Hand in hand they descended the steep slope to that rock-seat where he had found her on the morning of Easter Sunday. The great thorn which overhung it was then in bud; now the berries which covered the tree were already reddening to winter. Before her spread the silver-river, running to lose itself in the rocky bosom of that towering scar which closed the distance, whereon, too, all the wealth of the woods on either hand converged--the woods that hid the outer country, and all that was not Bannisdale and Helbeck's.

To-day, however, Laura felt no young pa.s.sion of pleasure in the beauty at her feet. She was ill at ease, and her look fled his as he glanced up to her from the turf where he had thrown himself.

"Do you like me to read your books?" she said abruptly, her question swooping hawk-like upon his and driving it off the field.

He paused--to consider, and to smile.

"I don't know. I believe you read them perversely!"

"I know what you read this morning. Do you--do you think St. Francis Borgia was a very admirable person?"

"Well, I got a good deal of edification out of him," said Helbeck quietly.

"Did you? Would you be like him if you could? Do you remember when his wife was very ill, and he was praying for her, he heard a voice--do you remember?"

"Go on," said Helbeck, nodding.

"And the voice said, 'If thou wouldst have the life of the d.u.c.h.ess prolonged, it shall be granted; but it is not expedient for thee'--'_thee_,' mind--not her! When he heard this, he was penetrated by a most tender love of G.o.d, and burst into tears. Then he asked G.o.d to do as He pleased with the lives of his wife and his children and himself. He gave up--I suppose he gave up--praying for her. She became much worse and died, leaving him a widower at the age of thirty-six. Afterwards--please don't interrupt!--in the s.p.a.ce of three years, he disposed somehow of all his eight children--some of them I reckoned must be quite babies--took the vows, became a Jesuit, and went to Rome. Do you approve of all that?"

Helbeck reddened. "It was a time of hard fighting for the Church," he said gravely, after a pause, "and the Jesuits were the advance guard. In such days a man may be called by G.o.d to special acts and special sacrifices."

"So you do approve? Papa was a member of an Ethical Society at Cambridge.

They used sometimes to discuss special things--whether they were right or wrong. I wonder what they would have said to St. Francis Borgia?"

Helbeck smiled.

"Mercifully, darling, the ideals of the Catholic Church do not depend upon the votes of Ethical Societies!"

He turned his handsome head towards her. His tone was perfectly gentle, but behind it she perceived the breathing of a contempt before which she first recoiled--then sprang in revolt.

"As for me," she said, panting a little, "when I finished the Life this morning in your room, I felt like Ivan in Browning's poem--do you recollect?--about the mother who threw her children one by one to the wolves, to save her wretched self? I would like to have dropped the axe on St. Francis Borgia's neck--just one--little--clean cut!--while he was saying his prayers, and enjoying his burning love, and all the rest of it!"

Helbeck was silent, nor could she see his face, which was again turned from her towards the river. The eager feverish voice went on:

"Do you know that's the kind of thing you read always--always--day after day? And it's just the same now! That girl of twenty-three, Augustina was talking of, who is going into a convent, and her mother only died last year, and there are six younger brothers and sisters, and her father says it will break his heart--_she_ must have been reading about St. Francis Borgia. Perhaps she felt 'burning love' and had 'floods of tears.' But Ivan with his axe--that's the person I'd bring in, if I could!"

Still not a word from the man beside her. She hesitated a moment--felt a sob of excitement in her throat--bent forward and touched his shoulder.

"Suppose--suppose I were to be ill--dying--and the voice came, 'Let her go! She is in your way; it would be better for you she should die'--would you just let go?--see me drop, drop, drop, through all eternity, to make your soul safe?"

"Laura!" cried a strong voice. And, with a spring, Helbeck was beside her, capturing both her cold hands in one of his, a mingled tenderness and wrath flashing from him before which she shrank. But though she drew away from him--her small face so white below the broad black hat!--she was not quelled. Before he could speak, she had said in sharp separate words, hardly above a whisper:

"It is that horrible egotism of religion that poisons everything! And if--if one shared it, well and good, one might make terms with it, like a wild thing one had tamed. But outside it, and at war with it, what can one do but hate--hate--_hate_--it!"

