"What do you want to go for, just yet?" he said abruptly.

"I ought to get home."

"No; you don't care for us, nor our ways. That's it; an I don't wonder."

She made polite protestations, but he would not listen to them. He strode on beside her in a stormy silence, till the impulse to prick him overmastered her.

"Do you generally sit with the cows?" she asked him sweetly. She shot her grey eyes towards him, all mockery and cool examination. He was not accustomed to such looks from the young women whom he chose to notice.

"I was not going to stay and be treated like that before strangers!" he said, with a sulky fierceness. "Mother thinks she and Daffady can just have their own way with me, as they'd used to do when I was nobbut a lad. But I'll let her know—aye, and the men too!"

"But if you hate farming, why don't you let Daffady do the work?"

Her sly voice stung him afresh.

"Because I'll be measter!" he said, bringing his hand violently down on the shaft of the pony cart. "If I'm to stay on in this beastly hole I'll make every one knaw their place. Let mother give me some money, an I'll soon take myself off, an leave her an Daffady to draw their own water their own way. But if I'm here I'm measter!" He struck the cart again.

"Is it true you don't work nearly as hard as your father?"

He looked at her amazed. If Susie Flinders down at the mill had spoken to him like that, he would have known how to shut her mouth for her.

"An I daur say it is," he said hotly. "I'm not goin to lead the dog's life my father did—all for the sake of diddlin another sixpence or two oot o' the neighbours. Let mother give me my money oot o' the farm. I'd go to Froswick fast enough. That's the place to get on. I've got friends—I'd work up in no time."

Laura glanced at him. She said nothing.

"You doan't think I would?" he asked her angrily, pausing in his handling of the harness to throw back the challenge of her manner. His wrath seemed to have made him handsomer, better-braced, more alive. Physically she admired him for the first time, as he stood confronting her.

But she only lifted her eyebrows a little.

"I thought one had to have a particular kind of brains for business—and begin early, too?"

"I could learn," he said gruffly, after which they were both silent till the harnessing was done.

Then he looked up.

"I'd like to drive you to the bridge—if you're agreeable?"

"Oh, don't trouble yourself, pray!" she said in polite haste.

His brows knit again.

"I know how 'tis—you won't come here again."

Her little face changed.

"I'd like to," she said, her voice wavering, "because papa used to stay here."

He stared at her.

"I do remember Cousin Stephen," he said at last, "though I towd you I didn't. I can see him standing at the door there—wi' a big hat—an a beard—like straw—an a check coat wi' great bulgin pockets."

He stopped in amazement, seeing the sudden beauty of her eyes and cheeks.

"That's it," she said, leaning towards him. "Oh, that's it!" She closed her eyes a moment, her small lips trembling. Then she opened them with a long breath.

"Yes, you may drive me to the bridge if you like."

* * * * *

And on the drive she was another being. She talked to him about music, so softly and kindly that the young man's head swam with pleasure. All her own musical enthusiasms and experiences—the music in the college chapels, the music at the Greek plays, the few London concerts and operas she had heard, her teachers and her hero-worships—she drew upon it all in her round light voice, he joining in from time to time with a rough passion and yearning that seemed to transfigure him. In half an hour, as it were, they were friends; their relations changed wholly. He looked at her with all his eyes; hung upon her with all his ears. And she—she forgot that he was vulgar and a clown; such breathless pleasure, such a humble absorption in superior wisdom, would have blunted the sternest standard.

As for him, the minutes flew. When at last the bridge over the Bannisdale River came in sight, he began to check the pony.

"Let's drive on a bit," he said entreatingly.

"No, no—I must get back to Mrs. Fountain." And she took the reins from his hands.

"I say, when will you come again?"

"Oh, I don't know." She had put on once more the stand-off town-bred manner that puzzled his countryman's sense.

"I say, mother shan't talk that stuff to you next time. I'll tell her—" he said imploringly.—"Halloa! let me out, will you?"

And to her amazement, before she could draw in the pony, he had jumped out of the cart.

"There's Mr. Helbeck!" he said to her with a crimson face. "I'm off. Good-bye!"

He shook her hand hastily, turned his back, and strode away.

She looked towards the gate in some bewilderment, and saw that Helbeck was holding it open for her. Beside him stood a tall priest—not Father Bowles. It was evident that both of them had seen her parting from her cousin.

Well, what then? What was there in that, or in Mr. Helbeck's ceremonious greeting, to make her cheeks hot all in a moment? She could have beaten herself for a silly lack of self-possession. Still more could she have beaten Hubert for his clownish and hurried departure. What was he afraid of? Did he think that she would have shown the smallest shame of her peasant relations?



CHAPTER VI

"Is that Mrs. Fountain's stepdaughter?" said Helbeck's companion, as Laura and her cart disappeared round a corner of the winding road on which the two men were walking.

Helbeck made a sign of assent.

"You may very possibly have known her father?" He named the Cambridge college of which Stephen Fountain had been a Fellow.

The Jesuit, who was a convert, and had been a distinguished Cambridge man, considered for a moment.

"Oh! yes—I remember the man! A strange being, who was only heard of, if I recollect right, in times of war. If there was any dispute going—especially on a religious point—Stephen Fountain would rush into it with broad-sheets. Oh, yes, I remember him perfectly—a great untidy, fair-haired, truculent fellow, to whom anybody that took any thought for his soul was either fool or knave. How much of him does the daughter inherit?"

Helbeck returned the other's smile. "A large slice, I think. She comes here in the curious position of having never lived in a Christian household before, and she seems already to have great difficulty in putting up with us."

Father Leadham laughed, then looked reflective.

"How often have I known that the best of all possible beginnings! Is she attached to her stepmother?"

"Yes. But Mrs. Fountain has no influence over her."

"It is a striking colouring—that white skin and reddish hair. And it is a face of some power, too."

"Power?" Helbeck demurred. "I think she is clever," he said dryly. "And, of course, coming from a university town, she has heard of things that other girls know nothing of. But she has had no training, moral or intellectual."

"And no Christian education?"

Helbeck shrugged his shoulders.

"She was only baptized with difficulty. When she was eleven or twelve she was allowed to go to church two or three times, I understand, on the helot principle—was soon disgusted—her father of course supplying a running comment at home—and she has stood absolutely outside religion of all kinds since."

"Poor child!" said the priest with heartiness. The paternal note in the words was more than official. He was a widower, and had lost his wife and infant daughter two years before his entrance into the Church of Rome.

