"Oh, _Alan_!--where is she?"
"I got a telegram through to the station-master. Don"t be anxious, Augustina. I asked him to direct her to the inn. The old White Hart, they say, has pa.s.sed into new management and is quite comfortable. She may arrive by the first train--7.20. Anyway I shall meet it."
Augustina pursued him with fretful inquiries and surmises. Helbeck, pale and gloomy, threw himself down on the settle, and produced the story of the accident, so far as the garrulous and incoherent Polly had enabled him to understand it. Fresh wails on Augustina"s part. What a horrible, horrible thing! Why, of course the child was terribly upset--hurt perhaps--or she would never have been so foolish about the trains. And now one could not even be sure that she had found a place to sleep in!
She would come home a wreck--a simple wreck. Helbeck moved uneasily.
"She was not hurt, according to Miss Mason."
"I suppose young Mason saw her off?"
"I suppose so."
"What were they all about, to make such a blunder?"
Helbeck shrugged his shoulders, and at last he succeeded in quieting his sister, by dint of a resolute suppression of all but the most ordinary and comforting suggestions.
"Well, after all, thank goodness, Laura has a great deal of common sense--she always had," said Mrs. Fountain, with a clearing countenance.
"Of course. She will be here, I have little doubt, before you are ready for your breakfast. It is unlucky, but it should not disturb your night"s rest. Please go to bed." With some difficulty he drove her there.
Augustina retired, but it was to spend a broken and often tearful night.
Alan might say what he liked--it was all most disagreeable. Why!--would the inn take her in? Mrs. Fountain had often been told that an inn, a respectable inn, required a trunk as well as a person. And Laura had not even a bag--positively not a hand-bag. A reflection which was the starting-point of a hundred new alarms, under which poor Mrs. Fountain tossed till the morning.
Meanwhile Helbeck went to his study. It was nearly one o"clock when he entered it, but the thought of sleep never occurred to him. He took out of his pocket the telegram from Braeside, re-read it, and destroyed it.
So Mason was with her--for of course it was Mason. Not one word of such a conjunction was to be gathered from the sister. She had clearly supposed that Laura would start alone and arrive alone. Or was she in the plot?
Had Mason simply arranged the whole "mistake," jumped into the same train with her, and confronted her at the junction?
Helbeck moved blindly up and down the room, traversed by one of those storms of excitement to which the men of his stock were liable. The thought of those two figures leaving the Braeside station together at midnight roused in him a madness half jealousy, half pride. He saw the dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had worshipped through his pain these many weeks. To think of them in the mere neighbourhood of that coa.r.s.e and sensual lad had always been profanation.
And now who would not be free to talk, to spatter her girlish name? The sheer unseemliness of such a kinship!--such a juxtaposition.
If he could only know the true reason of that persistency she had shown about the expedition, in the face of Augustina"s wailings, and his own silence? She had been dull--Heaven knows she had been dull at Bannisdale, for these two months. On every occasion of his return from those intermediate absences to which he had forced himself, he had perceived that she drooped, that she was dumbly at war with the barriers that shut her youth away from change and laughter, and the natural amus.e.m.e.nts, flatteries and courtings that wait, or should wait, on sweet-and-twenty.
More than once he had realised the fever pulsing through the girl"s unrest. Of course she was dissatisfied and starved. She was not of the sort that accepts the _role_ of companion or sick nurse without a murmur.
What could he do--he, into whose being she had crept with torturing power--he who could not marry her even if she should cease to hate him--who could only helplessly put land and distance between them? And then, who knows what a girl plans, to what she will stoop, out of the mere ebullience and rush of her youth--with what haloes she will surround even the meanest heads? Her blood calls her--not this man or that! She takes her decisions--behind that veil of mystery that masks the woman at her will. And who knows---who can know? A mother, perhaps. Not Augustina--not he--nor another.
