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Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.

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




"Yes, you may drive me to the bridge if you like."

* * * * *

And on the drive she was another being. She talked to him about music, so
softly and kindly that the young man's head swam with pleasure. All her
own musical enthusiasms and experiences--the music in the college
chapels, the music at the Greek plays, the few London concerts and operas
she had heard, her teachers and her hero-worships--she drew upon it all
in her round light voice, he joining in from time to time with a rough
passion and yearning that seemed to transfigure him. In half an hour, as
it were, they were friends; their relations changed wholly. He looked at
her with all his eyes; hung upon her with all his ears. And she--she
forgot that he was vulgar and a clown; such breathless pleasure, such a
humble absorption in superior wisdom, would have blunted the sternest
standard.

As for him, the minutes flew. When at last the bridge over the Bannisdale
River came in sight, he began to check the pony.

"Let's drive on a bit," he said entreatingly.

"No, no--I must get back to Mrs. Fountain." And she took the reins from
his hands.

"I say, when will you come again?"

"Oh, I don't know." She had put on once more the stand-off town-bred
manner that puzzled his countryman's sense.

"I say, mother shan't talk that stuff to you next time. I'll tell her--"
he said imploringly.--"Halloa! let me out, will you?"

And to her amazement, before she could draw in the pony, he had jumped
out of the cart.

"There's Mr. Helbeck!" he said to her with a crimson face. "I'm off.
Good-bye!"

He shook her hand hastily, turned his back, and strode away.

She looked towards the gate in some bewilderment, and saw that Helbeck
was holding it open for her. Beside him stood a tall priest--not Father
Bowles. It was evident that both of them had seen her parting from her
cousin.

Well, what then? What was there in that, or in Mr. Helbeck's ceremonious
greeting, to make her cheeks hot all in a moment? She could have beaten
herself for a silly lack of self-possession. Still more could she have
beaten Hubert for his clownish and hurried departure. What was he afraid
of? Did he think that she would have shown the smallest shame of her
peasant relations?




CHAPTER VI

"Is that Mrs. Fountain's stepdaughter?" said Helbeck's companion, as
Laura and her cart disappeared round a corner of the winding road on
which the two men were walking.

Helbeck made a sign of assent.

"You may very possibly have known her father?" He named the Cambridge
college of which Stephen Fountain had been a Fellow.

The Jesuit, who was a convert, and had been a distinguished Cambridge
man, considered for a moment.

"Oh! yes--I remember the man! A strange being, who was only heard of, if
I recollect right, in times of war. If there was any dispute
going--especially on a religious point--Stephen Fountain would rush into
it with broad-sheets. Oh, yes, I remember him perfectly--a great untidy,
fair-haired, truculent fellow, to whom anybody that took any thought for
his soul was either fool or knave. How much of him does the daughter
inherit?"

Helbeck returned the other's smile. "A large slice, I think. She comes
here in the curious position of having never lived in a Christian
household before, and she seems already to have great difficulty in
putting up with us."

Father Leadham laughed, then looked reflective.

"How often have I known that the best of all possible beginnings! Is she
attached to her stepmother?"

"Yes. But Mrs. Fountain has no influence over her."

"It is a striking colouring--that white skin and reddish hair. And it is
a face of some power, too."

"Power?" Helbeck demurred. "I think she is clever," he said dryly. "And,
of course, coming from a university town, she has heard of things that
other girls know nothing of. But she has had no training, moral or
intellectual."

"And no Christian education?"

Helbeck shrugged his shoulders.

"She was only baptized with difficulty. When she was eleven or twelve she
was allowed to go to church two or three times, I understand, on the
helot principle--was soon disgusted--her father of course supplying a
running comment at home--and she has stood absolutely outside religion of
all kinds since."

"Poor child!" said the priest with heartiness. The paternal note in the
words was more than official. He was a widower, and had lost his wife and
infant daughter two years before his entrance into the Church of Rome.

Helbeck smiled. "I assure you Miss Fountain spends none of her pity upon
herself."

"I dare say more than you think. The position of the unbeliever in a
house like yours is always a painful one. You see she is alone. There
must be a sense of exile--of something touching and profound going on
beside her, from which she is excluded. She comes into a house with a
chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, where everybody is
keeping a strict Lent. She has not a single thought in common with you
all. No; I am very sorry for Miss Fountain."