Helbeck smiled. "I assure you Miss Fountain spends none of her pity upon herself."

"I dare say more than you think. The position of the unbeliever in a house like yours is always a painful one. You see she is alone. There must be a sense of exile—of something touching and profound going on beside her, from which she is excluded. She comes into a house with a chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, where everybody is keeping a strict Lent. She has not a single thought in common with you all. No; I am very sorry for Miss Fountain."

Helbeck was silent a moment. His dark face showed a shade of disturbance.

"She has some relations near here," he said at last, "but unfortunately I can't do much to promote her seeing them. You remember Williams's story?"

"Of course. You had some local row, didn't you? Ah! I remember."

And the two men walked on, discussing a case which had been and was still of great interest to them as Catholics. The hero, moreover—the Jesuit novice himself—was well known to them both.

"So Miss Fountain's relations belong to that peasant class?" said the Jesuit, musing. "How curious that she should find herself in such a double relation to you and Bannisdale!"

"Consider me a little, if you please," said Helbeck, with his slight, rare smile. "While that young lady is under my roof—you see how attractive she is—I cannot get rid, you will admit, of a certain responsibility. Augustina has neither the will nor the authority of a mother, and there is literally no one else. Now there happens to be a young man in this Mason family——"

"Ah!" said the priest; "the young gentleman who jumped out at the bridge, with such a very light pair of heels?"

Helbeck nodded. "The old people were peasants and fanatics. They thought ill of me in the Williams affair, and the mother, who is still alive, would gladly hang and quarter me to-morrow if she could. But that is another point. The old people had their own dignity, their own manners and virtues—or, rather, the manners and virtues of their class. The old man was coarse and boorish, but he was hard-working and honourable, and a Christian after his own sort. But the old man is dead, and the son, who now works the farm jointly with his mother, is of no class and no character. He has just education enough to despise his father and his father's hard work. He talks the dialect with his inferiors, or his kindred, and drops it with you and me. The old traditions have no hold upon him, and he is just a vulgar and rather vicious hybrid, who drinks more than is good for him and has a natural affinity for any sort of low love-affair. I came across him at our last hunt ball. I never go to such things, but last year I went."

"Good!" ejaculated the Jesuit, turning a friendly face upon the speaker.

Helbeck paused. The word, still more the emphasis with which it was thrown out, challenged him. He was about to defend himself against an implied charge, but thought better of it, and resumed:

"And unfortunately, considering the way in which all the clan felt towards me already, I found this youth in the supper-room, misbehaving himself with a girl of his own sort, and very drunk. I fetched a steward, and he was told to go. After which, you may imagine that it is scarcely agreeable to me to see my guest—a very young lady, very pretty, very distinguished—driving about the country in cousinly relations with this creature!"

The last words were spoken with considerable vivacity. The aristocrat and the ascetic, the man of high family and the man of scrupulous and fastidious character, were alike expressed in them.

The Jesuit pondered a little.

"No; you will have to keep watch. Why not distract her? You must have plenty of other neighbours to show her."

Helbeck shook his head.

"I live like a hermit. My sister is in the first year of her widowhood and very delicate."

"I see." The Jesuit hesitated, then said, smiling, in the tone of one who makes a venture: "The Bishop and I allowed ourselves to discuss these cloistered ways of yours the other day. We thought you would forgive us as a pair of old friends."

"I know," was the somewhat quick interruption, "the Bishop is of Manning's temper in these things. He believes in acting on and with the Protestant world—in our claiming prominence as citizens. It was to please him that I joined one or two committees last year—that I went to the hunt ball——"

Then, suddenly, in a very characteristic way, Helbeck checked his own flow of speech, and resumed more quietly: "Well, all that——"

"Leaves you of the same opinion still?" said the Jesuit, smiling.

"Precisely. I don't belong to my neighbours, nor they to me. We don't speak the same language, and I can't bring myself to speak theirs. The old conditions are gone, I know. But my feeling remains pretty much, what that of my forefathers was. I recognise that it is not common nowadays—but I have the old maxim in my blood: 'Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.'"

"There is none which has done us more deadly harm in England," cried the Jesuit. "We forget that England is a baptized nation, and is therefore in the supernatural state."

"I remind myself of it very often," said Helbeck, with a kind of proud submission; "and I judge no man. But my powers, my time, are all limited. I prefer to devote them to the 'household of faith.'"

The two men walked on in silence for a time. Presently Father Leadham's face showed amusement, and he said:

"Certainly we modern converts have a better time of it than our predecessors! The Bishop tells me the most incredible things about the old feeling towards them in this Vicariate. And wherever I go I seem to hear the tale of the old priest who thanked God that he had never received anyone into the Church. Everybody has met someone who knew that old fellow! He may be a myth—but there is clearly history at the back of him!"

"I understand him perfectly," said Helbeck, smiling; and he added immediately, with a curious intensity, "I, too, have never influenced, never tried to influence, anyone in my life."

The priest looked at him, wondering.

"Not Williams?"

"Williams! But Williams was born for the faith. Directly he saw what I wanted to do in the chapel, he prayed to come and help me. It was his summer holiday—he neglected no duty; it was wonderful to see his happiness in the work—as I thought, an artistic happiness only. He used to ask me questions about the different saints; once or twice he borrowed a book—it was necessary to get the emblems correct. But I never said a single controversial word to him. I never debated religious subjects with him at all, till the night when he took refuge with me after his father had thrashed him so cruelly that he could not stand. Grace taught him, not I."

"Grace taught him, but through you," said the priest with quiet emphasis. "Perhaps I know more about that than you do."

Helbeck flushed.

"I think you are mistaken. At any rate, I should prefer that you were mistaken."

The priest raised his eyebrows.

"A man who holds 'no salvation outside the Church,'" he said slowly, "and rejoices in the thought that he has never influenced anybody?"

"I should hope little from the work achieved by such an instrument. Some men have enough to do with their own souls," was the low but vehement answer.

The priest threw a wondering glance at his companion, at the signs of feeling—profound and morbid feeling—on the harsh face beside him.

"Perhaps you have never cared enough for anyone outside to wish passionately to bring them within," he said. "But if that ever happens to you, you will be ready—I think you will be ready—to use any tool, even yourself."

