“That is not quite fairly stated,” said Frank, in the tone a man might use if he demurred to some argument in a discussion in which he was not really interested.
Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler.
“Did you say ‘fairly’?” he asked.
The deadly quietness of this suddenly frightened the girl. That was a tone in his voice she knew and dreaded.
“Father,” she said, “father.”
They neither of them took any notice of her, and Frank answered in the same gentle, objecting manner.
“You say ‘we settled it,’”he said. “I had nothing to do with it. You merely told me what you were going to do. That is why I used the word ‘fairly.’”
Mr. Challoner considered this for a moment.
“I see your point,” he said. “That is so.”
Then he turned to Helen.
“So choose,” he said. “I settled it so.”
Helen looked at Frank a moment and stood up, love streaming round her in triumphant flood, bearing her away.
“I have chosen,” she said. “You know it.”
Then, even in that moment, when she felt so strong, when her love was to her like a draught of wine or meat to the hungry, her strength utterly failed her, and she buried her head on the cushions of the sofa where she had been sitting and burst into hopeless, hysterical sobbing. She was not capable of more; all had given way, and she lay helpless, sobbing, sobbing, as if to sob her heart out.
But four hands were busy about her, and as the stress of her seizure began to leave her, she heard two voices, for the moment one. And one said, “Helen darling,” and the other, “Helen dear;” and one said, “If you would be so kind, Lord Yorkshire, there is some water on the table;” and the other said, “Helen, would you like to drink a little water?”
For two men in nature, in sympathy, in religion poles apart were bound together for a moment in the necessity divine and human of comforting the weak, of giving help to a sufferer. She who suffered was loved by them both, and though the distance of fifty poles could not span the difference between their ways of love, that was sufficient.
For myriads are the ways of approaching the throne where all love dwells. From east and west and north and south those myriad ways converge and meet. But at present east and west, being human, and thinking that they were going in opposite ways, could not foretell the meeting. But the Centre knew.
By degrees she came to herself again, and one said, “Some other time,” and the other, “Not again now, Helen.” So of the three she was the only one who was resolved to go on, to have this ghastly spiritual surgery finished. Though she had chosen, she knew there was more that had to be said.
She cast one glance at her father, but her physical weakness over, his pity, she saw, was over also. A gulf immeasurable by leagues had opened between them, and though not even yet did he despair that they would be forever disunited, it was she who must come to him. From the firm rock on which he stood he knew, so he believed, that he would never stir a step.
She pushed back her hair from her forehead.
“I don’t know why I did that,” she said. “It was stupid of me. Give me a minute.”
She got up, still a little unsteadily, and played with the pens in the tray on the writing-table, recovering herself. Then she turned suddenly to her father.
“Father,” she said, “you can’t mean what you say. How can I choose between you? What are you asking me to do? What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I say,” he answered, with the same dreadful quietness. That which had not seemed possible to him last night, that she would really choose as she had chosen, had become more than possible. “You choose between us. Are there words in which I can make that clearer? If you choose me, you say good-bye to Lord Yorkshire here and now. If you choose him, you are to understand that you cease to be my daughter. I will not be at your wedding; I will not see you afterwards. You shall not be married from this house, nor, if I could help it, should you be married in this church.”
Then suddenly the quietness of the scene was shattered. As if by a sudden flash of lightning, all that Helen’s choice implied, her rejection not of him alone, but her rejection of all in the world that he held sacred, was made dazzlingly clear to him. At that his self-control gave way, and as his voice rose louder and louder, he beat with his clenched hand on the edge of the marble chimney-piece, so that the knuckles bled.