Groans broke from him. In vain he scourged himself and the vileness of his own thoughts. In vain he said to himself, "All her instincts, her preferences, are pure, guileless, delicate--I could swear it, I, who have watched her every look and motion." Temper?--yes. Caprice?--yes. A hundred immaturities and rawnesses?--yes! but at the root of all, the most dazzling, the most convincing maidenliness. Not the down-dropt eyes, the shrinking modesties of your old Christian or Catholic types--far from it. But something that, as you dwelt upon it, seemed to make doubt a mere folly.
And yet his very self-a.s.surances, his very protests, left him in torment.
There is something in the Catholic discipline on points of s.e.x-relation that perhaps weakens a man"s instinctive confidence in women. Evil and its varieties, in this field, are pressed upon his thoughts perpetually with a scholastic fulness so complete, a deductive frankness so compelling, that nothing stands against the process. He sees corruption everywhere--dreads it everywhere. There is no part of its empire, or its action, that his imagination is allowed to leave in shadow. It is the confessional that works. The devout Catholic sees all the world _sub specie peccati_. The flesh seems to him always ready to fall--the devil always at hand.
--Little restless proud creature! What a riddle she has been to him all the time--flitting about the house so pale and inaccessible, so silent, too, in general, since that night when he had wrestled with her in the drawing-room. One moment of fresh battle between them there has been--in the park--on the subject of old Scarsbrook. Preposterous!--that she should think for one moment she could be allowed to confess herself--and so bring all the low talk of the neighbourhood about her ears. He could hear the old man"s plaintive cogitations over the strange experience which had blanched his hair and beard and brought him a visible step nearer to his end. "s...o...b..dy towd my owd woman tudther day, Misther Helbeck, at yoong Mason o" t" Browhead had been i" th" park that neet.
Mappen tha"ll tell me it was soom gell body he"d been coortin. Noa!--he doan"t gaa about wi" the likes o" thattens! Theer was never a soun" ov her feet, Misther Helbeck! She gaed ower t" gra.s.s like a bit cloud i"
summer, an she wor sma" an nesh as a wagtail on t" steeans. I ha seen aw maks o" gells, but this one bet "em aw." And after that, to think of her pouring herself out in impetuous explanation to the old peasant and his wife! It had needed a strong will to stop her. "Mr. Helbeck, I wish to tell the truth, and I ought to tell it! And your arguments have no weight with me whatever."
But he had made them prevail. And she had not punished him too severely.
A little more pallor, a little more silence for a time--that was all!
A score of poignant recollections laid hold upon him as he paced the night away. That music in the summer dusk--the softness of her little face--the friendliness--first, incredible friendliness!--of her lingering hand. Next morning he had banished himself to Paris, on a Catholic mission devised for the purpose. He had gone, torn with pa.s.sion--gone, in the spirit that drives the mystic through all the forms of self-torture that religious history records--_ad majorem Dei gloriam_. He had returned to find her frozen and hostile as before--all wilfulness with Augustina--all contradiction with himself. The Froswick plan was already on foot--and he had furthered it--out of a piteous wish to propitiate her, to make her happy. What harm could happen to her? The sister would go with her and bring her back. Why must he always play the disobliging and tyrannical host? Could he undo the blood-relationship between her and the Masons? If for mere difficulty and opposition"s sake there were really any fancy in her mind for this vulgar lad, perhaps after all it were the best thing to let her see enough of him for disenchantment!
There are instincts that can be trusted.
Such had been the thoughts of the morning. They do not help him through these night hours, when, in spite of all the arguments of common sense, he recurs again and again to the image of her as alone, possibly defenceless, in Mason"s company.
Suddenly he perceived that the light was changing. He put his lamp out and threw back the curtain. A pale gold was already creeping up the east.
The strange yew forms in the garden began to emerge from the night. A huge green lion showed his jaw, his crown, his straight tail quivering in the morning breeze; a peac.o.c.k nodded stiffly on its pedestal; a great H that had been reared upon its post supports before Dryden"s death stood black against the morning sky, and everywhere between the clumsy crowding forms were roses, straggling and dew-drenched, or wallflowers in a June wealth of bloom, or peonies that made a crimson flush amid the yews. The old garden, so stiff and sad through all the rest of the year, was in its moment of glory.
