Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume I Part 22

Certainly Helbeck had never before felt himself so uncomfortable in his own house as he had done since the arrival of this girl of twenty-one.

Nevertheless, as the weeks went on, the half-amused, half-contemptuous embarra.s.sment, which had been the first natural effect of her presence upon the mind of a man so little used to women and their ways, had pa.s.sed imperceptibly into something else. His reserved and formal manner remained the same. But Miss Fountain's goings and comings had ceased to be indifferent to him. A silent relation--still unknown to her--had arisen between them.

When he first noticed the fact in himself, it produced a strong, temporary reaction. He reproached himself for a light and unworthy temper. Had his solitary life so weakened him that any new face and personality about him could distract and disturb him, even amid the great thoughts of these solemn days? His heart, his life were in his faith. For more than twenty years, by prayer and meditation, by all the ingenious means that the Catholic Church provides, he had developed the sensibilities of faith; and for the Catholic these sensibilities are centred upon and sustained by the Pa.s.sion. Now, hour by hour, his Lord was moving to the Cross. He stood perpetually beside the sacred form in the streets of Jerusalem, in Gethsemane, on the steps of the Praetorium.

A varied and dramatic ceremonial was always at hand to stimulate the imagination, the penitence, and the devotion of the believer. That anything whatever should break in upon the sacred absorption of these days would have seemed to him beforehand a calamity to be shrunk from--nay, a sin to be repented. He had put aside all business that could be put aside with one object, and one only--to make "a good Easter."

And yet, no sooner did he come back from service in the chapel, or from talk of Church matters with Catholic friends, than he found himself suddenly full of expectation. Was Miss Fountain in the hall, in the garden? or was she gone to those people at Browhead? If she was not in the house--above all, if she was with the Masons--he would find it hard to absorb himself again in the thoughts that had held him before. If she was there, if he found her sitting reading or working by the hall fire, with the dogs at her feet, he seldom indeed went to speak to her. He would go into his library, and force himself to do his business, while Father Leadham talked to her and Augustina. But the library opened on the hall, and he could still hear that voice in the distance. Often, when she caressed the dogs, her tones had the note in them which had startled him on her very first evening under his roof. It was the emergence of something hidden and pa.s.sionate; and it awoke in himself a strange and troubling echo--the pa.s.sing surge of an old memory long since thrust down and buried. How fast his youth was going from him! It was fifteen years since a woman's voice, a woman's presence, had mattered anything at all to him.

So it came about that, in some way or other, he knew, broadly, all that Miss Fountain did, little as he saw of her. It appeared that she had discovered a pony carriage for hire in the little village near the bridge, and once or twice during this fortnight, he learned from Augustina that she had spent the afternoon at Browhead Farm, while the Bannisdale household had been absorbed in some function of the season.

Augustina disliked the news as much as he did, and would throw up her hands in annoyance.

"What _can_ she be doing there? They seem the roughest kind of people.

But she says the son plays so wonderfully. I believe she plays duets with him. She goes out with the cart full of music."

"Music!" said Helbeck, in frank amazement. "That lout!"

"Well, she says so," said Augustina crossly, as though it were a personal affront. "And what do you think, Alan? She talks of going to a dance up there after Easter--next Thursday, I think."

"At the farm?" Helbeck's tone was incredulous.

"No; at the mill--or somewhere. She says the schoolmaster is giving it, or something of that sort. Of course it's most unsuitable. But what am I to do, Alan? They _are_ her relations!"

"At the same time they are not her cla.s.s," said Helbeck decidedly. "She has been brought up in a different way, and she cannot behave as though she belonged to them. And a dance, with that young man to look after her!

You ought to stop it."

Augustina said dismally that she would try, but her head shook with more feebleness than usual as she went back to her knitting.

Next day Helbeck made a point of finding his sister alone. But she only threw him a deprecatory look.

"I tried, Alan--indeed I did. She says that she wants some amus.e.m.e.nt--that it will do her good--and that of course her father would have let her go to a dance with his relations. And when I say anything to her about not being quite like them, she fires up. She says she would be ashamed to be thought any better than they, and that Hubert has a great deal more good in him than some people think."