“Understand what you are doing,” he said, “and let me tell you, so that there can be no mistake. You will promise to love, honour, and obey an atheist, aninfidel, one who denies God and his Christ. You will have to say you do this according to God’s holy ordinance. That from you, in church, Helen, and a lie. It cannot be by His ordinance, for by your act you turn your back on the faith that has been yours from childhood till now, on all you have believed to be sacred. And what of the end? What of the life to which this is but a prelude? What of him, your husband, then? He that believeth not shall be damned. I would—I would sooner see you in your coffin than standing by the altar with this man. I would sooner see you his mistress——“
His passion, springing though it did from his own intense and fervent Christianity, had suddenly shot out into a bitter and poisonous blossom, and as that flared through the room, he paused a moment and looked at her as she stood before him in the beautiful whiteness of her girlhood. Her physical weakness had altogether passed, and except that she took one step back from him in involuntary disgust and shrinking, you would have said she was listening with quiet, incredulous wonder to some tale that did not concern her. But as he paused, hardly yet knowing what he had said, knowing, in fact, only that no words could be strong enough to express the intensity of his conviction, she turned from him.
“Come, Frank,” she said; “let us go.”
Frank also had risen with a sudden flush on his face at those intolerable words, an answer springing to his lips, and moved quickly towards her with some instinct of protecting her. But her tone checked him, and he followed her to the door. She had already opened it, without further speech or looking back,when her father’s voice, scarcely audible and broken and trembling, stopped her.
“Helen,” he said, “indeed I did not think or know what I said. But, my dearest, what are you doing? What are you doing? For Christ’s sake, Helen, who died for you.”
Frank had passed out. Whatever more took place between them was not for him to hear. Then the door closed behind him, leaving father and daughter alone.
“For Christ’s sake, Helen,” he said again.
She came back to the hearth-rug where he stood.
“Oh, father,” she said, and paused. That was all the reproach he was ever to hear from her. “You are making it very hard for me.”
“Yes, I am making it as hard as I can. I am bound by my duty to God to do that. If I knew how to make it harder, I would.”
“You cannot. You have said all that can be said. And I have nothing more to say. Let me go now.”
She kissed him gently.
“Poor father!” she said, and left him.
Mr. Challoner stood long where he was when she had gone. Never before perhaps in his whole life had another will come so actively and stubbornly into collision with his, and never before certainly had he felt so overwhelmingly a sense of spiritual desolation. Eager and strenuous all through, it was in the truths of the Christian faith that he found the incentive of his life, from it sprang all the earnestness and deep sense of duty in the man, to it was every effort and deed of his dedicated.
“But what have I done,” he half moaned to himself, “that this should come to my house, and to one for whose faith and upbringing I have to answer? Oh, Lord, if it is through any fault of mine, let me learn for what deadly sin this punishment is sent!”
Indeed, he had spoken no more than the truth, bitter and brutal though the truth was, when he told Helen that he would rather have seen her in her coffin than by the altar with her lover. And now he took no account of his personal sorrow; the yearning that she should accept her father’s wish and guidance as such was non-existent in him, killed by the stronger motive. All his personal relations with her of trust and affection, which to the best of his power he had built up for years, were voiceless now,—simply he strove for a soul—and that dear to him—in danger imminent and awful. The rigid Puritan note was here, and he would sooner have mated her with a thief or an adulterer, since such might repent and be saved, than with a reasoned atheist.
Then in a horror of great darkness he questioned his own spirit. “How had he failed?” and again, “How had he failed?” Never had precious plant been more hedged about from frost or untimely blighting of March winds than had his daughter been folded from all that could conceivably have stunted or weakened the one true growth. From the time when her lips were wet with a mother’s milk God counsels, verse by verse and line by line, had been the guides and counsellors of her life. What had he left undone that he could have done? Had any remissness of his own hindered growth where it should have helped? He searched the years for his fault, but among all hisfailures and weaknesses and harshnesses he could not find that even for a day had he let anything else take precedence of the greatest and the only thing in the world.
And now at the end she would mate with an infidel, a man, according to his idea, whose intimacy was more to be shunned than that of a leper’s or of one who was tainted with some deadly and contagious disease. That, at any rate, could only kill the body; but Helen had chosen as the friend and companion of her nights and days one whose soul was sick with a more fatal disease, the end of which, ordained and appointed of God, was eternal death. It was too hideous to be credible, it was too hideous to be conceivably just. And the fact that he could think that gives the measure of his soul’s anguish.
