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Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I.

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




* * * * *

But of her no one thought--save once. The beautiful "moment" of the
ceremony had come. Father Leadham had raised the monstrance, containing
the Host, to give the Benediction. Every Sister, every child, except a
few small and tired ones, was bowed in humblest adoration.

Mr. Helbeck, too, was kneeling in the little choir. But his attention
wandered. With the exception of his walk with Father Leadham, he had been
in church since early morning, and even for him response was temporarily
exhausted. His look strayed over the chapel.

It was suddenly arrested. Above the kneeling congregation a distant face
showed plainly in the April dusk amid the dimness of incense and
painting--a girl's face, delicately white and set--a face of revolt.

"Why is she here?" was his first thought. It came with a rush of
annoyance, even resentment. But immediately other thoughts met it: "She
is lonely; she is here under my roof; she has lost her father; poor
child!"

The last mental phrase was not so much his own as an echo from Father
Leadham. In Helbeck's mind it was spoken very much as the priest had
spoken it--with that strange tenderness, at once so intimate and so
impersonal, which belongs to the spiritual relations of Catholicism. The
girl's soul--lonely, hostile, uncared for--appealed to the charity of the
believer. At the same time there was something in her defiance, her crude
disapproval of his house and his faith, that stimulated and challenged
the man. Conscious for the first time of a new conflict of feeling within
himself, he looked steadily towards her across the darkness.

It was as though he had sought and found a way to lift himself above her
young pride, her ignorant enmity. For a moment there was a curious
exaltation and tyranny in his thought. He dropped his head and prayed for
her, the words falling slow and deliberate within his consciousness. And
she could not resent it or stop it. It was an aggression before which she
was helpless; it struck down the protest of her pale look.

* * * * *

At supper, when the Sisters and their charges had departed, Father Bowles
appeared, and never before had Helbeck been so lamentably aware of the
absurdities and inferiorities of his parish priest.

The Jesuit, too, was sharply conscious of them, and even Augustina felt
that something was amiss. Was it that they were all--except Father
Bowles--affected by the presence of the young lady on Helbeck's right--by
the cool detachment of her manner, the self-possession that appealed to
no one and claimed none of the prerogatives of sex and charm, while every
now and then it made itself felt in tacit and resolute opposition to her
environment?

"He might leave those things alone!" thought the Jesuit angrily, as he
heard Father Bowles giving Mrs. Fountain a gently complacent account of a
geological lecture lately delivered in Whinthorpe.

"What I always say, you know, my dear lady, is this: you must show me the
evidence! After all, you geologists have done much--you have dug here and
there, it is true. But dig all over the world--dig everywhere--lay it all
bare. Then you may ask me to listen to you!"

The little round-faced priest looked round the table for support. Laura
bit her lip and bent over her plate. Father Leadham turned hastily to
Helbeck, and began to discuss with him a recent monograph on the Roman
Wall, showing a plentiful and scholarly knowledge of the subject. And
presently he drew in the girl opposite, addressing her with a
man-of-the-world ease and urbanity which disarmed her. It appeared that
he had just come back from mission-work in British Guiana, that he had
been in India, and was in all respects a travelled and accomplished
person. But the girl did not yield herself, though she listened quite
civilly and attentively while he talked.

But again through the Jesuit's easy or polished phrases there broke the
purring inanity of Father Bowles.

"Lourdes, my dear lady? Lourdes? How can there be the smallest doubt of
the miracles of Lourdes? Why! they keep two doctors on the spot to verify
everything!"

The Jesuit's sense of humour was uncomfortably touched. He glanced at
Miss Fountain, but could only see that she was gazing steadily out of
window.

As for himself, convert and ex-Fellow of a well-known college, he gave a
strong inward assent to the judgment of some of his own leaders, that the
older Catholic priests of this country are as a rule lamentably unfit for
their work. "Our chance in England is broadening every year," he said to
himself. "How are we to seize it with such tools? But all round we want
_men_. Oh! for a few more of those who were 'out in forty-five'!"

* * * * *

In the drawing-room after dinner Laura, as usual, entrenched herself in
one of the deep oriel windows, behind a heavy table: Augustina showed an
anxious curiosity as to the expedition of the morning--as to the Masons
and their farm. But Laura would say very little about them.