"Hubert!" exclaimed Mr. Helbeck, raising his shoulders in disgust. After a little silence he turned round as he was leaving the room, and said abruptly: "Is she to stay the night at the farm?"

"No! oh, no! She wants to come home. She says she won't be late; she promises not to be late."

"And that young fellow will drive her home, of course?"

"Well, she couldn't drive home alone, Alan, at that time of night. It wouldn't be proper."

Mr. Helbeck smiled rather sourly. "One may doubt where the propriety comes in. Well, she seems determined. We must just arrange it. There is the tower door. Kindly tell her, Augustina, that I will let her have the key of it. And kindly tell her also--as from yourself, of course--that she will be treating us all with courtesy if she does come home at a reasonable hour. We have been a very quiet, prim household all these years, and Mrs. Denton, for all her virtues, has a tongue."

"So she has," said Augustina, sighing. "And she doesn't like Laura--not at all."

Helbeck raised his head quickly. "She does nothing to make Miss Fountain uncomfortable, I trust?"

"Oh--no," said Augustina undecidedly. "Besides, it doesn't matter. Laura has got Ellen under her thumb."

Helbeck's grave countenance showed a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"How does Mrs. Denton take that?"

"Oh! she has to bear it. Haven't you seen, Alan, how the girl has brightened up? Laura has shown her how to do her hair; she helped her to make a new frock for Easter; the girl would do anything in the world for her. It's like Bruno. Do you notice, Alan--I really thought you would be angry--that the dog will hardly go with you when Laura's there?"

"Oh! Miss Fountain is a very attractive young lady--to those she likes,"

said Helbeck dryly.

And on that he went away.

On Good Friday afternoon Laura, in a renewed pa.s.sion of revolt against all that was going on in the house, went to her room and wrote to her friend. Litanies were being said in the chapel. The distant, melancholy sounds mounted to her now and then. Otherwise the house was wrapped in a mourning silence; and outside, trailing clouds hung round the old walls, making a penitential barrier all about it.

"After this week," wrote Laura to her friend, "I shall always feel kindly towards 'sin'--and the 'world'! How they have been scouted and scourged!

And what, I ask you, would any of us do without them? The 'world,'

indeed! I seem to hear it go rumbling on, the poor, patient, toiling thing, while these people are praying. It works, and makes it possible for them to pray--while they abuse and revile it.

"And as to 'sin,' and the gloom in which we all live because of it--what on earth does it really mean to any decently taught and brought-up creature? You are greedy, or selfish, or idle, or ill-behaved. Very well, then--nature, or your next-door neighbor, knocks you down for it, and serve you right. Next time you won't do it again, or not so badly, and by degrees you don't even like to think of doing it--you would be 'ashamed,'

as people say. It's the process that everybody has to go through, I suppose--being sent into the world the sort of beings we are, and without any leave of ours, altogether. But why make such a wailing and woe and hullabaloo about it! Oh--such a waste of time! Why doesn't Mr. Helbeck go and learn geology? I vow he hasn't an idea what the rocks of his own valley are made of!

"Of course there are the _very_ great villains--I don't like to think about them. And the people who are born wrong and sick. But by-and-by we shall have weeded them out, or improved the breed. And why not spend your energies on doing that, instead of singing litanies, and taking ridiculous pains not to eat the things you like?

"...I shall soon be in disgrace with Augustina and Mr. Helbeck, about the Masons--worse disgrace, that is to say. For now that I have found a pony of my own, I go up there two or three times a week. And really--in spite of all those first experiences I told you of--I like it! Cousin Elizabeth has begun to talk to me; and when I come home, I read the Bible to see what it was all about. And I don't let her say too bad things about Mr.

Helbeck--it wouldn't be quite gentlemanly on my part. And I know most of the Williams story now, both from her and Augustina.

"Imagine, my dear!--a son not allowed to come and see his mother before she died, though she cried for him night and day. He was at a Jesuit school in Wales. They shilly-shallied, and wrote endless letters--and at last they sent him off--the day she died. He arrived three hours too late, and his father shut the door in his face. 'Noa yo' shan't see her,'

said the grim old fellow--'an if there's a G.o.d above, yo' shan't see her in heaven nayder!' Augustina of course calls it 'holy obedience.'

