"Is that Mrs. Fountain's stepdaughter?" said Helbeck's companion, as Laura and her cart disappeared round a corner of the winding road on which the two men were walking.
Helbeck made a sign of assent.
"You may very possibly have known her father?" He named the Cambridge college of which Stephen Fountain had been a Fellow.
The Jesuit, who was a convert, and had been a distinguished Cambridge man, considered for a moment.
"Oh! yes—I remember the man! A strange being, who was only heard of, if I recollect right, in times of war. If there was any dispute going—especially on a religious point—Stephen Fountain would rush into it with broad-sheets. Oh, yes, I remember him perfectly—a great untidy, fair-haired, truculent fellow, to whom anybody that took any thought for his soul was either fool or knave. How much of him does the daughter inherit?"
Helbeck returned the other's smile. "A large slice, I think. She comes here in the curious position of having never lived in a Christian household before, and she seems already to have great difficulty in putting up with us."
Father Leadham laughed, then looked reflective.
"How often have I known that the best of all possible beginnings! Is she attached to her stepmother?"
"Yes. But Mrs. Fountain has no influence over her."
"It is a striking colouring—that white skin and reddish hair. And it is a face of some power, too."
"Power?" Helbeck demurred. "I think she is clever," he said dryly. "And, of course, coming from a university town, she has heard of things that other girls know nothing of. But she has had no training, moral or intellectual."
"And no Christian education?"
Helbeck shrugged his shoulders.
"She was only baptized with difficulty. When she was eleven or twelve she was allowed to go to church two or three times, I understand, on the helot principle—was soon disgusted—her father of course supplying a running comment at home—and she has stood absolutely outside religion of all kinds since."
"Poor child!" said the priest with heartiness. The paternal note in the words was more than official. He was a widower, and had lost his wife and infant daughter two years before his entrance into the Church of Rome.
Helbeck smiled. "I assure you Miss Fountain spends none of her pity upon herself."
"I dare say more than you think. The position of the unbeliever in a house like yours is always a painful one. You see she is alone. There must be a sense of exile—of something touching and profound going on beside her, from which she is excluded. She comes into a house with a chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, where everybody is keeping a strict Lent. She has not a single thought in common with you all. No; I am very sorry for Miss Fountain."
Helbeck was silent a moment. His dark face showed a shade of disturbance.
"She has some relations near here," he said at last, "but unfortunately I can't do much to promote her seeing them. You remember Williams's story?"
"Of course. You had some local row, didn't you? Ah! I remember."
And the two men walked on, discussing a case which had been and was still of great interest to them as Catholics. The hero, moreover—the Jesuit novice himself—was well known to them both.
"So Miss Fountain's relations belong to that peasant class?" said the Jesuit, musing. "How curious that she should find herself in such a double relation to you and Bannisdale!"
"Consider me a little, if you please," said Helbeck, with his slight, rare smile. "While that young lady is under my roof—you see how attractive she is—I cannot get rid, you will admit, of a certain responsibility. Augustina has neither the will nor the authority of a mother, and there is literally no one else. Now there happens to be a young man in this Mason family——"
"Ah!" said the priest; "the young gentleman who jumped out at the bridge, with such a very light pair of heels?"
Helbeck nodded. "The old people were peasants and fanatics. They thought ill of me in the Williams affair, and the mother, who is still alive, would gladly hang and quarter me to-morrow if she could. But that is another point. The old people had their own dignity, their own manners and virtues—or, rather, the manners and virtues of their class. The old man was coarse and boorish, but he was hard-working and honourable, and a Christian after his own sort. But the old man is dead, and the son, who now works the farm jointly with his mother, is of no class and no character. He has just education enough to despise his father and his father's hard work. He talks the dialect with his inferiors, or his kindred, and drops it with you and me. The old traditions have no hold upon him, and he is just a vulgar and rather vicious hybrid, who drinks more than is good for him and has a natural affinity for any sort of low love-affair. I came across him at our last hunt ball. I never go to such things, but last year I went."
"Good!" ejaculated the Jesuit, turning a friendly face upon the speaker.
Helbeck paused. The word, still more the emphasis with which it was thrown out, challenged him. He was about to defend himself against an implied charge, but thought better of it, and resumed:
"And unfortunately, considering the way in which all the clan felt towards me already, I found this youth in the supper-room, misbehaving himself with a girl of his own sort, and very drunk. I fetched a steward, and he was told to go. After which, you may imagine that it is scarcely agreeable to me to see my guest—a very young lady, very pretty, very distinguished—driving about the country in cousinly relations with this creature!"
