Three glasses of claret during dinner and one of port with his dessert
was Mr. Challoner’s usual allowance of alcoholic fluid, and, as a rule,
neither his sister nor Helen took any. But to-night, in honour of the
occasion, a half-bottle of champagne, to drink a toast in which two
names were coupled, made its unusual appearance, and the vicar proposed
the health in a voice which shook a little with feeling.
“God bless you both, my dearest girl,” he said, and drained his glass.
Afterwards, as if to endorse the felicity of the occasion, the
malignancy of the cards was abated, and Aunt Clara’s Patience “came out”
twice before prayers without a semblance of cheating on her part. Why
she cared to play at all, if she cheated, had long been to Helen an
unanswerable riddle, and was so still. But, in her dry and passionless
way, to get out without cheating was a satisfaction to Aunt Clara. She
was pleased also with the engagement of her niece, but her comparative
reticence on that, as on the subject of Patience (she had said only
“Fancy, Sidney, Miss Milligan came out twice!”), was due not, as in her
brother’s case, to excess of feeling, but to the inability to feel
anything at all acutely. The performance of her duties in the house and
in the parish had been for years a sufficient emotional diet; from other
influences, like a freshly-vaccinated person in respect of smallpox, she
was immune. She always said “Good-night” the moment prayers were over,
and did so on this occasion. But she kissed Helen twice. That
corresponded to her observation to her brother about the Patience.
To-night, however, contrary to custom, the vicar lingered in the
drawing-room instead of going back to his study, and, when her aunt was
gone, Helen took this opportunity of getting her little confession made.
He had beckoned her to the arm of the long, deep chair in which he was
sitting, when she would naturally have followed her aunt upstairs, and
took her hand in his, stroking it softly. Such a spontaneous caress was
rare with him, and in spite of the enormity of her confession, she
needed no large call on her courage to make it.
“There is one thing I want to tell you, father,” she said. “I hope you
will not be very angry with me.”
Mr. Challoner pressed her hand gently. Now, as always, the confidence of
his children was a thing immensely sweet to him, to get it unasked,
pathetically so.
“What is it, dear?” he said. “I don’t think you need be afraid of that.”
“Do you remember this morning requesting Lord Yorkshire--Frank--not to
smoke in the Room?” she asked.
“Yes, perfectly. And since I feel sure I know what you want to tell me,
it did occur to me that you might, with a little courage, have asked him
not to. You knew my feeling about it. But you have told me of your own
accord, dear. So that is finished, quite finished.”
The temptation to say no more was extraordinarily strong, and to end
this beautiful day quite happily with every one--Aunt Clara had kissed
her twice, which she usually only did on Christmas morning--was the
childish impulse dominant in her. To-morrow she would deal with other
things, one perfect pearl of a day would be hers,--an imperishable
treasure. But the necessity of honesty, consecrated, as it were, by what
had passed between her and Frank on the subject, conquered. For the last
year she had occasionally smoked, and had never in the least desired to
tell her father that she did. Yet now, somehow, perhaps because it was
connected with him, she must. So she spoke.
“No, it is not quite finished,” she said. “I had been smoking, too.”
For a moment he almost failed to grasp this simple statement, then a
school-master voice rapped out a question.
“You smoke?” he asked.
“Not often; not much,” she said, with the old childish awe of him
suddenly returning.
“And who---- Did Martin teach you?” he asked, with an ironic emphasis on
“teach,” at that fine word being put to such base uses.
“No; I asked him for a cigarette,” she said.
“And he gave it you?”
There was no reply necessary. He had dropped her hand, as if it had been
a cigarette-end, but now he took it again.
“My dearest girl,” he said, “I do not want you for a moment to think
that I make much out of a little; do not think that I regard it as
morally wrong in any way. But think, Helen,--a girl like you smoking. Is
it seemly? Is it not a horrid, a nasty habit? And in the Room, too!
