Helbeck was silent. Laura to her dismay heard the sound of steps. Mr.
Williams had walked to the open door of the drawing-room and closed it.
What was she to do? Indecision--a wilful pa.s.sion of curiosity--held her where she was.
It was some moments, however, before the conversation was resumed. At last the young man said in a tone of strong agitation:
"You may blame me--my superiors may blame me. I have no leave--no commission whatever. The impulse to speak came to me when I was waiting for you in the dining-room just now. I can only plead your own goodness to me--and--the fact that I have remembered you before the Blessed Sacrament for these eight years.... It was an impression at meditation that I want to tell you of--an impression so strong that I have never since been able to escape from it--it haunts me perpetually. I was in our chapel at St. Aloysius. The subject of meditation was St. John vii. 36, "Every man went unto his own house," followed immediately by the first words of the eighth chapter, "and Jesus went unto Mount Olivet." ... I endeavoured strictly to obey the advice of St. Ignatius. I placed myself at the feet of our Lord. I went through the Preludes. Then I began on the meditation. I saw the mult.i.tude returning to their homes and their amus.e.m.e.nts--while our Lord went alone to the Mount of Olives. It was evening. The path seemed to me steep and weary--and He was bent with fatigue. At first He was all alone--darkness hung over the hill and the olive gardens. Then, suddenly, I became aware of forms that followed Him, at a long distance--saints, virgins, martyrs, confessors. They swept along in silence. I could just see them as a dim majestic crowd.
Presently, a form detached itself from the crowd--to my amazement, I saw _you_ distinctly--there seemed to be a special light upon your face. And the rest appeared to fall back. Soon I only saw the Form toiling in front, and you following. Then at the brow of the hill the Lord turned--and you, who were half-way up the last steep, paused also. The Lord beckoned to you. His Divine face was full of sweetness and encouragement--and you made a spring towards Him. Then something happened--something horrible--but I could hardly see what. But a figure seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h at you from behind--you stumbled--then you fell headlong. A black cloud fell from the sky--and covered you. I heard a wailing cry--I saw the Lord"s face darkened--and immediately afterwards the train of saints swept past me once more, with bent heads, beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I cannot describe the extraordinary vividness of it! The succession of thoughts and images never paused; and when I woke, or seemed to wake, I found myself bathed in sweat and nearly fainting."
There was a dead silence.
The scholastic began again, in still more rapid and troubled tones, to excuse himself. Mr. Helbeck might well think it presumption on his part to have repeated such a thing. He could only plead a strange pressure on his conscience--a sense of obligation. The fact was probably nothing--meant nothing. But if calamity came--if it meant calamity--and he had not delivered his message--would there not have been a burden on his soul?
Suddenly there was a sound. The handle of the drawing-room turned.
"Why, you are dark in here!" said Augustina. "What a wretched light that lamp gives!"
At the same moment the heavy curtain over the oriel window was drawn to one side, and a light figure entered the room.
The Jesuit made a step backwards. "Laura!" cried Helbeck in bewilderment.
"Where have you come from?"
"I was in the window watching the moon rise. Didn"t you know?"
She walked up to him, and without hesitation she did what she had never yet done before a spectator: she slipped her little hand into his. He looked down upon her, rather pale, his lips moving. Then withdrawing his hand, he quietly and proudly put his arm round her. She accepted the movement with equal pride, and without a word.
Augustina looked at them with discomfort--coughed, fumbled with her spectacles, and began to hunt for her knitting. The Jesuit, whiter and sicklier than before, murmured that he would go and rest after his journey, and with eyes steadily cast down he walked away.
"I don"t wonder!" thought Augustina, in an inward heat; "they really are too demonstrative!"
That night for the first time since her arrival at Bannisdale, Laura, instead of saying good-night as soon as the clock reached a quarter to ten, quietly walked beside Augustina to the chapel.
She knelt at some distance from Helbeck. But when the prayers, which were read by Mr. Williams, were over, and the tiny congregation was leaving the chapel, she felt herself drawn back. Helbeck did not speak, but in the darkness of the corridor he raised her hands and held them long against his lips. She quickly escaped from him, and without another word to anyone she was gone.
But an hour or two later, as she lay wakeful in her room above the study, she still heard the sound of continuous voices from below.
