A week later the Jesuit scholastic Edward Williams arrived at Bannisdale.
In Laura his coming roused a curiosity half angry, half feminine, by
which Helbeck was alternately harassed and amused. She never tired of
asking questions about the Jesuits--their training, their rules, their
occupations. She could not remember that she had ever seen one till she
made acquaintance with Father Leadham. They were alternately a mystery
and a repulsion to her.
Helbeck smilingly told her that she was no worse than the mass of English
people. "They have set up their bogey and they like it." She would be
surprised to find how simple was the Jesuit secret.
"What is it?--in two words?" she asked him.
"Obedience--training. So little!" he laughed at her, and took her hand
tenderly.
She inquired if Mr. Williams were yet "a full Jesuit."
"Oh dear no! He has taken his first vows. Now he has three years'
philosophy, then four years' theology. After that they will make him
teach somewhere. Then he will take orders--go through a third year's
noviceship--get a doctor's degree, if he can--and after that, perhaps, he
will be a professed 'Father.' It isn't done just by wishing for it, you
see."
The spirit of opposition reared its head. She coloured, laughed--and half
without intending it repeated some of the caustic things she had heard
occasionally from her father or his friends as to the learning of
Jesuits. Helbeck, under his lover's sweetness, showed a certain
restlessness. He hardly let himself think the thought that Stephen
Fountain had been quoted to him very often of late; but it was there.
"I am no judge," he said at last. "I am not learned. I dare say you will
find Williams ignorant enough. But he was a clever boy--besides his art."
"And they have made him give up his art?"
"For a time--yes--perhaps altogether. Of course it has been his great
renunciation. His superiors thought it necessary to cut him off from it
entirely. And no doubt during the novitiate he suffered a great deal. It
has been like any other starved faculty."
The girl's instincts rose in revolt. She cried out against such waste,
such mutilation. The Catholic tried to appease her; but in another
language. He bade her remember the Jesuit motto. "A Jesuit is like any
other soldier--he puts himself under orders for a purpose."
"And God is to be glorified by the crashing out of all He took the
trouble to give you!"
"You must take the means to the end," said Helbeck steadily. "The Jesuit
must yield his will--otherwise the Society need not exist. In Williams's
case, so long as he had a fascinating and absorbing pursuit, how could he
give himself up to his superiors? Besides"--his grave face stiffened--"in
his case there were peculiar difficulties. His art had become a
temptation. He wished to protect himself from it."
Laura's curiosity was roused; but Helbeck gently put her questions aside,
and at last she said in a flash of something like passion that she
wondered which the young man had felt most--the trampling on his art, or
the forsaking his mother.
Helbeck looked at her with sudden animation.
"I knew you had heard that story. Dear--he did not forsake his mother! He
meant to go--the Fathers had given him leave. But there was a mistake, a
miscalculation--and he arrived too late."
Laura's beautiful eyes threw lightnings.
"A _miscalculation!_" she cried scornfully, her quick breath
beating--"That puts it in a nutshell."
Helbeck looked at her sadly.
"So you are going to be very unkind to him?"
"No. I shall watch him."
"Look into him rather! Try and make out his spring. I will help you."
She protested that there was nothing she less desired. She had been
reading some Jesuit biographies from Augustina's room, and they had made
her feel that the only thing to be done with such people was to keep them
at a distance.
Helbeck sighed and gave up the conversation. Then in a moment,
compunctions and softenings began to creep over the girl's face. A small
hand made its way to his.
"There is Wilson in the garden--shall we go and talk to him?"
They were in Helbeck's study--where Augustina had left them alone for a
little after luncheon.
Helbeck put down his pipe with alacrity. Laura ran for her hat and cape,
and they went out together.
A number of small improvements both inside and outside the house had been
recently inaugurated to please the coming bride. Already Helbeck
realised--and not without a secret chafing--the restraints that would
soon be laid upon the almsgiving of Bannisdale. A man who marries, who
may have children, can no longer deal with his money as he pleases.