Helbeck was silent a moment. His dark face showed a shade of disturbance.

"She has some relations near here," he said at last, "but unfortunately I
can't do much to promote her seeing them. You remember Williams's story?"

"Of course. You had some local row, didn't you? Ah! I remember."

And the two men walked on, discussing a case which had been and was still
of great interest to them as Catholics. The hero, moreover--the Jesuit
novice himself--was well known to them both.

"So Miss Fountain's relations belong to that peasant class?" said the
Jesuit, musing. "How curious that she should find herself in such a
double relation to you and Bannisdale!"

"Consider me a little, if you please," said Helbeck, with his slight,
rare smile. "While that young lady is under my roof--you see how
attractive she is--I cannot get rid, you will admit, of a certain
responsibility. Augustina has neither the will nor the authority of a
mother, and there is literally no one else. Now there happens to be a
young man in this Mason family----"

"Ah!" said the priest; "the young gentleman who jumped out at the bridge,
with such a very light pair of heels?"

Helbeck nodded. "The old people were peasants and fanatics. They thought
ill of me in the Williams affair, and the mother, who is still alive,
would gladly hang and quarter me to-morrow if she could. But that is
another point. The old people had their own dignity, their own manners
and virtues--or, rather, the manners and virtues of their class. The old
man was coarse and boorish, but he was hard-working and honourable, and a
Christian after his own sort. But the old man is dead, and the son, who
now works the farm jointly with his mother, is of no class and no
character. He has just education enough to despise his father and his
father's hard work. He talks the dialect with his inferiors, or his
kindred, and drops it with you and me. The old traditions have no hold
upon him, and he is just a vulgar and rather vicious hybrid, who drinks
more than is good for him and has a natural affinity for any sort of low
love-affair. I came across him at our last hunt ball. I never go to such
things, but last year I went."

"Good!" ejaculated the Jesuit, turning a friendly face upon the speaker.

Helbeck paused. The word, still more the emphasis with which it was
thrown out, challenged him. He was about to defend himself against an
implied charge, but thought better of it, and resumed:

"And unfortunately, considering the way in which all the clan felt
towards me already, I found this youth in the supper-room, misbehaving
himself with a girl of his own sort, and very drunk. I fetched a steward,
and he was told to go. After which, you may imagine that it is scarcely
agreeable to me to see my guest--a very young lady, very pretty, very
distinguished--driving about the country in cousinly relations with this
creature!"

The last words were spoken with considerable vivacity. The aristocrat and
the ascetic, the man of high family and the man of scrupulous and
fastidious character, were alike expressed in them.

The Jesuit pondered a little.

"No; you will have to keep watch. Why not distract her? You must have
plenty of other neighbours to show her."

Helbeck shook his head.

"I live like a hermit. My sister is in the first year of her widowhood
and very delicate."

"I see." The Jesuit hesitated, then said, smiling, in the tone of one who
makes a venture: "The Bishop and I allowed ourselves to discuss these
cloistered ways of yours the other day. We thought you would forgive us
as a pair of old friends."

"I know," was the somewhat quick interruption, "the Bishop is of
Manning's temper in these things. He believes in acting on and with the
Protestant world--in our claiming prominence as citizens. It was to
please him that I joined one or two committees last year--that I went to
the hunt ball----"

Then, suddenly, in a very characteristic way, Helbeck checked his own
flow of speech, and resumed more quietly: "Well, all that----"

"Leaves you of the same opinion still?" said the Jesuit, smiling.

"Precisely. I don't belong to my neighbours, nor they to me. We don't
speak the same language, and I can't bring myself to speak theirs. The
old conditions are gone, I know. But my feeling remains pretty much, what
that of my forefathers was. I recognise that it is not common
nowadays--but I have the old maxim in my blood: 'Extra ecclesiam nulla
salus.'"

"There is none which has done us more deadly harm in England," cried the
Jesuit. "We forget that England is a baptized nation, and is therefore in
the supernatural state."

"I remind myself of it very often," said Helbeck, with a kind of proud
submission; "and I judge no man. But my powers, my time, are all limited.
I prefer to devote them to the 'household of faith.'"