Helbeck and the scholastic!--plunged once more in that common stock of recollections and interests in which she had no part, linked and reconciled through all difference by that Catholic freemasonry of which she knew nothing. The impertinent zeal of the evening--the young man"s ill manners and hypocrisies--would be soon forgiven. In some ways Mr.
Helbeck was more Jesuit than the Jesuits. He would not only excuse the audacity--was she quite sure that in his inmost heart he would not shrink before the warning?
"What chance have I?" she cried, in a sudden despair; and she wept long and miserably, oppressed by new terrors, new glimpses, as it were, of some hard or chilling reality that lay waiting for her in the dim corridors of life.
Next morning after breakfast, Helbeck and Mr. Williams disappeared. A light scaffolding had been placed in the chapel. Work was to begin.
Laura put on her hat, took a basket, and went into the garden to gather fresh flowers for the house. Along the edges of the bowling-green stood rows of sunflowers, a golden show against the deep bronze of the thick beech hedges that enclosed the ground. Laura was trying, without much success, to reach some of the top blossoms of a tall plant when Helbeck came upon her.
"Be as independent as you please," he said laughing, "but you will never be able to gather sunflowers without me!"
In a moment her basket was filled. He looked down upon her.
"You should live here--in the bowling-green. It frames you--your white hat--your grey dress. Laura!"--his voice leapt--"do I do enough to make you happy?"
She flushed--turned her little face, and smiled at him--but rather sadly, rather pensively. Then she examined him in her turn. He looked jaded and tired. From want of sleep?--or merely from the daily fatigue of that long walk, foodless, to Whinthorpe for early Ma.s.s? That morning, as usual, by seven o"clock she had seen him crossing the park. A cheerless rain was falling from a grey sky. But she had never yet known him stopped by weather.
There was a quick a.s.sociation of ideas--and she said abruptly:
"Why did Mr. Williams say all that to you last night, do you suppose?"
Helbeck"s countenance changed. He sauntered on beside her, his hands in his pockets, frowning. But he did not reply, and she became impatient.
"I have been reading a French story this morning," she said quickly.
"There is a character in it--a priest. The author says of him that he had "une imagination faussee et troublee."" She paused, then added with great vivacity--"I thought it applied to someone else--don"t you?"
The fold in Helbeck"s forehead deepened a little.
"Have you judged him already? I don"t know--I can"t take Williams, you see, quite as you take him. To me he is still the strange gifted boy I taught to draw--whom I had to protect from his brutal father. He has chosen the higher life, and will soon be a priest. He is therefore my superior. But at the same time I think I understand him and his character. I understand the kind of impulse--the impetuosity--that made him do and say what he did last night."
"It was our engagement, of course, that he meant--by your fall--the black cloud that covered you?"
The impetuous directness was all Laura; so was the sensitive change in eye and lip. But Helbeck neither wavered, nor caressed her. He had a better instinct. He looked at her with a penetrating glance.
"I don"t think he quite knew what he meant. And you? Now I will carry the war into the enemy"s country! Were you quite kind--quite right in doing what you did last night? Foolish or no, he was speaking in a very intimate way--of things that he felt deeply. It must have given him great pain to be overheard."
Her breath fluttered.
"It was quite an accident that I was there. But how could I help listening? I must know--I ought to know--what your Catholic friends think--what they say of me to you!"
She was conscious of a childish petulance. But it was as though she could not help herself.
"I wish you had not listened," he said, with gentle steadiness. "Won"t you trust those things to me?"
"What power have I beside theirs?" she said, turning away her head. He saw the trembling of the soft throat, and bent over her.
"I only ask you, for both our sakes, not to test it too far!"
And taking her hand by force, he crushed it pa.s.sionately in his own.
But she was only half appeased. Her mind, indeed, was in that miserable state when love finds its only pleasure in self-torment.
With a secret change of ground she asked him how he was going to spend the day. He answered, reluctantly, that there was a Diocesan Committee that would take the afternoon, and that the morning must be largely given to the preparation of papers.
"But you will come and look in upon me?--you will help me through?"
She raised her shoulders resentfully.
"And you have been, to Whinthorpe already!--Why do you go to Ma.s.s every morning?" she asked, looking up. "I know very few Catholics do. I wish you"d tell me."
He looked embarra.s.sed.