The last words were spoken with considerable vivacity. The aristocrat and the ascetic, the man of high family and the man of scrupulous and fastidious character, were alike expressed in them.
The Jesuit pondered a little.
"No; you will have to keep watch. Why not distract her? You must have plenty of other neighbours to show her."
Helbeck shook his head.
"I live like a hermit. My sister is in the first year of her widowhood and very delicate."
"I see." The Jesuit hesitated, then said, smiling, in the tone of one who makes a venture: "The Bishop and I allowed ourselves to discuss these cloistered ways of yours the other day. We thought you would forgive us as a pair of old friends."
"I know," was the somewhat quick interruption, "the Bishop is of Manning's temper in these things. He believes in acting on and with the Protestant world—in our claiming prominence as citizens. It was to please him that I joined one or two committees last year—that I went to the hunt ball——"
Then, suddenly, in a very characteristic way, Helbeck checked his own flow of speech, and resumed more quietly: "Well, all that——"
"Leaves you of the same opinion still?" said the Jesuit, smiling.
"Precisely. I don't belong to my neighbours, nor they to me. We don't speak the same language, and I can't bring myself to speak theirs. The old conditions are gone, I know. But my feeling remains pretty much, what that of my forefathers was. I recognise that it is not common nowadays—but I have the old maxim in my blood: 'Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.'"
"There is none which has done us more deadly harm in England," cried the Jesuit. "We forget that England is a baptized nation, and is therefore in the supernatural state."
"I remind myself of it very often," said Helbeck, with a kind of proud submission; "and I judge no man. But my powers, my time, are all limited. I prefer to devote them to the 'household of faith.'"
The two men walked on in silence for a time. Presently Father Leadham's face showed amusement, and he said:
"Certainly we modern converts have a better time of it than our predecessors! The Bishop tells me the most incredible things about the old feeling towards them in this Vicariate. And wherever I go I seem to hear the tale of the old priest who thanked God that he had never received anyone into the Church. Everybody has met someone who knew that old fellow! He may be a myth—but there is clearly history at the back of him!"
"I understand him perfectly," said Helbeck, smiling; and he added immediately, with a curious intensity, "I, too, have never influenced, never tried to influence, anyone in my life."
The priest looked at him, wondering.
"Not Williams?"
"Williams! But Williams was born for the faith. Directly he saw what I wanted to do in the chapel, he prayed to come and help me. It was his summer holiday—he neglected no duty; it was wonderful to see his happiness in the work—as I thought, an artistic happiness only. He used to ask me questions about the different saints; once or twice he borrowed a book—it was necessary to get the emblems correct. But I never said a single controversial word to him. I never debated religious subjects with him at all, till the night when he took refuge with me after his father had thrashed him so cruelly that he could not stand. Grace taught him, not I."
"Grace taught him, but through you," said the priest with quiet emphasis. "Perhaps I know more about that than you do."
Helbeck flushed.
"I think you are mistaken. At any rate, I should prefer that you were mistaken."
The priest raised his eyebrows.
"A man who holds 'no salvation outside the Church,'" he said slowly, "and rejoices in the thought that he has never influenced anybody?"
"I should hope little from the work achieved by such an instrument. Some men have enough to do with their own souls," was the low but vehement answer.
The priest threw a wondering glance at his companion, at the signs of feeling—profound and morbid feeling—on the harsh face beside him.
"Perhaps you have never cared enough for anyone outside to wish passionately to bring them within," he said. "But if that ever happens to you, you will be ready—I think you will be ready—to use any tool, even yourself."
The priest's voice changed a little. Helbeck, somewhat startled, recalled the facts of Father Leadham's personal history, and thought he understood. The subject was instantly dropped, and the two men walked on to the house, discussing a great canonisation service at St. Peter's and the Pope's personal part in it.
* * * * *
The old Hall, as Helbeck and Father Leadham approached it, looked down upon a scene of animation to which in these latter days it was but little accustomed. The green spaces and gravelled walks in front of it were sprinkled with groups of children in a blue-and-white uniform. Three or four Sisters of Mercy in their winged white caps moved about among them, and some of the children hung clustered like bees about the Sisters' skirts, while others ran here and there, gleefully picking the scattered daffodils that starred the grass.
