so fretful, so wearisome! But she is better, much better. How
unscrupulous are doctors, and those other persons who make them say
exactly what suits the moment!

The dulness seems to grow with the June heat. Soon it becomes
intolerable. Nobody comes, nobody speaks; no mind offers itself to yours
for confidence and sympathy. Well, but change and excitement of some sort
one _must_ have!--who is to blame, if you get it where you can?

A day in Froswick with Hubert Mason? Yes--why not? Polly proposes it--has
proposed it once or twice before to no purpose. For two months now the
young man has been in training. Polly writes to him often; Laura
sometimes wonders whether the cross-examinations through which Polly puts
her may not partly be for Hubert's benefit. She herself has written twice
to him in answer to some half-dozen letters, has corrected his song for
him--has played altogether a very moral and sisterly part. Is the youth
really in love? Perhaps. Will it do him any harm?

Augustina of course dislikes the prospect of the Froswick day. But,
really, Augustina must put up with it! The Reverend Mother will come for
the afternoon, and keep her company. Such civility of late on the part of
all the Catholic friends of Bannisdale towards Miss Fountain!--a civility
always on the watch, week by week, day by day--that never yields itself
for an instant, has never a human impulse, an unguarded tone. Father
Leadham is there one day--he makes a point of talking with Miss Fountain.
He leads the conversation to Cambridge, to her father--his keen glance
upon her all the time, the hidden life of the convert and the mystic
leaping every now and then to the surface, and driven down again by a
will that makes itself felt--even by so cool a listener--as a living
tyrannous thing, developed out of all proportion to, nay at the cruel
expense of, the rest of the personality. Yet it is no will of the man's
own--it is the will of his order, of his faith. And why these repeated
stray references to Bannisdale--to its owner--to the owner's goings and
comings? They are hardly questions, but they might easily have done the
work of questions had the person addressed been willing. Laura laughs to
think of it.

Ah! well--but discretion to-day, discretion to-morrow, discretion always,
is not the most amusing of diets. How dumb, how tame, has she become!
There is no one to fight with, nothing whereon to let loose the
sharp-edged words and sayings that lie so close behind the girl's shut
lips. How amazing that one should positively miss those fuller activities
in the chapel that depend on the Squire's presence! Father Bowles says
Mass there twice a week; the light still burns before the altar; several
times a day Augustina disappears within the heavy doors. But when Mr.
Helbeck is at home, the place becomes, as it were, the strong heart of
the house. It beats through the whole organism; so that no one can ignore
or forget it.

What is it that makes the difference when he returns? Unwillingly, the
mind shapes its reply. A sense of unity and law comes back into the
house--a hidden dignity and poetry. The Squire's black head carries with
it stern reminders, reminders that challenge or provoke; but "he nothing
common does nor mean," and smaller mortals, as the weeks go by, begin to
feel their hot angers and criticisms driven back upon themselves, to
realise the strange persistency and force of the religious life.

Inhuman force! But force of any kind tends to draw, to conquer. More than
once Laura sees herself at night, almost on the steps of the chapel, in
the dark shadows of the passage--following Augustina. But she has never
yet mounted the steps--never passed the door. Once or twice she has
angrily snatched herself from listening to the distant voice.

... Mr. Helbeck makes very little comment on the Froswick plan. One swift
involuntary look at breakfast, as who might say--"Our compact?" But there
was no compact. And go she will.

And at last all opposition clears away. It must be Mr. Helbeck who has
silenced Augustina--for even she complains no more. Trains are looked
out; arrangements are made to fetch Polly from a half-way village; a fly
is ordered to meet the 9.10 train at night. Why does one feel a culprit
all through? Absurdity! Is one to be mewed up all one's life, to throw
over all fun and frolic at Mr. Helbeck's bidding--Mr. Helbeck, who now
scarcely sets foot in Bannisdale, who seems to have turned his back upon
his own house, since that precise moment when his sister and her
stepdaughter came to inhabit it? Never till this year was he restless in
this way--so says Mrs. Denton, whose temper grows shorter and shorter.

Oh--as to fun and frolic! The girl yawns as she looks out of window. What
a long hot day it is going to be--and how foolish are all expeditions,
all formal pleasures! 9.10 at Marsland--about seven, she supposes, at
Froswick? Already her thoughts are busy, hungrily busy with the evening,
and the return.

* * * * *

The train sped along. They passed a little watering-place under the steep
wooded hills--a furnace of sun on this hot June day, in winter a soft and
sheltered refuge from the north. Further on rose the ruins of a great
Cistercian abbey, great ribs and arches of red sandstone, that still, in
ruin, made the soul and beauty of a quiet valley; then a few busy towns
with mills and factories, the fringe of that industrial district which
lies on the southern and western border of the Lake Country; more wide
valleys sweeping back into blue mountains; a wealth of June leaf and
blossoming tree; and at last docks and buildings, warehouses and "works,"
a network of spreading railway lines, and all the other signs of an
important and growing town. The train stopped amid a crowd, and Polly
hurried to the door.

"Why, Hubert!--Mr. Seaton!--Here we are!"

She beckoned wildly, and not a few passers-by turned to look at the
nodding clouds of tulle.

"We shall find them, Polly--don't shout," said Laura behind her, in some
disgust.

Shout and beckon, however, Polly did and would, till the two young men
were finally secured.

"Why, Hubert, you never towd me what a big place 'twas," said Polly
joyously. "Lor, Mr. Seaton, doant fash yoursel. This is Miss Fountain--my
cousin. You'll remember her, I knaw."

