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.
"Carrotina--why, what's happened to you?" said her father to her one day.
She turned in astonishment from her task of putting some books tidy on
his study shelves. Then she coloured half angrily.
"I must put my hair up some time, I suppose," she said resentfully. There
was something in the abruptness of her father's question, no less than in
the new closeness and sharpness of eye with which he was examining her,
that annoyed her.
"Well! you've made a young lady of yourself. I dare say I mustn't call
you nicknames any more!"
"I don't mind," she said indifferently, going on with her work, while he
looked at the golden-red mass she had coiled round her little head, with
an odd half-welcome sense of change, a sudden prescience of the future.
Then she turned again.
"If--if you make any absurd changes," she said, with a frown, "I'll--I'll
cut it all off!"
"You'd better not; there'd be ructions," he said laughing. "It's not
yours till you're twenty-one."
And to himself he said, "Gracious! I didn't bargain for a pretty
daughter. What am I to do with her? Augustina'll never get her married."
And certainly during this early youth, Laura showed no signs of getting
herself married. She did not apparently know when a young man was by; and
her bright vehement ways, her sharp turns of speech, went on just the
same; she neither quivered nor thrilled; and her chatter, when she did
chatter, spent itself almost with indifference on anyone who came near
her. She was generally gay, generally in spirits; and her girl companions
knew well that there was no one so reserved, and that the inmost self of
her, if such a thing existed, dwelt far away from any ken of theirs.
Every now and then she would have vehement angers and outbreaks which
contrasted with the nonchalance of her ordinary temper; but it was hard
to find the clue to them.
Altogether she passed for a clever girl, even in a University town, where
cleverness is weighed. But her education, except in two points, was, in
truth, of the slightest. Any mechanical drudgery that her father could
set her, she did without a murmur; or, rather, she claimed it jealously,
with a silent passion. But, with an obstinacy equally silent, she set
herself against the drudgery that would have made her his intellectual
companion.
His rows of technical books, the scholarly and laborious details of his
work, filled her with an invincible repugnance. And he did not attempt to
persuade her. As to women and their claims, he was old-fashioned and
contemptuous; he would have been much embarrassed by a learned daughter.
That she should copy and tidy for him; that she should sit curled up for
hours with a book or a piece of work in a corner of his room; that she
should bring him his pipe, and break in upon his work at the right moment
with her peremptory "Papa, come out!"--these things were delightful, nay,
necessary to him. But he had no dreams beyond; and he never thought of
her, her education or her character, as a whole. It was not his way.
Besides, girls took their chance. With a boy, of course, one plans and
looks ahead. But Laura would have 200_l_. a year from her mother whatever
happened, and something more at his own death. Why trouble oneself?
No doubt indirectly he contributed very largely to her growing up. The
sight of his work and his methods; the occasional talks she overheard
between him and his scientific comrades; the tones of irony and denial in
the atmosphere about him; his antagonisms, his bitternesses, worked
strongly upon her still plastic nature. Moreover she felt to her heart's
core that he was unsuccessful; there were appointments he should have
had, but had failed to get, and it was the religious party, the "clerical
crew" of Convocation, that had stood in the way. From her childhood it
came natural to her to hate bigoted people who believed in ridiculous
things. It was they stood between her father and his deserts. There
loomed up, as it were, on her horizon, something dim and majestic, which
was called Science. Towards this her father pressed, she clinging to him;
while all about them was a black and hindering crowd, through which they
clove their way--contemptuously.
In one direction, indeed, Fountain admitted her to his mind. Like Mill,
he found the rest and balm of life in poetry; and here he took Laura with
him. They read to each other, they spurred each other to learn by heart.
He kept nothing from her. Shelley was a passion of his own; it became
hers. She taught herself German, that she might read Heine and Goethe
with him; and one evening, when she was little more than sixteen, he
rushed her through the first part of "Faust," so that she lay awake the
whole night afterwards in such a passion of emotion, that it seemed, for
the moment, to change her whole existence. Sometimes it astonished him to
see what capacity she had, not only for the feeling, but for the sensuous
pleasure, of poetry. Lines--sounds--haunted her for days, the beauty of
them would make her start and tremble.
She did her best, however, to hide this side of her nature even from him.
And it was not difficult. She remained childishly immature and backward
in many things. She was a personality; that was clear; one could hardly
say that she was or had a character. She was a bundle of loves and hates;
a force, not an organism; and her father was often as much puzzled by her
as anyone else.
Music perhaps was the only study which ever conquered her indolence. Here
it happened that a famous musician, who settled in Cambridge for a time,
came across her gift and took notice of it. And to please him she worked
with industry, even with doggedness. Brahms, Chopin, Wagner--these great
romantics possessed her in music as Shelley or Rossetti did in poetry.
"You little demon, Laura! How do you come to play like that?" a girl
friend--her only intimate friend--said to her once in despair. "It's the
expression. Where do you get it? And I practise, and you don't; it's not
fair."
"Expression!" said Laura, with annoyance, "what does that matter? That's
the amateur all over. Of course I play like that because I can't do it
any better. If I could _play the notes_"--she clenched her little hand,
with a curious, almost a fierce energy--"if I had any technique--or was
ever likely to have any, what should I want with expression? Any cat can
give you expression! There was one under my window last night--you should
just have heard it!"
Molly Friedland, the girl friend, shrugged her shoulders. She was as
soft, as normal, as self-controlled, as Laura was wilful and irritable.
But there was a very real affection between them.