When the gentlemen came in, Helbeck sent a searching look round the
drawing-room. He had the air of one who enters with a purpose.

The beautiful old room lay in a half-light. A lamp at either end could do
but little against the shadows that seemed to radiate from the panelled
walls and from the deep red hangings of the windows. But the wood fire on
the hearth sent out a soft glow, which fastened on the few points of
brilliance in the darkness--on the ivory of the fretted ceiling, on the
dazzling dress of the Romney, on the gold of Miss Fountain's hair.

Laura looked up with some surprise as Helbeck approached her; then,
seeing that he apparently wished to talk, she made a place for him among
the old "Books of Beauty" with which she had been bestrewing the seat
that ran round the window.

"I trust the pony behaved himself this morning?" he said, as he sat down.

Laura answered politely.

"And you found your way without difficulty?"

"Oh, yes! Your directions were exact."

Inwardly she said to herself, "Does he want to cross-examine me about the
Masons?" Then, suddenly, she noticed the scar under his hair--a jagged
mark, testifying to a wound of some severity--and it made her
uncomfortable. Nay, it seemed in some curious way to put her in the
wrong, to shake her self-reliance.

But Helbeck had not come with the intention of talking about the Masons.
His avoidance of their name was indeed a pointed one. He drew out her
admiration of the daffodils and of the view from Browhead Lane.

"After Easter we must show you something of the high mountains. Augustina
tells me you admire the country. The head of Windermere will delight
you."

His manner of offering her these civilities was somewhat stiff and
conventional--the manner of one who had been brought up among country
gentry of the old school, apart from London and the _beau monde_. But it
struck Laura that, for the first time, he was speaking to her as a man of
his breeding might be expected to speak to a lady visiting his house.
There was consideration, and an apparent desire to please. It was as
though she had grown all at once into something more in his eyes than
Mrs. Fountain's little stepdaughter, who was, no doubt, useful as a nurse
and a companion, but radically unwelcome and insignificant none the less.

Inevitably the girl's vanity was smoothed. She began to answer more
naturally; her smile became more frequent. And gradually an unwonted ease
and enjoyment stole over Helbeck also. He talked with so much animation
at last as to draw the attention of another person in the room. Father
Leadham, who had been leaning with some languor against the high, carved
mantel, while Father Bowles and Augustina babbled beneath him, began to
take increasing notice of Miss Fountain, and of her relation to the
Bannisdale household. For a girl who had "no training, moral or
intellectual," she was showing herself, he thought, possessed of more
attraction than might have been expected, for the strict master of the
house.

Presently Helbeck came to a pause in what he was saying. He had been
describing the country of Wordsworth, and had been dwelling on Grasmere
and Eydal Mount, in the tone, indeed, of one who had no vital concern
whatever with the Lake poets or their poetry, but still with an evident
desire to interest his companion. And following closely on this first
effort to make friends with her something further suggested itself.

He hesitated, looked at Laura, and at last said, in a lower voice than he
had been using, "I believe your father, Miss Fountain, was a great lover
of Wordsworth. Augustina has told me so. You and he were accustomed, were
you not, to read much together? Your loss must be very great. You will
not wonder, perhaps, that for me there are painful thoughts connected
with your father. But I have not been insensible--I have not been without
feeling--for my sister--and for you."

He spoke with embarrassment, and a kind of appeal. Laura had been
startled by his first words, and while he spoke she sat very pale and
upright, staring at him. The hand on her lap shook.

When he ceased she did not answer. She turned her head, and he saw her
pretty throat tremble. Then she hastily raised her handkerchief; a
struggle passed over the face; she wiped away her tears, and threw back
her head, with a sobbing breath and a little shake of the bright hair,
like one who reproves herself. But she said nothing; and it was evident
that she could say nothing without breaking down.

Deeply touched, Helbeck unconsciously drew a little nearer to her.
Changing the subject at once, he began to talk to her of the children and
the little festival of the afternoon. An hour before he would have
instinctively avoided doing anything of the kind. Now, at last, he
ventured to be himself, or something near it. Laura regained her
composure, and bent her attention upon him, with a slightly frowning
brow. Her mind was divided between the most contradictory impulses and
attractions. How had it come about, she asked herself, after a while,
that _she_ was listening like this to his schemes for his children and
his new orphanage?--she, and not his natural audience, the two priests
and Augustina.