The priest's voice changed a little. Helbeck, somewhat startled, recalled the facts of Father Leadham's personal history, and thought he understood. The subject was instantly dropped, and the two men walked on to the house, discussing a great canonisation service at St. Peter's and the Pope's personal part in it.

* * * * *

The old Hall, as Helbeck and Father Leadham approached it, looked down upon a scene of animation to which in these latter days it was but little accustomed. The green spaces and gravelled walks in front of it were sprinkled with groups of children in a blue-and-white uniform. Three or four Sisters of Mercy in their winged white caps moved about among them, and some of the children hung clustered like bees about the Sisters' skirts, while others ran here and there, gleefully picking the scattered daffodils that starred the grass.

The invaders came from the Orphanage of St. Ursula, a house founded by Mr. Helbeck's exertions, which lay half-way between Bannisdale and Whinthorpe. They had not long arrived, and were now waiting for Rosary and Benediction in the chapel before they were admitted to the tea which Mrs. Denton and Augustina had already spread for them in the big hall.

At sight of the children Helbeck's face lit up and his step quickened. They on their side ran to him from all parts; and he had hardly time to greet the Sisters in charge of them, before the eager creatures were pulling him into the walled garden behind the Hall, one small girl hanging on his hand, another perched upon his shoulder. Father Leadham went into the house to prepare for the service.

The garden was old and dark, like the Tudor house that stood between it and the sun. Rows of fantastic shapes carved in living yew and box stood ranged along the straight walks. A bowling-green enclosed in high beech hedges was placed in the exact centre of the whole formal place, while the walks and alleys from three sides, west, north, and south, converged upon it, according to a plan unaltered since it was first laid down in the days of James II. At this time of the year there were no flowers in the stiff flower-beds; for Mr. Helbeck had long ceased to spend any but the most necessary monies upon his garden. Only upon the high stone walls that begirt this strange and melancholy pleasure-ground, and in the "wilderness" that lay on the eastern side, between the garden and the fell, were nature and the spring allowed to show themselves. Their joint magic had covered the old walls with fruit blossom and spread the "wilderness" with daffodils. Otherwise all was dark, tortured, fantastic, a monument of old-world caprice that the heart could not love, though piety might not destroy it.

The children, however, brought life and brightness. They chased each other up and down the paths, and in and out of the bowling-green. Helbeck set them to games, and played with them himself. Only for the orphans now did he ever thus recall his youth.

Two Sisters, one comparatively young, the other a woman of fifty, stood in an opening of the bowling-green, looking at the games.

The younger one said to her companion, who was the Superior of the orphanage, "I do like to see Mr. Helbeck with the children! It seems to change him altogether."

She spoke with eager sympathy, while her eyes, the visionary eyes of the typical religious, sunk in a face that was at once sweet and peevish, followed the children and their host.

The other—shrewd-faced and large—had a movement of impatience.

"I should like to see Mr. Helbeck with some children of his own. For five years now I have prayed our Blessed Mother to give him a good wife. That's what he wants. Ah! Mrs. Fountain——"

And as Augustina advanced with her little languid air, accompanied by her stepdaughter, the Sisters gathered round her, chattering and cooing, showing her a hundred attentions, enveloping her in a homage that was partly addressed to the sister of their benefactor, and partly—as she well understood—to the sheep that had been lost and was found. To the stepdaughter they showed a courteous reserve. One or two of them had already made acquaintance with her, and had not found her amiable.

And, indeed, Laura held herself aloof, as before. But she shot a glance of curiosity at the elderly woman who had wished Mr. Helbeck a good wife. The girl had caught the remark as she and her stepmother turned the corner of the dense beechen hedge that, with openings to each point of the compass, enclosed the bowling-green.

Presently Helbeck, stopping to take breath in a game of which he had been the life, caught sight of the slim figure against the red-brown of the hedge. The next moment he perceived that Miss Fountain was watching him with an expression of astonishment.

His first instinct was to let her be. Her manner towards him since her arrival, with hardly a break, had been such as to chill the most sociable temper. And Helbeck's temper was far from sociable.

But something in her attitude—perhaps its solitariness—made him uncomfortable. He went up to her, dragging with him a crowd of small children, who tugged at his coat and hands.

"Miss Fountain, will you take pity on us? My breath is gone."

He saw her hesitate. Then her sudden smile broke out.

"What'll you have?" she said, catching hold of the nearest child. "Mother Bunch?"

And off she flew, running, twisting, turning with the merriest of them, her loosened hair gleaming in the sun, her small feet twinkling. Now it was Helbeck's turn to stand and watch. What a curious grace and purpose there was in all her movements! Even in her play Miss Fountain was a personality.

At last a little girl who was running with her began to drag and turn pale. Laura stopped to look at her.

"I can't run any more," said the child piteously. "I had a bone took out of my leg last year."

She was a sickly-looking creature, rickety and consumptive, a waif from a Liverpool slum. Laura picked her up and carried her to a seat in a yew arbour away from the games. Then the child studied her with shy-looking eyes, and suddenly slipped an arm like a bit of stick round the pretty lady's neck.

"Tell me a story, please, teacher," she said imploringly.

Laura was taken aback, for she had forgotten the tales of her own childhood, and had never possessed any younger brothers or sisters, or paid much attention to children in general. But with some difficulty she stumbled through Cinderella.

"Oh, yes, I know that; but it's lovely," said the child, at the end, with a sigh of content. "Now I'll tell you one."

And in a high nasal voice, like one repeating a lesson in class, she began upon something which Laura soon discovered to be the life of a saint. She followed the phrases of it with a growing repugnance, till at last the speaker said, with the unction of one sure of her audience:

"And once the good Father went to a hospital to visit some sick people. And as he was hearing a poor sailor's confession, he found out that it was his own brother, whom he had not seen for a long, long time. Now the sailor was very ill, and going to die, and he had been a bad man, and done a great many wicked things. But the good Father did not let the poor man know who he was. He went home and told his Superior that he had found his brother. And the Superior forbade him to go and see his brother again, because, he said, God would take care of him. And the Father was very sad, and the devil tempted him sorely. But he prayed to God, and God helped him to be obedient.

"And a great many years afterwards a poor woman came to see the good Father. And she told him she had seen our Blessed Lady in a vision. And our Blessed Lady had sent her to tell the Father that because he had been so obedient, and had not been to see his brother again, our Lady had prayed our Lord for his brother. And his brother had made a good death, and was saved, all because the good Father had obeyed what his Superior told him."