Meanwhile he found his reward in Laura's half-reluctant pleasure. She was
at once full of eagerness and full of a proud shyness. No bride less
grasping or more sensitive could have been imagined. She loved the old
house and would fain repair its hurts. But her wild nature, at the
moment, asked, in this at least, to be commanded, not to command. To be
the managing wife of an obedient husband was the last thing that her
imagination coveted. So that when any change in the garden, any repair in
the house, was in progress, she would hover round Helbeck, half cold,
half eager, now only showing a fraction of her mind, and now flashing out
into a word or look that for Helbeck turned the whole business into pure
joy. Day by day, indeed, amid all jars and misgivings, the once solitary
master of Bannisdale was becoming better acquainted with that mere
pleasantness of a woman's company which is not passion, but its best
friend. In the case of those women whom nature marks for love, it is a
company full of incident, full of surprise. Certainly Helbeck found it
so.
A week or more had now passed since the quarrel over the picture. Not a
word upon the subject had passed between them since. As for Laura, she
took pains not to look at the picture--to forget its existence. It was as
though she felt some hidden link between herself and it--as though some
superstitious feeling attached to it in her mind.
Meanwhile a number of new understandings were developing in Helbeck. His
own nature was simple and concentrated, with little introspective power
of the modern kind--even through all the passions and subtleties of his
religion. Nevertheless his lover's sense revealed to him a good deal of
what was going on in the semi-darkness of Laura's feelings and ideas. He
divined this jealousy of his religious life that had taken possession of
her since their return from the sea. He felt by sympathy that obscure
pain of separation that tormented her. What was he to do?--what could he
do?
The change astonished him, for while they were at the sea, it seemed to
him that she had accepted the situation with a remarkable resolution. But
it also set him on new trains of thought; it roused in him a secret
excitement, a vague hope. If her earlier mood had persisted; if amid the
joys of their love she had continued to put the whole religious matter
away from her, as many a girl with her training might and would have
done--then indeed he must have resigned himself to a life-long difference
and silence between them on these vital things.
But, since she suffered--since she felt the need of that more intimate,
more exquisite link--? Since she could not let it alone, but must needs
wound herself and him----?
Instinctively he felt the weakness of her intellectual defence. Once or
twice he let himself imagine the capture of her little struggling soul,
the break-down of her childish resistance, and felt the flooding of a
joy, at once mystical and very human.
But that natural chivalry and deep self-distrust he had once expressed to
Father Leadham kept him in check; made him very slow and scrupulous.
Towards his Catholic friends indeed he stood all along in defence of
Laura, an attitude which only made him more sensitive and more vulnerable
in other directions.
Meanwhile his own struggles and discomforts were not few. No strong man
of Helbeck's type endures so complete an overthrow at the hands of
impulse and circumstance as he had done, without going afterwards through
a period of painful readjustment. The new image of himself that he saw
reflected in the astonished eyes of his Catholic companions worked in him
a number of fresh forms of self-torment. His loyalty to Laura, indeed,
and to his own passion was complete. Secretly, he had come to believe,
with all the obstinate ardor of the religious mind, that the train of
events which had first brought Laura into his life, and had then overcome
his own resistance to her spell, represented, not temptation, but a
Divine volition concerning him. No one so impoverished and forlorn as she
in the matters of the soul! But not of her own doing. Was she responsible
for her father? In the mere fact that she had so incredibly come to love
him--he being what he was--there was surely a significance which the
Catholic was free to interpret in the Catholic sense. So that, where
others saw defection from a high ideal and danger to his own Catholic
position, he, with hidden passion, and very few words of explanation even
to his director, Father Leadham, felt the drawing of a heavenly force,
the promise of an ultimate and joyful issue.