There, there, don’t tremble, my dear. I am not angry.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Let us dismiss it altogether, Helen,” he said. “You told me, anyhow,
and I know it was hard for you to do that. But”--and he was father,
responsible father, when he should have been friend--“but you knew my
feeling about it. It was disobedient.”
All the time his heart was warmed by the thought that she had told him,
yet his sense of duty, his responsibility towards his children, which
was one of the most constant motives of his acts, made him say more. He
did not want to preach, but he was incapable of not doing so.
“Yes, disobedient,” he said, “to what you knew I felt. And that Martin
should give you a cigarette is as bad.”
“Ah, do not bring him into it,” she said. “I am stronger than
Martin,--he had to give it me. Martin would always do what I asked him.
Please do not write to him or speak to him about it.”
Then, at the thought of Martin, and of the constant, continual
misunderstandings between him and her father, her own great happiness
urged her to try to help him.
“I am much worse than Martin is, dear father,” she said; “much more
disobedient, much,--‘The Mill on the Floss,’ for instance. I had been
reading it.”
“And he had lent it you?” asked Mr. Challoner, quietly.
“No. I found it in his bedroom and took it. Oh, father----“
The issues for each had deepened. The meaning of that exclamation was
understood by him: it pleaded with him for Martin.
“I have always tried to be a good father to you both,” he said.
Then all that Helen had suppressed and striven not to have thought for
years rose to the surface on this her first day of liberty. She had not
let herself know how heavy the yoke had been till now, when her
manumission was signed. But Martin still was in subjection. She stood
up.
“I know that,” she said. “If I had not always known that I should not
have cared. It is just that which makes it so sad. But we have both been
afraid of you. We have concealed things from you because we were afraid
of your displeasure. You know, Martin is awfully timid; he shrinks from
what hurts. And we do not tell you everything even now.”
The thrill of pleasure that her unasked confidence had given him had
pretty well died out. He felt also that there was something more coming.
“You or Martin?” he asked.
The tide was irresistible, sweeping her away. A thing which must be
horribly painful to him had to be told her father to-day, to-morrow, or
some time, and she suddenly knew that she must tell him now. Besides,
here was a burden she could voluntarily bear for her lover, a pain, a
difficult thing she could take on herself. And, woman all through, as
she would have saved him anything from a toothache to a heartache,
especially if the saving it from him meant the transference of it to
her, she felt, in spite of the pain, an inward thrill and warmth at the
thought that it would be spared to Frank. A few minutes before, when
Aunt Clara left the room, she would have gone too, if she had known that
the little confession would lead on to this, but now the burning of her
love, as when a furnace-door is thrown open, glowed with a whiteness
that consumed all else.
“I, anyhow,” she said. “I have something which you must be told. And I
choose to tell you instead of Frank.”
Her father got up also facing her. He was very grave, very still.
“Does it concern him?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it disgraceful?”
“No.”
He made one futile attempt to stop in the middle of the rapids into
which he or she, he did not know which, had steered.
“Then, tell me nothing, Helen,” he said. “You say it is not disgraceful.
That is quite sufficient for me when it comes from your mouth. I do not
wish to be told either by him or you. There is no past that can be raked
up--ah, I need not have asked you that. You would have turned from him
with loathing if there had been that. For the rest I am satisfied. He
has artistic tastes of which I have no knowledge, and with which no
sympathy. He is honourable and of a great name, he is liked, respected;
he is a man whom I would have chosen myself for you, and he has the
interests and welfare of the church close to his heart----“
He stopped suddenly, arrested by the sudden whiteness of her face.
“Or what?” he asked.
“He is not even a Christian,” said Helen, simply.
Mr. Challoner did not reply at once. The habit of tidiness in him,
unconsciously asserting itself, led him to put square the case of cards
which his sister had used for her Patience. Then he turned down with his
foot the corner of the hearth-rug which Helen’s dress, as she walked to
the fireplace, had disarranged. Indeed, it had distressed him for some
time; it was easy to trip on it. Then he spoke.
“And did you know that when you promised to be his wife?” he asked, with
a scrupulous desire to be absolutely fair.
