Was it not three weeks and more, now, that Laura had been at the farm?
And only two visits to Bannisdale! For the Squire, by Augustina"s wish, and against the girl"s own judgment, knew nothing of her presence in the neighbourhood, and she could only see her stepmother on days when Augustina could be certain that her brother was away. During part of Pa.s.sion week, all Holy week, and half Easter week, priests had been staying in the house--or the orphanage ceremony had detained the Squire.
But by now, surely, he had gone to London on some postponed business.
That was what Mrs. Fountain expected. The girl hungered for her letter.
Poor Augustina! The heart malady had been developing rapidly. She was very ill, and Laura thought unhappy.
And yet, when the first shock of it was over--in spite of the bewilderment and grief she suffered in losing her companion--Mrs.
Fountain had been quite willing to recognise and accept the situation which had been created by Laura"s violent action. She wailed over the countermanded gowns and furnishings; but she was in truth relieved. "Now we know where we are again," she had said both to herself and Father Bowles. That strange topsy--turveydom of things was over. She was no more tormented with anxieties; and she moved again with personal ease and comfort about her old home.
Poor Alan of course felt it dreadfully. And Laura could not come to Bannisdale for a long, long time. But Mrs. Fountain could go to her--several times a year. And the Sisters were very good, and chatty. Oh no, it was best--much best!
But now--whether it came from physical weakening or no--Mrs. Fountain was always miserable, always complaining. She spoke of her brother perpetually. Yet when he was with her, she thought him hard and cold. It was evident to Laura that she feared him; that she was never at ease with him. Merely to speak of those increased austerities of his, which had marked the Lent of this year, troubled and frightened her.
Often, too, she would lie and look at Laura with an expression of dry bitterness and resentment, without speaking. It was as though she were equally angry with the pa.s.sion which had changed her brother--and with Laura"s strength in breaking from it.
Laura moved her seat a little. Between the wild cherry and the firs was a patch of deep blue distance. Those were his woods. But the house, was hidden by the hills.
"Somehow I have got to live!" she said to herself suddenly, with a violent trembling.
But how? For she bore two griefs. The grief for him, of which she never let a word pa.s.s her lips, was perhaps the strongest among the forces that were destroying her. She knew well that she had torn the heart that loved her--that she had set free a hundred dark and morbid forces in Helbeck"s life.
But it was because she had realised, by the insight of a moment, the madness of what they had done, the gulf to which they were rushing--because, at one and the same instant, there had been revealed to her the fatality under which she must still resist, and he must become gradually, inevitably, her persecutor, and her tyrant!
Amid the emotion, the overwhelming impressions of his story of himself, that conviction had risen in her inmost being--a strange inexorable voice of judgment--bidding her go! In a flash, she had seen the wretched future years--the daily struggle--the aspect of violence, even of horror, that his pursuit of her, his pressure upon her will, might a.s.sume--the sharpening of all those wild forces in her own nature.
She was broken with the anguish of separation--and how she had been able to do what she had done, she did not know. But the inner voice persisted--that for the first time, amid the selfish, or pa.s.sionate, or joy-seeking impulses of her youth, she had obeyed a higher law. The moral realities of the whole case closed her in. She saw no way out--no way in which, so far as her last act was concerned, she could have bettered or changed the deed. She had done it for him, first of all. He must be delivered from her. And she must have room to breathe, without making of her struggle for liberty a hideous struggle with him, and with love.
Well, but--comfort!--where was it to be had? The girl"s sensuous craving nature fought like a tortured thing in the grasp laid upon it. How was it possible to go on suffering like this? She turned impatiently to one thought after another.
Beauty? Nature? Last year, yes! But now! That past physical ecstasy--in spring--in flowing water--in flowers--in light and colour--where was it gone? Let these tears--these helpless tears--make answer!
Music?--books?--the books that "make incomparable old maids"--friends?
The thought of the Friedlands made her realise that she could still love.
But after all--how little!--against how much!
Religion? All religion need not be as Alan Helbeck"s. There was religion as the Friedlands understood it--a faith convinced of G.o.d, and of a meaning for human life, trusting the "larger hope" that springs out of the daily struggle of conscience, and the garnered experience of feeling.
Both in Friedland and his wife, there breathed a true spiritual dignity and peace.
But Laura was not affected by this fact in the least. She put away the suggestions of it with impatience. Her father had not been so. Now that she had lost her lover, she clung the more fiercely to her father. And there had been no anodynes for him.
... Oh if the sun--the useless sun--would only go--and Cousin Elizabeth would come back--and bring that letter! Yes, one little pale joy there was still--for a few weeks or months. The craving for the bare rooms of Bannisdale possessed her--for that shadow-happiness of entering his house as he quitted it--walking its old boards unknown to him--touching the cushions and chairs in Augustina"s room that he would touch, perhaps that very same night, or on the morrow!
Till Augustina"s death.--Then both for Laura and for Helbeck--an Unknown--before which the girl shut her eyes.
There was company that night in the farm kitchen. Mr. Bayley, the more than evangelical curate, came to tea.
He was a little man, with a small sharp anaemic face buried in red hair.