"The painting in the chapel is really extraordinary. Mr. Helbeck seems to have taught the young man, to begin with. He himself used to paint long ago--not very well, I should think, to judge from the bits of his work still left in the chapel. But at any rate the youth learnt the rudiments from him, and then of course went far beyond his teacher. He was almost two years here, working in the house--tabooed by his family all the time.

Then there seems to have been a year in London, when he gave Mr. Helbeck some trouble. I don't know--Augustina is vague. How it was that he joined the Jesuits I can't make out. No doubt Mr. Helbeck induced them to take him. But _why_--I ask you--with such a gift? They say he will be here in the summer, and one will have to set one's teeth and shake hands with him.

"Oh, that droning in the chapel--there it is again! I will open the window and let the howl of the rain in to get rid of it. And yet I can't always keep myself away from it. It is all so new--so horribly intimate.

Every now and then the music or a prayer or something sends a stab right down to my heart of hearts.--A voice of suffering, of torture--oh! so ghastly, so _real_. Then I come and read papa's note-books for an hour to forget it. I wish he had ever taught me anything--strictly! But _of course_ it was my fault.

"... As to this dance, why shouldn't I go?--just tell me! It is being given by the new schoolmaster, and two or three young farmers, in the big room at the old mill. The schoolmaster is the most tiresomely virtuous young man, and the whole thing is so respectable, it makes me yawn to think of it. Polly implores me to go, and I like Polly. (Very soon she'll let me halve her fringe!) I gave Hubert a preliminary snub, and now he doesn't dare implore me to go. But that is all the more engaging. I _don't_ flirt with him!--heavens!--unless you call bear-taming flirtation. But one can't see his music running to waste in such a bog of tantrums and tempers. I must try my hand. And as he is my cousin I can put up with him."

After High Ma.s.s on Easter Sunday Helbeck walked home from Whinthorpe alone, as his companion Father Leadham had an engagement in the town.

Through the greater part of Holy Week the skies had been as grey and penitential as the season. The fells and the river flats had been scourged at night with torrents of rain and wind, and in the pale mornings any pa.s.sing promise of sun had been drowned again before the day was high. The roofs and eaves, the small panes of the old house, trickled and shone with rain; and at night the wind tore through the gorge of the river with great boomings and onslaughts from the west. But with Easter eve there had come appeas.e.m.e.nt--a quiet dying of the long storm. And as Helbeck made his way along the river on Easter morning, mountain and flood, gra.s.s and tree, were in a glory of recovered sun. The distant fells were drawn upon the sky in the heavenliest brushings of blue and purple; the river thundered over its falls and weirs in a foamy splendour; and the deer were feeding with a new zest amid the fast-greening gra.s.s.

He stopped a moment to rest upon his stick and look about him. Something in his own movement reminded him of another solitary walk some five weeks before. And at the same instant he perceived a small figure sitting on a stone seat in front of him. It was Miss Fountain. She had a book on her knee, and the two dogs were beside her. Her white dress and hat seemed to make the centre of a whole landscape. The river bent inward in a great sweep at her feet, the crag rose behind her, and the great prospect beyond the river of dale and wood, of scar and cloud, seemed spread there for her eyes alone. A strange fancy seized on Helbeck. This was his world--his world by inheritance and by love. Five weeks before he had walked about it as a solitary. And now this figure sat enthroned, as it were, at the heart of it. He roughly shook the fancy off and walked on.

Miss Fountain greeted him with her usual detachment. He stood a minute or two irresolute, then threw himself on the slope in front of her.

"Bruno will hardly look at his master now," he said to her pleasantly, pointing to the dog's att.i.tude as it lay with its nose upon the hem of her dress.

Laura closed her book in some annoyance. He usually returned by the other side of the river, and she was not grateful to him for his breach of habit. Why had he been meddling in her affairs? She perfectly understood why Augustina had been making herself so difficult about the dance, and about the Masons in general. Let him keep his proprieties to himself.

She, Laura, had nothing to do with them. She was hardly his guest--still less his ward. She had come to Bannisdale against her will, simply and solely as Augustina's nurse. In return, let Mr. Helbeck leave her alone to enjoy her plebeian relations as she pleased.