Laura sprang up. The child, who had expected a kiss and a pious phrase, looked up, startled.

"Wasn't that a pretty story?" she said timidly.

"No; I don't like it at all," said Miss Fountain decidedly. "I wonder they tell you such tales!"

The child stared at her for a moment. Then a sudden veil fell across the clearness of her eyes, which had the preternatural size and brilliance of disease. Her expression changed. It became the slyness of the watching animal, that feels the enemy. She said not another word.

Laura felt a pang of shame, even though she was still vibrating with the repulsion the child's story had excited in her.

"Look!" she said, raising the little one in her arms; "the others are all going into the house. Shall we go too?"

But the child struggled resolutely.

"Let me down. I can walk." Laura set her down, and the child walked as fast as her lame leg would let her to join the others. Once or twice she looked round furtively at her companion; but she would not take the hand Laura offered her, and she seemed to have wholly lost her tongue.

"Little bigot!" thought Laura, half angry, half amused; "do they catch it from their cradle?"

Presently they found themselves in the tail of a crowd of children and Sisters who were ascending the stairs of a doorway opening on the garden. The doorway led, as Laura knew, to the corridor of the chapel. She let herself be carried along, irresolute, and presently she found herself within the curtained doorway, mechanically helping the Sisters and Augustina to put the children in their places.

One or two of the older children noticed that the young lady with Mrs. Fountain did not sign herself with holy water, and did not genuflect in passing the altar, and they looked at her with a stealthy surprise. A gentle-looking young Sister came up to her as she was lifting a very small child to a seat.

"Thank you," murmured the Sister, "It is very good of you." But the voice, though so soft, was cold, and Laura at once felt herself the intruder, and withdrew to the back of the crowd.

Yet again, as at her first visit to the chapel, so now, she was too curious, for all her soreness, to go. She must see what they would be at.

* * * * *

"Rosary" passed, and she hardly understood a word. The voice of the Jesuit intoning suggested nothing intelligible to her, and it was some time before she could even make out what the children were saying in their loud-voiced responses. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death"—was that it? And occasionally an "Our Father" thrown in—all of it gabbled as fast as possible, as though the one object of both priest and people were to get through and make an end. Over and over again, without an inflection, or a change—with just the one monotonous repetition and the equally monotonous variation. What a barbarous and foolish business!

Very soon she gave up listening. Her eyes wandered to the frescoes, to the bare altar with its purple covering, to the tall candles sparkling before the tabernacle; and the coloured and scented gloom, pierced with the distant lights, gave her a vague pleasure.

Presently there was a pause. The children settled themselves in their seats with a little clatter. Father Leadham retired, while the Sisters knelt, each bowed profoundly on herself, eyes closed under her coif, hands clasped in front of her.

What were they waiting for? Ah! there was the priest again, but in a changed dress—a white cope of some splendour. The organ, played by one of the Sisters, broke out upon the silence, and the voices of the rest rose suddenly, small and sweet, in a Latin hymn. The priest went to the tabernacle, and set it open. There was a swinging of incense, and the waves of fragrant smoke flowed out upon the chapel, dimming the altar and the figure before it. Laura caught sight for a moment of the young Sister who had spoken to her. She was kneeling and singing, with sweet, shut eyes; it was clear that she was possessed by a fervour of feeling. Miss Fountain thought to herself, with wonder, "She cannot be much older than I am!"

After the hymn it was the children's turn. What were they singing so lustily to so dancing a tune? Laura bent over to look at the book of a Sister in front of her.

"Virgo prudentissima, Virgo veneranda, Virgo praedicanda——"

With difficulty she found the place in another book that lay upon a chair beside her. Then for a few minutes she lost herself in a first amazement over that string of epithets and adjectives with which the Catholic Church throughout the world celebrates day by day and Sunday after Sunday the glories of Mary. The gay music, the harsh and eager voices of the children, flowed on, the waves of incense spread throughout the chapel. When she raised her eyes they fell upon Helbeck's dark head in the far distance, above his server's cotta. A quick change crossed her face, transforming it to a passionate contempt.

* * * * *

But of her no one thought—save once. The beautiful "moment" of the ceremony had come. Father Leadham had raised the monstrance, containing the Host, to give the Benediction. Every Sister, every child, except a few small and tired ones, was bowed in humblest adoration.

Mr. Helbeck, too, was kneeling in the little choir. But his attention wandered. With the exception of his walk with Father Leadham, he had been in church since early morning, and even for him response was temporarily exhausted. His look strayed over the chapel.

It was suddenly arrested. Above the kneeling congregation a distant face showed plainly in the April dusk amid the dimness of incense and painting—a girl's face, delicately white and set—a face of revolt.

"Why is she here?" was his first thought. It came with a rush of annoyance, even resentment. But immediately other thoughts met it: "She is lonely; she is here under my roof; she has lost her father; poor child!"

The last mental phrase was not so much his own as an echo from Father Leadham. In Helbeck's mind it was spoken very much as the priest had spoken it—with that strange tenderness, at once so intimate and so impersonal, which belongs to the spiritual relations of Catholicism. The girl's soul—lonely, hostile, uncared for—appealed to the charity of the believer. At the same time there was something in her defiance, her crude disapproval of his house and his faith, that stimulated and challenged the man. Conscious for the first time of a new conflict of feeling within himself, he looked steadily towards her across the darkness.

It was as though he had sought and found a way to lift himself above her young pride, her ignorant enmity. For a moment there was a curious exaltation and tyranny in his thought. He dropped his head and prayed for her, the words falling slow and deliberate within his consciousness. And she could not resent it or stop it. It was an aggression before which she was helpless; it struck down the protest of her pale look.

* * * * *

At supper, when the Sisters and their charges had departed, Father Bowles appeared, and never before had Helbeck been so lamentably aware of the absurdities and inferiorities of his parish priest.

The Jesuit, too, was sharply conscious of them, and even Augustina felt that something was amiss. Was it that they were all—except Father Bowles—affected by the presence of the young lady on Helbeck's right—by the cool detachment of her manner, the self-possession that appealed to no one and claimed none of the prerogatives of sex and charm, while every now and then it made itself felt in tacit and resolute opposition to her environment?

"He might leave those things alone!" thought the Jesuit angrily, as he heard Father Bowles giving Mrs. Fountain a gently complacent account of a geological lecture lately delivered in Whinthorpe.