The invaders came from the Orphanage of St. Ursula, a house founded by Mr. Helbeck's exertions, which lay half-way between Bannisdale and Whinthorpe. They had not long arrived, and were now waiting for Rosary and Benediction in the chapel before they were admitted to the tea which Mrs. Denton and Augustina had already spread for them in the big hall.
At sight of the children Helbeck's face lit up and his step quickened. They on their side ran to him from all parts; and he had hardly time to greet the Sisters in charge of them, before the eager creatures were pulling him into the walled garden behind the Hall, one small girl hanging on his hand, another perched upon his shoulder. Father Leadham went into the house to prepare for the service.
The garden was old and dark, like the Tudor house that stood between it and the sun. Rows of fantastic shapes carved in living yew and box stood ranged along the straight walks. A bowling-green enclosed in high beech hedges was placed in the exact centre of the whole formal place, while the walks and alleys from three sides, west, north, and south, converged upon it, according to a plan unaltered since it was first laid down in the days of James II. At this time of the year there were no flowers in the stiff flower-beds; for Mr. Helbeck had long ceased to spend any but the most necessary monies upon his garden. Only upon the high stone walls that begirt this strange and melancholy pleasure-ground, and in the "wilderness" that lay on the eastern side, between the garden and the fell, were nature and the spring allowed to show themselves. Their joint magic had covered the old walls with fruit blossom and spread the "wilderness" with daffodils. Otherwise all was dark, tortured, fantastic, a monument of old-world caprice that the heart could not love, though piety might not destroy it.
The children, however, brought life and brightness. They chased each other up and down the paths, and in and out of the bowling-green. Helbeck set them to games, and played with them himself. Only for the orphans now did he ever thus recall his youth.
Two Sisters, one comparatively young, the other a woman of fifty, stood in an opening of the bowling-green, looking at the games.
The younger one said to her companion, who was the Superior of the orphanage, "I do like to see Mr. Helbeck with the children! It seems to change him altogether."
She spoke with eager sympathy, while her eyes, the visionary eyes of the typical religious, sunk in a face that was at once sweet and peevish, followed the children and their host.
The other—shrewd-faced and large—had a movement of impatience.
"I should like to see Mr. Helbeck with some children of his own. For five years now I have prayed our Blessed Mother to give him a good wife. That's what he wants. Ah! Mrs. Fountain——"
And as Augustina advanced with her little languid air, accompanied by her stepdaughter, the Sisters gathered round her, chattering and cooing, showing her a hundred attentions, enveloping her in a homage that was partly addressed to the sister of their benefactor, and partly—as she well understood—to the sheep that had been lost and was found. To the stepdaughter they showed a courteous reserve. One or two of them had already made acquaintance with her, and had not found her amiable.
And, indeed, Laura held herself aloof, as before. But she shot a glance of curiosity at the elderly woman who had wished Mr. Helbeck a good wife. The girl had caught the remark as she and her stepmother turned the corner of the dense beechen hedge that, with openings to each point of the compass, enclosed the bowling-green.
Presently Helbeck, stopping to take breath in a game of which he had been the life, caught sight of the slim figure against the red-brown of the hedge. The next moment he perceived that Miss Fountain was watching him with an expression of astonishment.
His first instinct was to let her be. Her manner towards him since her arrival, with hardly a break, had been such as to chill the most sociable temper. And Helbeck's temper was far from sociable.
But something in her attitude—perhaps its solitariness—made him uncomfortable. He went up to her, dragging with him a crowd of small children, who tugged at his coat and hands.
"Miss Fountain, will you take pity on us? My breath is gone."
He saw her hesitate. Then her sudden smile broke out.
"What'll you have?" she said, catching hold of the nearest child. "Mother Bunch?"
And off she flew, running, twisting, turning with the merriest of them, her loosened hair gleaming in the sun, her small feet twinkling. Now it was Helbeck's turn to stand and watch. What a curious grace and purpose there was in all her movements! Even in her play Miss Fountain was a personality.
At last a little girl who was running with her began to drag and turn pale. Laura stopped to look at her.
"I can't run any more," said the child piteously. "I had a bone took out of my leg last year."
She was a sickly-looking creature, rickety and consumptive, a waif from a Liverpool slum. Laura picked her up and carried her to a seat in a yew arbour away from the games. Then the child studied her with shy-looking eyes, and suddenly slipped an arm like a bit of stick round the pretty lady's neck.