At the same time, the sadness of his Catholic friends should find no
other pretext. Upon his fidelity now and here, not only his own eternal
fate, but Laura's, might depend. Devotion to the crucified Lord and His
Mother, obedience to His Church, imitation of His saints, charity to His
poor--these are the means by which the Catholic draws down the grace, the
condescension that he seeks. He felt his own life offered for hers. So
that the more he loved her, the more set, the more rigid became all the
habits and purposes of religion. Again and again he was tempted to soften
them--to spend time with her that he had been accustomed to give to
Catholic practice--to slacken or modify the harshness of that life of
self-renouncement, solitude, unpopularity, to which he had vowed himself
for years--to conceal from her the more startling and difficult of his
convictions. But he crushed the temptation, guided, inflamed by that
profound idea of a substituted life and a vicarious obedience which has
been among the root forces of Christianity.
* * * * *
One evening, as she was dressing for the very simple meal that only Mrs.
Denton dignified by the name of "dinner," Laura reminded herself that Mr.
Williams must have arrived, and that she would probably find him in the
hall on her descent.
It happened to be the moment for donning a new dress, which she had
ordered from a local artist. She had no mind to exhibit it to the Jesuit.
On the other hand the temptation to show it to Helbeck was irresistible.
She put it on.
When she entered the hall, her feelings of dislike to Mr. Williams, and
her pride in her new dress, had both combined to give her colour and
radiance. Helbeck saw her come in with a start of pleasure. Augustina
fidgeted uncomfortably. She thought that Laura might have dressed in
something more quiet and retiring to meet a guest who was a religious,
almost a priest.
Helbeck introduced the newcomer. Laura's quick eyes travelled over the
young man who bowed to her with a cold awkwardness. She turned aside and
seated herself in a corner of the settle, whither Helbeck came to bend
over her.
"What have you been doing to yourself?" he asked her in a low voice. At
the moment of her entrance she had thought him pale and fatigued. He had
been half over the country that day on Catholic business. But now his
deep-set eyes shone again. He had thrown off the load.
"Experimenting with a Whinthorpe dressmaker," she said; "do you approve?"
Her smile, her brilliance in her pretty dress, intoxicated him. He
murmured some lover's words under his breath. She flushed a little
deeper, then exerted herself to keep him by her. Till supper was
announced they had not a word or look for anyone but each other. The
young "scholastic" talked ceremoniously to Augustina.
"Who talks of Jesuit tyranny now?" said Helbeck, laughing, as he and
Laura led the way to the dining-room. "If it is not too much for him,
Williams has leave to finish some of his work in the chapel while he is
here. But he looks very ill--don't you think so?"
She understood the implied appeal to her sympathy.
"He is extraordinarily handsome," she said, with decision.
At table, however, she came to terms more exactly with her impression.
The face of the young Jesuit was indeed, in some ways, singularly
handsome. The round, dark eyes, the features delicate without weakness,
the high brow narrowed by the thick and curly hair that overhung it, the
small chin and curving mouth, kept still something of the look and the
bloom of the child--a look that was only intensified by the strange force
of expression that was added to the face whenever the lids so constantly
dropped over the eyes were raised. For one saw in it a mingling at once
of sharp observation and of distrust; it seemed to spring from some fiery
source of personality, which at the very moment it revealed itself, yet
warned the spectator back, and stood, half proudly, half sullenly, on the
defensive. Such a look one may often see in the eyes of a poetic and
morbid child.
But the whole aspect was neither delicate nor poetic. For the beauty of
the head was curiously and unexpectedly contradicted by the clumsiness of
the frame below it. "Brother" Williams might have the head of a poet; he
had the form and movements, the large feet and shambling gait, of the
peasant. And Laura, scanning him with some closeness, noticed with
distaste a good many signs of personal slovenliness and ill-breeding. His
hands were not as clean as they might have been; his clerical coat badly
wanted a brushing.
His talk to Augustina could hardly have been more formal. In speaking to
ladies he seldom raised his eyes; and as far as she herself was concerned
Laura was certain, before half an hour was over, that he meant to address
her and to be addressed by her, as little as possible.