"What I always say, you know, my dear lady, is this: you must show me the evidence! After all, you geologists have done much—you have dug here and there, it is true. But dig all over the world—dig everywhere—lay it all bare. Then you may ask me to listen to you!"

The little round-faced priest looked round the table for support. Laura bit her lip and bent over her plate. Father Leadham turned hastily to Helbeck, and began to discuss with him a recent monograph on the Roman Wall, showing a plentiful and scholarly knowledge of the subject. And presently he drew in the girl opposite, addressing her with a man-of-the-world ease and urbanity which disarmed her. It appeared that he had just come back from mission-work in British Guiana, that he had been in India, and was in all respects a travelled and accomplished person. But the girl did not yield herself, though she listened quite civilly and attentively while he talked.

But again through the Jesuit's easy or polished phrases there broke the purring inanity of Father Bowles.

"Lourdes, my dear lady? Lourdes? How can there be the smallest doubt of the miracles of Lourdes? Why! they keep two doctors on the spot to verify everything!"

The Jesuit's sense of humour was uncomfortably touched. He glanced at Miss Fountain, but could only see that she was gazing steadily out of window.

As for himself, convert and ex-Fellow of a well-known college, he gave a strong inward assent to the judgment of some of his own leaders, that the older Catholic priests of this country are as a rule lamentably unfit for their work. "Our chance in England is broadening every year," he said to himself. "How are we to seize it with such tools? But all round we want men. Oh! for a few more of those who were 'out in forty-five'!"

* * * * *

In the drawing-room after dinner Laura, as usual, entrenched herself in one of the deep oriel windows, behind a heavy table: Augustina showed an anxious curiosity as to the expedition of the morning—as to the Masons and their farm. But Laura would say very little about them.

When the gentlemen came in, Helbeck sent a searching look round the drawing-room. He had the air of one who enters with a purpose.

The beautiful old room lay in a half-light. A lamp at either end could do but little against the shadows that seemed to radiate from the panelled walls and from the deep red hangings of the windows. But the wood fire on the hearth sent out a soft glow, which fastened on the few points of brilliance in the darkness—on the ivory of the fretted ceiling, on the dazzling dress of the Romney, on the gold of Miss Fountain's hair.

Laura looked up with some surprise as Helbeck approached her; then, seeing that he apparently wished to talk, she made a place for him among the old "Books of Beauty" with which she had been bestrewing the seat that ran round the window.

"I trust the pony behaved himself this morning?" he said, as he sat down.

Laura answered politely.

"And you found your way without difficulty?"

"Oh, yes! Your directions were exact."

Inwardly she said to herself, "Does he want to cross-examine me about the Masons?" Then, suddenly, she noticed the scar under his hair—a jagged mark, testifying to a wound of some severity—and it made her uncomfortable. Nay, it seemed in some curious way to put her in the wrong, to shake her self-reliance.

But Helbeck had not come with the intention of talking about the Masons. His avoidance of their name was indeed a pointed one. He drew out her admiration of the daffodils and of the view from Browhead Lane.

"After Easter we must show you something of the high mountains. Augustina tells me you admire the country. The head of Windermere will delight you."

His manner of offering her these civilities was somewhat stiff and conventional—the manner of one who had been brought up among country gentry of the old school, apart from London and the beau monde. But it struck Laura that, for the first time, he was speaking to her as a man of his breeding might be expected to speak to a lady visiting his house. There was consideration, and an apparent desire to please. It was as though she had grown all at once into something more in his eyes than Mrs. Fountain's little stepdaughter, who was, no doubt, useful as a nurse and a companion, but radically unwelcome and insignificant none the less.

Inevitably the girl's vanity was smoothed. She began to answer more naturally; her smile became more frequent. And gradually an unwonted ease and enjoyment stole over Helbeck also. He talked with so much animation at last as to draw the attention of another person in the room. Father Leadham, who had been leaning with some languor against the high, carved mantel, while Father Bowles and Augustina babbled beneath him, began to take increasing notice of Miss Fountain, and of her relation to the Bannisdale household. For a girl who had "no training, moral or intellectual," she was showing herself, he thought, possessed of more attraction than might have been expected, for the strict master of the house.

Presently Helbeck came to a pause in what he was saying. He had been describing the country of Wordsworth, and had been dwelling on Grasmere and Eydal Mount, in the tone, indeed, of one who had no vital concern whatever with the Lake poets or their poetry, but still with an evident desire to interest his companion. And following closely on this first effort to make friends with her something further suggested itself.

He hesitated, looked at Laura, and at last said, in a lower voice than he had been using, "I believe your father, Miss Fountain, was a great lover of Wordsworth. Augustina has told me so. You and he were accustomed, were you not, to read much together? Your loss must be very great. You will not wonder, perhaps, that for me there are painful thoughts connected with your father. But I have not been insensible—I have not been without feeling—for my sister—and for you."

He spoke with embarrassment, and a kind of appeal. Laura had been startled by his first words, and while he spoke she sat very pale and upright, staring at him. The hand on her lap shook.

When he ceased she did not answer. She turned her head, and he saw her pretty throat tremble. Then she hastily raised her handkerchief; a struggle passed over the face; she wiped away her tears, and threw back her head, with a sobbing breath and a little shake of the bright hair, like one who reproves herself. But she said nothing; and it was evident that she could say nothing without breaking down.

Deeply touched, Helbeck unconsciously drew a little nearer to her. Changing the subject at once, he began to talk to her of the children and the little festival of the afternoon. An hour before he would have instinctively avoided doing anything of the kind. Now, at last, he ventured to be himself, or something near it. Laura regained her composure, and bent her attention upon him, with a slightly frowning brow. Her mind was divided between the most contradictory impulses and attractions. How had it come about, she asked herself, after a while, that she was listening like this to his schemes for his children and his new orphanage?—she, and not his natural audience, the two priests and Augustina.

She actually heard him describe the efforts made by himself and one or two other Catholics in the county to provide shelter and education for the county's Catholic orphans. He dwelt on the death and disappearance of some of his earlier colleagues, on the urgent need for a new building in the neighbourhood of the county town, and for the enlargement of the "home" he himself had put up some ten years before, on the Whinthorpe Road.

"But, unfortunately, large plans want large means," he added, with a smile, "and I fear it will come to it—has Augustina said anything to you about it?—I fear there is nothing for it, but that our beauteous lady there must provide them."

