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Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.

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




Helbeck, however, did not enlighten her. He talked indeed with no
freedom, merely to pass the time.

She perfectly recognised that he was not at ease with her, and she
hurried her meal, in spite of her very frank hunger, that she might set
him free. But, as she was putting down her coffee-cup for the last time,
she suddenly said:

"It's a very good air here, isn't it, Mr. Helbeck?"

"I believe so," he replied, in some surprise. "It's a mixture of the sea
and the mountains. Everybody here--most of the poor people--live to a
great age."

"That's all right! Then Augustina will soon get strong here. She can't do
without me yet--but you know, of course--I have decided--about myself?"

Somehow, as she looked across to her host, her little figure, in its
plain white dress and black ribbons, expressed a curious tension. "She
wants to make it very plain to me," thought Helbeck, "that if she comes
here as my guest, it is only as a favour, to look after my sister."

Aloud he said:

"Augustina told me she could not hope to keep you for long."

"No!" said the girl sharply. "No! I must take up a profession. I have a
little money, you know, from papa. I shall go to Cambridge, or to London,
perhaps to live with a friend. Oh! you darling!--you _darling_!"

Helbeck opened his eyes in amazement. Miss Fountain had sprung from her
seat, and thrown herself on her knees beside his old collie Bruno. Her
arms were round the dog's neck, and she was pressing her cheek against
his brown nose. Perhaps she caught her host's look of astonishment, for
she rose at once in a flush of some feeling she tried to put down, and
said, still holding the dog's head against her dress:

"I didn't know you had a dog like this. It's so like ours--you see--like
papa's. I had to give ours away when we left Folkestone. You dear, dear
thing!"--(the caressing intensity in the girl's young voice made Helbeck
shrink and turn away)--"now you won't kill my Fricka, will you? She's
curled up, such a delicious black ball, on my bed; you couldn't--you
couldn't have the heart! I'll take you up and introduce you--I'll do
everything proper!"

The dog looked up at her, with its soft, quiet eyes, as though it weighed
her pleadings.

"There," she said triumphantly. "It's all right--he winked. Come along,
my dear, and let's make real friends."

And she led the dog into the hall, Helbeck ceremoniously opening the door
for her.

She sat herself down in the oak settle beside the hall fire, where for
some minutes she occupied herself entirely with the dog, talking a sort
of baby language to him that left Helbeck absolutely dumb. When she
raised her head, she flung, dartlike, another question at her host.

"Have you many neighbours, Mr. Helbeck?"

Her voice startled his look away from her.

"Not many," he said, hesitating. "And I know little of those there are."

"Indeed! Don't you like--society?"

He laughed with some embarrassment. "I don't get much of it," he said
simply.

"Don't you? What a pity!--isn't it, Bruno? I like society
dreadfully,--dances, theatres, parties,--all sorts of things. Or I
did--once."

She paused and stared at Helbeck. He did not speak, however. She sat up
very straight and pushed the dog from her. "By the way," she said, in a
shrill voice, "there are my cousins, the Masons. How far are they?"

"About seven miles."

"Quite up in the mountains, isn't it?"

Helbeck assented.

"Oh! I shall go there at once, I shall go tomorrow," said the girl, with
emphasis, resting her small chin lightly on the head of the dog, while
she fixed her eyes--her hostile eyes--upon her host.

Helbeck made no answer. He went to fetch another log for the fire.

"Why doesn't he say something about them?" she thought angrily. "Why
doesn't he say something about papa?--about his illness?--ask me any
questions? He may have hated him, but it would be only decent. He is a
very grand, imposing person, I suppose, with his melancholy airs, and his
family. Papa was worth a hundred of him! Oh! past a quarter to ten? Time
to go, and let him have his prayers to himself. Augustina told me ten."

She sprang up, and stiffly held out her hand.

"Good-night, Mr. Helbeck. I ought to go to Augustina and settle her for
the night. To-morrow I should like to tell you what the doctor said about
her; she is not strong at all. What time do you breakfast?"

"Half-past eight. But, of course----"

"Oh, no! of course Augustina won't come down! I will carry her up her
tray myself. Good-night."

Helbeck touched her hand. But as she turned away, he followed her a few
steps irresolutely, and then said: "Miss Fountain,"--she looked round in
surprise,--"I should like you to understand that everything that can be
done in this poor house for my sister's comfort, and yours, I should wish
done. My resources are not great, but my will is good."