"My G.o.d!" he said in bewilderment, "where am I to begin?"

He stared at her with a pa.s.sionate amazement. Never before had she shown such forces of personality, or been able to express herself with an utterance so mature and resonant. Her stature had grown before his eyes.

In the little frowning figure there was something newly, tragically fine.

The man for the first time felt his match. His own hidden self rose at last to the struggle with a kind of angry joy, eager at once to conquer the woman and to pierce the sceptic.

"Listen to me, Laura!" he said, bending over her. "That was more than I can bear--that calls me out of my tent. I have tried to keep my poor self out of sight, but it has rights. You have challenged it. Will you take the consequences?"

She trembled before the pale concentration of his face and bent her head.

"I will tell you," he said in a low determined voice, "the only story that a man truly knows--the story of his own soul. You shall know--what you hate."

And, after a pause of thought, Helbeck made one of the great efforts of his life.

He did not fully know indeed what it was that he had undertaken, till the wave of emotion had gathered through all the inmost chambers of memory, and was bearing outward in one great tide the secret n.o.bilities, the hidden poetries, the unconscious weaknesses, of a nature no less narrow than profound, no less full of enmities than of loves.

But gradually from hurried or broken beginnings the narrative rose to clearness and to strength.

The first impressions of a lonely childhood; the first workings of the family history upon his boyish sense, like the faint, perpetual touches of an unseen hand moulding the will and the character; the picture of his patient mother on her sofa, surrounded with her little religious books, twisted and tormented, yet always smiling; his early collisions with his morose and half-educated father--he pa.s.sed from these to the days of his first Communion, the beginnings of the personal life. "But I had very little fervour then, such as many boys feel. I did not doubt--I would not have shown any disrespect to my religion for the world, mostly, I think, from family pride--but I felt no ardour, and did not pretend any. My mother sometimes shed tears over it, and was comforted by her old confessor--so she told me when she was dying--who used to say to her: 'Feeling is good, but obedience is better. He obeys;' for I did all my religious duties without difficulty. Then at thirteen I was sent to Stonyhurst. And there, after a while, G.o.d began His work in me."

He paused a moment; and when he resumed, his voice shook:

"Among the masters there was a certain Father Lewin. He took an affection for me, and I for him. He was even then a dying man, but he accomplished more, and was more severe to himself, than any man in health I ever knew.

So long as he lived, he made the path of religion easy to me. He was the supernatural life before my eyes. I had only to open them and see. The only difference between us was that I began--first out of love for him, I suppose--to have a great wish to become a Jesuit; whereas he was against it--he thought there were too many special claims upon me here. Then, when I was eighteen, he died. I had seen him the day before, when there seemed to be no danger, or they concealed it from me. But in the night I was called, too late to hear him speak; he was already in his agony. The sight terrified me. I had expected something much more consoling--more beautiful. For a long time I could not shake off the impression, the misery of it."

He was silent again for a minute. He still held Laura's hands close, as though there was something in their touch that spurred him on.