“Yes,” said she.
“Then, what are his religious opinions?” asked he, still scrupulous.
“Does he believe in God?”
“No.”
“And you knew that all along?”
“I knew it on the day when, I think, I began to love him,” she said.
A sudden, superficial flow of bitterness, just as a light breeze will
ruffle the surface of some huge wave, passed over her father.
“For that reason?” he asked.
Helen looked at him in amazement.
“I did not know you could have asked me that,” she said.
“And I, too, have much to learn about my children,” said he.
Helen’s eye flashed back at him. She was afraid no longer. The talk she
had had with Frank on that memorable Sunday afternoon she had put away
like stored provisions; often since it had been food to her thoughts,
and it was now all eaten, digested, assimilated. The instinct of
individualism had no doubt often been present to her mind before, but
what he said then had made it blossom and fructify. He had said, in
fact, perhaps no more than she had known, though without knowing she
knew it; his words had been a taper to a gas-jet already turned on.
Without the taper it might have continued to escape; the taper made
flame of it. And in the light of it the figure “father” was shewn her as
a man only, capable of using one vote, in opposition it might be to her
own, but, however dear and intimate he was to her, and in spite of her
parentage, education, and upbringing, he was still only somebody, not
herself. And she, Helen, had to be herself.
“Yes; you are learning that they are people,” she said, in answer to his
bitterness. “Martin and I are people. I must think for myself and feel
for myself. Yes; I knew that Frank is what he is,--an atheist. And I
love him.”
Mr. Challoner looked at her a moment with terrible, alien eyes, meeting
her full gaze. Then he turned and went towards the door.
Instantly the daughter in her awoke.
“Father,” she cried, holding out her hands to him, “Father.”
But he passed out without turning, and she heard the door of his study
opposite close behind him, and the click of a lock.
The finality, the sharpness of that click of well-oiled wards, brought
home to the girl, even more than the bitter and burning words which had
been said, what had happened, the unbridgeable breach that had opened
between herself and her father. For, even now, distraught as she was
with the agitation of the scene, so that she felt almost physically
sick, she knew that she had acted in compulsory obedience to an instinct
which was irresistible; she could not call back into her own control the
love she had given. Whatever else beckoned, that to her was the
strongest call. And equally well-known to her was the instinct in
obedience to which her father had acted. Dear as his children were to
him, there was something infinitely dearer, that which from the tower of
the church had pointed upwards into the clear, sunset sky. No assertion
of individualism made its voice heard there; the one immutable love
claimed all allegiances.
Infinitely shocked and distressed as he was, Mr. Challoner did not
suffer during the next half-hour nearly as keenly as Helen, for the idea
that she would not eventually--after pain and struggle, no doubt--see as
he saw never entered his mind. Indeed, after a few minutes the emotion
predominant in him was pity for her at the necessity of the rejection of
the human love offered to and accepted by her. She would be led to the
light--not for a moment did he doubt that--and the suffering would
ennoble and not embitter her. Then, out of pity for her, compunction at
what he had done rose within him. Again he had been harsh and
peremptory; not even the sacred cause he championed could justify that
nor excuse his lack of gentleness. He had left her in anger, anger as he
now acknowledged to himself partly personal in its origin. So, before
half an hour was passed, he unlocked his door, and going upstairs to her
bedroom, tapped softly.
Helen had had no more thought of going to bed than he, and she let him
in at once.
“We did not say good-night, Helen,” he said. “We were both----“
She raised her eyes to him.
“Ah, don’t let us discuss it any more to-night,” she said.
“No, dear. I only wanted to say good-night to you, to--to say that I am
sorry for leaving in the manner I did. You look very tired. Will you not
go to bed.”
“Yes; soon perhaps.”
She kissed him, and stood silent a moment, fingering the lappel of his
coat.
“If we did not care for each other it would be easier,” she said. “Poor
father! Good-night, dear. Thank you for coming.”
