Laura turned in surprise.
"Mr. Helbeck tells me you wrenched your wrist on the drive. He thought you would perhaps allow me to treat it."
Laura submitted. It was indeed nearly helpless and much swollen, though she had been hardly conscious of it since the little accident happened.
The brisk, black-eyed Sister had soon put a comforting bandage round it, chattering all the time of Mrs. Fountain and the ups and downs of the illness.
"She missed you very much after you went yesterday. But now, I suppose, you will stay? It won"t be long, poor lady!"
The Sister gave a little professional sigh, and Laura, of course, repeated that she must certainly stay. As the Sister broke off the cotton with which she had been st.i.tching the bandage, she stole a curious glance at her patient. She had not frequented the orphanage in her off-time for nothing; and she was perfectly aware of the anxiety with which the Catholic friends of Bannisdale must needs view the re-entry of Miss Fountain. Sister Rosa, who spoke French readily, wondered whether it had not been after all "reculer pour mieux sauter."
After a first restless sleep of sheer fatigue, Laura found herself sitting up in bed struggling with a sense of horrible desolation.
Augustina was dead--Mr. Helbeck was gone, was a Jesuit--and she herself was left alone in the old house, weeping--with no one, not a living soul, to hear. That was the impression; and it was long before she could disentangle truth from nightmare.
When she lay down again, sleep was banished. She lit a candle and waited for the dawn. There in the flickering light were the old tapestries--the princess stepping into her boat, Diana ranging through the wood. Nothing was changed in the room or its furniture. But the Laura who had fretted or dreamed there; who had written her first letter to Molly Friedland from that table; who had dressed for her lover"s eye before that rickety gla.s.s; who had been angry or sullen, or madly happy there--why, the Laura who now for the second time watched the spring dawn through that diamond-paned window looked back upon her as the figures in Rossetti"s strange picture meet the ghosts of their old selves--with the same sense of immeasurable, irrevocable distance. What childish follies and impertinences!--what misunderstanding of others, and misreckoning of the things that most concerned her--what blind drifting--what inevitable shipwreck!
Ah! this aching of the whole being, physical and moral,--again she asked herself, only with a wilder impatience, how long it could be borne.
The wind had fallen, but in the pause of the dawn the river spoke with the hills. The light mounted quickly. Soon the first glint of sun came through the curtains. Laura extinguished her candle, and went to let in the day. As on that first morning, she stood in the window, following with her eye the foaming curves of the Greet, or the last streaks of snow upon the hills, or the daffodil stars in the gra.s.s.
Hush!--what time was it? She ran for her watch. Nearly seven.
She wrapped a shawl about her, and went back to her post, straining to see the path on the further side of the river through the mists that still hung about it. Suddenly her head dropped upon her hands. One sob forced its way. Helbeck had pa.s.sed.
For some three weeks, after this April night, the old house of Bannisdale was the scene of one of those dramas of life and death which depend, not upon external incident, but upon the inner realities of the heart, its inextinguishable affections, hopes, and agonies.
Helbeck and Laura were once more during this time brought into close and intimate contact by the claims of a common humanity. They were united by the common effort to soften the last journey for Augustina, by all the little tendernesses and cares that a sick room imposes, by the pities and charities, the small renascent hopes and fears of each successive day and night.
But all the while, how deeply were they divided!--how sharp was the clash between the reviving strength of pa.s.sion, which could not but feed itself on the daily sight and contact of the beloved person, and those facts of character and individuality which held them separated!--facts which are always, and in all cases, the true facts of this world.
In Helbeck the shock of Laura"s October flight had worked with profound and transforming power. After those first desperate days in which he had merely sought to recover her, to break down her determination, or to understand if he could the grounds on which she had acted, a new conception of his own life and the meaning of it had taken possession of him. He fell into the profoundest humiliation and self-abas.e.m.e.nt, denouncing himself as a traitor to his faith, who out of mere self-delusion, and a lawless love of ease, had endangered his own obedience, and neglected the plain task laid upon him. That fear of proselytism, that humble dread of his own influence, which had once determined his whole att.i.tude towards those about him, began now to seem to him mere wretched cowardice and self-will--the caprice of the servant who tries to better his master"s instructions.
But now I cast that finer sense And sorer shame aside; Such dread of sin was indolence, Such aim at heaven was pride.