God sets a limit to human misery: for it happens that the tortured brain, tired with suffering, lapses into a state of semi-sensibility; or again, since one cannot feel pain on account of another unless the other is dear,—the pain felt varying, indeed, in proportion to the affection felt,—the joy of love is always mingled with it. It was so now with Mr. Challoner. Had he not have been Helen’s father, had he not loved her, he would have cared less. But she was his daughter, his own girl, whose sweetness had all her life made sunshine in his home. He had said an intolerable thing to her, and for reproach she had still given him gentleness. In the keenness of his own suffering he had forgotten hers; he had forgotten even, except for that moment when she had broken down, that she must be suffering. So he went out after her.
She was standing at the door with her lover, andhe went straight up to them. Even the sight of Frank there gave him no pause.
“It has been a dreadful morning for us all,” he said, “and selfishly I had forgotten that others beside myself were unhappy. God knows what is in store for us all, but we can do no good by being bitter, as I have been. Let us,—yes, you, too, Lord Yorkshire,—let us all join hands a moment. We are His children, are we not? We——“
His mouth quivered, no more words would come, and they stood there a moment, all three hands clasped. Then, feeling that his self-control was utterly giving way, he left them, and went back to his empty room.
Helenwas sitting on a pile of crimson cushions in the stern of a Canadian canoe, while from the middle of the boat Martin, with shirt-sleeves rolled up over his brown elbows, paddled her gently along the reaches of the upper river at Cambridge. The dryness and heat of this glorious summer had made the river very low in places, and his feet also were bare, with flannel trousers rolled up to the knee, for again and again he had to get out to pull the boat round snags or over shoals where the depth did not allow it to pass with the draught of two passengers. To the right, across a stretch of meadow stained brown with length of summer suns, rose the tower of Grantchester church, embowered in trees, and the booming of the mill sounded drowsily through the still air. Close to the river, however, a vivider tone of colour prevailed, tresses of water-side foliage dabbled in the stream, and tall, slender trees made a shelter from the heat, where cows, a classical example (and so not appealing to Martin, who splashed water at them) of unbustling life, chewed the cud and looked with large incurious eyes at the gliding constellation of the twins. Between them in the boat were packages containing lunch, for Martin had taken a complete day off his studies in recalcitrant languages and was devoting himself to Helen, who was staying with an aunt, Lady Susan Arne. Dr. Arne, her husband, was tutor at King’s, at which seat of learning Martin pursued his antipatheticlabours, and had the reputation of being the greatest authority living on the metres of Greek choruses.
Helen had left Chartries a couple of days after the crisis in her love-affair, at the suggestion of her uncle, to whom she had confided it.
“I will walk back with you to the vicarage, Helen,” he had said, “and persuade your father, in case he needs persuasion, to let you go away at once. Your being with him just now only keeps the wound open. Go away; it will heal better so. Just now, after that scene, you can only torture each other by your remaining there. Poor, dear child!”
“Yes; but ‘poor father,’ too,” said Helen.
“Certainly. Come to Chartries, if you like.”
Helen took his arm.
“That is so good of you, Uncle Rupert,” she said; “but I think I should like to go quite away, if father will let me. I think I should like to go to Cambridge. Martin is there. And Martin is so good for one, if one is, well, not very happy.”
“Yes; that is a good plan. You can stay with Susan. My dear, I’m more sorry for you than I can tell you, and also I am as sorry for your father. You and I both know him, and we both love him, and, though we are made very differently, we know how—how splendid he is. And how big.”
“I know,” said she. “I feel that if I could only persuade myself he was narrow I should care less. But his huge, singlehearted devotion to—to God cannot possibly be called narrow.”
They walked on in silence a little.
“But that is all I can do for you, Helen,” said he. “Nobody can really help you except yourself; we canonly alleviate things a bit. You have made your choice, absolutely, I gather?”
“Am I being a selfish, egotistic little brute, Uncle Rupert?” she asked.