* * * * *
It had been arranged that Frank should bring the motor over again next
morning and drive Helen back to Fareham to lunch with Lady Sunningdale,
and he made his appearance rather sooner than expected, having driven,
as he acknowledged, a little over the regulation two miles an hour.
Helen had heard the approach of wheels, and met him at the door. One
glance at her face was enough to tell him that something, and what that
was he easily guessed, had happened.
“Father is in,” she said; “he waited in on purpose to see you. Yes; he
knows.”
“You told him? Well?”
“He said very little, but enough. Oh, Frank, it is very dreadful. He is
my father. But all I said to you holds. He, you; that is what hurts so.
It was awful telling him, too. But I had to.”
“My darling, why?” he asked. “You should have left it to me.”
Her eye brightened.
“Ah, that was one of the reasons why I didn’t,” she said.
“Oh, Helen! But you look tired, knocked up.”
“That doesn’t much matter,” she said. “Go to see him now, dear. You will
find me on the lawn when you have finished. And, remember, it all holds.
It was never shaken, not for a moment, even last night. And he came to
say good-night to me afterwards; poor, dear father! I have always envied
him for his strength till now; but now it is just that which will make
him suffer so horribly.”
Frank felt in his coat pocket, and took a note out of it.
“From Lady Sunningdale,” he said. “She is delighted, and is telling
everybody how she managed and contrived it all from the beginning.”
Helen took the note.
“Go now, Frank,” she said. “I can think of nothing till this is over.”
She strolled out on to the lawn again, and sat down in the warm shade of
the box-hedge to read Lady Sunningdale’s ecstatic and desultory
raptures. The scene the evening before, followed by a very restless
night, full of half-conscious sleep and wide-eyed awakenings, had so
tired her that weariness had brought a sort of healing of its own,
dulling the keenest edge of her capacity for suffering. Breakfast had
been a meal of ghastly silence, broken only by noises of knives and
forks, loud in the stillness. Her father had only addressed her directly
once, and that to say that he wished to see Lord Yorkshire when he
arrived. Breakfast over, she had written to Martin to tell him all that
had happened; then Frank had come.
All sorts of awful, impossible situations flapped like horrible bats
about her as she waited. She pictured her father insulting her lover;
she pictured Frank, stung by some intolerable taunt, striking him; she
pictured, with dreadful vividness, a hundred things that could not
possibly be. All round her hummed the myriad noises of the summer noon,
and the myriad scents of the flower-garden, where still the industrious
sweet-peas were prolific, mingled, and were wafted in web of fragrant
smell round her. It was a day of high festival in sound and smell and
light and colour, a day of a brilliance that had again and again been
sufficient to make her half crazy with the pure joy of living and sight
of joyous life so abundantly manifested. But this morning she was deaf
and blind to the myriad-voiced noon; for in these last twenty-four hours
there had come to her a happiness transcending all she had ever felt and
a bitterness of sorrow, marching side by side, and inextricably mingled
with it, that was as immeasurably more poignant than any she had ever
known as her joy transcended all the other joys of her very happy years.
Whatever might happen, life could never again be enjoyed by her with the
_insouciance_ of girlhood: some finger had touched her as she smiled and
dreamed in her twenty years of sleep and had awakened her. And a voice
had said, “Wake; you are a woman; you shall love and suffer.” Yet, even
now, while she shrank and winced under the pain, some secret fibre of
her being welcomed it. She--her essential self--was the richer for it;
life at last had touched her sad, bitter, imperfect, but admirable
life. Like a plant, she had been moved suddenly out of the warm shelter
of a green-house. Hereafter the sun might scorch her, the wind tear her,
the frost wither her, the rain lash her, but she was to know what it was
to be rooted in the great earth, to grow, with no shelter in between,
upward towards the heavens.