Again and again he said to himself that if he had struck at once for the Church and for the Faith at the moment when Laura"s young heart was first opened to him, when under the earliest influences of her love for him--how could he doubt that she had loved him!--her nature was still plastic, still capable of being won to G.o.d, as it were, by a _coup de main_--might not--would not--all have been well? But no!--he must needs believe that G.o.d had given her to him for ever, that there was room for all the gradual softening, the imperceptible approaches by which he had hoped to win her. It had seemed to him the process could not be too gentle, too indulgent. And meanwhile the will and mind that might have been captured at a rush had time to harden--the forces of revolt to gather.
What wonder? Oh! blind--infatuate! How could he have hoped to bring her, still untouched, within the circle of his Catholic life, into contact with its secrets and its renunciations, without recoil on her part, without risk of what had actually happened? The strict regulation of every hour, every habit, every thought, at which he aimed as a Catholic--what _could_ it seem to her but a dreary and forbidding tyranny?--to her who had no clue to it, who was still left free, though she loved him, to judge his faith coldly from outside? And when at last he had begun to drop hesitation, to change his tone--then, it was too late!
_Tyranny!_ She had used that word once or twice, in that first letter which had reached him on the evening of her flight, and in a subsequent one. Not of anything that had been, apparently--but of that which might be. It had wounded him to the very quick.
And yet, in truth, the course of his present thoughts--plainly interpreted--meant little else than this--that if, at the right moment, he had coerced her with success, they might both have been happy.
Later on he had seen his own self-judgment reflected in the faces, the consolations, of his few intimate friends. Father Leadham, for instance--whose letters had been his chief support during a period of dumb agony when he had felt himself more than once on the brink of some morbid trouble of brain.
"I found her adamant," said Father Leadham. "Never was I so powerless with any human soul. She would not discuss anything. She would only say that she was born in freedom--and free she would remain. All that I urged upon her implied beliefs in which she had not been brought up, which were not her father"s and were not hers. Nor on closer experience had she been any more drawn to them--quite the contrary; whatever--and there, poor child! her eyes filled with tears--whatever she might feel towards those who held them. She said fiercely that you had never argued with her or persuaded her--or perhaps only once; that you had promised--this with an indignant look at me--that there should be no pressure upon her. And I could but feel sadly, dear friend, that you only, under our Blessed Lord, could have influenced her; and that you, by some deplorable mistake of judgment, had been led to feel that it was wrong to do so. And if ever, I will even venture to say, violence--spiritual violence, the violence that taketh by storm--could have been justified, it would have been in this case. Her affections were all yours; she was, but for you and her stepmother, alone in the world; and amid all her charms and gifts, a soul more starved and dest.i.tute I never met with. May our Lord and His Immaculate Mother strengthen you to bear your sorrow! For your friends, there are and must be consolations in this catastrophe. The cross that such a marriage would have laid upon you must have been heavy indeed."
Hara.s.sed by such thoughts and memories Helbeck pa.s.sed through these strange, these miserable days--when he and Laura were once more under the same roof, living the same household life. Like Laura, he clung to every hour; like Laura, he found it almost more than he could bear. He suffered now with a fierceness, a moroseness, unknown to him of old. Every permitted mortification that could torment the body or humble the mind he brought into play during these weeks, and still could not prevent himself from feeling every sound of Laura"s voice and every rustle of her dress as a rough touch upon a sore.
What was in her mind all the time--behind those clear indomitable eyes?
He dared not let himself think of the signs of grief that were written so plainly on her delicate face and frame. One day he found himself looking at her from a distance in a pa.s.sionate bewilderment. So white--so sad!
For what? What was this freedom, this atrocious freedom--that a creature so fragile, so unfit to wield it, had yet claimed so fatally? His thoughts fell back to Stephen Fountain, cursing an influence at once so intangible and so strong.
It was some relief that they were in no risk of _tete-a-tete_ outside Augustina"s sick room. One or other of the nurses was always present at meals. And on the day after Laura"s arrival Father Leadham appeared and stayed for ten days.
The relations of the Jesuit towards Miss Fountain during this time were curious. It was plain to Helbeck that Father Leadham treated the girl with a new respect, and that she on her side showed herself much more at ease with him than she had used to be. It was as though they had tested each other, with the result that each had found in the other something n.o.bler and sincerer than they had expected to find. Laura might be spiritually dest.i.tute; but it was evident that since his conversation with her, Father Leadham had realised for the first time the "charms and gifts" which might be supposed to have captured Mr. Helbeck.
So that when they met at meals, or in the invalid"s room, the Jesuit showed Miss Fountain a very courteous attention. He was fresh from Cambridge; he brought her gossip of her friends and acquaintances; he said pleasant things of the Friedlands. She talked in return with an ease that astonished Helbeck and his sister. She seemed to both to have grown years older.