“Not according to my view, which is that when a thing concerns you so intimately and vitally as this it is nobody else’s business. Not even your father’s,” he added.
A good deal of persuasion, as Lord Flintshire found, was needed. At first his brother would not hear of Helen’s going, for he said that her departure was shirking the situation. What made him yield was the suggestion that the situation, if not shirked, might make her really ill. And a hurried interchange of telegrams led to her arrival at Cambridge the next evening.
The expedition to-day had started rather silently, and Martin decided that, as Helen did not at present want to talk about her affairs, the best thing to do was to be completely futile, foolish, and garrulous. For years he and Helen had adopted this method of treating each other’s depression, and it was sufficient for one to say “Hump. Play the fool,” for the other to understand that until further notice he had to talk rot. This was a device, by the way, which neither had ever employed when Mr. Challoner was in a similar mood. He would probably not have understood it.
Martin stood up in the boat, which had stuck, and peered into the water.
“The great thing,” he remarked, “as the White Knight said, is to guide against the bites of sharks. He had steel anklets. Ow! why do they take thesharpest stones in the world and place them where I want to step. I’m bleeding like a pig.”
He stood precariously on the other foot and examined the injury.
“A pig,” he remarked, fatuously, “that has not yet had its throat cut. Helen, how fat you must be getting. You weigh tons. We’ll have to throw the lunch overboard. Or perhaps it would be simpler if you stepped ashore for a moment. You can easily step on to the bank from there.”
He pulled the canoe over the shoal and took it where she could get in again. She laid her hand on his shoulder as she stepped in.
“You darling,” she said. “You can stop now. I’m better.”
“That’s good work,” said Martin. “Because, really I was beginning to run rather dry. You mightn’t have thought it.”
“I didn’t. I had no idea of it. I thought there was any amount more.”
“I can manage ten minutes more, if you like,” said Martin.
“No; I’m going to talk now. Martin, if you look suddenly grave like that I shall begin to laugh.”
“Well, give me a couple of minutes,” said the outraged Martin. “We always have an interval after the rot before we begin to talk. Otherwise, you know, we always laugh. One always laughs at anything abrupt. Don’t you know the story of the man who was suddenly told his wife was dead? Just like that. He said, ‘Oh, how shocking!’ and burst into shrieks of laughter. And he was really devoted to her, and never smiled again for years.”
Helen gave up all attempts at gravity, and the two foolish twins laughed till they were completely exhausted, while the Canadian canoe went slowly circling round and round down the river.
So they landed and lunched, as Martin refused to drag the boat any more till he had eaten and by degrees recovered themselves. Then, taking to the canoe again, they paddled and talked.
“It has been dreadful at home, Martin,” said she. “Father hardly speaks at all. He has been very gentle since that scene with Frank and me, yet even that was hardly so bad as his silence and quietness now. He is suffering horribly, too; I am sure of it. Sometimes I see him looking at me with a sort of appeal in his eyes like a dumb animal. That is the worst of all; I feel such a brute.”
“You suffer, too,” said Martin, quickly.
“I know; but though they all—Uncle Rupert, Lady Sunningdale—think I am right, that doesn’t make me feel less of a brute. Besides, there is no ‘right’ about it. I can’t give him up, and father can’t bear it. And every evening he uses the prayer for Jews, Turks, and infidels.”
Martin frowned.
“That is not good manners,” he said, “with you there.”
“Oh, Martin, manners don’t come into it. The truth of father’s beliefs is so overwhelmingly real to him that he can’t think of anything else. That light is so strong that he can see nothing but it. It is soberly the whole world to him.”
“But it isn’t as if Frank was immoral,” said Martin.
“I believe he would mind that less,” said she.
Martin swung the canoe round a half-submerged tree-trunk, where the water sucked and gurgled.
“But how unreasonable,” he cried. “Frank can’t help his want of belief. But we can all, in some degree, help making brutes of ourselves.”
Helen sat up suddenly, causing the boat to rock.