Helbeck opened one of the lattices of the oriel, and stood there gazing.
Six months before there had been a pa.s.sionate oneness between him and his inheritance, between his nature and the spirit of his race. Their privations and persecutions, their faults, their dumb or stupid fidelities, their very vices even, had been the source in him of a constant and secret affection. For their vices came from their long martyrdom, and their martyrdom from their faith. New influences had worked upon himself, influences linking him with a more European and militant Catholicism, as compared with that starved and local type from which he sprang. But through it all his family pride, his sense of ancestry with all its stimulus and obligations, had but grown. He was proud of calamity, impoverishment, isolation; they were the scars on pilgrims" feet--honour-marks left by the oppressor. His bare and rained house, his melancholy garden, where not a bed or path had suffered change since the man who planned them had refused to comply with the Test Act, and so forfeited his seat in Parliament; his dwindling resources, his hermit"s life and fare--were they not all joy to him? For years he had desired to be a Jesuit; the obligations of his place and name had stood in the way. And short of being a son of St. Ignatius, he exulted in being a Helbeck--the more stripped and despised, the more happy--with those maimed generations behind him, and the triumph of his faith, his faith and theirs, gilding the mind"s horizon.
And now after just four months of temptation he stands there, racked with desire for this little pagan creature, this girl without a single Christian sentiment or tradition, the child of an infidel father, herself steeped in denial and cradled in doubt, with nothing meekly feminine about her on which to press new stamps--and knowing well why she denies, if not personally and consciously, at least by a kind of inheritance.
The tangled garden, slowly yielding its splendours to the morning light, the walls of the old house, springing sheer from the gra.s.s like the native rock itself--for the first time he feels a gulf between himself and them. His ideals waver in the soul"s darkened air; the breath of pa.s.sion drives them to and fro.
With an anguished "Domine, exaudi!" he s.n.a.t.c.hed himself from the window, and leaving the room he crossed the hall, where the Tudor badges on the ceiling, the arms of "Elizabetha Regina" above the great hearth were already clear in the cold dawn, and made his way as noiselessly as possible to the chapel.
Those strange figures on the wall had already shaken the darkness from them. Wing rose on wing, halo on halo, each face turning in a mystic pa.s.sion to the altar and its steadfast light.
_Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere n.o.bis_.
In prayer and pa.s.sionate meditation he pa.s.sed through much of the time that had still to be endured. But meanwhile he knew well, in his sinful and shrinking mind, that, for that night at least, he was only praying because he could do nothing else--nothing that would give him Laura, or deliver him from the fears that shook his inmost being.
A little before six Helbeck left the chapel. He must bathe and dress--then to the farm for the pony cart. If she did not arrive by the first train he would get a horse at Marsland and drive on to Braeside.
But first he must take care to leave a message for Mrs. Denton, whose venomous face, as she stood listening the night before to his story of Miss Fountain"s mishaps, recurred to him disagreeably.
The housekeeper would not be stirring yet, perhaps, for an hour. He went back to his study to write her some short directions covering the hours of his possible absence.
The room, as he entered it, struck him as musty and airless, in spite of the open lattice. Instinctively, before writing, he went to throw another window wide. In rushed a fresh rose-scented air, and he leant forward an instant, letting its cool current flow through him.
Something white caught his eye beneath the window.
Laura slowly raised her head.
Had she fallen asleep in her fatigue?
Helbeck, bending over her, saw her eyes unclose. She looked at him as she had never looked before--with a sad and spiritual simplicity as though she had waked in a world where all may tell the truth, and there are no veils left between man and woman.
Her light hat fell back from her brow; her delicate pinched features, with the stamp of suffering upon them, met his look so sweetly--so frankly!
"I was _very_ tired," she said, in a new voice, a voice of appealing trust. "And there was no door open."
She raised her small hand, and he took it in his, trembling through all his man"s strength.
"I was just starting to see if the train had brought you."