Towards Helbeck the visitor's manner was more natural and more
attractive. It was a manner of affection, and great deference; but even
here the occasional bursts of conversation into which the Squire drew his
guest were constantly interrupted by fits of silence or absence on the
part of the scholastic.
Perhaps the subject on which they talked most easily was that of Jesuit
Missions--especially of certain West African stations. Helbeck had some
old friends there; and Laura thought she detected that the young
scholastic had himself missionary ambitions.
Augustina too joined in with eagerness; Laura fell silent.
But she watched Helbeck, she listened to Helbeck throughout. How full his
mind and heart were of matters, persons, causes, that must for ever
represent a sealed world to her! The eagerness, the knowledge with which
he discussed them, roused in her that jealous, half-desolate sense that
was becoming an habitual tone of mind.
And some things offended her taste. Helbeck showed most animation, and
the young Jesuit most response, whenever it was a question not so much of
Catholic triumphs, as of Protestant rebuffs. The follies, mistakes, and
defeats of Anglican missions in particular--Helbeck's memory was stored
with them. By his own confession he had made a Jesuit friend departing
for the mission, promise to tell him any funny or discreditable tales
that could be gathered as to their Anglican rivals in the same region.
And while he repeated them for Williams's amusement, he laughed
immoderately--he who laughed so seldom. The Jesuit too was
convulsed--threw off all restraint for the first time.
The girl flushed brightly, and began to play with Bruno. Years ago she
remembered hearing her father say approvingly of Helbeck's manner and
bearing that they were those "of a man of rank, though not of a man of
fashion;" and it was hardly possible to say how much of Helbeck's first
effect on her imagination had been produced by that proud unworldliness,
that gently, cold courtesy in which he was commonly wrapped. These silly
pointless stories that he had been telling with such relish disturbed and
repelled her. They revealed a new element in his character, something
small and ugly, that was like the speck in a fine fruit, or, rather, like
the disclosure of an angry sore beneath an outward health and strength.
She recalled the incident of the land, and that cold isolation in which
Helbeck held himself towards his Protestant neighbours--the passionate
animosity with which he would sometimes speak of their charities or their
pietisms, the contempt he had for almost all their ideals, national or
social. Again and again, in the early days at Bannisdale, it had ruffled
or provoked her.
Helbeck soon perceived that she was jarred. When she called to Bruno he
checked his flow of anecdote, and said to her in a lower voice:
"You think us uncharitable?"
She looked up--but rather at the Jesuit than at Helbeck.
"No--only it is not amusing! If Augustina or I could speak for the other
side--that would be more fun!"
"Laura!" cried Augustina, scandalised.
"Oh, I know you wouldn't, if you could," said the girl gayly. "And I
can't. So there it is. One can't stop you, I suppose!"
She threw back her bright head and turned to Helbeck. The action was
pretty and coquettish; but there was a touch of fever in it,
nevertheless, which did not escape the stranger sitting opposite to her.
Brother Williams raised his down-dropped lids an instant. Those brilliant
eyes of his took in the girl's beauty and the change in Helbeck's
countenance.
"You shall stop what you like," said Helbeck. A mute conversation seemed
to pass between him and Miss Fountain; then the Squire turned to his
sister, and asked her cheerfully as to the merits of a new pony that she
and Laura had been trying that afternoon.
* * * * *
After dinner Helbeck, much troubled by the pinched features and pale
cheeks of his guest, descended himself to the cellar in search of a
particular Burgundy laid down by his father and reputed to possess a rare
medicinal force.
Mr. Williams was left standing before the hearth, and the famous carved
mantelpiece put up by the martyr of 1596. As soon as Helbeck was gone he
looked carefully--furtively--round the room. It was the look of the
peasant appraising a world not his.
A noise made by the wind at one of the old windows disturbed him. He
looked up and was caught by a photograph that had been propped against
one of the vases of the mantelpiece. It was a picture--recently
taken--of Miss Fountain sitting on the settle in the hall with the dogs
beside her. And it rendered the half-mocking animation of her small face
with a peculiar fidelity.