"Tell me a story, please, teacher," she said imploringly.
Laura was taken aback, for she had forgotten the tales of her own childhood, and had never possessed any younger brothers or sisters, or paid much attention to children in general. But with some difficulty she stumbled through Cinderella.
"Oh, yes, I know that; but it's lovely," said the child, at the end, with a sigh of content. "Now I'll tell you one."
And in a high nasal voice, like one repeating a lesson in class, she began upon something which Laura soon discovered to be the life of a saint. She followed the phrases of it with a growing repugnance, till at last the speaker said, with the unction of one sure of her audience:
"And once the good Father went to a hospital to visit some sick people. And as he was hearing a poor sailor's confession, he found out that it was his own brother, whom he had not seen for a long, long time. Now the sailor was very ill, and going to die, and he had been a bad man, and done a great many wicked things. But the good Father did not let the poor man know who he was. He went home and told his Superior that he had found his brother. And the Superior forbade him to go and see his brother again, because, he said, God would take care of him. And the Father was very sad, and the devil tempted him sorely. But he prayed to God, and God helped him to be obedient.
"And a great many years afterwards a poor woman came to see the good Father. And she told him she had seen our Blessed Lady in a vision. And our Blessed Lady had sent her to tell the Father that because he had been so obedient, and had not been to see his brother again, our Lady had prayed our Lord for his brother. And his brother had made a good death, and was saved, all because the good Father had obeyed what his Superior told him."
Laura sprang up. The child, who had expected a kiss and a pious phrase, looked up, startled.
"Wasn't that a pretty story?" she said timidly.
"No; I don't like it at all," said Miss Fountain decidedly. "I wonder they tell you such tales!"
The child stared at her for a moment. Then a sudden veil fell across the clearness of her eyes, which had the preternatural size and brilliance of disease. Her expression changed. It became the slyness of the watching animal, that feels the enemy. She said not another word.
Laura felt a pang of shame, even though she was still vibrating with the repulsion the child's story had excited in her.
"Look!" she said, raising the little one in her arms; "the others are all going into the house. Shall we go too?"
But the child struggled resolutely.
"Let me down. I can walk." Laura set her down, and the child walked as fast as her lame leg would let her to join the others. Once or twice she looked round furtively at her companion; but she would not take the hand Laura offered her, and she seemed to have wholly lost her tongue.
"Little bigot!" thought Laura, half angry, half amused; "do they catch it from their cradle?"
Presently they found themselves in the tail of a crowd of children and Sisters who were ascending the stairs of a doorway opening on the garden. The doorway led, as Laura knew, to the corridor of the chapel. She let herself be carried along, irresolute, and presently she found herself within the curtained doorway, mechanically helping the Sisters and Augustina to put the children in their places.
One or two of the older children noticed that the young lady with Mrs. Fountain did not sign herself with holy water, and did not genuflect in passing the altar, and they looked at her with a stealthy surprise. A gentle-looking young Sister came up to her as she was lifting a very small child to a seat.
"Thank you," murmured the Sister, "It is very good of you." But the voice, though so soft, was cold, and Laura at once felt herself the intruder, and withdrew to the back of the crowd.
Yet again, as at her first visit to the chapel, so now, she was too curious, for all her soreness, to go. She must see what they would be at.
* * * * *
"Rosary" passed, and she hardly understood a word. The voice of the Jesuit intoning suggested nothing intelligible to her, and it was some time before she could even make out what the children were saying in their loud-voiced responses. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death"—was that it? And occasionally an "Our Father" thrown in—all of it gabbled as fast as possible, as though the one object of both priest and people were to get through and make an end. Over and over again, without an inflection, or a change—with just the one monotonous repetition and the equally monotonous variation. What a barbarous and foolish business!
Very soon she gave up listening. Her eyes wandered to the frescoes, to the bare altar with its purple covering, to the tall candles sparkling before the tabernacle; and the coloured and scented gloom, pierced with the distant lights, gave her a vague pleasure.
Presently there was a pause. The children settled themselves in their seats with a little clatter. Father Leadham retired, while the Sisters knelt, each bowed profoundly on herself, eyes closed under her coif, hands clasped in front of her.