She actually heard him describe the efforts made by himself and one or
two other Catholics in the county to provide shelter and education for
the county's Catholic orphans. He dwelt on the death and disappearance of
some of his earlier colleagues, on the urgent need for a new building in
the neighbourhood of the county town, and for the enlargement of the
"home" he himself had put up some ten years before, on the Whinthorpe
Road.

"But, unfortunately, large plans want large means," he added, with a
smile, "and I fear it will come to it--has Augustina said anything to you
about it?--I fear there is nothing for it, but that our beauteous lady
there must provide them."

He nodded towards the picture that gleamed from the opposite wall. Then
he added gravely, and with a perfect simplicity:

"It is my last possession of any value."

Several times during the fortnight that she had known him, Laura had
heard him speak with a similar simplicity about his personal and
pecuniary affairs. That anyone so stately should treat himself and his
own worldly concerns with so much _naïveté_ had been a source of frequent
surprise to her. To what, then, did his dignity, his reserve apply?

Nevertheless, because, childishly, she had already taken a side, as it
were, about the picture, his manner, with its apparent indifference,
annoyed her. She drew back.

"Yes, Augustina told me. But isn't it cruel? isn't it unkind? A picture
like that is alive. It has been here so long--one could hardly feel it
belonged only to oneself. It is part of the house, isn't it?--part of the
family? Won't other people--people who come after--reproach you?"

Helbeck lifted his shoulders, his dark face half amused, half sad.

"She died a hundred years ago, pretty creature! She has had her turn; so
have we--in the pleasure of looking at her."

"But she belongs to you," said the girl insistently. "She is your own
kith and kin."

He hesitated, then said, with a new emphasis that answered her own:

"Perhaps there are two sorts of kindred----"

The girl's cheek flushed.

"And the one you mean may always push out the other? I know, because one
of your children told me a story to-day--such a frightful story!--of a
saint who would not go to see his dying brother, for obedience' sake. She
asked me if I liked it. How could I say I liked it! I told her it was
horrible! I wondered how people could tell her such tales."

Her bearing was again all hostility--a young defiance. She was delighted
to confess herself. Her crime, untold, had been pressing upon her
conscience, hurting her natural frankness.

Helbeck's face changed. He looked at her attentively, the fine dark eye,
under the commanding brow, straight and sparkling.

"You said that to the child?"

"Yes."

Her breast fluttered. She trembled, he saw, with an excitement she could
hardly repress.

He, too, felt a novel excitement--the excitement of a strong will
provoked. It was clear to him that she meant to provoke him--that her
young personality threw itself wantonly across his own. He spoke with a
harsh directness.

"You did wrong, I think--quite wrong. Excuse the word, but you have
brought me to close quarters. You sowed the seeds of doubt, of revolt, in
a child's mind."

"Perhaps," said Laura quickly. "What then?"

She wore her half-wild, half-mocking look. Everything soft and touching
had disappeared. The eyes shone under the golden mass of hair; the small
mouth was close and scornful. Helbeck looked at her in amazement, his own
pulse hurrying.

"What then?" he echoed, with a sternness that astonished himself. "Ask
your own feeling. What has a child--a little child under orders--to do
with doubt, or revolt? For her--for all of us--doubt is misery."

Laura rose. She forced down her agitation--made herself speak plainly.

"Papa taught me--it was life--and I believe him."

The old clock in the farther corner of the room struck a quarter to
ten--the hour of prayers. The two priests on the farther side of the room
stood up, and Augustina sheathed her knitting-needles.

Laura turned towards Helbeck and coldly held out her little hand. He
touched it, and she crossed the room. "Good-night, Augustina."

She kissed her stepmother, and bowed to the two priests. Father Leadham
ceremoniously opened the door for her. Then he and Helbeck, Father Bowles
and Augustina followed across the dark hall on their way to the chapel.
Laura took her candle, and her light figure could be seen ascending the
Jacobean staircase, a slim and charming vision against the shadows of the
old house.

Father Leadham followed it with eyes and thoughts. Then he glanced
towards Helbeck. An idea--and one that was singularly unwelcome--was
forcing its way into the priest's mind.