He raised his eyelids, and she saw the eyes beneath, full, for the first
time,--eyes grey like her own, but far darker and profounder. She felt a
momentary flutter, perhaps of compunction. Then she thanked him and went
her way.

* * * * *

When she had made her stepmother comfortable for the night, Laura
Fountain went back to her room, shielding her candle with difficulty from
the gusts that seemed to tear along the dark passages of the old house.
The March rawness made her shiver, and she looked shrinkingly into the
gloom before her, as she paused outside her own door. There, at the end
of the passage, lay the old tower; so Mrs. Denton had told her. The
thought of all the locked and empty rooms in it,--dark, cold
spaces,--haunted perhaps by strange sounds and presences of the past,
seemed to let loose upon her all at once a little whirlwind of fear. She
hurried into her room, and was just setting down her candle before
turning to lock her door, when a sound from the distant hall caught her
ear.

A deep monotonous sound, rising and falling at regular intervals, Mr.
Helbeck reading prayers, with the two maids, who represented the only
service of the house.

Laura lingered with her hand on the door. In the silence of the ancient
house, there was something touching in the sound, a kind of appeal. But
it was an appeal which, in the girl's mind, passed instantly into
reaction. She locked the door, and turned away, breathing fast as though
under some excitement.

The tears, long held down, were rising, and the room, where a large wood
fire was burning,--wood was the only provision of which there was a
plenty at Bannisdale,--seemed to her suddenly stifling. She went to the
casement window and threw it open. A rush of mild wind came through, and
with it, the roar of the swollen river.

The girl leant forward, bathing her hot face in the wild air. There was a
dark mist of trees below her, trees tossed by the wind; then, far down, a
ray of moonlight on water; beyond, a fell-side, clear a moment beneath a
sky of sweeping cloud; and last of all, highest of all, amid the clouds,
a dim radiance, intermittent and yet steady, like the radiance of moonlit
snow.

A strange nobility and freedom breathed from the wide scene; from its
mere depth below her; from the spacious curve of the river, the mountains
half shown, half hidden, the great race of the clouds, the fresh beating
of the wind. The north spoke to her and the mountains. It was like the
rush of something passionate and straining through her girlish sense,
intensifying all that was already there. What was this thirst, this
yearning, this physical anguish of pity that crept back upon her in all
the pauses of the day and night?

It was nine months since she had lost her father, but all the scenes of
his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often
sheer incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise
of the breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the
doctor, the gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and
phantoms of the past,--that the house was empty, the bed sold, the
patient gone. Oh! the clinging of the thin hand round her own, the
piteousness of suffering--of failure! Poor, poor papa!--he would not say,
even to comfort her, that they would meet again. He had not believed it,
and so she must not.

No, and she would not! She raised her head fiercely and dried her tears.
Only, why was she here, in the house of a man who had never spoken to her
father--his brother-in-law--for thirteen years; who had made his sister
feel that her marriage had been a disgrace; who was all the time, no
doubt, cherishing such thoughts in that black, proud head of his, while
she, her father's daughter, was sitting opposite to him?

"How am I ever going to bear it--all these months?" she asked herself.




CHAPTER II

But the causes which had brought Laura Fountain to Bannisdale were very
simple. It had all come about in the most natural inevitable way.

When Laura was eight years old--nearly thirteen years before this
date--her father, then a widower with one child, had fallen in with and
married Alan Helbeck's sister. At the time of their first meeting with
the little Catholic spinster, Stephen Fountain and his child were
spending part of the Cambridge vacation at a village on the Cumberland
coast where a fine air could be combined with cheap lodgings. Fountain
himself was from the North Country. His grandfather had been a small
Lancashire yeoman, and Stephen Fountain had an inbred liking for the
fells, the farmhouses, and even the rain of his native district. Before
descending to the sea, he and his child had spent a couple of days with
his cousin by marriage, James Mason, in the lonely stone house among the
hills, which had belonged to the family since the Revolution. He left it
gladly, however, for the farm life seemed to him much harder and more
squalid than he had remembered it to be, and he disliked James Mason's
wife. As he and Laura walked down the long, rough track connecting the
farm with the main road on the day of their departure, Stephen Fountain
whistled so loud and merrily that the skipping child beside him looked at
him with astonishment.