The two men walked on in silence for a time. Presently Father Leadham's
face showed amusement, and he said:

"Certainly we modern converts have a better time of it than our
predecessors! The Bishop tells me the most incredible things about the
old feeling towards them in this Vicariate. And wherever I go I seem to
hear the tale of the old priest who thanked God that he had never
received anyone into the Church. Everybody has met someone who knew that
old fellow! He may be a myth--but there is clearly history at the back of
him!"

"I understand him perfectly," said Helbeck, smiling; and he added
immediately, with a curious intensity, "I, too, have never influenced,
never tried to influence, anyone in my life."

The priest looked at him, wondering.

"Not Williams?"

"Williams! But Williams was born for the faith. Directly he saw what I
wanted to do in the chapel, he prayed to come and help me. It was his
summer holiday--he neglected no duty; it was wonderful to see his
happiness in the work--as I thought, an artistic happiness only. He used
to ask me questions about the different saints; once or twice he borrowed
a book--it was necessary to get the emblems correct. But I never said a
single controversial word to him. I never debated religious subjects with
him at all, till the night when he took refuge with me after his father
had thrashed him so cruelly that he could not stand. Grace taught him,
not I."

"Grace taught him, but through you," said the priest with quiet emphasis.
"Perhaps I know more about that than you do."

Helbeck flushed.

"I think you are mistaken. At any rate, I should prefer that you were
mistaken."

The priest raised his eyebrows.

"A man who holds 'no salvation outside the Church,'" he said slowly, "and
rejoices in the thought that he has never influenced anybody?"

"I should hope little from the work achieved by such an instrument. Some
men have enough to do with their own souls," was the low but vehement
answer.

The priest threw a wondering glance at his companion, at the signs of
feeling--profound and morbid feeling--on the harsh face beside him.

"Perhaps you have never cared enough for anyone outside to wish
passionately to bring them within," he said. "But if that ever happens to
you, you will be ready--I think you will be ready--to use any tool, even
yourself."

The priest's voice changed a little. Helbeck, somewhat startled, recalled
the facts of Father Leadham's personal history, and thought he
understood. The subject was instantly dropped, and the two men walked on
to the house, discussing a great canonisation service at St. Peter's and
the Pope's personal part in it.

* * * * *

The old Hall, as Helbeck and Father Leadham approached it, looked down
upon a scene of animation to which in these latter days it was but little
accustomed. The green spaces and gravelled walks in front of it were
sprinkled with groups of children in a blue-and-white uniform. Three or
four Sisters of Mercy in their winged white caps moved about among them,
and some of the children hung clustered like bees about the Sisters'
skirts, while others ran here and there, gleefully picking the scattered
daffodils that starred the grass.

The invaders came from the Orphanage of St. Ursula, a house founded by
Mr. Helbeck's exertions, which lay half-way between Bannisdale and
Whinthorpe. They had not long arrived, and were now waiting for Rosary
and Benediction in the chapel before they were admitted to the tea which
Mrs. Denton and Augustina had already spread for them in the big hall.

At sight of the children Helbeck's face lit up and his step quickened.
They on their side ran to him from all parts; and he had hardly time to
greet the Sisters in charge of them, before the eager creatures were
pulling him into the walled garden behind the Hall, one small girl
hanging on his hand, another perched upon his shoulder. Father Leadham
went into the house to prepare for the service.

The garden was old and dark, like the Tudor house that stood between it
and the sun. Rows of fantastic shapes carved in living yew and box stood
ranged along the straight walks. A bowling-green enclosed in high beech
hedges was placed in the exact centre of the whole formal place, while
the walks and alleys from three sides, west, north, and south, converged
upon it, according to a plan unaltered since it was first laid down in
the days of James II. At this time of the year there were no flowers in
the stiff flower-beds; for Mr. Helbeck had long ceased to spend any but
the most necessary monies upon his garden. Only upon the high stone walls
that begirt this strange and melancholy pleasure-ground, and in the
"wilderness" that lay on the eastern side, between the garden and the
fell, were nature and the spring allowed to show themselves. Their joint
magic had covered the old walls with fruit blossom and spread the
"wilderness" with daffodils. Otherwise all was dark, tortured, fantastic,
a monument of old-world caprice that the heart could not love, though
piety might not destroy it.

The children, however, brought life and brightness. They chased each
other up and down the paths, and in and out of the bowling-green. Helbeck
set them to games, and played with them himself. Only for the orphans now
did he ever thus recall his youth.