The young man was conscious of a strong movement of repulsion. Mr.
Helbeck's engagement had sent a thrill of pain through a large section of
the Catholic world; and the Jesuit had already divined a hostile force in
the small and brilliant creature whose eyes had scanned him so coldly as
she sat beside the Squire. He fell into a reverie, and took one or two
turns up and down the room.
"Shall I?" he said to himself in an excitement that was half vanity, half
religion.
* * * * *
Half an hour later Laura was in the oriel window of the drawing-room,
looking out through the open casement at the rising of a golden moon
above the fell. Her mind was full of confusion.
"Is he never to be free to say what he thinks and feels in his own
house?" she asked herself passionately. "Or am I to sit by and see him
sink to the level of these bigots?"
Augustina was upstairs, and Laura, absorbed in her own thoughts and the
night loveliness of the garden, did not hear Helbeck and Mr. Williams
enter the room, which was as usual but dimly lighted. Suddenly she caught
the words:
"So you still keep her? That's good! One could not imagine this room
without her."
The voice was the voice of the Jesuit, but in a new tone--more eager,
more sincere. What were they talking of?--the picture? And she, Laura, of
course was hidden from them by the heavy curtain half drawn across the
oriel. She could not help waiting for Helbeck's reply.
"Ah!--you remember how she was threatened even when you first began to
come here! I have clung to her, of course--there has always been a strong
feeling about her in the family. Last week I thought again that she must
go. But--well! it is too soon to speak--I still have some hopes---I have
been straining every nerve. You know, however, that we must begin our new
buildings at the orphanage in six weeks--and that I must have the money?"
He spoke with his usual simplicity. Laura dropped her head upon the
window-sill, and the tears rushed into her eyes.
"I know--we all know--what you have done and sacrificed for the faith,"
said the younger man with emotion.
"_You_ will not venture to make a merit of it," said Helbeck gravely.
"For we serve the same ends--only you perceive them more clearly--and
follow them more persistently than I."
"I have stronger aids--and shall have to answer for more!" said Williams,
in a low voice. "And I owe it all to you--my friend and rescuer."
"You use a great deal too strong language," said Helbeck, smiling.
Williams threw him an uncertain look. The colour mounted in the young
man's sickly cheek. He approached the Squire.
"Mr. Helbeck--I know from something a common friend told me--that you
think--that you have said to others--that my conversion was not your
doing. You are mistaken. I should like to tell you the truth. May I?"
Helbeck looked uncomfortable, but was not ready enough to stave off the
impending confidence. Williams fixed him with eyes now fully lifted, and
piercingly bright.
"You said little--that is quite true. But it was what you did, what I saw
as I worked here beside you week after week that conquered me. Do you
remember once rebuking me in anger because I had made some mistake in the
chapel work? You were very angry--and I was cut to the heart. That very
night you came to me, as I was still working, and asked my pardon--you!
Mr. Helbeck of Bannisdale, and I, a boy of sixteen, the son of the
wheelwright who mended your farm carts. You made me kneel down beside you
on the steps of the sanctuary--and we said the Confiteor together. Don't
say you forget it!"
Helbeck hesitated, then spoke with evident unwillingness.
"You make a great deal of nothing, my dear Edward. I had treated you to
one of the Helbeck rages, I suppose--and had the grace to be ashamed of
myself."
"It made me a Catholic," said the other emphatically, "so I naturally
dwell upon it. Next day I stole a 'Garden of the Soul' and a book of
meditations from your study. Then, on the pretext of the work, I used to
make you tell me or read me the stories of the saints--later, I often
used to follow you in the morning when you went to Mass. I watched you
day by day, till the sense of something supernatural possessed me. Then
you noticed my coming to Mass--you asked Father Bowles to speak to
me--you seemed to shrink--or I thought so--from speaking yourself. But it
was not Father Bowles--it was not my first teachers at St. Aloysius it
was you--who brought me to the faith!"