What were they waiting for? Ah! there was the priest again, but in a changed dress—a white cope of some splendour. The organ, played by one of the Sisters, broke out upon the silence, and the voices of the rest rose suddenly, small and sweet, in a Latin hymn. The priest went to the tabernacle, and set it open. There was a swinging of incense, and the waves of fragrant smoke flowed out upon the chapel, dimming the altar and the figure before it. Laura caught sight for a moment of the young Sister who had spoken to her. She was kneeling and singing, with sweet, shut eyes; it was clear that she was possessed by a fervour of feeling. Miss Fountain thought to herself, with wonder, "She cannot be much older than I am!"
After the hymn it was the children's turn. What were they singing so lustily to so dancing a tune? Laura bent over to look at the book of a Sister in front of her.
With difficulty she found the place in another book that lay upon a chair beside her. Then for a few minutes she lost herself in a first amazement over that string of epithets and adjectives with which the Catholic Church throughout the world celebrates day by day and Sunday after Sunday the glories of Mary. The gay music, the harsh and eager voices of the children, flowed on, the waves of incense spread throughout the chapel. When she raised her eyes they fell upon Helbeck's dark head in the far distance, above his server's cotta. A quick change crossed her face, transforming it to a passionate contempt.
* * * * *
But of her no one thought—save once. The beautiful "moment" of the ceremony had come. Father Leadham had raised the monstrance, containing the Host, to give the Benediction. Every Sister, every child, except a few small and tired ones, was bowed in humblest adoration.
Mr. Helbeck, too, was kneeling in the little choir. But his attention wandered. With the exception of his walk with Father Leadham, he had been in church since early morning, and even for him response was temporarily exhausted. His look strayed over the chapel.
It was suddenly arrested. Above the kneeling congregation a distant face showed plainly in the April dusk amid the dimness of incense and painting—a girl's face, delicately white and set—a face of revolt.
"Why is she here?" was his first thought. It came with a rush of annoyance, even resentment. But immediately other thoughts met it: "She is lonely; she is here under my roof; she has lost her father; poor child!"
The last mental phrase was not so much his own as an echo from Father Leadham. In Helbeck's mind it was spoken very much as the priest had spoken it—with that strange tenderness, at once so intimate and so impersonal, which belongs to the spiritual relations of Catholicism. The girl's soul—lonely, hostile, uncared for—appealed to the charity of the believer. At the same time there was something in her defiance, her crude disapproval of his house and his faith, that stimulated and challenged the man. Conscious for the first time of a new conflict of feeling within himself, he looked steadily towards her across the darkness.
It was as though he had sought and found a way to lift himself above her young pride, her ignorant enmity. For a moment there was a curious exaltation and tyranny in his thought. He dropped his head and prayed for her, the words falling slow and deliberate within his consciousness. And she could not resent it or stop it. It was an aggression before which she was helpless; it struck down the protest of her pale look.
* * * * *
At supper, when the Sisters and their charges had departed, Father Bowles appeared, and never before had Helbeck been so lamentably aware of the absurdities and inferiorities of his parish priest.
The Jesuit, too, was sharply conscious of them, and even Augustina felt that something was amiss. Was it that they were all—except Father Bowles—affected by the presence of the young lady on Helbeck's right—by the cool detachment of her manner, the self-possession that appealed to no one and claimed none of the prerogatives of sex and charm, while every now and then it made itself felt in tacit and resolute opposition to her environment?
"He might leave those things alone!" thought the Jesuit angrily, as he heard Father Bowles giving Mrs. Fountain a gently complacent account of a geological lecture lately delivered in Whinthorpe.
"What I always say, you know, my dear lady, is this: you must show me the evidence! After all, you geologists have done much—you have dug here and there, it is true. But dig all over the world—dig everywhere—lay it all bare. Then you may ask me to listen to you!"
The little round-faced priest looked round the table for support. Laura bit her lip and bent over her plate. Father Leadham turned hastily to Helbeck, and began to discuss with him a recent monograph on the Roman Wall, showing a plentiful and scholarly knowledge of the subject. And presently he drew in the girl opposite, addressing her with a man-of-the-world ease and urbanity which disarmed her. It appeared that he had just come back from mission-work in British Guiana, that he had been in India, and was in all respects a travelled and accomplished person. But the girl did not yield herself, though she listened quite civilly and attentively while he talked.
But again through the Jesuit's easy or polished phrases there broke the purring inanity of Father Bowles.
"Lourdes, my dear lady? Lourdes? How can there be the smallest doubt of the miracles of Lourdes? Why! they keep two doctors on the spot to verify everything!"
The Jesuit's sense of humour was uncomfortably touched. He glanced at Miss Fountain, but could only see that she was gazing steadily out of window.
