Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume Ii Part 12

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 hara.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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 novices.h.i.+p--get a doctor's degree, if he can--and after that, perhaps, he will be a professed 'Father.' It isn't done just by wis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d is to be glorified by the cras.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 nutsh.e.l.l."

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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed since the quarrel over the picture. Not a word upon the subject had pa.s.sed 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 superst.i.tious 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 pa.s.sions 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 subst.i.tuted 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.