“I can’t live my life on other people’s lines,” she said, “any more than I expect others to live theirs on my lines. ‘I am I.’ I remember Frank quoting that to me the Sunday he walked back with me from Chartries. That has been like leaven; it has fermented and expanded within me. But, after all, is it only another way of saying ‘I shall be as selfish as I please’?”
“Of course not. That is what people think who haven’t got any individuality of their own. Lots of people haven’t. They are like mirrors slightly cracked, which reflect with certain dimnesses and distortions what is put opposite them. They say individuality is selfishness. What bosh!”
“Aunt Susan hasn’t got any,” remarked Helen, letting the conversation drift away a little. “It is that which makes her so restful. Her mind is like a cushion. It is quite soft, and if you lean on it you make great dents in it.”
Martin remained quite serious, staring at the water with vacant black eyes.
“Poor father!” he said at length. “Just think; you and me, Helen. He must find us awfully trying.”
“I know; and he continues to love us so. It is that which makes it so dreadful. Oh, Martin, do get through your stupid examination. Do turn out satisfactory, as I’ve been so eminently the reverse.”
Martin transferred his gaze to his sister.
“I really don’t think there’s much chance of it,” he said.
“Of your getting through?”
“I might manage that. But there are other things. The career I propose, for instance.”
“But he’s reconciled to that,” said Helen. “That’s nothing new.”
Martin paddled on without answering this, and Helen looked at him rather closely.
“There is something more,” she said. “What is it? Is there not something more?”
He brought the boat up to the bank in Byron’s pool, where they were to disembark.
“Yes, there is,” he said. “At least, there may be. There is no use in my telling you now. If it happens, if I am sure it is going to happen, I will tell you beforehand. I promise you that. And now I think we won’t talk any more about it.”
But a sudden uneasiness seized the girl.
“Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise me it is nothing disgraceful.”
Martin looked rather injured.
“No; I have not been stealing hens,” he said. “And it is compatible with the highest character.”
Helen looked at him a moment in silence.
“Then I’m not afraid,” she said. “And I will try not to guess at it until you tell me.”
The afternoon was intensely hot, and having arrived here, they settled that a boat under trees was far more to the point than walking under the blaze of the sun, and Helen merely reclined more recumbently on a pile of cushions.
“I think we will go for a walk to-morrow, Martin,” she said, “instead of to-day.”
“That may be. By the way, I met last week that nice girl who was down at Chartries on the Sunday when I got into so many rows. What was her name?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Helen.
“Yes, you have. Oh, I know—Miss Pl—— Oh, yes,—Stella Plympton.”
Helen did not answer for a moment.
“Well, I shall go to sleep,” she said. “Martin!”
“Well?”
“You did that remarkably badly,” she said; “a cow could give you points in dissimulation. You remembered her name perfectly.”
Dr. Arne, at whose house on the Trumpington Road Helen was staying, was probably as nearly happy as is possible to the sons of men, who have so marked a genius for discontent. Whether his happiness was worth much and what it all came to is another question; but happy he was,—an affair of immense importance not only to himself, but to all on whom his imperturbable serenity shone. For Providence had endowed him with an apparently insatiable curiosity about the chorus-metres in Greek plays, and also with an intuitive perception as regards this extremely difficult and no doubt fascinating branch of knowledge, which had proved itself capable of being trained into something approaching the perfection of acumen. His intellectual ambitions were thus completely satisfied, and being without any passion but this, which the fact that he was tutor of his college enabled him to gratify without stint, there was really no possiblechink at which the bitter wind of discontent could enter and make draughts. The same good fortune had attended his marriage, for he had wooed and won a woman of good birth and breeding, whose only desire, as far as he was aware, was to make her husband not happy,—he was that already,—but comfortable. Extremely edible meals were offered to his notice at hours of his choosing, no sacrilegious hand ever disturbed the papers in his study, his wife walked with him after lunch, and, unless they had people dining with them or were themselves bidden to other feasts, played picquet with him after dinner. His mode of progression along roads was naturally a little quicker than hers, his play of the hand at cards a shade less mediocre, and in consequence he lived in an atmosphere of slight domestic superiority. The same atmosphere, though not domestic, surrounded him in his studies, for, to make a rough statement of the matter, he knew rather more about Greek chorus-metres than anybody else had ever done. His bodily health, moreover, if not exuberant,—he would have found exuberance very trying,—was excellent; he appeared, in fact, to be as immune to the frailties and disorders of the flesh as he was to any unsatisfied cravings of the spirit. He was also childless; and though he was not consciously grateful for this, he was aware that he desired neither more distractions, anxieties, or even joys than he possessed in such completeness.