He nodded towards the picture that gleamed from the opposite wall. Then he added gravely, and with a perfect simplicity:

"It is my last possession of any value."

Several times during the fortnight that she had known him, Laura had heard him speak with a similar simplicity about his personal and pecuniary affairs. That anyone so stately should treat himself and his own worldly concerns with so much naivete had been a source of frequent surprise to her. To what, then, did his dignity, his reserve apply?

Nevertheless, because, childishly, she had already taken a side, as it were, about the picture, his manner, with its apparent indifference, annoyed her. She drew back.

"Yes, Augustina told me. But isn't it cruel? isn't it unkind? A picture like that is alive. It has been here so long—one could hardly feel it belonged only to oneself. It is part of the house, isn't it?—part of the family? Won't other people—people who come after—reproach you?"

Helbeck lifted his shoulders, his dark face half amused, half sad.

"She died a hundred years ago, pretty creature! She has had her turn; so have we—in the pleasure of looking at her."

"But she belongs to you," said the girl insistently. "She is your own kith and kin."

He hesitated, then said, with a new emphasis that answered her own:

"Perhaps there are two sorts of kindred——"

The girl's cheek flushed.

"And the one you mean may always push out the other? I know, because one of your children told me a story to-day—such a frightful story!—of a saint who would not go to see his dying brother, for obedience' sake. She asked me if I liked it. How could I say I liked it! I told her it was horrible! I wondered how people could tell her such tales."

Her bearing was again all hostility—a young defiance. She was delighted to confess herself. Her crime, untold, had been pressing upon her conscience, hurting her natural frankness.

Helbeck's face changed. He looked at her attentively, the fine dark eye, under the commanding brow, straight and sparkling.

"You said that to the child?"

"Yes."

Her breast fluttered. She trembled, he saw, with an excitement she could hardly repress.

He, too, felt a novel excitement—the excitement of a strong will provoked. It was clear to him that she meant to provoke him—that her young personality threw itself wantonly across his own. He spoke with a harsh directness.

"You did wrong, I think—quite wrong. Excuse the word, but you have brought me to close quarters. You sowed the seeds of doubt, of revolt, in a child's mind."

"Perhaps," said Laura quickly. "What then?"

She wore her half-wild, half-mocking look. Everything soft and touching had disappeared. The eyes shone under the golden mass of hair; the small mouth was close and scornful. Helbeck looked at her in amazement, his own pulse hurrying.

"What then?" he echoed, with a sternness that astonished himself. "Ask your own feeling. What has a child—a little child under orders—to do with doubt, or revolt? For her—for all of us—doubt is misery."

Laura rose. She forced down her agitation—made herself speak plainly.

"Papa taught me—it was life—and I believe him."

The old clock in the farther corner of the room struck a quarter to ten—the hour of prayers. The two priests on the farther side of the room stood up, and Augustina sheathed her knitting-needles.

Laura turned towards Helbeck and coldly held out her little hand. He touched it, and she crossed the room. "Good-night, Augustina."

She kissed her stepmother, and bowed to the two priests. Father Leadham ceremoniously opened the door for her. Then he and Helbeck, Father Bowles and Augustina followed across the dark hall on their way to the chapel. Laura took her candle, and her light figure could be seen ascending the Jacobean staircase, a slim and charming vision against the shadows of the old house.

Father Leadham followed it with eyes and thoughts. Then he glanced towards Helbeck. An idea—and one that was singularly unwelcome—was forcing its way into the priest's mind.



BOOK II



CHAPTER I

From that night onwards the relations between Helbeck and his sister's stepdaughter took another tone. He no longer went his own way, with no more than a vague consciousness that a curious and difficult girl was in the house; he watched her with increasing interest; he began to taste, as it were, the thorny charm that was her peculiar possession.

Not that he was allowed to see much of the charm. After the conversation of Passion Sunday her manner to him was no less cold and distant than before. Their final collision, on the subject of the child, had, he supposed, undone the effects of his conciliatory words about her father. It must be so, no doubt, since her hostile observation of him and of his friends seemed to be in no whit softened.

That he should be so often conscious of her at this particular time annoyed and troubled him. It was the most sacred moment of the Catholic year. Father Leadham, his old Stonyhurst friend, had come to spend Passion Week and Holy Week at Bannisdale, as a special favour to one whom the Church justly numbered among the most faithful of her sons; while the Society of Jesus had many links of mutual service and affection, both with the Helbeck family in the past and with the present owner of the Hall. Helbeck, indeed, was of real importance to Catholicism in this particular district of England. It had once abounded in Catholic families, but now hardly one of them remained, and upon Helbeck, with his small resources and dwindling estate, devolved a number of labours which should have been portioned out among a large circle. Only enthusiasm such as his could have sufficed for the task. But, for the Church's sake, he had now remained unmarried some fifteen years. He lived like an ascetic in the great house, with a couple of women servants; he spent all his income—except a fraction—on the good works of a wide district; when larger sums were necessary he was ready, nay, eager, to sell the land necessary to provide them; and whenever he journeyed to other parts of England, or to the Continent, it was generally assumed that he had gone, not as other men go, for pleasure and recreation, but simply that he might pursue some Catholic end, either of money or administration, among the rich and powerful of the faith elsewhere. Meanwhile, it was believed that he had bequeathed the house and park of Bannisdale to a distant cousin, also a strict Catholic, with the warning that not much else would remain to his heir from the ancient and splendid inheritance of the family.

It was not wonderful, then, that the Jesuits should be glad to do such a man a service; and no service could have been greater in Helbeck's eyes than a visit from a priest of their order during these weeks of emotion and of penance. Every day Mass was said in the little chapel; every evening a small flock gathered to Litany or Benediction. Ordinary life went on as it could in the intervals of prayer and meditation. The house swarmed with priests—with old and infirm priests, many of them from a Jesuit house of retreat on the western coast, not far away, who found in a visit to Bannisdale one of the chief pleasures of their suffering or monotonous lives; while the Superiors of Helbeck's own orphanages were always ready to help the Bannisdale chapel, on days of special sanctity, by sending a party of Sisters and children to provide the singing.