It was his way no doubt of thanking Providence for the happy chance that
had sent his father to a small local government post at Newcastle, and
himself to a grammar school with openings on the University. Yet as a
rule he thought himself anything but a successful man. He held a
lectureship at Cambridge in an obscure scientific subject; and was in his
way both learned and diligent. But he had few pupils, and had never cared
to have them. They interfered with his own research, and he had the
passionate scorn for popularity which grows up naturally in those who
have no power with the crowd. His religious opinions, or rather the
manner in which he chose to express them, divided him from many good men.
He was poor, and he hated his poverty. A rather imprudent marriage had
turned out neither particularly well nor particularly ill. His wife had
some beauty, however, and there was hardly time for disillusion. She died
when Laura was still a tottering baby, and Stephen had missed her sorely
for a while. Since her death he had grown to be a very lonely man,
silently discontented with himself and sourly critical of his neighbours.
Yet all the same he thanked God that he was not his cousin James.

Potter's Beach as a watering-place was neither beautiful nor amusing.
Laura was happy there, but that said nothing. All her childhood through,
she had the most surprising gift for happiness. From morning till night
she lived in a flutter of delicious nothings. Unless he watched her
closely, Stephen Fountain could not tell for the life of him what she was
about all day. But he saw that she was endlessly about something; her
little hands and legs never rested; she dug, bathed, dabbled, raced,
kissed, ate, slept, in one happy bustle, which never slackened except for
the hours when she lay rosy and still in her bed. And even then the
pretty mouth was still eagerly open, as though sleep had just breathed
upon its chatter for a few charmed moments, and "the joy within" was
already breaking from the spell.

Stephen Fountain adored her, but his affections were never enough for
him. In spite of the child's spirits he himself found Potter's Beach a
desolation, all the more that he was cut off from his books for a time by
doctor's orders and his own common sense. Suddenly, as he took his daily
walk over the sands with Laura, he began to notice a thin lady in black,
sitting alone under a bank of sea-thistles, and generally struggling with
an umbrella which she had put up to shelter herself and her book from a
prevailing and boisterous wind. Sometimes when he passed her in the
little street, he caught a glimpse of timid eyes, or he saw and pitied
the slight involuntary jerk of the head and shoulders, which seemed to
tell of nervous delicacy. Presently they made friends, and he found her
lonely and discontented like himself. She was a Catholic, he discovered;
but her Catholicism was not that of the convert, but of an old inherited
sort which sat easily enough on a light nature. Then, to his
astonishment, it appeared that she lived with a brother at an old house
in North Lancashire--a well-known and even, in its degree, famous
house--which lay not seven miles distant from his grandfather's little
property, and had been quite familiar to him by repute, and even by sight
as a child. When he was a small lad staying at Browhead Farm, he had once
or twice found his way to the Greet, and had strayed along its course
through Bannisdale Park. Once even, when he was in the act of fishing a
particular pool where the trout were rising in a manner to tempt a very
archangel, he had been seized and his primitive rod broken over his
shoulder by an old man whom he believed to have been the owner, Mr.
Helbeck himself,--a magnificent white-haired person, about whom tales ran
freely in the country-side.

So this little, shabby old maid was a Helbeck of Bannisdale! As he looked
at her, Fountain could not help thinking with a hidden amusement of all
the awesome prestige the name had once carried with it for his boyish
ear. Thirty years back, what a gulf had seemed to yawn between the
yeoman's grandson and the lofty owners of that stern and ancient house
upon the Greet! And now, how glad was old Helbeck's daughter to sit or
walk with him and his child!--and how plain it grew, as the weeks passed
on, that if he, Stephen Fountain, willed it, she would make no difficulty
at all about a much longer companionship! Fountain held himself to be the
most convinced of democrats, a man who had a reasoned right to his
Radical opinions that commoner folk must do without. Nevertheless, his
pride fed on this small turn of fortune, and when he carelessly addressed
his new friend, her name gave him pleasure.

It seemed that she possessed but little else, poor lady. Even in his
young days, Fountain could remember that the Helbecks were reported to be
straitened, to have already much difficulty in keeping up the house and
the estate. But clearly things had fallen by now to a much lower depth.
Miss Helbeck's dress, talk, lodgings, all spoke of poverty, great
poverty. He himself had never known what it was to have a superfluous ten
pounds; but the feverish strain that belongs to such a situation as the
Helbecks' awoke in him a new and sharp pity. He was very sorry for the
little, harassed creature; that physical privation should touch a woman
had always seemed to him a monstrosity.

