Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume I Part 21

"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 _navete_ 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 ma.s.s of hair; the small mouth was close and scornful. Helbeck looked at her in amazement, his own pulse hurrying.

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

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

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

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

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

She kissed her stepmother, and bowed to the two priests. Father Leadham ceremoniously opened the door for her. Then he and Helbeck, Father Bowles and Augustina followed across the dark hall on their way to the chapel.

Laura took her candle, and her light figure could be seen ascending the Jacobean staircase, a slim and charming vision against the shadows of the old house.

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

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

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

Not that he was allowed to see much of the charm. After the conversation of Pa.s.sion Sunday her manner to him was no less cold and distant than before. Their final collision, on the subject of the child, had, he supposed, undone the effects of his conciliatory words about her father.

It must be so, no doubt, since her hostile observation of him and of his friends seemed to be in no whit softened.

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

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

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

Through all this drama of an inventive and exacting faith, Laura Fountain pa.s.sed like a being from another world, an alien and a mocking spirit.

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

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

"My dear," she wrote to her friend, "one thing you learn from a Catholic Lent is that food matters 'nowt at aw,' as they would say in these parts.

You can do just as well without it as with it. Why you should think yourself a saint for not eating it puzzles me. Otherwise--_vive la faim_!

And as we are none of us likely to starve ourselves half so much as the poor people of the world, the soldiers, and sailors, and explorers, are always doing, to please themselves or their country, I don't suppose that anybody will come to harm.

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

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

As Lent went on, the mingling of curiosity and cool criticism with which Miss Fountain regarded her surroundings became perhaps more apparent.

Father Leadham, in particular, detected the young lady's fasting experiments. He spoke of them to Helbeck as showing a lack of delicacy and good taste. But the Squire, it seemed, was rather inclined to regard them as the whims of a spoilt and wilful child.

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