Meanwhile all else was forgotten. As to food, Helbeck and Father Leadham—according to the letters describing her experiences which Laura wrote during these weeks to a Cambridge girl friend—lived upon "a cup of coffee and a banana" per day, and she had endless difficulty in restraining her charge, Augustina, from doing likewise. For Augustina, indeed—Stephen Fountain's little black-robed widow—her husband was daily receding further and further into a dim and dreadful distance, where she feared and yet wept to think of him. She passed her time in the intoxication of her recovered faith, excited by the people around her, by the services in the chapel, and by her very terrors over her own unholy union, lapse, and restoration. The sound of intoning, the scent, of incense, seemed to pervade the house; and at the centre of all brooded that mysterious Presence upon the altar, which drew the passion of Catholic hearts to itself in ever deeper measure as the great days of Holy Week and Easter approached.

Through all this drama of an inventive and exacting faith, Laura Fountain passed like a being from another world, an alien and a mocking spirit. She said nothing, but her eyes were satires. The effect of her presence in the house was felt probably by all its inmates, and by many of its visitors. She did not again express herself—except rarely to Augustina—with the vehemence she had shown to the little lame orphan; she was quite ready to chat and laugh upon occasion with Father Leadham, who had a pleasant wit, and now and then deliberately sought her society; and, owing to the feebleness of Augustina, she, quite unconsciously, established certain household ways which spoke the woman, and were new to Bannisdale. She filled the drawing-room with daffodils; she made the tea-table by the hall fire a cheerful place for any who might visit it; she flitted about the house in the prettiest and neatest of spring dresses; her hair, her face, her white hands and neck shone amid the shadows of the panelling like jewels in a casket. Everyone was conscious of her—uneasily conscious. She yielded herself to no one, was touched by no one. She stood apart, and through her cold, light ways spoke the world and the spirit that deny—the world at which the Catholic shudders.

At the same time, like everybody else in the house—even the sulky housekeeper—she grew pale and thin from Lenten fare. Mr. Helbeck had of course given orders to Mrs. Denton that his sister and Miss Fountain were to be well provided. But Mrs. Denton was grudging or forgetful; and it amused Laura to see that Augustina was made to eat, while she herself fared with the rest. The viands of whatever sort were generally scanty and ill-cooked; and neither the Squire nor Father Leadham cared anything about the pleasures of the table, in Lent or out of it. Mr. Helbeck hardly noticed what was set before him. Once or twice indeed he woke up to the fact that there was not enough for the ladies and would say an angry word to Mrs. Denton. But on the whole Laura was able to follow her whim and to try for herself what this Catholic austerity might be like.

"My dear," she wrote to her friend, "one thing you learn from a Catholic Lent is that food matters 'nowt at aw,' as they would say in these parts. You can do just as well without it as with it. Why you should think yourself a saint for not eating it puzzles me. Otherwise—vive la faim! And as we are none of us likely to starve ourselves half so much as the poor people of the world, the soldiers, and sailors, and explorers, are always doing, to please themselves or their country, I don't suppose that anybody will come to harm.

"You are to understand, nevertheless, that our austerities are rather unusual. And when anyone comes in from the outside they are concealed as much as possible.... The old Helbecks, as far as I can hear, must have been very different people from their modern descendant. They were quite good Catholics, understand. What the Church prescribed they did—but not a fraction beyond. They were like the jolly lazy sort of schoolboy, who just does his lesson, but would think himself a fool if he did a word more. Whereas the man who lives here now can never do enough!

"And in general these old Catholic houses—from Augustina's tales—must have been full of fun and feasting. Well, I can vouch for it, there is no fun in Bannisdale now! It is Mr. Helbeck's personality, I suppose. It makes its own atmosphere. He can laugh—I have seen it myself!—but it is an event."

* * * * *

As Lent went on, the mingling of curiosity and cool criticism with which Miss Fountain regarded her surroundings became perhaps more apparent. Father Leadham, in particular, detected the young lady's fasting experiments. He spoke of them to Helbeck as showing a lack of delicacy and good taste. But the Squire, it seemed, was rather inclined to regard them as the whims of a spoilt and wilful child.

This difference of shade in the judgment of the two men may rank as one of the first signs of all that was to come.

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 embarrassment, 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 passed 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 Passion. 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 passionate; and it awoke in himself a strange and troubling echo—the passing 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 class," 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 amusement—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 amusement.

"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 passion 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 God 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 Mass 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 passing 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 appeasement—a quiet dying of the long storm. And as Helbeck made his way along the river on Easter morning, mountain and flood, grass 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 grass.

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 attitude 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.

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, embarrassed 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 association. The flash of wild pleasure in her face astounded him. There was in it that fiery, tameless something that was the girl's distinguishing 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 Lancashire 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 embarrassed, 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 prick 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 friendship; 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 Mass 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 grass—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 succumbed. But they had their compensations!"

As he spoke he rose from the grass, 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 Mass 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 shiver passed 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.

"Yes, on Thursday, at eight. I shall go early. I have engaged a fly to take me to the farm—thank you!—and my cousins will see me home. I am obliged to you for the key. It will save my giving any trouble."

"If you did we should not grudge it," he said quietly.

She was silent for a few more steps, then she said:

"I quite understand, Mr. Helbeck, that you do not approve of my going. But I must judge for myself. The Masons are my own people. I am sorry they should have—— Well—I don't understand—but it seems you have reason to think badly of them."

"Not of them," he said with emphasis.

"Of my cousin Hubert, then?"

He made no answer. She coloured angrily, then broke out, her words tumbling childishly over one another:

"There are a great many things said of Hubert that I don't believe he deserves! He has a great many good tastes—his music is wonderful. At any rate, he is my cousin; they are papa's only relations in the world. He would have been kind to Hubert; and he would have despised me if I turned my back on them because I was staying in a grand house with grand people!"

"Grand people!" said Helbeck, raising his eyebrows. "But I am sorry I led you to say these things, Miss Fountain. Excuse me—may I open this gate for you?"

She reached her own room as quickly as possible, and dropped upon the chair beside her dressing-table in a whirl of angry feeling. A small and heated face looked out upon her from the glass. But after the first instinctive moment she took no notice of it. With the mind's eye she still saw the figure she had just parted from, the noble poise of the head, thrown back on the broad shoulders, the black and greys of the hair, the clear penetrating glance—all the slight signs of age and austerity that had begun to filch away the Squire's youth. It was at least ten minutes before she could free herself enough from the unwelcome memories of her walk to find a vindictive pleasure in running hastily to look at her one white dress—all she had to wear at the Browhead dance.