All this was certainly happening to her, but as yet she guessed but a
small part of it. All that her reverie, when she had read Lady
Sunningdale’s letter, told her was that she was acutely unhappy because
her father would suffer; and in some tremulous, aërial way happy beyond
all that she had ever guessed to be possible because she loved and was
loved. The two feelings were inextricably intertwined; neither, as she
knew them, could have existence without the other. And out of this
tangled thicket of rose and thorn there emerged this new self of hers,
in no selfish or egoistic mood, but very conscious, very vital, bleeding
from the thorns, but breathing the inimitable odour of the roses.
A maid-servant with a message from the vicar roused her. Would she
please to come into his study for a moment. She got up with a vague,
dreadful sense that this had all happened before, but she could not
remember the outcome, and as she walked across the lawn the terrible,
impossible pictures again flashed through her head, like scenes of a
magic-lantern staring out of blackness.
The aroma of tobacco as she opened the study door gave her a sudden,
shallow thrill of comfort. But this was scarcely endorsed by the next
impression. Mr. Challoner, always courteous, had no doubt suggested one
of his excellent cigars, and Frank had accepted it. But the
good-fellowship tacitly implied by the act was here omitted. The vicar
stood with his back to the fireplace, flinty-faced; Frank sat in a big
chair drawn close to the writing-table, the chair in which times without
number Helen and Martin had sat together looking at Bible pictures after
tea on Sunday. All the furniture of the study, the aromatic smell of
leather bindings that hung there, the uncompromising tidiness of it, its
orderly severity, the picture of the Roman forum, the glass paper-weight
on the table, brought a sudden rush of associations into the girl’s mind
now that she saw Frank there too; they were all so closely knit into the
fabric of her life, so intimately suggestive of that stern, tall figure
by the fireplace. And somewhere far away back in her brain her own
voice, in a little childish pipe, whispered to Martin, “Papa’s cross
about something. Is it you or me?”
She took a seat in silence, and the silence lengthened ominously. Frank
was looking at her with a quiet, level gaze, full of love and full of
pity, and she turned her eyes away, fearing that she would scream with
tears or laughter if she allowed herself to look at him. And the voice
that broke the silence was quiet and level also; the whole thing was
deplorably well-bred. Insults, violence, all that she had pictured to
herself, would have been a relief, a safety-valve for the bursting
pressure that she knew existed beneath. But as yet there was none.
“I have sent for you, Helen,” said her father, “to choose.” He paused a
moment. “Lord Yorkshire is on the one side,” he said, “I am on the
other. We have settled it so.”
“That is not quite fairly stated,” said Frank, in the tone a man might
use if he demurred to some argument in a discussion in which he was not
really interested.
Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler.
“Did you say ‘fairly’?” he asked.
The deadly quietness of this suddenly frightened the girl. That was a
tone in his voice she knew and dreaded.
“Father,” she said, “father.”
They neither of them took any notice of her, and Frank answered in the
same gentle, objecting manner.
“You say ‘we settled it,’” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. You
merely told me what you were going to do. That is why I used the word
‘fairly.’”
Mr. Challoner considered this for a moment.
“I see your point,” he said. “That is so.”
Then he turned to Helen.
“So choose,” he said. “I settled it so.”
Helen looked at Frank a moment and stood up, love streaming round her in
triumphant flood, bearing her away.
“I have chosen,” she said. “You know it.”
Then, even in that moment, when she felt so strong, when her love was to
her like a draught of wine or meat to the hungry, her strength utterly
failed her, and she buried her head on the cushions of the sofa where
she had been sitting and burst into hopeless, hysterical sobbing. She
was not capable of more; all had given way, and she lay helpless,
sobbing, sobbing, as if to sob her heart out.
But four hands were busy about her, and as the stress of her seizure
began to leave her, she heard two voices, for the moment one. And one
said, “Helen darling,” and the other, “Helen dear;” and one said, “If
you would be so kind, Lord Yorkshire, there is some water on the table;”
and the other said, “Helen, would you like to drink a little water?”
For two men in nature, in sympathy, in religion poles apart were bound
together for a moment in the necessity divine and human of comforting
the weak, of giving help to a sufferer. She who suffered was loved by
them both, and though the distance of fifty poles could not span the
difference between their ways of love, that was sufficient.
