Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume Ii Part 15

"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 const.i.tutions of the Third Order; its obligations as to fasting, attendance at Ma.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s; and the clouds were low upon the fells.

Presently Laura raised herself. "Promise me you will never press me," she said pa.s.sionately; "don't send anyone to me."

He sighed.

"I promise."

CHAPTER III

One afternoon towards the end of Mr. Williams's visit, Laura was walking along a high field-path that overlooked the whole valley of the Flent.

Helbeck had gone to meet the Bishop on some urgent business; but the name of his Catholic affairs was legion.

The weather, after long days of golden mist, of veiled and stealing lights on stream and fell, had turned to rain and tumult. This afternoon, indeed, the rain had made a sullen pause. It had drawn back for an hour or two from the drenched valleys, even from the high peaks that stood violet-black against a s.p.a.ce of rainy light. Yet still the sky was full of anger. The clouds, dark and jagged, rushed across the marsh lands before the northwest wind. And the colour of everything--of the moss, the peaks, the nearer crags and fields--was superbly rich and violent. The soaked woods of the park from which she had just emerged were almost black, and from their heart Laura could hear the river's swollen voice pursuing her as she walked.

There was something in the afternoon that reminded her of her earliest impressions of Bannisdale and its fell country--of those rainy March winds that were blowing about her when she first alighted at the foot of the old tower.

The a.s.sociation made her tremble and catch her breath. It was not all joy--oh! far from it! The sweet common rapture of common love was not hers. Instinctively she felt something in her own lot akin to the wilder and more tragic aspects of this mountain land, to which she had turned from the beginning with a daughter's yearning.

Yet the tragedy, if tragedy there were, was all from within, not from without. Augustina--though Laura guessed her mind well enough--complained no more. The marriage was fixed for November; the dispensation from the Bishop had been obtained. No lover could be more ardent, more tender, than Helbeck.

Why then this weariness--this overwhelming melancholy that seized her in all her solitary moments? Her nature had lost its buoyancy, its old gift for happiness.

The truth was that her will was tired out. Her whole soul thirsted to submit, and yet could not submit. Was it the mere spell of Catholic order and discipline, working upon her own restless and ill-ordered nature? It had so worked, indeed, from the beginning. She could recall--with trembling--many a strange moment in Helbeck's presence, or in the chapel, when she had seemed to feel her whole self breaking up, dissolving in the grip of a power that was at once her foe and the bearer of infinite seduction. But always the will, the self, had won the victory, had delivered a final "_No!_" into which had rushed the whole energy of her being.

And now--if it were only possible to crush back that "No"--to beat down this resistance which, like an alien garrison, defended, as it were, a town that hated it; if she could only turn and knock--knock humbly--at that closed door in her lover's life and heart. One touch!--one step!

Just as Helbeck could hardly trust himself to think of the joy of conquest, so she shrank bewildered before the fancied bliss of yielding.

To what awful or tender things would it admit her! That ebb and flow of mystical emotion she dimly saw in Helbeck, a life within a life;--all that is most intimate and touching in the struggle of the soul--all that strains and pierces the heart--the world to which these belong rose before her, secret, mysterious, "a city not made with hands," now drawing, now repelling. Voices came from it to her that penetrated all the pa.s.sion and the immaturity of her nature.

The mere imagination of what it would mean to surrender herself to Helbeck's teaching in these strange and moving things--what it would be to approach them through the sweetness, the chiding, the training of his love--could shake and unnerve her.

What stood in the way?

Simply a revolt and repulsion that seemed to be more than and outside herself--something independent and unconquerable, of which she was the mere instrument.

Had the differences between her and Helbeck been differences of opinion, they would have melted like morning dew. But they went far deeper.

Helbeck, indeed, was in his full maturity. He had been trained by Jesuit teachers; he had lived and thought; his mind had a framework. Had he ever felt a difficulty, he would have been ready, no doubt, with the answer of the schools. But he was governed by heart and imagination no less than Laura. A serviceable intelligence had been used simply to strengthen the claims of feeling and faith. Such as it was, however, it knew itself. It was at command.

But Laura!--Laura was the pure product of an environment. She represented forces of intelligence, of a.n.a.lysis, of criticism, of which in themselves she knew little or nothing, except so far as they affected all her modes of feeling. She felt as she had been born to feel, as she had been trained to feel. But when in this new conflict--a conflict of instincts, of the deepest tendencies of two natures--she tried to lay hold upon the rational life, to help herself by it and from it, it failed her everywhere. She had no tools, no weapons. The Catholic argument scandalised, exasperated her; but she could not meet it. And the personal prestige and fascination of her lover did but increase with her, as her feeling grew more troubled and excited, and her intellectual defence weaker.

Meanwhile to the force of temperament there was daily added the force of a number of childish prejudices and dislikes. She had come to Bannisdale prepared to hate all she saw there; and with the one supreme exception, hatred had grown at command. She was a creature of excess; of poignant and indelible impressions. The nuns, with their unintelligible virtues, and their very obvious bigotries and littlenesses; the slyness and absurdities of Father Bowles; the priestly claims of Father Leadham; the various superst.i.tions and peculiarities of the many priests and religious who had pa.s.sed through the house since she knew it--alas! she hated them all!--and did not know how she was to help hating them in the future.

These Catholic figures were to her so many disagreeable automata, moved by springs she could not possibly conceive, and doing perpetually the most futile and foolish things. She knew, moreover, by a sure instinct, that she had been unwelcome to them from the first moment of her appearance, and that she was now a stumbling-block and a grievance to them all.

Was she--by submission--to give these people, so to speak, a right to meddle and dabble in her heart? Was she to be wept over by Sister Angela--to confess her sins to Father Bowles--still worse, to Father Leadham? As she asked herself the question, she shrank in sudden pa.s.sion from the whole world of ideas concerned--from all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution, direction, as they were conventionalised in Catholic practice and chattered about by stupid and mindless people. In defiance of them, her whole nature stood like a charged weapon, ready to strike.

For she had been bred in that strong sense of personal dignity which is the modern subst.i.tute for the abas.e.m.e.nts and humiliations of faith. And with that sense of dignity went reserve--the intimate conviction that no feeling which is talked about, which can be observed and handled and measured by other people, is worth a rush. It was what seemed to her the spiritual intrusiveness of Catholicism, its perpetual uncovering of the soul--its disrespect for the secrets of personality--its humiliation of the will--that made it most odious in the eyes of this daughter of a modern world, which finds in the development and dignifying of human life its most characteristic faith.

There were many moments indeed in which the whole Catholic system appeared to Laura's strained imagination as one vast _cha.s.se_--an a.s.semblage of hunters and their toils--against which the poor human spirit that was their quarry must somehow protect itself, with every possible wile or violence.