What was the brother about?--a great strong fellow by all accounts,
capable, surely, of doing something for the family fortunes.
Instinctively Fountain held him responsible for the sister's fatigue and
delicacy. They had just lost their mother, and Augustina had come to
Potter's Beach to recover from long months of nursing. And presently
Fountain discovered that what stood between her and health was not so
much the past as the future.

"You don't like the idea of going home," he said to her once, abruptly,
after they had grown intimate. She flushed, and hesitated; then her eyes
filled with tears.

Gradually he made her explain herself. The brother, it appeared, was
twelve years younger than herself, and had been brought up first at
Stonyhurst, and afterwards at Louvain, in constant separation from the
rest of the family. He had never had much in common with his home, since,
at Stonyhurst, he had come under the influence of a Jesuit teacher, who,
in the language of old Helbeck, had turned him into "a fond sort of
fellow," swarming with notions that could only serve to carry the family
decadence a step further.

"We have been Catholics for twenty generations," said Augustina, in her
quavering voice. "But our ways--father's ways--weren't good enough for
Alan. We thought he was making up his mind to be a Jesuit, and father was
mad about it, because of the old place. Then father died, and Alan came
home. He and my mother got on best; oh! he was very good to her. But he
and I weren't brought up in the same way; you'd think he was already
under a rule. I don't--know--I suppose it's too high for me----"

She took up a handful of sand, and threw it, angrily, from her thin
fingers, hurrying on, however, as if the unburdenment, once begun, must
have its course.

"And it's hard to be always pulled up and set right by some one you've
nursed in his cradle. Oh! I don't mean he says anything; he and I never
had words in our lives. But it's the way he has of doing things--the
changes he makes. You feel how he disapproves of you; he doesn't like my
friends--our old friends; the house is like a desert since he came. And
the money he gives away! The priests just suck us dry--and he hasn't got
it to give. Oh! I know it's all very wicked of me; but when I think of
going back to him--just us two, you know, in that old house--and all the
trouble about money----"

Her voice failed her.

"Well, don't go back," said Fountain, laying his hand on her arm.

* * * * *

And twenty-four hours later he was still pleased with himself and her. No
doubt she was stupid, poor Augustina, and more ignorant than he had
supposed a human being could be. Her only education seemed to have been
supplied by two years at the "Couvent des Dames Anglaises" at St.-Omer,
and all that she had retained from it was a small stock of French idioms,
most of which she had forgotten how to use, though she did use them
frequently, with a certain timid pretension. Of that habit Fountain, the
fastidious, thought that he should break her. But for the rest, her
religion, her poverty,--well, she had a hundred a year, so that he and
Laura would be no worse off for taking her in, and the child's prospects,
of course, should not suffer by a halfpenny. And as to the Catholicism,
Fountain smiled to himself. No doubt there was some inherited feeling.
But even if she did keep up her little mummeries, he could not see that
they would do him or Laura any harm. And for the rest she suited him. She
somehow crept into his loneliness and fitted it. He was getting too old
to go farther, and he might well fare worse. In spite of her love of
talk, she was not a bad listener; and longer experience showed her to be
in truth the soft and gentle nature that she seemed. She had a curious
kind of vanity which showed itself in her feeling towards her brother.
But Fountain did not find it disagreeable; it even gave him pleasure to
flatter it; as one feeds or caresses some straying half-starved creature,
partly for pity, partly that the human will may feel its power.

"I wonder how much fuss that young man will make?" Fountain asked
himself, when at last it became necessary to write to Bannisdale.

Augustina, however, was thirty-five, in full possession of her little
moneys, and had no one to consult but herself. Fountain enjoyed the
writing of the letter, which was brief, if not curt.

Alan Helbeck appeared without an hour's delay at Potter's Beach. Fountain
felt himself much inclined beforehand to treat the tall dark youth,
sixteen years his junior, as a tutor treats an undergraduate. Oddly
enough, however, when the two men stood face to face, Fountain was once
more awkwardly conscious of that old sense of social distance which the
sister had never recalled to him. The sting of it made him rougher than
he had meant to be. Otherwise the young man's very shabby coat, his
superb good looks, and courteous reserve of manner might almost have
disarmed the irritable scholar.