BOOK II




CHAPTER I

From that night onwards the relations between Helbeck and his sister's
stepdaughter took another tone. He no longer went his own way, with no
more than a vague consciousness that a curious and difficult girl was in
the house; he watched her with increasing interest; he began to taste, as
it were, the thorny charm that was her peculiar possession.

Not that he was allowed to see much of the charm. After the conversation
of Passion Sunday her manner to him was no less cold and distant than
before. Their final collision, on the subject of the child, had, he
supposed, undone the effects of his conciliatory words about her father.
It must be so, no doubt, since her hostile observation of him and of his
friends seemed to be in no whit softened.

That he should be so often conscious of her at this particular time
annoyed and troubled him. It was the most sacred moment of the Catholic
year. Father Leadham, his old Stonyhurst friend, had come to spend
Passion Week and Holy Week at Bannisdale, as a special favour to one whom
the Church justly numbered among the most faithful of her sons; while the
Society of Jesus had many links of mutual service and affection, both
with the Helbeck family in the past and with the present owner of the
Hall. Helbeck, indeed, was of real importance to Catholicism in this
particular district of England. It had once abounded in Catholic
families, but now hardly one of them remained, and upon Helbeck, with his
small resources and dwindling estate, devolved a number of labours which
should have been portioned out among a large circle. Only enthusiasm such
as his could have sufficed for the task. But, for the Church's sake, he
had now remained unmarried some fifteen years. He lived like an ascetic
in the great house, with a couple of women servants; he spent all his
income--except a fraction--on the good works of a wide district; when
larger sums were necessary he was ready, nay, eager, to sell the land
necessary to provide them; and whenever he journeyed to other parts of
England, or to the Continent, it was generally assumed that he had gone,
not as other men go, for pleasure and recreation, but simply that he
might pursue some Catholic end, either of money or administration, among
the rich and powerful of the faith elsewhere. Meanwhile, it was believed
that he had bequeathed the house and park of Bannisdale to a distant
cousin, also a strict Catholic, with the warning that not much else would
remain to his heir from the ancient and splendid inheritance of the
family.

It was not wonderful, then, that the Jesuits should be glad to do such a
man a service; and no service could have been greater in Helbeck's eyes
than a visit from a priest of their order during these weeks of emotion
and of penance. Every day Mass was said in the little chapel; every
evening a small flock gathered to Litany or Benediction. Ordinary life
went on as it could in the intervals of prayer and meditation. The house
swarmed with priests--with old and infirm priests, many of them from a
Jesuit house of retreat on the western coast, not far away, who found in
a visit to Bannisdale one of the chief pleasures of their suffering or
monotonous lives; while the Superiors of Helbeck's own orphanages were
always ready to help the Bannisdale chapel, on days of special sanctity,
by sending a party of Sisters and children to provide the singing.

Meanwhile all else was forgotten. As to food, Helbeck and Father
Leadham--according to the letters describing her experiences which Laura
wrote during these weeks to a Cambridge girl friend--lived upon "a cup of
coffee and a banana" per day, and she had endless difficulty in
restraining her charge, Augustina, from doing likewise. For Augustina,
indeed--Stephen Fountain's little black-robed widow--her husband was
daily receding further and further into a dim and dreadful distance,
where she feared and yet wept to think of him. She passed her time in the
intoxication of her recovered faith, excited by the people around her, by
the services in the chapel, and by her very terrors over her own unholy
union, lapse, and restoration. The sound of intoning, the scent, of
incense, seemed to pervade the house; and at the centre of all brooded
that mysterious Presence upon the altar, which drew the passion of
Catholic hearts to itself in ever deeper measure as the great days of
Holy Week and Easter approached.

Through all this drama of an inventive and exacting faith, Laura Fountain
passed like a being from another world, an alien and a mocking spirit.
She said nothing, but her eyes were satires. The effect of her presence
in the house was felt probably by all its inmates, and by many of its
visitors. She did not again express herself--except rarely to
Augustina--with the vehemence she had shown to the little lame orphan;
she was quite ready to chat and laugh upon occasion with Father Leadham,
who had a pleasant wit, and now and then deliberately sought her society;
and, owing to the feebleness of Augustina, she, quite unconsciously,
established certain household ways which spoke the woman, and were new to
Bannisdale. She filled the drawing-room with daffodils; she made the
tea-table by the hall fire a cheerful place for any who might visit it;
she flitted about the house in the prettiest and neatest of spring
dresses; her hair, her face, her white hands and neck shone amid the
shadows of the panelling like jewels in a casket. Everyone was conscious
of her--uneasily conscious. She yielded herself to no one, was touched by
no one. She stood apart, and through her cold, light ways spoke the world
and the spirit that deny--the world at which the Catholic shudders.