As for himself, convert and ex-Fellow of a well-known college, he gave a strong inward assent to the judgment of some of his own leaders, that the older Catholic priests of this country are as a rule lamentably unfit for their work. "Our chance in England is broadening every year," he said to himself. "How are we to seize it with such tools? But all round we want men. Oh! for a few more of those who were 'out in forty-five'!"
* * * * *
In the drawing-room after dinner Laura, as usual, entrenched herself in one of the deep oriel windows, behind a heavy table: Augustina showed an anxious curiosity as to the expedition of the morning—as to the Masons and their farm. But Laura would say very little about them.
When the gentlemen came in, Helbeck sent a searching look round the drawing-room. He had the air of one who enters with a purpose.
The beautiful old room lay in a half-light. A lamp at either end could do but little against the shadows that seemed to radiate from the panelled walls and from the deep red hangings of the windows. But the wood fire on the hearth sent out a soft glow, which fastened on the few points of brilliance in the darkness—on the ivory of the fretted ceiling, on the dazzling dress of the Romney, on the gold of Miss Fountain's hair.
Laura looked up with some surprise as Helbeck approached her; then, seeing that he apparently wished to talk, she made a place for him among the old "Books of Beauty" with which she had been bestrewing the seat that ran round the window.
"I trust the pony behaved himself this morning?" he said, as he sat down.
Laura answered politely.
"And you found your way without difficulty?"
"Oh, yes! Your directions were exact."
Inwardly she said to herself, "Does he want to cross-examine me about the Masons?" Then, suddenly, she noticed the scar under his hair—a jagged mark, testifying to a wound of some severity—and it made her uncomfortable. Nay, it seemed in some curious way to put her in the wrong, to shake her self-reliance.
But Helbeck had not come with the intention of talking about the Masons. His avoidance of their name was indeed a pointed one. He drew out her admiration of the daffodils and of the view from Browhead Lane.
"After Easter we must show you something of the high mountains. Augustina tells me you admire the country. The head of Windermere will delight you."
His manner of offering her these civilities was somewhat stiff and conventional—the manner of one who had been brought up among country gentry of the old school, apart from London and the beau monde. But it struck Laura that, for the first time, he was speaking to her as a man of his breeding might be expected to speak to a lady visiting his house. There was consideration, and an apparent desire to please. It was as though she had grown all at once into something more in his eyes than Mrs. Fountain's little stepdaughter, who was, no doubt, useful as a nurse and a companion, but radically unwelcome and insignificant none the less.
Inevitably the girl's vanity was smoothed. She began to answer more naturally; her smile became more frequent. And gradually an unwonted ease and enjoyment stole over Helbeck also. He talked with so much animation at last as to draw the attention of another person in the room. Father Leadham, who had been leaning with some languor against the high, carved mantel, while Father Bowles and Augustina babbled beneath him, began to take increasing notice of Miss Fountain, and of her relation to the Bannisdale household. For a girl who had "no training, moral or intellectual," she was showing herself, he thought, possessed of more attraction than might have been expected, for the strict master of the house.
Presently Helbeck came to a pause in what he was saying. He had been describing the country of Wordsworth, and had been dwelling on Grasmere and Eydal Mount, in the tone, indeed, of one who had no vital concern whatever with the Lake poets or their poetry, but still with an evident desire to interest his companion. And following closely on this first effort to make friends with her something further suggested itself.
He hesitated, looked at Laura, and at last said, in a lower voice than he had been using, "I believe your father, Miss Fountain, was a great lover of Wordsworth. Augustina has told me so. You and he were accustomed, were you not, to read much together? Your loss must be very great. You will not wonder, perhaps, that for me there are painful thoughts connected with your father. But I have not been insensible—I have not been without feeling—for my sister—and for you."
He spoke with embarrassment, and a kind of appeal. Laura had been startled by his first words, and while he spoke she sat very pale and upright, staring at him. The hand on her lap shook.
When he ceased she did not answer. She turned her head, and he saw her pretty throat tremble. Then she hastily raised her handkerchief; a struggle passed over the face; she wiped away her tears, and threw back her head, with a sobbing breath and a little shake of the bright hair, like one who reproves herself. But she said nothing; and it was evident that she could say nothing without breaking down.
