Helbeck of Bannisdale Volume Ii Part 23

"No. But I guessed. And that Trinity man Leadham, who went over, gave me to understand the other day what the end would probably be. But not while his sister lives."

"I should hope not!" said Mrs. Friedland.

After a pause, she turned to her husband.

"John! you know you liked him!"

"If you mean by that, my dear, that I showed a deplorable weakness in dealing with him, my conscience supports you!" said the doctor; "but I would have you remember that for a person of my quiet habits, to have a gentleman pale as death in your study, demanding his lady-love--you knowing all the time that the lady-love is upstairs--and only one elderly man between them--is an agitating situation."

"Poor Laura!--poor Mr. Helbeck!" murmured Mrs. Friedland. The agony of the man, the resolution of the girl, stood out sharply from the medley of the past.

"All very well, my dear--all very well. But you showed a pusillanimity on that occasion that I scorn to qualify. You were afraid of that child--positively afraid of her. I could have dealt with her in a twinkling, if you'd left her to me."

"What would you have said to her?" inquired Mrs. Friedland gently.

"How can there be any possible doubt what I should have said to her?"

said the doctor, slapping his knee. "'My dear, you love him--_ergo_, marry him!' That first and foremost. 'And as to those other trifles, what have you to do with them? Look over them--look round them! Rise, my dear, to your proper dignity and destiny--have a right and natural pride--in the rock that bore you! You, a child of the Greater Church--of an Authority of which all other authorities are the mere caricature--why all this humiliation, these misgivings--this turmoil? Take a serener--take a loftier view!' Ah! if I could evoke Fountain for one hour!"

The doctor bent forward, his hands hanging over his knees, his lips moving without sound, under the sentences his brain was forming. This habit of silent rhetoric represented a curious compromise between a natural impetuosity of temperament, and the caution of scientific research. His wife watched him with a loving, half-amused eye.

"And what, pray, could Mr. Fountain do, John, but make matters ten times worse?"

"Do!--who wants him to do anything? But ten years ago he might have done something. Listen to me, Jane!" He seized his wife's arm. "He makes Laura a child of Knowledge, a child of Freedom, a child of Revolution--without an ounce of training to fit her for the part. It is like an heir--flung to the gypsies. Then you put her to the test--sorely--conspicuously. And she stands fast--she does not yield--it is not in her blood, scarcely in her power, to yield. But it is a blind instinct carried through at what a cost! You might have equipped and fortified her. You did neither. You trusted everything to the pa.s.sionate loyalty of the woman. And it does not fail you. But----!"

The doctor shook his head, long and slowly. Mrs. Friedland quietly replaced the rugs which had gone wandering, in the energy of these remarks.

"You see, Jane, if it's true--'ne croit qui veut'--it's still more true, 'ne doute qui veut!' To doubt--doubt wholesomely, cheerfully, fruitfully--why, my dear, there's no harder task in the world! And a woman, who thinks with her heart--who can't stand on her own feet as a man can--you remove her from all her normal shelters and supports--you expect her to fling a 'No!' in the face of half her natural friends--and then you are too indolent or too fastidious to train the poor child for her work!--Fountain took Laura out of her generation, and gave her nothing in return. Did he read with her--share his mind with her? Never!

He was indolent;-she was wilful; so the thing slid. But all the time he made a partisan of her--he expected her to echo his hates and his prejudice--he stamped himself and his cause deep into her affections----

"And then, my dear, she must needs fall in love with this man, this Catholic! Catholicism at its best--worse luck! No mean or puerile type, with all its fetishisms and unreasons on its head--no!--a type sprung from the finest English blood, disciplined by heroic memories, by the persecution and hardships of the Penal Laws. What happens? Why, of course the girl's imagination goes over! Her father in her--her temperament--stand in the way of anything more. But where is she to look for self-respect, for peace of mind? She feels herself an infidel--a moral outcast. She trembles before the claims of this great visible system. Her reason refuses them--but why? She cannot tell. For Heaven's sake, why do we leave our children's minds empty like this? If you believe, my good friend, Educate! And if you doubt, still more--Educate!

Educate!"

The doctor rose in his might, tossed his rugs from him, and began to pace a sheltered path, leaning on his wife's arm.