It was two or three years of mission work, first in Mexico, and then at Lima as the envoy of one of the most thoroughgoing of Protestant societies, that had given him his strangely vivid notions of the place of Romanism among the world"s forces. At no moment in this experience can he have had a grain of personal success. Lima, apparently, is of all towns in the universe the town where the beard of Protestantism is least worth the shaving--to quote a northern proverb. At any rate, Mr. Bayley returned to his native land at fifty with a permanent twist of brain.
Hence these preposterous sermons in the fell chapel; this eager nosing out and tracking down of every scent of Popery; this fanatical satisfaction in such a kindred soul as that of Elizabeth Mason. Some mild Ritualism at Whinthorpe had given him occupation for years; and as for Bannisdale, he and the Masons between them had raised the most causeless of storms about Mr. Helbeck and his doings, from the beginning; they had kept up for years the most rancorous memory of the Williams affair; they had made the owner of the old Hall the bogey of a country-side.
Laura knew it well. She never spoke to the little red man if she could help it. What pleased her was to make Daffady talk of him--Daffady, whose contempt as a "Methody" for "paid priests" made him a sure ally.
"Why, he taaks i" church as thoo G.o.d Awmighty were on the pulpit stairs--gi-en him his worrds!" said the cow-man, with the natural distaste of all preachers for diatribes not their own; and Laura, when she wandered the fields with him, would drive him on to say more and worse.
Mr. Bayley, on the other hand, had found a new pleasure in his visits to the farm-since Miss Fountain"s arrival. The young lady had escaped indeed from the evil thing--so as by fire. But she was far too pale and thin; she showed too many regrets. Moreover she was not willing to talk of Mr.
Helbeck with his enemies. Indeed, she turned her back rigorously on any attempt to make her do so.
So all that was left to the two cronies was to sit night after night, talking to each other in the hot hope that Miss Fountain might be reached thereby and strengthened--that even Mrs. Fountain and that distant black brood of Bannisdale might in some indirect way be brought within the saving-power of the Gospel.
Strange fragments of this talk floated through the kitchen.--
"Oh, my dear friend!--forbidding to marry is a doctrine of _devils_!--Now Lima, as I have often told you, is a city of convents----"
There was a sudden grinding of chairs on the flagged floor. The grey head and the red approached each other; the nightly shudder began; while the girls chattered and coughed as loudly as they dared.
"No--a woan"t--a conno believe "t!" Mrs. Mason would say at last, throwing herself back against her chair with very red cheeks. And Daffady would look round furtively, trying to hear.
But sometimes the curate would try to propitiate the young ladies. He made himself gentle; he raised the most delicate difficulties. He had, for instance, a very strange compa.s.sion for the Saints. "I hold it," he said--with an eye on Miss Fountain--"to be clearly demonstrable that the Invocation of Saints is, of all things, most lamentably injurious to the Saints themselves!"
"Hoo can he knaw?" said Polly to Laura, open-mouthed.
But Mrs. Mason frowned.
"A doan"t hod wi Saints whativer," she said violently. "So A doan"t fash mysel aboot em!"
Daffady sometimes would be drawn into these diversions, as he sat smoking on the settle. And then out of a natural slyness--perhaps on these latter occasions, from a secret sympathy for "missie"--he would often devote himself to proving the solidarity of all "church priests,"
Establishments, and prelatical Christians generally. Father Bowles might be in a "parlish" state; but as to all supporters of bishops and the heathenish custom of fixed prayers--whether they wore black gowns or no--"a man mut hae his doots."
Never had Daffady been so successful with his shafts as on this particular evening. Mrs. Mason grew redder and redder; her large face alternately flamed and darkened in the firelight. In the middle the girls tried to escape into the parlour. But she shouted imperiously after them.
"Polly--Laura--what art tha aboot? Coom back at yance. I"ll not ha sickly foak sittin wi"oot a fire!"
They came back sheepishly. And when they were once more settled as audience, the mistress--who was by this time fanning herself tempestuously with the Whinthorpe paper--launched her last word:
"Daffady--thoo"s naa call to lay doon t" law, on sic matters at aw.
Mappen tha"ll recolleck t" Bible--headstrong as tha art i" thy aan conceit. Bit t" Bible says "How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough--whose taak is o" bullocks?" Aa coom on that yestherday--an A"ve bin sair exercised aboot thy preachin ever sen!"
Daffady held his peace.
The clergyman departed, and Daffady went out to the cattle. Laura had not given the red-haired man her hand. She had found it necessary to carry her work upstairs, at the precise moment of his departure. But when he was safely off the premises she came down again to say good-night to her cousins.
Oh! they had not been unkind to her these last weeks. Far from it. Mrs.
Mason had felt a fierce triumph--she knew--in her broken engagement.
Probably at first Cousin Elizabeth had only acquiesced in Hubert"s demand that Miss Fountain should be asked to stay at the farm, out of an ugly wish to see the girl"s discomfiture for herself. And she had not been able to forego the joy of bullying Mr. Helbeck"s late betrothed through Mr. Bayley"s mouth.