Mr. Seaton began a polite and stilted speech while possessing himself of
Polly's shawl and bag. He was a very superior young man of the clerk or
foreman type, somewhat ill put together at the waist, with a flat back to
his head, and a cadaverous countenance. Laura gave him a rapid look. But
her chief curiosity was for Hubert. And at her first glance she saw the
signs of that strong and silent process perpetually going on amongst us
that tames the countryman to the life and habits of the town. It was only
a couple of months since the young athlete from the fells had been
brought within its sway, and already the marks of it were evident in
dress, speech, and manner. The dialect was almost gone; the black Sunday
coat was of the most fashionable cut that Froswick could provide; and as
they walked along, Laura detected more than once in the downcast eyes of
her companion, a stealthy anxiety as to the knees of his new grey
trousers. So far the change was not an embellishment. The first loss of
freedom and rough strength is never that. But it roused the girl's
notice, and a sort of secret sympathy. She too had felt the curb of an
alien life!--she could almost have held out her hand to him as to a
comrade in captivity.

Outside the station, to Laura's surprise--considering the object of the
expedition--Hubert made a sign to his sister, and they two dropped behind
a little.

"What's the matter with her?" said Hubert abruptly, as soon as he judged
that they were out of hearing of the couple in front.

"Who do you mean? Laura? Why, she's well enoof!"

"Then she don't look it. She's fretting. What's wrong with her?"

As Hubert looked down upon his sister, Polly was startled by the
impatient annoyance of look and manner. And how red-rimmed and weary were
the lad's eyes! You might have thought he had not slept for a week.
Polly's mind ran through a series of conjectures; and she broke out with
Westmoreland plainness--

"Hubert, I do wish tha wouldn't be sich a fool! I've towd tha so times
and times."

"Aye, and you may tell me so till kingdom come--I shan't mind you," he
said doggedly. "There's something between her and the Squire, I know
there is. I know it by the look of her."

Polly laughed.

"How you jump! I tell tha she never says a word aboot him."

Hubert looked moodily at Laura's little figure in front.

"All the more reason!" he said between his teeth. "She'd talk about him
when she first came. But I'll find out--never fear."

"For goodness' sake, Hubert, let her be!" said Polly, entreating. "Sich
wild stuff as thoo's been writin me! Yan might ha thowt yo'd be fer
cuttin yor throat, if yo' didn't get her doon here.--What art tha thinkin
of, lad? She'll never marry tha! She doan't belong to us--and there's noa
undoin it."

Hubert made no reply, but unconsciously his muscular frame took a
passionate rigidity; his face became set and obstinate.

"Well, you keep watch," he said. "You'll see--I'll make it worth your
while."

Polly looked up--half laughing. She understood his reference to herself
and her new sweetheart. Hubert would play her game if she would play his.
Well--she had no objection whatever to help him to the sight of Laura
when she could. Polly's moral sense was not over-delicate, and as to the
upshot and issues of things, her imagination moved but slowly. She did
not like to let herself think of what might have been Hubert's relations
to women--to one or two wild girls about Whinthorpe for instance. But
Laura--Laura who was so much their social better, whose manners and
self-possession awed them both, what smallest harm could ever come to her
from any act or word of Hubert's? For this rustic Westmoreland girl,
Laura Fountain stood on a pedestal robed and sceptred like a little
queen. Hubert was a fool to fret himself--a fool to go courting some one
too high for him. What else was there to say or think about it?

At the next street corner Laura made a resolute stop. Polly should not
any longer be defrauded of her Mr. Seaton. Besides she, Laura, wished to
talk to Hubert. Mr. Beaton's long words, and way of mouthing his highly
correct phrases, had already seemed to take the savour out of the
morning.

When the exchange was made--Mr. Seaton alas! showing less eagerness than
might have been expected--Laura quietly examined her companion. It seemed
to her that he was taller than ever; surely she was not much higher than
his elbow! Hubert, conscious that he was being scrutinised, turned red,
looked away, coughed, and apparently could find nothing to say.

"Well--how are you getting on?" said the light voice, sending its
vibration through all the man's strong frame.

"I suppose I'm getting on all right," he said, switching at the railings
beside the road with his stick.

"What sort of work do you do?"

He gave her a stumbling account, from which she gathered that he was for
the time being the factotum of an office, sent on everybody's errands,
and made responsible for everybody's shortcomings.

She threw him a glance of pity. This young Hercules, with his open-air
traditions, and his athlete's triumphs behind him, turned into the butt
and underling of half a dozen clerks in a stuffy office!

"I don't mind," he said hastily. "All the others paid for their places; I
didn't pay for mine. I'll be even with them all some day. It was the
chance I wanted, and my uncle gives me a lift now and then. It was to
please him they gave me the berth; he's worth thousands and thousands a
year to them!"

And he launched into a boasting account of the importance and abilities
of his uncle, Daniel Mason, who was now managing director of the great
shipbuilding yard into which Hubert had been taken, as a favour to his
kinsman.

"He began at the bottom, same as me--only he was younger than me," said
Hubert, "so he had the pull. But you'll see, I'll work up. I've learnt a
lot since I've been here. The classes at the Institute--well, they're
fine!"

Laura showed an astonished glance. New sides of the lad seemed to be
revealing themselves.

She inquired after his music. But he declared he was too busy to think of
it. By-and-by in the winter he would have lessons. There was a violin
class at the Institute--perhaps he'd join that. Then abruptly, staring
down upon her with his wide blue eyes--

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