"Well, if so, I thank God. But I think your humility----"
"One moment," said the Jesuit hurriedly. "There is something on my mind
to say to you--if I might be allowed to say it--if the gratitude, the
strong and filial gratitude, which I feel towards you--for that, and
much, much else," his voice shook, "might be my excuse----"
Helbeck was silent. Laura to her dismay heard the sound of steps. Mr.
Williams had walked to the open door of the drawing-room and closed it.
What was she to do? Indecision--a wilful passion of curiosity--held her
where she was.
It was some moments, however, before the conversation was resumed. At
last the young man said in a tone of strong agitation:
"You may blame me--my superiors may blame me. I have no leave--no
commission whatever. The impulse to speak came to me when I was waiting
for you in the dining-room just now. I can only plead your own goodness
to me--and--the fact that I have remembered you before the Blessed
Sacrament for these eight years.... It was an impression at meditation
that I want to tell you of--an impression so strong that I have never
since been able to escape from it--it haunts me perpetually. I was in our
chapel at St. Aloysius. The subject of meditation was St. John vii. 36,
'Every man went unto his own house,' followed immediately by the first
words of the eighth chapter, 'and Jesus went unto Mount Olivet.' ... I
endeavoured strictly to obey the advice of St. Ignatius. I placed myself
at the feet of our Lord. I went through the Preludes. Then I began on the
meditation. I saw the multitude returning to their homes and their
amusements--while our Lord went alone to the Mount of Olives. It was
evening. The path seemed to me steep and weary--and He was bent with
fatigue. At first He was all alone--darkness hung over the hill and the
olive gardens. Then, suddenly, I became aware of forms that followed Him,
at a long distance--saints, virgins, martyrs, confessors. They swept
along in silence. I could just see them as a dim majestic crowd.
Presently, a form detached itself from the crowd--to my amazement, I saw
_you_ distinctly--there seemed to be a special light upon your face. And
the rest appeared to fall back. Soon I only saw the Form toiling in
front, and you following. Then at the brow of the hill the Lord
turned--and you, who were half-way up the last steep, paused also. The
Lord beckoned to you. His Divine face was full of sweetness and
encouragement--and you made a spring towards Him. Then something
happened--something horrible--but I could hardly see what. But a figure
seemed to snatch at you from behind--you stumbled--then you fell
headlong. A black cloud fell from the sky--and covered you. I heard a
wailing cry--I saw the Lord's face darkened--and immediately afterwards
the train of saints swept past me once more, with bent heads, beating
their breasts. I cannot describe the extraordinary vividness of it! The
succession of thoughts and images never paused; and when I woke, or
seemed to wake, I found myself bathed in sweat and nearly fainting."
There was a dead silence.
The scholastic began again, in still more rapid and troubled tones, to
excuse himself. Mr. Helbeck might well think it presumption on his part
to have repeated such a thing. He could only plead a strange pressure on
his conscience--a sense of obligation. The fact was probably
nothing--meant nothing. But if calamity came--if it meant calamity--and
he had not delivered his message--would there not have been a burden on
his soul?
Suddenly there was a sound. The handle of the drawing-room turned.
"Why, you are dark in here!" said Augustina. "What a wretched light that
lamp gives!"
At the same moment the heavy curtain over the oriel window was drawn to
one side, and a light figure entered the room.
The Jesuit made a step backwards. "Laura!" cried Helbeck in bewilderment.
"Where have you come from?"
"I was in the window watching the moon rise. Didn't you know?"
She walked up to him, and without hesitation she did what she had never
yet done before a spectator: she slipped her little hand into his. He
looked down upon her, rather pale, his lips moving. Then withdrawing his
hand, he quietly and proudly put his arm round her. She accepted the
movement with equal pride, and without a word.
Augustina looked at them with discomfort--coughed, fumbled with her
spectacles, and began to hunt for her knitting. The Jesuit, whiter and
sicklier than before, murmured that he would go and rest after his
journey, and with eyes steadily cast down he walked away.
