Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume I Part 23

Nevertheless, of course she must be civil; and civil she intermittently tried to be. She answered his remark about Bruno by a caress to the dog that brought him to lay his muzzle against her knee.

"Do you mind? Some people do mind. I can easily drive him away."

"Oh, no! I reckon on recovering him--some day," he said, with a frank smile.

Laura flushed.

"Very soon, I should think. Have you noticed, Mr. Helbeck, how much better Augustina is already? I believe that by the end of the summer, at least, she will be able to do without me. And she tells me that the Superior at the orphanage has a girl to recommend her as a companion when I go."

"Rather officious of the Reverend Mother, I think," said Helbeck sharply.

He paused a moment, then added with some emphasis, "Don't imagine, Miss Fountain, that anybody else can do for my sister what you do."

"Ah! but--well--one must live one's life--mustn't one, Fricka?"--Fricka was by this time jealously pawing her dress. "I want to work at my music--hard--this winter."

"And I fear that Bannisdale is not a very gay place for a young lady visitor?"

He smiled. And so did she; though his tone, with its shade of proud humility, embarra.s.sed her.

"It is as beautiful as a dream!" she said, with sudden energy, throwing up her little hand. And he turned to look, as she was looking, at the river and the woods.

"You feel the beauty of it so much?" he asked her, wondering. His own strong feeling for his native place was all a matter of old habit and a.s.sociation. The flash of wild pleasure in her face astounded him. There was in it that fiery, tameless something that was the girl's distinguis.h.i.+ng mark, her very soul and self. Was it beginning to speak from her blood to his?

She nodded, then laughed.

"But, of course, it isn't my business to live here. I have a great friend--a Cambridge girl--and we have arranged it all. We are to live together, and travel a great deal, and work at music."

"That is what young ladies do nowadays, I understand."

"And why not?"

He lifted his shoulders, as though to decline the answer, and was silent--so silent that she was forced at last to take the field.

"Don't you approve of 'new women,' Mr. Helbeck? Oh! I wish I was a new woman," she threw out defiantly. "But I'm not good enough--I don't know anything."

"I wasn't thinking of them," he said simply. "I was thinking of the life that women used to live here, in this place, in the past--of my mother and my grandmother."

She could not help a stir of interest. What might the Catholic women of Bannisdale have been like? She looked along the path that led downward to the house, and seemed to see their figures upon it--not short and sickly like Augustina, but with the morning in their eyes and on their white brows, like the Romney lady. Helbeck's thoughts meanwhile were peopled by the more solid forms of memory.

"You remember the picture?" he said at last, breaking the silence. "The husband of that lady was a boor and a gambler. He soon broke her heart.

But her children consoled her to some extent, especially the daughters, several of whom became nuns. The poor wife came from a large Lancas.h.i.+re family, but she hardly saw her relations after her marriage; she was ashamed of her husband's failings and of their growing poverty. She became very shy and solitary, and very devout. These rock-seats along the river were placed by her. It is said that she used in summer to spend long hours on that very seat where you are sitting, doing needlework, or reading the Little Office of the Virgin, at the hours when her daughters in their French convent would be saying their office in chapel. She died before her husband, a very meek, broken creature. I have a little book of her meditations, that she wrote out by the wish of her confessor.

"Then my grandmother--ah! well, that is too long a story. She was a Frenchwoman--we have some of her books in my study. She never got on with England and English people--and at last, after her husband's death, she never went outside the house and park. My father owed much of his shyness and oddity to her bringing up. When she felt herself dying she went over to her family to die at Nantes. She is buried there; and my father was sent to the Jesuit school at Nantes for a long time. Then my mother--But I mustn't bore you with these family tales."

He turned to look at his listener. Laura was by this time half embarra.s.sed, half touched.

"I should like to hear about your mother," she said rather stiffly.

"You may talk to me if you like, but don't, pray, presume upon it!"--that was what her manner said.

Helbeck smiled a little, unseen, under his black moustache.

"My mother was a great lover of books--the only Helbeck, I think, that ever read anything. She was a friend and correspondent of Cardinal Wiseman's--and she tried to make a family history out of the papers here.

But in her later years she was twisted and crippled by rheumatic gout--her poor fingers could not turn the pages. I used to help her sometimes; but we none of us shared her tastes. She was a very happy person, however."

Happy! Why? Laura felt a fresh p.r.i.c.k of irritation as he paused. Was she never to escape--not even here, in the April sun, beside the river bank!

For, of course, what all this meant was that the really virtuous and admirable woman does not roam the world in search of art and friends.h.i.+p; she makes herself happy at home with religion and rheumatic gout.

But Helbeck resumed. And instantly it struck her that he had dropped a sentence, and was taking up the thread further on.

"But there was no priest in the house then, for the Society could not spare us one; and very few services in the chapel. Through all her young days nothing could be poorer or raggeder than English Catholicism. There was no church at Whinthorpe. Sunday after Sunday my father used to read the prayers in the chapel, which was half a lumber-room. I often think no Dissent could have been barer; but we heard Ma.s.s when we could, and that was enough for us. One of the priests from Stonyhurst came when she died.

This is her little missal."

He raised it from the gra.s.s--a small volume bound in faded morocco--but he did not offer to show it to Miss Fountain, and she felt no inclination to ask for it.

"Why did they live so much alone?" she asked him, with a little frown. "I suppose there were always neighbours?"

He shook his head.

"A difference that has law and education besides religion behind it, goes deep. Times are changed, but it goes deep still."

There was a pause. Then she looked at him with a whimsical lifting of her brows.

"Bannisdale was not amusing?" she said.

He laughed good-humouredly. "Not for a woman, certainly. For a man, yes.

There was plenty of rough sport and card-playing, and a good deal of drinking. The men were full of character, often full of ability. But there was no outlet--and a wretched education. My great-grandfather might have been saved by a commission in the army. But the law forbade it him.

So they lived to themselves and by themselves; they didn't choose to live with their Protestant neighbours--who had made them outlaws and inferiors! And, of course, they sank in manners and refinement. You may see the results in all the minor Catholic families to this day--that is, the old families. The few great houses that remained faithful escaped many of the drawbacks of the position. The smaller ones suffered, and succ.u.mbed. But they had their compensations!"

As he spoke he rose from the gra.s.s, and the dogs, springing up, barked joyously about him.

"Augustina will be waiting dinner for us, I think."

Laura, who had meant to stay behind, saw that she was expected to walk home with him. She rose unwillingly, and moved on beside him.

"Their compensations?" That meant the Ma.s.s and all the rest of this tyrannous clinging religion. What did it honestly mean to Mr. Helbeck--to anybody? She remembered her father's rough laugh. "There are twelve hundred men, my dear, belonging to the Athenaeum Club. I give you the bishops. After them, what do you suppose religion has to say to the rest of the twelve hundred? How many of them ever give a thought to it?"

She raised her eyes, furtively, to Helbeck's face. In spite of its melancholy lines, she had lately begun to see that its fundamental expression was a contented one. That, no doubt, came from the "compensations." But to-day there was more. She was positively startled by his look of happiness as he strode silently along beside her. It was all the more striking because of the plain traces left upon him by Lenten fatigue and "mortification."

It was Easter day, and she supposed he had come from Communion.

A little s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed through her, caused by the recollection of words she had heard, acts of which she had been a witness, in the chapel during the foregoing week--words and acts of emotion, of abandonment--love crying to love. A momentary thirst seized her--an instant's sense of privation, of longing, gone almost as soon as it had come.

Helbeck turned to her.

"So this dance you are going to is on Thursday?" he said pleasantly.

She came to herself in a moment.