Lady Susan Arne had been compared by her niece to a cushion; and, indeed, the superficial similarity—not, indeed, in point of looks, for Lady Susan was remarkably well-favoured—in the nature of the two was extremely striking when once it had been pointed out.It was true that if one leaned on Lady Susan’s mind there was no firm resistance, only a large dent seemed to have been made in hers. But Helen, with a certain impatience in her survey, had overlooked the existence of a permanent dent there, a thing entirely foreign to cushions. She, Helen, it is true, might lean and make a dent, and that the next person who, so to speak, shook Aunt Susan up, or leaned upon her in another place, would (still in Helen’s view) efface the first dent; but in a corner of her, where no one ever thought of leaning or looking, there was a permanent and uneffaceable dent. This was made in the first place by the ungratified yearning for a child of her own; it was now daily renewed by the knowledge of its impossibility. There was in her, in fact, a potential vitality which under other circumstances might have made of her a woman, not a housekeeper, and have given her points more directly in contact with life than were picquet and constitutionals. As it was, she had experienced none of the divine unsatisfiedness which fulness of life alone brings with it; she knew only the content of a rather empty existence. And Helen, judging with the impatience of youth, which is akin to the impatience of kittens or puppies with inanimate objects that will not come and play with them, had overlooked this. For, in truth, Aunt Susan was not inanimate; tucked away in a corner of the cushion was a real, live thing that groped for life and light, and she, the individual, was like a room made ready for the reception of guests,—chairs and tables in order, games put out for their entertainment, but until the guests began to arrive the room was in darkness. Aunt Susan stood there, match-box in hand, so to speak,waiting for the first ring at the bell to light up her tapers and shew how orderly, how fragrant, how charming (a little old-fashioned, too) her room was, how thoughtfully arranged for the pleasure of others. But no ring had yet come at her door-bell, and she still stood there, very patient and still smiling, but still waiting.
Lady Susan, on Helen’s arrival, knew only vaguely that something uncomfortable had happened at the vicarage; but Helen, the first evening she was there, had confided to her, rather as one may confide on cold nights to one’s pillow or to bedclothes tucked round the neck, the history of the last few days. But she neither knew nor would have guessed it possible that the news had kept Aunt Susan awake half the night, and that while she herself was up the river with Martin her aunt had gone about her household businesses and taken her walk with her husband in such a tremor of excitement that he had to hurry after her, instead of hanging on his step to wait for her. In all these tranquil years at Cambridge she had never been brought into contact with a thing that moved her like this. The gentle ministrations in which her years were passed had not touched her emotions, which, had not her yearnings for a child kept them alive, would probably long ago have fossilised. But those yearnings had nourished and rendered mature their sweet, delicate sensitiveness, and now when they were aroused, though even in this second-hand manner, they responded instantly, gently vibrating, not with a crackle of dry autumn leaves, but like foliage of aspen in the breath of spring.
Helen got back to this house of quiet towards fivein the afternoon, and found her aunt and Dr. Arne at tea on the lawn behind the house. The latter, however, soon went indoors to enjoy—literally enjoy—his couple of hours’ work before dinner, after forewarning them as to possible dampness on the grass after sunset.
“And have you enjoyed yourself, dear?” asked Aunt Susan, pleasantly; “and was the lunch I gave you really sufficient? Dear Martin has always such a beautiful appetite. It is a pleasure to see him eat his dinner.”