At the same time, like everybody else in the house--even the sulky
housekeeper--she grew pale and thin from Lenten fare. Mr. Helbeck had of
course given orders to Mrs. Denton that his sister and Miss Fountain were
to be well provided. But Mrs. Denton was grudging or forgetful; and it
amused Laura to see that Augustina was made to eat, while she herself
fared with the rest. The viands of whatever sort were generally scanty
and ill-cooked; and neither the Squire nor Father Leadham cared anything
about the pleasures of the table, in Lent or out of it. Mr. Helbeck
hardly noticed what was set before him. Once or twice indeed he woke up
to the fact that there was not enough for the ladies and would say an
angry word to Mrs. Denton. But on the whole Laura was able to follow her
whim and to try for herself what this Catholic austerity might be like.

"My dear," she wrote to her friend, "one thing you learn from a Catholic
Lent is that food matters 'nowt at aw,' as they would say in these parts.
You can do just as well without it as with it. Why you should think
yourself a saint for not eating it puzzles me. Otherwise--_vive la faim_!
And as we are none of us likely to starve ourselves half so much as the
poor people of the world, the soldiers, and sailors, and explorers, are
always doing, to please themselves or their country, I don't suppose that
anybody will come to harm.

"You are to understand, nevertheless, that our austerities are rather
unusual. And when anyone comes in from the outside they are concealed as
much as possible.... The old Helbecks, as far as I can hear, must have
been very different people from their modern descendant. They were quite
good Catholics, understand. What the Church prescribed they did--but not
a fraction beyond. They were like the jolly lazy sort of schoolboy, who
_just_ does his lesson, but would think himself a fool if he did a word
more. Whereas the man who lives here now can never do enough!

"And in general these old Catholic houses--from Augustina's tales--must
have been full of fun and feasting. Well, I can vouch for it, there is no
fun in Bannisdale now! It is Mr. Helbeck's personality, I suppose. It
makes its own atmosphere. He _can_ laugh--I have seen it myself!--but it
is an event."

* * * * *

As Lent went on, the mingling of curiosity and cool criticism with which
Miss Fountain regarded her surroundings became perhaps more apparent.
Father Leadham, in particular, detected the young lady's fasting
experiments. He spoke of them to Helbeck as showing a lack of delicacy
and good taste. But the Squire, it seemed, was rather inclined to regard
them as the whims of a spoilt and wilful child.

This difference of shade in the judgment of the two men may rank as one
of the first signs of all that was to come.

Certainly Helbeck had never before felt himself so uncomfortable in his
own house as he had done since the arrival of this girl of twenty-one.
Nevertheless, as the weeks went on, the half-amused, half-contemptuous
embarrassment, which had been the first natural effect of her presence
upon the mind of a man so little used to women and their ways, had passed
imperceptibly into something else. His reserved and formal manner
remained the same. But Miss Fountain's goings and comings had ceased to
be indifferent to him. A silent relation--still unknown to her--had
arisen between them.

When he first noticed the fact in himself, it produced a strong,
temporary reaction. He reproached himself for a light and unworthy
temper. Had his solitary life so weakened him that any new face and
personality about him could distract and disturb him, even amid the great
thoughts of these solemn days? His heart, his life were in his faith. For
more than twenty years, by prayer and meditation, by all the ingenious
means that the Catholic Church provides, he had developed the
sensibilities of faith; and for the Catholic these sensibilities are
centred upon and sustained by the Passion. Now, hour by hour, his Lord
was moving to the Cross. He stood perpetually beside the sacred form in
the streets of Jerusalem, in Gethsemane, on the steps of the Praetorium.
A varied and dramatic ceremonial was always at hand to stimulate the
imagination, the penitence, and the devotion of the believer. That
anything whatever should break in upon the sacred absorption of these
days would have seemed to him beforehand a calamity to be shrunk
from--nay, a sin to be repented. He had put aside all business that could
be put aside with one object, and one only--to make "a good Easter."

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