It was the same with all the other Catholic haunters of the house. For the first time she discovered how to get on with the Reverend Mother, even with Sister Angela--how not to find Father Bowles himself too wearisome. She moved among them with a dignity, perhaps an indifference, that changed her wholly.
Once, when she had been chatting in the friendliest way with the Reverend Mother, she paused for a moment in the pa.s.sage outside Augustina"s room, amazed at herself.
It was liberty, no doubt--this strange and desolate liberty in which she stood, that made the contrast. By some obscure a.s.sociation she fell on the words that Helbeck had once quoted to her--how differently! "My soul is escaped like a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and we are delivered."
"Ah! but the bird"s wings are broken and its breast pierced. What can it do with its poor freedom?" she said to herself, in a pa.s.sion of tears.
Meanwhile, she realised the force of the saying that Catholicism is the faith to die in.
The concentration of all these Catholic minds upon the dying of Augustina, the busy fraternal help evoked by every stage of her _via dolorosa_, was indeed marvellous to see. "It is a work of art," Laura thought, with that new power of observation which had developed in her.
"It is--it must be--the most wonderful thing of its sort in the world!"
For it was no mere haphazard series of feelings or kindnesses. It was an act--a function--this "good death" on which the sufferer and those who a.s.sisted her were equally bent. Something had to be done, a process to be gone through; and everyone was anxiously bent upon doing it in the right, the prescribed, way--upon omitting nothing. The physical fact, indeed, became comparatively unimportant, except as the evoking cause of certain symbolisms--nay, certain actual and direct contacts between earth and heaven, which were the distraction of death itself--which took precedence of it, and reduced it to insignificance.
When Father Leadham left, Father Bowles came to stay in the house, and Communion was given to Mrs. Fountain every day. Two or three times a week, also, Ma.s.s was said in her room. Laura a.s.sisted once or twice at these scenes--the blaze of lights and flowers in the old panelled room--the altar adorned with splendid fittings brought from the chapel below--the small, blanched face in the depths of the great tapestried bed--the priest bending over it.
On one of these occasions, in the early morning, when the candles on the altar were almost effaced by the first brilliance of a May day, Laura stole away from the darkened room where Mrs. Fountain lay soothed and sleeping, and stood for long at an open window overlooking the wild valley outside.
She was stifled by the scent of flowers and burning wax; still more, mentally oppressed. The leaping river, the wide circuit of the fells, the blowing of the May wind!--to them, in a great reaction, the girl gave back her soul, pa.s.sionately resting in them. They were no longer a joy and intoxication. But the veil lifted between her and them. They became a sanctuary and refuge.
From the Martha of the old faith, so careful and troubled about many things--sins and penances, creeds and sacraments, the miraculous hauntings of words and objects, of water and wafer, of fragments of bone and stuff, of scapulars and medals, of crucifixes and indulgences--her mind turned to this Mary of a tameless and patient nature, listening and loving in the sunlight.
Only, indeed, to destroy her own fancy as soon as woven! Nature was pain and combat, too, no less than Faith. But here, at least, was no jealous lesson to be learnt; no exclusions, no conditions. Her rivers were deep and clear for all; her "generous sun" was lit for all. What she promised she gave. Without any preliminary _credo_, her colours glowed, her breezes blew for the unhappy. Oh! such a purple shadow on the fells--such a red glory of the oak twigs in front of it--such a white sparkle of the Greet, parting the valley!
What need of any other sacrament or sign than these--this beauty and bounty of the continuing world? Indeed, Friedland had once said to her, "The joy that Catholics feel in the sacrament, the plain believer in G.o.d will get day by day out of the simplest things--out of a gleam on the hills--a purple in the distance--a light on the river; still more out of any tender or heroic action."
She thought very wistfully of her old friend and his talk; but here also with a strange sense of distance, of independence. How the river dashed and raced! There had been wild nights of rain amid this May beauty, and the stream was high. Day by day, of late, she had made it her comrade.
Whenever she left Augustina it was always to wander beside it, or to sit above it, cradled and lost in that full triumphant song it went uttering to the spring.
But there was a third person in the play, by no means so pa.s.sive an actor as Laura was wont to imagine her.
There is often a marvellous education in such a tedious parting with the world as Augustina was enduring. If the physical conditions allow it, the soul of the feeblest will acquire a new dignity, and perceptions more to the point. As she lay looking at the persons who surrounded her, Augustina pa.s.sed without an effort, and yet wonderfully, as it seemed to her, into a new stage of thought and desire about them. A fresh, an eager ambition sprang up in her, partly of the woman, partly of the believer.