Mrs. Friedland looked at him slyly, and laughed.

"So if Laura had been learned, she might have been happy?--John!--what a paradox!"

"Not mine then!--but the Almighty's--who seems to have included a mind in this odd bundle that makes up Laura. What! You set a woman to fight for ideas, and then deny her all knowledge of what they mean. Happy! Of course she might have been happy. She might have made her Catholic respect her. He offered her terms--she might have accepted them with a free and equal mind. There would have been none, anyway, of this _moral doubt_--this bogeyfication of things she don't understand! Ah! here she comes. Now just look at her, Jane! What's your housekeeping after? She's lost half a stone this month if she's lost an ounce."

And the doctor standing still peered discontentedly through his spectacles at the advancing figure.

Laura approached slowly, with her hands behind her, looking on her way at the daffodils and tulips just opening in the garden border.

"Pater!--Molly says you and Mater are to come in. It's March and not May, you'll please to remember."

She came up to them with the airs of a daughter, put a flower in Mrs.

Friedland's dress--ran for one of the discarded rugs, and draped it again round the doctor's ample shoulders. Her manner to the two elderly folk was much softer and freer than it had ever been in the days of her old acquaintance with them. A wistful grat.i.tude played through it, revealing a new Laura--a Laura that had pa.s.sed, in these five months through deep waters, and had been forced, in spite of pride, to throw herself upon the friendly and saving hands held out to her.

They on their side looked at her with a tender concern, which tried to disguise itself in chat. The doctor hooked his arm through hers, and made her examine the garden.

"Look at these Lent lilies, Miss Laura. They will be out in two days at most."

Laura bent over them, then suddenly drew herself erect. The doctor felt the stiffening of the little arm.

"I suppose you had sheets of them in the north," he said innocently, as he poked a stone away from the head of an emerging hyacinth.

"Yes--a great many." She looked absently straight before her, taking no more notice of the flowers.

"Well--and Mrs. Fountain? Are you really anxious?"

The girl hesitated.

"She is ill--quite ill. I ought to see her somehow."

"Well, my dear, go!" He looked round upon her with a cheerful decision.

"No--that isn't possible," she said quietly. "But I might stay somewhere near. She must have lost a great deal of strength since Christmas."

At Christmas and for some time afterwards, she and Mrs. Fountain had been at St. Leonard's together. In fact, it was little more than a fortnight since Laura had parted from her stepmother, who had shown a piteous unwillingness to go back alone to Bannisdale.

The garden door opened and shut; a white-capped servant came along the path. A gentleman--for Miss Fountain.

"For me?" The girl's cheek flushed involuntarily. "Why, Pater--who is it?"

For behind the servant came the gentleman--a tall and comely youth, with narrow blue eyes, a square chin, and a very conscious smile. He was well dressed in a dark serge suit, and showed a great deal of white cuff, and a conspicuous watch-chain, as he took off his hat.

"Hubert!"

Laura advanced to him, with a face of astonishment, and held out her hand.

Mason greeted her with a mixture of confusion and a.s.surance, glancing behind her at the Friedlands all the time. "Well, I was here on some business--and I thought I'd look you up, don't you know?"

"My cousin, Hubert Mason," said Laura, turning to the old people.

Friedland lifted his wide-awake. Mrs. Friedland, whose gentle face could be all criticism, eyed him quietly, and shook hands perfunctorily. A few nothings pa.s.sed on the weather and the spring. Suddenly Mason said:

"Would you take a walk with me, Miss Laura?"

After a momentary hesitation, she a.s.sented, and went into the house for her walking things. Mason hurriedly approached the doctor.

"Why, she looks--she looks as if you could blow her away!" he cried, staring into the doctor's face, while his own flushed.

"Miss Fountain's health has not been strong this winter," said the doctor gravely, his spectacled eyes travelling up and down Mason's tall figure.

"You, I suppose, became acquainted with her in Westmoreland?"

"Acquainted with her!" The young man checked himself, flushed still redder, then resumed. "Well, we're cousins, you see--though of course I don't mean to say that we're her sort--you understand?"

"Miss Fountain is ready," said Mrs. Friedland.