Two Sisters, one comparatively young, the other a woman of fifty, stood
in an opening of the bowling-green, looking at the games.

The younger one said to her companion, who was the Superior of the
orphanage, "I do like to see Mr. Helbeck with the children! It seems to
change him altogether."

She spoke with eager sympathy, while her eyes, the visionary eyes of the
typical religious, sunk in a face that was at once sweet and peevish,
followed the children and their host.

The other--shrewd-faced and large--had a movement of impatience.

"I should like to see Mr. Helbeck with some children of his own. For five
years now I have prayed our Blessed Mother to give him a good wife.
That's what he wants. Ah! Mrs. Fountain----"

And as Augustina advanced with her little languid air, accompanied by her
stepdaughter, the Sisters gathered round her, chattering and cooing,
showing her a hundred attentions, enveloping her in a homage that was
partly addressed to the sister of their benefactor, and partly--as she
well understood--to the sheep that had been lost and was found. To the
stepdaughter they showed a courteous reserve. One or two of them had
already made acquaintance with her, and had not found her amiable.

And, indeed, Laura held herself aloof, as before. But she shot a glance
of curiosity at the elderly woman who had wished Mr. Helbeck a good wife.
The girl had caught the remark as she and her stepmother turned the
corner of the dense beechen hedge that, with openings to each point of
the compass, enclosed the bowling-green.

Presently Helbeck, stopping to take breath in a game of which he had been
the life, caught sight of the slim figure against the red-brown of the
hedge. The next moment he perceived that Miss Fountain was watching him
with an expression of astonishment.

His first instinct was to let her be. Her manner towards him since her
arrival, with hardly a break, had been such as to chill the most sociable
temper. And Helbeck's temper was far from sociable.

But something in her attitude--perhaps its solitariness--made him
uncomfortable. He went up to her, dragging with him a crowd of small
children, who tugged at his coat and hands.

"Miss Fountain, will you take pity on us? My breath is gone."

He saw her hesitate. Then her sudden smile broke out.

"What'll you have?" she said, catching hold of the nearest child. "Mother
Bunch?"

And off she flew, running, twisting, turning with the merriest of them,
her loosened hair gleaming in the sun, her small feet twinkling. Now it
was Helbeck's turn to stand and watch. What a curious grace and purpose
there was in all her movements! Even in her play Miss Fountain was a
personality.

At last a little girl who was running with her began to drag and turn
pale. Laura stopped to look at her.

"I can't run any more," said the child piteously. "I had a bone took out
of my leg last year."

She was a sickly-looking creature, rickety and consumptive, a waif from a
Liverpool slum. Laura picked her up and carried her to a seat in a yew
arbour away from the games. Then the child studied her with shy-looking
eyes, and suddenly slipped an arm like a bit of stick round the pretty
lady's neck.

"Tell me a story, please, teacher," she said imploringly.

Laura was taken aback, for she had forgotten the tales of her own
childhood, and had never possessed any younger brothers or sisters, or
paid much attention to children in general. But with some difficulty she
stumbled through Cinderella.

"Oh, yes, I know that; but it's lovely," said the child, at the end, with
a sigh of content. "Now I'll tell you one."

And in a high nasal voice, like one repeating a lesson in class, she
began upon something which Laura soon discovered to be the life of a
saint. She followed the phrases of it with a growing repugnance, till at
last the speaker said, with the unction of one sure of her audience:

"And once the good Father went to a hospital to visit some sick people.
And as he was hearing a poor sailor's confession, he found out that it
was his own brother, whom he had not seen for a long, long time. Now the
sailor was very ill, and going to die, and he had been a bad man, and
done a great many wicked things. But the good Father did not let the poor
man know who he was. He went home and told his Superior that he had found
his brother. And the Superior forbade him to go and see his brother
again, because, he said, God would take care of him. And the Father was
very sad, and the devil tempted him sorely. But he prayed to God, and God
helped him to be obedient.

"And a great many years afterwards a poor woman came to see the good
Father. And she told him she had seen our Blessed Lady in a vision. And
our Blessed Lady had sent her to tell the Father that because he had been
so obedient, and had not been to see his brother again, our Lady had
prayed our Lord for his brother. And his brother had made a good death,
and was saved, all because the good Father had obeyed what his Superior
told him."