"I don't wonder!" thought Augustina, in an inward heat; "they really are
too demonstrative!"
That night for the first time since her arrival at Bannisdale, Laura,
instead of saying good-night as soon as the clock reached a quarter to
ten, quietly walked beside Augustina to the chapel.
She knelt at some distance from Helbeck. But when the prayers, which were
read by Mr. Williams, were over, and the tiny congregation was leaving
the chapel, she felt herself drawn back. Helbeck did not speak, but in
the darkness of the corridor he raised her hands and held them long
against his lips. She quickly escaped from him, and without another word
to anyone she was gone.
But an hour or two later, as she lay wakeful in her room above the study,
she still heard the sound of continuous voices from below.
Helbeck and the scholastic!--plunged once more in that common stock of
recollections and interests in which she had no part, linked and
reconciled through all difference by that Catholic freemasonry of which
she knew nothing. The impertinent zeal of the evening--the young man's
ill manners and hypocrisies--would be soon forgiven. In some ways Mr.
Helbeck was more Jesuit than the Jesuits. He would not only excuse the
audacity--was she quite sure that in his inmost heart he would not shrink
before the warning?
"What chance have I?" she cried, in a sudden despair; and she wept long
and miserably, oppressed by new terrors, new glimpses, as it were, of
some hard or chilling reality that lay waiting for her in the dim
corridors of life.
* * * * *
Next morning after breakfast, Helbeck and Mr. Williams disappeared. A
light scaffolding had been placed in the chapel. Work was to begin.
Laura put on her hat, took a basket, and went into the garden to gather
fresh flowers for the house. Along the edges of the bowling-green stood
rows of sunflowers, a golden show against the deep bronze of the thick
beech hedges that enclosed the ground. Laura was trying, without much
success, to reach some of the top blossoms of a tall plant when Helbeck
came upon her.
"Be as independent as you please," he said laughing, "but you will never
be able to gather sunflowers without me!"
In a moment her basket was filled. He looked down upon her.
"You should live here--in the bowling-green. It frames you--your white
hat--your grey dress. Laura!"--his voice leapt--"do I do enough to make
you happy?"
She flushed--turned her little face, and smiled at him--but rather sadly,
rather pensively. Then she examined him in her turn. He looked jaded and
tired. From want of sleep?--or merely from the daily fatigue of that long
walk, foodless, to Whinthorpe for early Mass? That morning, as usual, by
seven o'clock she had seen him crossing the park. A cheerless rain was
falling from a grey sky. But she had never yet known him stopped by
weather.
There was a quick association of ideas--and she said abruptly:
"Why did Mr. Williams say all that to you last night, do you suppose?"
Helbeck's countenance changed. He sauntered on beside her, his hands in
his pockets, frowning. But he did not reply, and she became impatient.
"I have been reading a French story this morning," she said quickly.
"There is a character in it--a priest. The author says of him that he had
'une imagination faussée et troublée.'" She paused, then added with great
vivacity--"I thought it applied to someone else--don't you?"
The fold in Helbeck's forehead deepened a little.
"Have you judged him already? I don't know--I can't take Williams, you
see, quite as you take him. To me he is still the strange gifted boy I
taught to draw--whom I had to protect from his brutal father. He has
chosen the higher life, and will soon be a priest. He is therefore my
superior. But at the same time I think I understand him and his
character. I understand the kind of impulse--the impetuosity--that made
him do and say what he did last night."
"It was our engagement, of course, that he meant--by your fall--the black
cloud that covered you?"
The impetuous directness was all Laura; so was the sensitive change in
eye and lip. But Helbeck neither wavered, nor caressed her. He had a
better instinct. He looked at her with a penetrating glance.
"I don't think he quite knew what he meant. And you? Now I will carry the
war into the enemy's country! Were you quite kind--quite right in doing
what you did last night? Foolish or no, he was speaking in a very
intimate way--of things that he felt deeply. It must have given him great
pain to be overheard."