For myriads are the ways of approaching the throne where all love
dwells. From east and west and north and south those myriad ways
converge and meet. But at present east and west, being human, and
thinking that they were going in opposite ways, could not foretell the
meeting. But the Centre knew.
By degrees she came to herself again, and one said, “Some other time,”
and the other, “Not again now, Helen.” So of the three she was the only
one who was resolved to go on, to have this ghastly spiritual surgery
finished. Though she had chosen, she knew there was more that had to be
said.
She cast one glance at her father, but her physical weakness over, his
pity, she saw, was over also. A gulf immeasurable by leagues had opened
between them, and though not even yet did he despair that they would be
forever disunited, it was she who must come to him. From the firm rock
on which he stood he knew, so he believed, that he would never stir a
step.
She pushed back her hair from her forehead.
“I don’t know why I did that,” she said. “It was stupid of me. Give me a
minute.”
She got up, still a little unsteadily, and played with the pens in the
tray on the writing-table, recovering herself. Then she turned suddenly
to her father.
“Father,” she said, “you can’t mean what you say. How can I choose
between you? What are you asking me to do? What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I say,” he answered, with the same dreadful
quietness. That which had not seemed possible to him last night, that
she would really choose as she had chosen, had become more than
possible. “You choose between us. Are there words in which I can make
that clearer? If you choose me, you say good-bye to Lord Yorkshire here
and now. If you choose him, you are to understand that you cease to be
my daughter. I will not be at your wedding; I will not see you
afterwards. You shall not be married from this house, nor, if I could
help it, should you be married in this church.”
Then suddenly the quietness of the scene was shattered. As if by a
sudden flash of lightning, all that Helen’s choice implied, her
rejection not of him alone, but her rejection of all in the world that
he held sacred, was made dazzlingly clear to him. At that his
self-control gave way, and as his voice rose louder and louder, he beat
with his clenched hand on the edge of the marble chimney-piece, so that
the knuckles bled.
“Understand what you are doing,” he said, “and let me tell you, so that
there can be no mistake. You will promise to love, honour, and obey an
atheist, an infidel, one who denies God and his Christ. You will have
to say you do this according to God’s holy ordinance. That from you, in
church, Helen, and a lie. It cannot be by His ordinance, for by your act
you turn your back on the faith that has been yours from childhood till
now, on all you have believed to be sacred. And what of the end? What of
the life to which this is but a prelude? What of him, your husband,
then? He that believeth not shall be damned. I would--I would sooner see
you in your coffin than standing by the altar with this man. I would
sooner see you his mistress----“
His passion, springing though it did from his own intense and fervent
Christianity, had suddenly shot out into a bitter and poisonous blossom,
and as that flared through the room, he paused a moment and looked at
her as she stood before him in the beautiful whiteness of her girlhood.
Her physical weakness had altogether passed, and except that she took
one step back from him in involuntary disgust and shrinking, you would
have said she was listening with quiet, incredulous wonder to some tale
that did not concern her. But as he paused, hardly yet knowing what he
had said, knowing, in fact, only that no words could be strong enough to
express the intensity of his conviction, she turned from him.
“Come, Frank,” she said; “let us go.”
Frank also had risen with a sudden flush on his face at those
intolerable words, an answer springing to his lips, and moved quickly
towards her with some instinct of protecting her. But her tone checked
him, and he followed her to the door. She had already opened it, without
further speech or looking back, when her father’s voice, scarcely
audible and broken and trembling, stopped her.
“Helen,” he said, “indeed I did not think or know what I said. But, my
dearest, what are you doing? What are you doing? For Christ’s sake,
Helen, who died for you.”
Frank had passed out. Whatever more took place between them was not for
him to hear. Then the door closed behind him, leaving father and
daughter alone.
“For Christ’s sake, Helen,” he said again.
She came back to the hearth-rug where he stood.