"After his death I got my father's leave to go and study at Louvain. I pa.s.sed there the most wretched years of my life. Father Lewin's death had thrown me into an extraordinary dejection, which seemed to have taken from me all the joy of my faith; but at Louvain I came very near to losing it altogether. It came, I think, from the reading of some French sceptical books the first year I was there; but I went through a horror and anguish. Often I used to wander for a whole day along the Scheldt, or across lonely fields where no one could see me, lost in what seemed to me a fight with devils. The most horrible blasphemies--the most subtle, the most venomous thoughts--ah! well--by G.o.d's grace, I never gave up Confession and Communion--at long intervals, indeed--but still I held to them. The old Pa.s.sionist father, my director, did not understand much about me. I seemed, indeed, to have no friends. I lived shut up with my own thoughts. The only comfort and relief I got was from painting. I loved the studio where I worked, poor as my own attempts were. It seemed often to be the only thing between me and madness.... Well, the first relief came in a strange way. I was visiting one of the professors, an old Canon of the Cathedral, on a June evening. The Bishop of the See was very ill, and while I was with the Canon word came round to summon the Chapter to a.s.sist at the administration of the last Sacraments, and to hear the sick man's Profession of Faith. The old Canon had been good to me. I don't know whether he suspected what was wrong with me. At any rate, he laid a kind hand on my arm. 'Come with me,' he said; and I went with him into the Bishop's residence. I can see the old house now--the black panelled stairs and pa.s.sages, and the shadow of the great church outside.

"In the Bishop's room were gathered all the canons in their white robes; there was an altar blazing with lights, the windows were wide open to the dusk, and the cathedral bell was tolling. We all knelt, and Monseigneur received the Viatic.u.m. He was fully vested. I could just see his venerable white head on the pillow. After the Communion one of the canons knelt by him and recited the Creed of Pope Pius IV."

Laura started. But Helbeck did not notice the sudden tremulous movement of the hands lying in his. He was sitting rigidly upright, the eyes half closed, his mind busy with the past.

"And as he recited it, the bands that held my own heart seemed to break.

I had not been able to approach any clause of that creed for months without danger of blasphemy; and now--it was like a bird escaped from the nets. The snare is broken--and we are delivered! The dying man raised his voice in a last effort; he repeated the oath with which the Creed ends.

The Gospels were handed to him; he kissed them with fervour. '_Sic me Deus adjuvet, et Sancta Dei Evangelia_.' 'So may G.o.d help me, and His Holy Gospels!' I joined in the words mentally, overcome with joy. Before me, as in a vision, had risen the majesty and glory of the Catholic Church; I felt her foundations once more under my feet."

He drew a long breath. Then he turned. Laura felt his eyes upon her, as though in doubt. She herself neither moved nor spoke; she was all hearing, absorbed in a pa.s.sionate prescience of things more vital yet to come.

"Laura!"--his voice dropped--"I want you to know it all, to understand me through and through. I will try that there shall not be a word to offend you. That scene I have described to you was for me only the beginning of another apostasy. I had no longer the excuse of doubt. I believed and trembled. But for two years after that, I was every day on the brink of ruining my own soul--and another's. The first, the only woman I ever loved before I saw you, Laura, I loved in defiance of all law--G.o.d's or man's. If she had struggled one heartbeat less, if G.o.d had let me wander one hair's breadth further from His hand, we had both made shipwreck--hopeless, eternal shipwreck. Laura, my little Laura, am I hurting you so?"

She gave a little sob, and mutely, with shut eyes, she raised her face towards him. He stooped and very tenderly and gravely kissed her cheek.

"But G.o.d's mercy did not fail!" he said or rather murmured. "At the last moment that woman--G.o.d rest her soul!--G.o.d bless her for ever!----"

He took off his hat, and bent forward silently for a moment.

--"She died, Laura, more than ten years ago!--At the last moment she saved both herself and me. She sent for one of my old Jesuit masters at Stonyhurst, a man who had been a great friend of Father Lewin's and happened to be at that moment in Brussels. He came. He brought me her last farewell, and he asked me to go back with him that evening to join a retreat that he was holding in one of the houses of the order near Brussels. I went in a sullen state, stunned and for the moment submissive.

"But the retreat was agony. I could take part in nothing. I neglected the prescribed hours and duties; it was as though my mind could not take them in, and I soon saw that I was disturbing others.

"One evening--I was by myself in the garden at recreation hour--the father who was holding the retreat came up to me, and sternly asked me to withdraw at once. I looked at him. 'Will you give me one more day?' I said. He agreed. He seemed touched. I must have appeared to him a miserable creature.