Deeply touched, Helbeck unconsciously drew a little nearer to her. Changing the subject at once, he began to talk to her of the children and the little festival of the afternoon. An hour before he would have instinctively avoided doing anything of the kind. Now, at last, he ventured to be himself, or something near it. Laura regained her composure, and bent her attention upon him, with a slightly frowning brow. Her mind was divided between the most contradictory impulses and attractions. How had it come about, she asked herself, after a while, that she was listening like this to his schemes for his children and his new orphanage?—she, and not his natural audience, the two priests and Augustina.
She actually heard him describe the efforts made by himself and one or two other Catholics in the county to provide shelter and education for the county's Catholic orphans. He dwelt on the death and disappearance of some of his earlier colleagues, on the urgent need for a new building in the neighbourhood of the county town, and for the enlargement of the "home" he himself had put up some ten years before, on the Whinthorpe Road.
"But, unfortunately, large plans want large means," he added, with a smile, "and I fear it will come to it—has Augustina said anything to you about it?—I fear there is nothing for it, but that our beauteous lady there must provide them."
He nodded towards the picture that gleamed from the opposite wall. Then he added gravely, and with a perfect simplicity:
"It is my last possession of any value."
Several times during the fortnight that she had known him, Laura had heard him speak with a similar simplicity about his personal and pecuniary affairs. That anyone so stately should treat himself and his own worldly concerns with so much naÏvetÉ had been a source of frequent surprise to her. To what, then, did his dignity, his reserve apply?
Nevertheless, because, childishly, she had already taken a side, as it were, about the picture, his manner, with its apparent indifference, annoyed her. She drew back.
"Yes, Augustina told me. But isn't it cruel? isn't it unkind? A picture like that is alive. It has been here so long—one could hardly feel it belonged only to oneself. It is part of the house, isn't it?—part of the family? Won't other people—people who come after—reproach you?"
Helbeck lifted his shoulders, his dark face half amused, half sad.
"She died a hundred years ago, pretty creature! She has had her turn; so have we—in the pleasure of looking at her."
"But she belongs to you," said the girl insistently. "She is your own kith and kin."
He hesitated, then said, with a new emphasis that answered her own:
"Perhaps there are two sorts of kindred——"
The girl's cheek flushed.
"And the one you mean may always push out the other? I know, because one of your children told me a story to-day—such a frightful story!—of a saint who would not go to see his dying brother, for obedience' sake. She asked me if I liked it. How could I say I liked it! I told her it was horrible! I wondered how people could tell her such tales."
Her bearing was again all hostility—a young defiance. She was delighted to confess herself. Her crime, untold, had been pressing upon her conscience, hurting her natural frankness.
Helbeck's face changed. He looked at her attentively, the fine dark eye, under the commanding brow, straight and sparkling.
"You said that to the child?"
"Yes."
Her breast fluttered. She trembled, he saw, with an excitement she could hardly repress.
He, too, felt a novel excitement—the excitement of a strong will provoked. It was clear to him that she meant to provoke him—that her young personality threw itself wantonly across his own. He spoke with a harsh directness.
"You did wrong, I think—quite wrong. Excuse the word, but you have brought me to close quarters. You sowed the seeds of doubt, of revolt, in a child's mind."
"Perhaps," said Laura quickly. "What then?"
She wore her half-wild, half-mocking look. Everything soft and touching had disappeared. The eyes shone under the golden mass of hair; the small mouth was close and scornful. Helbeck looked at her in amazement, his own pulse hurrying.
"What then?" he echoed, with a sternness that astonished himself. "Ask your own feeling. What has a child—a little child under orders—to do with doubt, or revolt? For her—for all of us—doubt is misery."
Laura rose. She forced down her agitation—made herself speak plainly.
"Papa taught me—it was life—and I believe him."
The old clock in the farther corner of the room struck a quarter to ten—the hour of prayers. The two priests on the farther side of the room stood up, and Augustina sheathed her knitting-needles.
Laura turned towards Helbeck and coldly held out her little hand. He touched it, and she crossed the room. "Good-night, Augustina."
She kissed her stepmother, and bowed to the two priests. Father Leadham ceremoniously opened the door for her. Then he and Helbeck, Father Bowles and Augustina followed across the dark hall on their way to the chapel. Laura took her candle, and her light figure could be seen ascending the Jacobean staircase, a slim and charming vision against the shadows of the old house.
Father Leadham followed it with eyes and thoughts. Then he glanced towards Helbeck. An idea—and one that was singularly unwelcome—was forcing its way into the priest's mind.