As it was, Helbeck soon discovered that Fountain had no intention of
allowing Augustina to apply for any dispensation for the marriage, that
he would make no promise of Catholic bringing-up, supposing there were
children, and that his idea was to be married at a registry office.

"I am one of those people who don't trouble themselves about the affairs
of another world," said Fountain in a suave voice, as he stood in the
lodging-house window, a bearded, broad-shouldered person, his hands
thrust wilfully into the very baggy pockets of his ill-fitting light
suit. "I won't worry your sister, and I don't suppose there'll be any
children. But if there are, I really can't promise to make Catholics of
them. And as for myself, I don't take things so easy as it's the fashion
to do now. I can't present myself in church, even for Augustina."

Helbeck sat silent for a few minutes with his eyes on the ground. Then he
rose.

"You ask what no Catholic should grant," he said slowly. "But that of
course you know. I can have nothing to do with such a marriage, and my
duty naturally will be to dissuade my sister from it as strongly as
possible."

Fountain bowed.

"She is expecting you," he said. "I of course await her decision."

His tone was hardly serious. Nevertheless, during the time that Helbeck
and Augustina were pacing the sands together, Fountain went through a
good deal of uneasiness. One never knew how or where this damned poison
in the blood might break out again. That young fanatic, a Jesuit already
by the look of him, would of course try all their inherited Mumbo Jumbo
upon her; and what woman is at bottom anything more than the prey of the
last speaker?

When, however, it was all over, and he was allowed to see his Augustina
in the evening, he found her helpless with crying indeed, but as
obstinate as only the meek of the earth can be. She had broken wholly
with her brother and with Bannisdale; and Fountain gathered that, after
all Helbeck's arguments and entreaties, there had flashed a moment of
storm between them, when the fierce "Helbeck temper," traditional through
many generations, had broken down the self-control of the ascetic, and
Augustina must needs have trembled. However, there she was, frightened
and miserable, but still determined. And her terror was much more
concerned with the possibility of any return to live with Alan and his
all-exacting creed than anything else. Fountain caught himself wondering
whether indeed she had imagination enough to lay much hold on those
spiritual terrors with which she had no doubt been threatened. In this,
however, he misjudged her, as will be seen.

Meanwhile he sent for an elderly Evangelical cousin of his wife's, who
was accustomed to take a friendly interest in his child and himself. She,
in Protestant jubilation over this brand snatched from the burning, came
in haste, very nearly departing, indeed, in similar haste as soon as the
unholy project of the secular marriage was mooted. However, under much
persuasion she remained, lamenting; Augustina sent to Bannisdale for her
few possessions, and the scanty ceremony was soon over.

Meanwhile Laura had but found in the whole affair one more amusement and
excitement added to the many that, according to her, Potter's Beach
already possessed. The dancing elfish child--who had no memory of her own
mother--had begun by taking the little old maid under her patronising
wing. She graciously allowed Augustina to make a lap for all the briny
treasures she might accumulate in the course of a breathless morning; she
rushed to give her first information whenever that encroaching monster
the sea broke down her castles. And as soon as it appeared that her papa
liked Augustina, and had a use for her, Laura at the age of eight
promptly accepted her as part of the family circle, without the smallest
touch of either sentiment or opposition. She walked gaily hand in hand
with her father to the registry office at St. Bees. The jealously hidden,
stormy little heart knew well enough that it had nothing to fear.

Then came many quiet years at Cambridge. Augustina spoke no more of her
brother, and apparently let her old creed slip. She conformed herself
wholly to her husband's ways,--a little colourless thread on the stream
of academic life, slightly regarded, and generally silent out of doors,
but at home a gentle, foolish, and often voluble person, very easily made
happy by some small kindness and a few creature comforts.

Laura meanwhile grew up, and no one exactly knew how. Her education was a
thing of shreds and patches, managed by herself throughout, and
expressing her own strong will or caprice from the beginning. She put
herself to school--a day school only; and took herself away as soon as
she was tired of it. She threw herself madly into physical exercises like
dancing or skating; and excelled in most of them by virtue of a certain
wild grace, a tameless strength of spirits and will. And yet she grew up
small and pale; and it was not till she was about eighteen that she
suddenly blossomed into prettiness.

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