So that neither submission, nor a mere light tolerance and forgetting, were possible. Other girls, it seemed, married Catholics and made nothing of it--agreed pleasantly to differ all their lives. Her heart cried out!
There could be no likeness between these Catholic husbands and Alan Helbeck.
In the first days of their engagement she had often said to herself: "I need have nothing to do with it!" or "Some things are so lovely!--I will only think of them." In those hours beside the sea it had been so easy to be tolerant and kind. Helbeck was hers from morning till night. And she, so much younger, so weak and small and ignorant, had seemed to hold his life, with all its unexplored depths and strengths, in her hand.
And now------
She threw herself down on a rock that jutted from the wet gra.s.s, and gave herself up to the jealous pain that possessed her.
A few days more and Mr. Williams would be gone. There was some relief in that thought. That strange scene in the drawing-room--deep as all concerned had buried it in oblivious silence--had naturally made his whole visit an offence to her. In her pa.s.sionate way she felt herself degraded by his very presence in the house. His eyes constantly dropt, especially in her presence and Augustina"s, his evident cold shrinking from the company of women--she thought of them with disgust and anger.
For she said to herself that now she understood what they meant.
Of late she had been constantly busy with the books that stood to the right of Helbeck"s table. She could not keep herself away from them, although the signs of tender and familiar use they bore, were as thorns in her sore sense. Even his books were better friends to him than she!
And especially had she been dipping into those "Lives of the Saints" that Helbeck read habitually day by day; of which he talked to young Williams with a minuteness of knowledge that he scarcely possessed on any other subject--knowledge that appeared in all the details of the chapel painting. And on one occasion, as she turned over the small, worn volumes of his Alban Butler, she had come upon a certain pa.s.sage in the life of St. Charles Borromeo:
"Out of a most scrupulous love of purity ... neither would he speak to any woman, not even to his pious aunt, or sisters, or any nun, but in sight of at least two persons, and in as few words as possible."
The girl flung it down. Surrounded as she often was by priests--affronted by those downcast eyes of the scholastic--the pa.s.sage came upon her as an insult. Her cheeks burnt. Instinctively she showed herself that evening more difficult and exacting than ever with the man who loved her, and could yet feed his mind on the virtues of St. Charles Borromeo.
Nevertheless, she was often puzzled by the manner and demeanour of the young Jesuit.
During his work at the chapel frescoes certain curious transformations seemed to have pa.s.sed over him. Or was it merely the change of dress?
While painting he wore a long holland blouse that covered the clerical coat, concealed the clumsy limbs and feet, and concentrated the eye of the spectator on the young beauty of the head. When a visitor entered he would look up for an instant flushed with work and ardour, then plunge again into what he was doing. Art had reclaimed him; Laura could almost have said the Jesuit had disappeared. And what an astonishing gift there was in those clumsy fingers! His daring delicacies of colour; his ways of using the brush, that seemed to leave no clue behind; the liquid shimmer and brilliancy of his work--Helbeck could only explain them by saying that he had once taken him as a lad of nineteen to see a loan exhibition at Manchester, and then to the gallery at Edinburgh,
"There were three artists that he fastened upon--Watteau!--I have seen him recoil from the subjects (he was already balancing whether he should become a religious) and then go back again and again to the pictures, feeding himself upon them. Then there were two or three Rembrandts, and two or three Tintorets. One Tintoret Entombment I remember--a small picture. I never could get him away from it. He told me once that it was like something painted in powdered gems and then dipped in air. I believe he got the expression from some book he was reading," said Helbeck, with the good-humoured smile of one who does not himself indulge in the fineries of language.... "When we came home I borrowed a couple of pictures for him from a friend in Lancashire, who has good things. One was a Rembrandt--"The Casting-out of Hagar"--I have his copy of it in my room now--the other was a Tintoret sketch. He worked at them for days and weeks, pondering and copying them, bit by bit, till he was almost ill with excitement and enthusiasm. But you see the result in what he does."
And Helbeck smiled upon the artist with the affectionate sympathy of an elder brother. He and Laura were standing together one morning at the west end of the chapel, while Williams, in his blouse and mounted on a high stool, was painting a dozen yards away.
"And then he gave it up!" said Laura under her breath. "Who can understand that?"
Helbeck hesitated a little. His face was crossed for a moment by the shadow of some thought that he did not communicate. Then he said, "He came--as I told you--to think that it was right and best for him to do so. An artist, darling, has to think of the Four Last Things, like anybody else!"
"The Four Last Things!" said Laura, startled. "What do you mean?"
"Death--Judgment--Heaven--and h.e.l.l."
The words fell slowly from the half-whispering voice into the quiet darkness of the chapel. Laura looked up--Helbeck"s eyes, fixed upon the crucifix over the altar, seemed to receive thence a stem and secret message to which the whole man responded.
The girl moved restlessly away.
"Let us go and see what he is doing."