Laura sprang up. The child, who had expected a kiss and a pious phrase,
looked up, startled.

"Wasn't that a pretty story?" she said timidly.

"No; I don't like it at all," said Miss Fountain decidedly. "I wonder
they tell you such tales!"

The child stared at her for a moment. Then a sudden veil fell across the
clearness of her eyes, which had the preternatural size and brilliance of
disease. Her expression changed. It became the slyness of the watching
animal, that feels the enemy. She said not another word.

Laura felt a pang of shame, even though she was still vibrating with the
repulsion the child's story had excited in her.

"Look!" she said, raising the little one in her arms; "the others are all
going into the house. Shall we go too?"

But the child struggled resolutely.

"Let me down. I can walk." Laura set her down, and the child walked as
fast as her lame leg would let her to join the others. Once or twice she
looked round furtively at her companion; but she would not take the hand
Laura offered her, and she seemed to have wholly lost her tongue.

"Little bigot!" thought Laura, half angry, half amused; "do they catch it
from their cradle?"

Presently they found themselves in the tail of a crowd of children and
Sisters who were ascending the stairs of a doorway opening on the garden.
The doorway led, as Laura knew, to the corridor of the chapel. She let
herself be carried along, irresolute, and presently she found herself
within the curtained doorway, mechanically helping the Sisters and
Augustina to put the children in their places.

One or two of the older children noticed that the young lady with Mrs.
Fountain did not sign herself with holy water, and did not genuflect in
passing the altar, and they looked at her with a stealthy surprise. A
gentle-looking young Sister came up to her as she was lifting a very
small child to a seat.

"Thank you," murmured the Sister, "It is very good of you." But the
voice, though so soft, was cold, and Laura at once felt herself the
intruder, and withdrew to the back of the crowd.

Yet again, as at her first visit to the chapel, so now, she was too
curious, for all her soreness, to go. She must see what they would be at.

* * * * *

"Rosary" passed, and she hardly understood a word. The voice of the
Jesuit intoning suggested nothing intelligible to her, and it was some
time before she could even make out what the children were saying in
their loud-voiced responses. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us
sinners, now and at the hour of our death"--was that it? And occasionally
an "Our Father" thrown in--all of it gabbled as fast as possible, as
though the one object of both priest and people were to get through and
make an end. Over and over again, without an inflection, or a
change--with just the one monotonous repetition and the equally
monotonous variation. What a barbarous and foolish business!

Very soon she gave up listening. Her eyes wandered to the frescoes, to
the bare altar with its purple covering, to the tall candles sparkling
before the tabernacle; and the coloured and scented gloom, pierced with
the distant lights, gave her a vague pleasure.

Presently there was a pause. The children settled themselves in their
seats with a little clatter. Father Leadham retired, while the Sisters
knelt, each bowed profoundly on herself, eyes closed under her coif,
hands clasped in front of her.

What were they waiting for? Ah! there was the priest again, but in a
changed dress--a white cope of some splendour. The organ, played by one
of the Sisters, broke out upon the silence, and the voices of the rest
rose suddenly, small and sweet, in a Latin hymn. The priest went to the
tabernacle, and set it open. There was a swinging of incense, and the
waves of fragrant smoke flowed out upon the chapel, dimming the altar and
the figure before it. Laura caught sight for a moment of the young Sister
who had spoken to her. She was kneeling and singing, with sweet, shut
eyes; it was clear that she was possessed by a fervour of feeling. Miss
Fountain thought to herself, with wonder, "She cannot be much older than
I am!"

After the hymn it was the children's turn. What were they singing so
lustily to so dancing a tune? Laura bent over to look at the book of a
Sister in front of her.

"Virgo prudentissima, Virgo veneranda, Virgo praedicanda----"

With difficulty she found the place in another book that lay upon a chair
beside her. Then for a few minutes she lost herself in a first amazement
over that string of epithets and adjectives with which the Catholic
Church throughout the world celebrates day by day and Sunday after Sunday
the glories of Mary. The gay music, the harsh and eager voices of the
children, flowed on, the waves of incense spread throughout the chapel.
When she raised her eyes they fell upon Helbeck's dark head in the far
distance, above his server's cotta. A quick change crossed her face,
transforming it to a passionate contempt.

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