Her breath fluttered.
"It was quite an accident that I was there. But how could I help
listening? I must know--I ought to know--what your Catholic friends
think--what they say of me to you!"
She was conscious of a childish petulance. But it was as though she could
not help herself.
"I wish you had not listened," he said, with gentle steadiness. "Won't
you trust those things to me?"
"What power have I beside theirs?" she said, turning away her head. He
saw the trembling of the soft throat, and bent over her.
"I only ask you, for both our sakes, not to test it too far!"
And taking her hand by force, he crushed it passionately in his own.
But she was only half appeased. Her mind, indeed, was in that miserable
state when love finds its only pleasure in self-torment.
With a secret change of ground she asked him how he was going to spend
the day. He answered, reluctantly, that there was a Diocesan Committee
that would take the afternoon, and that the morning must be largely given
to the preparation of papers.
"But you will come and look in upon me?--you will help me through?"
She raised her shoulders resentfully.
"And you have been, to Whinthorpe already!--Why do you go to Mass every
morning?" she asked, looking up. "I know very few Catholics do. I wish
you'd tell me."
He looked embarrassed.
"It has been my custom for a long time," he said at last.
"But _why?_"
"Inquisitive person!"
Her look of pain checked him. He observed her rather sadly and silently
for a moment, then said:
"I will tell you, dear, of course, if you want to know. It is one of the
obligations of the Third Order of St. Francis, to which I belong."
"What does that mean?"
He shortly explained. She cross-examined. He was forced to describe to
her in detail all the main constitutions of the Third Order; its
obligations as to fasting, attendance at Mass, and at the special
meetings of the fraternity; its prescriptions of a rigid simplicity in
life and dress; its prohibition of theatre-going.
She stood amazed. All her old notions of Catholics as gay people, who
practised a free Sunday and allowed you to enjoy yourself, had been long
overthrown by the Catholicism of Bannisdale. But this--this might be
Daffady's Methodism!
"So that is why you would not take us to Whinthorpe the other day to see
that London company?"
"It was an unsuitable play," he said hastily. "Theatres are not wholly
forbidden us; but the exceptions must be few, and the plays such as a
Catholic can see without harm to his conscience."
"But I love acting!" she cried, almost with a sense of suffocation.
"Whenever I could, I got papa to take me to the play. I shall always want
to go."
"There will be nothing to prevent you."
"So that anything is good enough for those who are not tertiaries!" she
cried, confronting him.
Her cheeks burned. Had there been any touch of spiritual arrogance in his
tone?
"I think I shall not answer that," he said, after a pause.
They walked on--she blindly holding herself as far as possible from him;
he, with the mingled ardour and maladroitness of his character, longing
and not quite venturing to cut the whole coil, and silence all this mood
in her, by some masterfulness of love.
Suddenly she paused--she stepped to him--she laid her fingers on his
arms--bright tears shone in her eyes.
"You can't--you can't belong to that--when we are married?"
"To the Third Order? But, dear!--there is nothing in it that conflicts
with married life! It was devised specially for persons living in the
world. You would not have me give up what has been my help and salvation
for ten years?"
He spoke with great emotion. She trembled and hid her face against him.
"Oh! I could not bear it!" she said. "Can't you realise how it would
divide us? I should feel outside--a pariah. As it is, I seem to have
nothing to do with half your life--there is a shut door between me and
it."
A flash of natural, of wholly irresistible feeling passed through him. He
stooped and kissed her hair.
"Open the door and come in!" he said in a whisper that seemed to rise
from his inmost soul.
She shook her head. They were both silent. The deep shade of the
"wilderness" trees closed them in. There was a gentle melancholy in the
autumn morning. The first leaves were dropping on the cobwebbed grass;
and the clouds were low upon the fells.
Presently Laura raised herself. "Promise me you will never press me," she
said passionately; "don't send anyone to me."
He sighed.
"I promise."