As they approached, Williams turned to Helbeck--he seemed not to see Miss Fountain--and said a few troubled phrases that showed him wholly dissatisfied with his morning"s work. Beads of perspiration stood on his brow; his lips were pinched and feverish; his eyes unhappy. He pointed Helbeck to the figure he was engaged upon--a strange dream of St. Mary of Egypt, as a very old woman, clothed in the mantle of Zosimus--the lion who was to bury her, couchant at her feet. Helbeck looked into it; admired some points, criticised others. Williams got down from his stool, talked with a low-voiced volubility, an egotistical pa.s.sion and disturbance that roused astonishment in Laura. Till then she had been acquainted only with the measured att.i.tudes and levelled voice that the Jesuit learns from the "Regulae Modestiae" of his order. But for the first time she felt a certain sympathy with him.
Afterwards for some days the young man, so recently an invalid, could hardly be persuaded to take sufficient exercise or food. He was absorbed in his saint and in the next figure beyond her, that was already growing under his brush. St. Ursula, white robed and fair haired, was springing like a flower from the wall; her delicate youth shone beside the age and austerity, the penitence and emaciation, of St. Mary of Egypt. Both looked towards the altar; but St. Mary with a mystic sadness that both adored and quailed; St. Ursula with the rapture, the confidence, of a bride.
The artist could not be torn from his conception; and upon Laura too the spell of the work steadily grew. She would slip into the chapel at all hours, and watch; sometimes standing a little way from the painter, a black lace scarf thrown round her bright hair, sometimes sitting motionless with a book on her knee, which she did not read. When Helbeck was there conversation arose into which she was often drawn. And out of a real wish to please Helbeck, she would silence her own resentments, and force herself to be friendly. Insensibly Williams began to talk to her; and it would sometimes happen, when Helbeck went away for a time, that the cold reserve or _mauvaise honte_ of the Jesuit would melt wholly before the eagerness of the artist--when, with intervals of a brusque silence, he talked with the rapidity and force of a turbid stream on the imaginations and the memories embodied in his work. And on one occasion, when the painter was busy with the head of St. Ursula, Laura, who was talking to Helbeck a few yards away, turned suddenly and found those dark strange eyes, that as a rule evaded her, fixed steadily and intently upon her. Next day she fancied with a start of dislike that in the lines of St. Ursula"s brow, and in the arrangement of the hair, there was a certain resemblance to herself. But Helbeck did not notice it, and nothing was said.
At meals, too, conversation turned now more on art than on missions.
Pictures seen by the two friends years before; Helbeck"s fading recollections of Florence and Rome; modern Catholic art as it was being developed in the Jesuit churches of the Continent: of these things Williams would talk, and talk eagerly. Sometimes Augustina would timidly introduce some subject of greater practical interest to the commonplace English Catholic. Mr. Williams would let it drop; and then Mrs. Fountain would sit silent and ill at ease, her head and hands twitching in a helpless bewildered way.
But in a moment came a change. After a certain Thursday when he was at work all day, the young man painted no more. Beyond St. Ursula, St.
Eulalia of Saragossa, Virgin and Martyr, had been sketched in, with a strange force of line and some suggestions both of colour and symbolism that held Laura fascinated. But the sketch remained ghostlike on the wall. The high stool was removed; the blouse put away.
Thenceforward Mr. Williams--to Laura"s secret anger--spent hours in Helbeck"s study reading. His avoidance of her society and Mrs. Fountain"s was more marked than ever. His face, which in the first days at Bannisdale had begun to recover a certain boyish bloom, became again white and drawn. The eyes were scarcely ever seen; if, by some rare chance, the heavy lids did lift, the fire and brilliance of the gaze below were startling to the bystander. But for the most part he seemed to be wrapped in a dumb sickliness and pain; his person was even less cleanly, his clothes less cared for, than before. At table he hardly talked at all; never of painting, or of any topic connected with it.
Once or twice Laura caught Helbeck"s look fixed upon his guest in what seemed to her anxiety or perplexity. But when she carelessly asked him what might be wrong with Mr. Williams, the Squire gave a decided answer.
"He is ill--and we ought not to have allowed him to do this work. There must be complete rest till he goes."
"Has he seen his father?" asked Laura.
"No. That is still hanging over him."
"Does his father wish to see him?"
"No! But it is his duty to go."
"Why? That he may enjoy a little more martyrdom?"
Helbeck laughed and captured her hand.
"What penalty do I exact for that?"
"It doesn"t deserve any," she said quickly. "I don"t think it is for health he has given up his painting. I believe he is unhappy."
"It may have revived old struggles," said Helbeck, with a sigh that seemed to escape him against his will.
"Why doesn"t he give it all up," she said with energy, "and be an artist?
That"s where his heart, his strength, lies."
Helbeck"s manner changed and stiffened.
"You are entirely mistaken, dearest. His heart and his strength are in his vocation--in making himself a good Jesuit."
She shook her head obstinately, with that rising breath of excitement which the slightest touch of difference was now apt to call up.
"I don"t think so!--and I have watched him. Suppose he _did_ give it all up? He could, of course, at any time."
Helbeck tried to smile and change the subject. But Laura persisted. Till at last the Squire said with pain:
"Darling--I don"t think you know how these things sound in Catholic ears."