CHAPTER VI

"Is that Mrs. Fountain's stepdaughter?" said Helbeck's companion, as Laura and her cart disappeared round a corner of the winding road on which the two men were walking.

Helbeck made a sign of a.s.sent.

"You may very possibly have known her father?" He named the Cambridge college of which Stephen Fountain had been a Fellow.

The Jesuit, who was a convert, and had been a distinguished Cambridge man, considered for a moment.

"Oh! yes--I remember the man! A strange being, who was only heard of, if I recollect right, in times of war. If there was any dispute going--especially on a religious point--Stephen Fountain would rush into it with broad-sheets. Oh, yes, I remember him perfectly--a great untidy, fair-haired, truculent fellow, to whom anybody that took any thought for his soul was either fool or knave. How much of him does the daughter inherit?"

Helbeck returned the other's smile. "A large slice, I think. She comes here in the curious position of having never lived in a Christian household before, and she seems already to have great difficulty in putting up with us."

Father Leadham laughed, then looked reflective.

"How often have I known that the best of all possible beginnings! Is she attached to her stepmother?"

"Yes. But Mrs. Fountain has no influence over her."

"It is a striking colouring--that white skin and reddish hair. And it is a face of some power, too."

"Power?" Helbeck demurred. "I think she is clever," he said dryly. "And, of course, coming from a university town, she has heard of things that other girls know nothing of. But she has had no training, moral or intellectual."

"And no Christian education?"

Helbeck shrugged his shoulders.

"She was only baptized with difficulty. When she was eleven or twelve she was allowed to go to church two or three times, I understand, on the helot principle--was soon disgusted--her father of course supplying a running comment at home--and she has stood absolutely outside religion of all kinds since."

"Poor child!" said the priest with heartiness. The paternal note in the words was more than official. He was a widower, and had lost his wife and infant daughter two years before his entrance into the Church of Rome.

Helbeck smiled. "I a.s.sure you Miss Fountain spends none of her pity upon herself."

"I dare say more than you think. The position of the unbeliever in a house like yours is always a painful one. You see she is alone. There must be a sense of exile--of something touching and profound going on beside her, from which she is excluded. She comes into a house with a chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, where everybody is keeping a strict Lent. She has not a single thought in common with you all. No; I am very sorry for Miss Fountain."

Helbeck was silent a moment. His dark face showed a shade of disturbance.

"She has some relations near here," he said at last, "but unfortunately I can't do much to promote her seeing them. You remember Williams's story?"

"Of course. You had some local row, didn't you? Ah! I remember."

And the two men walked on, discussing a case which had been and was still of great interest to them as Catholics. The hero, moreover--the Jesuit novice himself--was well known to them both.

"So Miss Fountain's relations belong to that peasant cla.s.s?" said the Jesuit, musing. "How curious that she should find herself in such a double relation to you and Bannisdale!"

"Consider me a little, if you please," said Helbeck, with his slight, rare smile. "While that young lady is under my roof--you see how attractive she is--I cannot get rid, you will admit, of a certain responsibility. Augustina has neither the will nor the authority of a mother, and there is literally no one else. Now there happens to be a young man in this Mason family----"

"Ah!" said the priest; "the young gentleman who jumped out at the bridge, with such a very light pair of heels?"

Helbeck nodded. "The old people were peasants and fanatics. They thought ill of me in the Williams affair, and the mother, who is still alive, would gladly hang and quarter me to-morrow if she could. But that is another point. The old people had their own dignity, their own manners and virtues--or, rather, the manners and virtues of their cla.s.s. The old man was coa.r.s.e and boorish, but he was hard-working and honourable, and a Christian after his own sort. But the old man is dead, and the son, who now works the farm jointly with his mother, is of no cla.s.s and no character. He has just education enough to despise his father and his father's hard work. He talks the dialect with his inferiors, or his kindred, and drops it with you and me. The old traditions have no hold upon him, and he is just a vulgar and rather vicious hybrid, who drinks more than is good for him and has a natural affinity for any sort of low love-affair. I came across him at our last hunt ball. I never go to such things, but last year I went."

"Good!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Jesuit, turning a friendly face upon the speaker.

Helbeck paused. The word, still more the emphasis with which it was thrown out, challenged him. He was about to defend himself against an implied charge, but thought better of it, and resumed:

"And unfortunately, considering the way in which all the clan felt towards me already, I found this youth in the supper-room, misbehaving himself with a girl of his own sort, and very drunk. I fetched a steward, and he was told to go. After which, you may imagine that it is scarcely agreeable to me to see my guest--a very young lady, very pretty, very distinguished--driving about the country in cousinly relations with this creature!"

The last words were spoken with considerable vivacity. The aristocrat and the ascetic, the man of high family and the man of scrupulous and fastidious character, were alike expressed in them.

The Jesuit pondered a little.

"No; you will have to keep watch. Why not distract her? You must have plenty of other neighbours to show her."

Helbeck shook his head.

"I live like a hermit. My sister is in the first year of her widowhood and very delicate."

"I see." The Jesuit hesitated, then said, smiling, in the tone of one who makes a venture: "The Bishop and I allowed ourselves to discuss these cloistered ways of yours the other day. We thought you would forgive us as a pair of old friends."

"I know," was the somewhat quick interruption, "the Bishop is of Manning's temper in these things. He believes in acting on and with the Protestant world--in our claiming prominence as citizens. It was to please him that I joined one or two committees last year--that I went to the hunt ball----"

Then, suddenly, in a very characteristic way, Helbeck checked his own flow of speech, and resumed more quietly: "Well, all that----"

"Leaves you of the same opinion still?" said the Jesuit, smiling.

"Precisely. I don't belong to my neighbours, nor they to me. We don't speak the same language, and I can't bring myself to speak theirs. The old conditions are gone, I know. But my feeling remains pretty much, what that of my forefathers was. I recognise that it is not common nowadays--but I have the old maxim in my blood: 'Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.'"

"There is none which has done us more deadly harm in England," cried the Jesuit. "We forget that England is a baptized nation, and is therefore in the supernatural state."

"I remind myself of it very often," said Helbeck, with a kind of proud submission; "and I judge no man. But my powers, my time, are all limited.

I prefer to devote them to the 'household of faith.'"

The two men walked on in silence for a time. Presently Father Leadham's face showed amus.e.m.e.nt, and he said:

"Certainly we modern converts have a better time of it than our predecessors! The Bishop tells me the most incredible things about the old feeling towards them in this Vicariate. And wherever I go I seem to hear the tale of the old priest who thanked G.o.d that he had never received anyone into the Church. Everybody has met someone who knew that old fellow! He may be a myth--but there is clearly history at the back of him!"

"I understand him perfectly," said Helbeck, smiling; and he added immediately, with a curious intensity, "I, too, have never influenced, never tried to influence, anyone in my life."

The priest looked at him, wondering.

"Not Williams?"

"Williams! But Williams was born for the faith. Directly he saw what I wanted to do in the chapel, he prayed to come and help me. It was his summer holiday--he neglected no duty; it was wonderful to see his happiness in the work--as I thought, an artistic happiness only. He used to ask me questions about the different saints; once or twice he borrowed a book--it was necessary to get the emblems correct. But I never said a single controversial word to him. I never debated religious subjects with him at all, till the night when he took refuge with me after his father had thrashed him so cruelly that he could not stand. Grace taught him, not I."

"Grace taught him, but through you," said the priest with quiet emphasis.

"Perhaps I know more about that than you do."

Helbeck flushed.