“Oh, father,” she said, and paused. That was all the reproach he was
ever to hear from her. “You are making it very hard for me.”
“Yes, I am making it as hard as I can. I am bound by my duty to God to
do that. If I knew how to make it harder, I would.”
“You cannot. You have said all that can be said. And I have nothing more
to say. Let me go now.”
She kissed him gently.
“Poor father!” she said, and left him.
* * * * *
Mr. Challoner stood long where he was when she had gone. Never before
perhaps in his whole life had another will come so actively and
stubbornly into collision with his, and never before certainly had he
felt so overwhelmingly a sense of spiritual desolation. Eager and
strenuous all through, it was in the truths of the Christian faith that
he found the incentive of his life, from it sprang all the earnestness
and deep sense of duty in the man, to it was every effort and deed of
his dedicated.
“But what have I done,” he half moaned to himself, “that this should
come to my house, and to one for whose faith and upbringing I have to
answer? Oh, Lord, if it is through any fault of mine, let me learn for
what deadly sin this punishment is sent!”
Indeed, he had spoken no more than the truth, bitter and brutal though
the truth was, when he told Helen that he would rather have seen her in
her coffin than by the altar with her lover. And now he took no account
of his personal sorrow; the yearning that she should accept her father’s
wish and guidance as such was non-existent in him, killed by the
stronger motive. All his personal relations with her of trust and
affection, which to the best of his power he had built up for years,
were voiceless now,--simply he strove for a soul--and that dear to
him--in danger imminent and awful. The rigid Puritan note was here, and
he would sooner have mated her with a thief or an adulterer, since such
might repent and be saved, than with a reasoned atheist.
Then in a horror of great darkness he questioned his own spirit. “How
had he failed?” and again, “How had he failed?” Never had precious plant
been more hedged about from frost or untimely blighting of March winds
than had his daughter been folded from all that could conceivably have
stunted or weakened the one true growth. From the time when her lips
were wet with a mother’s milk God counsels, verse by verse and line by
line, had been the guides and counsellors of her life. What had he left
undone that he could have done? Had any remissness of his own hindered
growth where it should have helped? He searched the years for his fault,
but among all his failures and weaknesses and harshnesses he could not
find that even for a day had he let anything else take precedence of the
greatest and the only thing in the world.
And now at the end she would mate with an infidel, a man, according to
his idea, whose intimacy was more to be shunned than that of a leper’s
or of one who was tainted with some deadly and contagious disease. That,
at any rate, could only kill the body; but Helen had chosen as the
friend and companion of her nights and days one whose soul was sick with
a more fatal disease, the end of which, ordained and appointed of God,
was eternal death. It was too hideous to be credible, it was too hideous
to be conceivably just. And the fact that he could think that gives the
measure of his soul’s anguish.
God sets a limit to human misery: for it happens that the tortured
brain, tired with suffering, lapses into a state of semi-sensibility; or
again, since one cannot feel pain on account of another unless the other
is dear,--the pain felt varying, indeed, in proportion to the affection
felt,--the joy of love is always mingled with it. It was so now with Mr.
Challoner. Had he not have been Helen’s father, had he not loved her, he
would have cared less. But she was his daughter, his own girl, whose
sweetness had all her life made sunshine in his home. He had said an
intolerable thing to her, and for reproach she had still given him
gentleness. In the keenness of his own suffering he had forgotten hers;
he had forgotten even, except for that moment when she had broken down,
that she must be suffering. So he went out after her.
She was standing at the door with her lover, and he went straight up to
them. Even the sight of Frank there gave him no pause.
“It has been a dreadful morning for us all,” he said, “and selfishly I
had forgotten that others beside myself were unhappy. God knows what is
in store for us all, but we can do no good by being bitter, as I have
been. Let us,--yes, you, too, Lord Yorkshire,--let us all join hands a
moment. We are His children, are we not? We----“
His mouth quivered, no more words would come, and they stood there a
moment, all three hands clasped. Then, feeling that his self-control was
utterly giving way, he left them, and went back to his empty room.