* * * * *

On Thursday afternoon Helbeck was fishing in the park. The sea-trout were coming up, the day was soft, and he had done well. But just as the evening rise was beginning he put up his rod and went home. Father Leadham had taken his departure. Augustina, Miss Fountain, and he were again alone in the house.

He went into his study, and left the door open, while he busied himself with some writing.

Presently Augustina put her head in. She looked dishevelled, and rather pinker than usual, as always happened when there was the smallest disturbance of her routine.

"Laura has just gone up to dress, Alan. Is it fine?"

"There is no rain," he said, without turning his head. "Don't shut the door, please. This fire is oppressive."

She went away, and he wrote on a little while—then listened. He heard hurrying feet and movements overhead, and presently a door opened hastily, and a voice exclaimed, "Just two or three, you know, Ellen—from that corner under the kitchen-window! Run, there's a good girl!"

And there was a clattering noise as Ellen ran down the front stairs, and then flew along the corridor to the garden-door.

In a minute she was back again, and as she passed his room Helbeck saw that she was carrying a bunch of white narcissus.

Then more sounds of laughter and chatter overhead. At last Augustina hurried down and looked in upon him again, flurried and smiling.

"Alan, you really must see her. She looks so pretty."

"I am afraid I'm busy," he said, still writing. And she retired disappointed, careful, however, to follow his wishes about the door.

"Augustina, hold Bruno!" cried a light voice suddenly. "If he jumps on me I'm done for!"

A swish of soft skirts and she was there—in the hall. Helbeck could see her quite plainly as she stood by the oak table in her white dress. There was just room at the throat of it for a pearl necklace, and at the wrists for some thin gold bracelets. The narcissus were in her hair, which she had coiled and looped in a wonderful way, so that Helbeck's eyes were dazzled by its colour and abundance, and by the whiteness of the slender neck below it. She meanwhile was quite unconscious of his neighbourhood, and he saw that she was all in a happy flutter, hastily putting on her gloves, and chattering alternately to Augustina and to the transformed Ellen, who stood in speechless admiration behind her, holding a cloak.

"There, Ellen, that'll do. You're a darling—and the flowers are perfect. Run now, and tell Mrs. Denton that I didn't keep you more than twenty minutes. Oh, yes, Augustina, I'm quite warm. I can't choke, dear, even to please you. There now—here goes! If you do lock me out, there's a corner under the bridge, quite snug. My dress will mind—I shan't. Good-night. My compliments to Mr. Helbeck."

Then a hasty kiss to Augustina and she was gone.

Helbeck went out into the hall. Augustina was standing on the steps, watching the departing fly. At the sight of her brother she turned back to him, her poor little face aglow.

"She did look so nice, Alan! I wish she had gone to a proper dance, and not to these odd farmers and people. Why, they'll all go in their high dresses, and think her stuck-up."

"I assure you I never saw anything so smart as Miss Mason at the hunt ball," said Helbeck. "Did you give her the key, Augustina? But I shall probably sit up. There are some Easter accounts that must be done."

* * * * *

The old clock in the hall struck one. Helbeck was sitting in his familiar chair before the log fire, which he had just replenished. In one hand was a life of St. Philip Neri, the other played absently with Bruno's ears. In truth he was not reading but listening.

Suddenly there was a sound. He turned his head, and saw that the door leading from the hall to the tower staircase, and thence to the kitchen regions, had been opened.

"Who's there?" he said in astonishment.

Mrs. Denton appeared.

"You, Denton! What are you up for at this time?"

"I came to see if the yoong lady had coom back," she said in a low voice, and with her most forbidding manner. "It's late, and I heard nowt."

"Late? Not at all! Go to bed, Denton, at once; Miss Fountain will be here directly."

"I'm not sleepy; I can wait for her," said the housekeeper, advancing a step or two into the hall. "You mun be tired, sir, and should take your rest."

"I'm not the least tired, thank you. Good-night. Let me recommend you to go to bed as quickly as possible."

Mrs. Denton lingered for a moment, as though in hesitation, then went with a sulky unwillingness that was very evident to her master.

Helbeck laid down his book on his knee with a little laugh.

"She would have liked to get in a scolding, but we won't give her the chance."

The reverie that followed was not a very pleasant one. He seemed to see Miss Fountain in the large rustic room, with a bevy of young men about her—young fellows in Sunday coats, with shiny hair and limbs bursting out of their ill-fitting clothes. There would be loud talking and laughter, rough jokes that would make her wince, compliments that would disgust her—they not knowing how to take her, nor she them. She would be wholly out of her place—a butt for impertinence—perhaps worse. And there would be a certain sense of dragging a lady from her sphere—of making free with the old house and the old family.

He thought of it with disgust. He was an aristocrat to his fingers' ends.

But how could it have been helped? And when he remembered her as she stood there in the hall, so young and pretty, so eager for her pleasure, he said to himself with sudden heartiness:

"Nonsense! I hope the child has enjoyed herself." It was the first time that, even in his least formal thoughts, he had applied such a word to her.

Silence again. The wind breathed gently round the house. He could hear the river rushing.

Once he thought there was a sound of wheels and he went to the outer door, but there was nothing. Overhead the stars shone, and along the track of the river lay a white mist.

As he was turning back to the hall, however, he heard voices from the mist—a loud man's voice, then a little cry as of some one in fright or anger, then a song. The rollicking tune of it shouted into the night, into the stately stillness that surrounded the old house, had the abruptest, unseemliest effect.

Helbeck ran down the steps. A dog-cart with lights approached the gateway in the low stone enclosure before the house. It shot through so fast and so awkwardly as to graze the inner post. There was another little cry. Then, with various lurches and lunges, the cart drove round the gravel, and brought up somewhere near the steps.

Hubert Mason jumped down.

"Who's that? Mr. Helbeck? O Lord! glad to see yer, I'm sure! There's that little silly—she's been making such a' fuss all the way—thought I was going to upset her into the river, I do believe. She would try and get at the reins, though I told her it was the worst thing to do, whatever—to be interfering with the driver. Lord! I thought she'd have used the whip to me!"

And Mason stood beside the shafts, with his arms on the side, laughing loudly and looking at Laura.

"Stand out of the way, sir!" said Helbeck sternly, "and let me help Miss Fountain."

"Oh! I say!—Come now, I'm not going to stand you coming it over me twice in the same sort—not I," cried the young man with a violent change of tone. "You get out of the way, d—mn you! I brought Miss Fountain home, and she's my cousin—so there!—not yours."