Years passed. Insensibly Augustina's health began to fail; and with it
the new cheerfulness of her middle life. Then Fountain himself fell
suddenly and dangerously ill. All the peaceful habits and small pleasures
of their common existence broke down after a few days, as it were, into a
miserable confusion. Augustina stood bewildered. Then a convulsion of
soul she had expected as little as anyone else, swept upon her. A number
of obscure, inherited, half-dead instincts revived. She lived in terror;
she slept, weeping; and at the back of an old drawer she found a rosary
of her childhood to which her fingers clung night and day.
Meanwhile Fountain resigned himself to death. During his last days his
dimmed senses did not perceive what was happening to his wife. But he
troubled himself about her a good deal.
"Take care of her, Laura," he said once, "till she gets strong. Look
after her.--But you can't sacrifice your life.--It may be Christian," he
added, in a murmur, "but it isn't sense."
Unconsciousness came on. Augustina seemed to lose her wits; and at last
only Laura, sitting pale and fierce beside her father, prevented her
stepmother from bringing a priest to his death-bed. "You would not
_dare_!" said the girl, in her low, quivering voice; and Augustina could
only wring her hands.
* * * * *
The day after her husband died Mrs. Fountain returned to her Catholic
duties. When she came back from confession, she slipped as noiselessly as
she could into the darkened house. A door opened upstairs, and Laura came
out of her father's room.
"You have done it?" she said, as her stepmother, trembling with agitation
and weariness, came towards her. "You have gone back to them?"
"Oh, Laura! I had to follow the call--my conscience--Laura! oh! your poor
father!"
And with a burst of weeping the widow held out her hands.
Laura did not move, and the hands dropped.
"My father wants nothing," she said.
The indescribable pride and passion of her accent cowed Augustina, and
she moved away, crying silently. The girl went back to the dead, and sat
beside him, in an anguish that had no more tears, till he was taken from
her.
Mr. Helbeck wrote kindly to his sister in reply to a letter from her
informing him of her husband's death, and of her own reconciliation with
the Church. He asked whether he should come at once to help them through
the business of the funeral, and the winding up of their Cambridge life.
"Beg him, please, to stay away," said Laura, when the letter was shown
her. "There are plenty of people here."
And indeed Cambridge, which had taken little notice of the Fountains
during Stephen's lifetime, was even fussily kind after his death to his
widow and child. It was at all times difficult to be kind to Laura in
distress, but there was much true pity felt for her, and a good deal of
curiosity as to her relations with her Catholic stepmother. Only from the
Friedlands, however, would she accept, or allow her stepmother to accept,
any real help. Dr. Friedland was a man of middle age, who had retired on
moderate wealth to devote himself to historical work by the help of the
Cambridge libraries. He had been much drawn to Stephen Fountain, and
Fountain to him. It was a recent and a brief friendship, but there had
been something in it on Dr. Friedland's side--something respectful and
cordial, something generous and understanding, for which Laura loved the
infirm and grey-haired scholar, and would always love him. She shed some
stormy tears after parting with the Friedlands, otherwise she left
Cambridge with joy.
On the day before they left Cambridge Augustina received a parcel of
books from her brother. For the most part they were kept hidden from
Laura. But in the evening, when the girl was doing some packing in her
stepmother's room, she came across a little volume lying open on its
face. She lifted it, saw that it was called "Outlines of Catholic
Belief," and that one page was still wet with tears. An angry curiosity
made her look at what stood there: "A believer in one God who, without
wilful fault on his part, knows nothing of the Divine Mystery of the
Trinity, is held capable of salvation by many Catholic theologians. And
there is the 'invincible ignorance' of the heathen. What else is possible
to the Divine mercy let none of us presume to know. Our part in these
matters is obedience, not speculation."
In faint pencil on the margin was written: "My Stephen _could_ not
believe. Mary--pray----"
The book contained the Bannisdale book-plate, and the name "Alan
Helbeck." Laura threw it down. But her face trembled through its scorn,
and she finished what she was doing in a kind of blind passion. It was as
though she held her father's dying form in her arms, protecting him
against the same meddling and tyrannical force that had injured him while
he lived, and was still making mouths at him now that he was dead.
She and Augustina went to the sea--to Folkestone, for Augustina's health.
Here Mrs. Fountain began to correspond regularly with her brother, and it
was soon clear that her heart was hungering for him, and for her old home
at Bannisdale. But she was still painfully dependent on Laura. Laura was
her maid and nurse; Laura managed all her business. At last one day she
made her prayer. Would Laura go with her--for a little while--to
Bannisdale? Alan wished it--Alan had invited them both. "He would be so
good to you, Laura--and I'm sure it would set me up."
Laura gave a gulp. She dropped her little chin on her hands and thought.
Well--why not? It would be all hateful to her--Mr. Helbeck and his house
together. She knew very well, or guessed what his relation to her father
had been. But what if it made Augustina strong, if in time she could be
left with her brother altogether, to live with him?--In one or two of his
letters he had proposed as much. Why, that would bring Laura's
responsibility, her sole responsibility, at any rate, to an end.
She thought of Molly Friedland--of their girlish plans--of travel, of
music.
"All right," she said, springing up. "We will go, Augustina. I suppose,
for a little while, Mr. Helbeck and I can keep the peace. You must tell
him to let me alone."
She paused, then said with sudden vehemence, like one who takes her
stand--"And tell him, please, Augustina--make it very plain--that I shall
never come in to prayers."