“Yes, dear aunt, we had heaps. And it was all so good, and so beautifully done up. Exactly like you.”
Aunt Susan, who always looked like a kind, little, animated Dresden shepherdess, flushed a little.
“And so you had a nice day?” she said. “And no upsets? Martin is so reckless on water. Dear Helen, is it quite wise to take off your hat? It may turn suddenly chilly.”
Helen laughed, and threw it on the grass.
“No; no upsets, and quite wise, Aunt Susan. But a nice day? There was everything to make it nice externally; but one’s nice days are made inside one, I think. And just now my machine for making nice days creaks and groans; it is out of order.”
Aunt Susan, though far too shy to take the initiative, was longing for the least thing that could be considered an introduction of this topic.
“Do you know, dear, I lay awake half the night thinking of you and your trouble,” she said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” cried Helen. “I ought not to have told you so late last night. Selfish little pig I am!”
Aunt Susan patted her hand gently.
“Dear, it was delicious,” she said, “lying awake and thinking about you. I am afraid I actually enjoyed it. Not that I am not very, very sorry for you and your father and Lord Yorkshire; but when I said it was delicious, I meant it was so real, so alive, so very interesting. I don’t think I have lain awake more than a few minutes in the last couple of years, and that was when your uncle had the influenza. And then it was only his cough that kept me awake; I was not anxious, for he had it very slightly. Now, if you do not mind talking about it, do tell me more. You told me just the facts. Tell me what you feel. How does it touch,—I am so stupid at saying things,—not what you willdoonly, your actions, but yourself?”
The question implied a perception with which Helen had not credited her aunt.
“Ah, what a difference there is between them!” she said, quickly. “One’s actions may so frightfully belie one. What one does is so often a parody of one’s best. One’s worst part acts, while one’s best does nothing, turns its face to the wall, like Hezekiah. Or, or”—she was still kindly trying to explain to this dear little Dresden shepherdess—“one’s actions are often like an unsympathetic repetition of something one has really said, which gives quite a different meaning to it. Do you understand?” she asked, eagerly.
“Yes, dear, quite,” said Lady Susan. “Surely everybody understands that. All the same it is our business if we are kind and good at all not to be harsh or hard in what we do.”
Suddenly Helen’s eyes were opened. In a flash she saw that she had been doing what she deprecated, andhitherto had judged Aunt Susan merely by her actions. With the impatience that was so very characteristic of her, she had observed her ordering dinner, taking the walk, playing picquet, and otherwise having a great deal of rather fragrant leisure with which she did nothing. From this she had drawn the conclusion that there was, so to speak, no one really there, only a punctual little domestic automaton. She had been so taken up with the fact that others did not understand her, did not allow for her individuality, that she had as yet never taken the trouble to consider whether these others also had not their own individuality equally to be respected. Aunt Susan, she would have said offhand, had none, yet she was referring to as a mere commonplace what was still to Helen a blinding discovery. And she went on talking with a freedom and a certainty of being understood that she associated only with the beloved twin.
“Well, it is just that,” she said. “Any one,—you, Uncle David,—any one may say it is merely heartless, merely selfish of me to go my own way, to pay no attention to the wish—ah, it is much stronger than that—of my father. Or you may think that I don’t really know how strong his objection to my marriage is. I do know, I fully know. And knowing that, knowing also that he is my father, that I owe nearly everything to him, that he loves me and I love him, I am going to do, you may say,as I choose, throwing away all the love and the care he has spent on me, repudiating my debts to him. But I don’t. Oh, Aunt Susan, I don’t throw away his love or repudiate my debts. It is not fair to say that. Simply I can’t help it—I must. Something has come which is strongerthan everything else. Ah, Aunt Susan, you know what it is.”
Lady Susan’s delicate little china-looking face flushed suddenly.
“Yes, dear, I know,” she said. “At least I know some of it. We women are meant to be wives and mothers. I know half of what a woman longs to know. And the half I know, dear Helen, is so very fine that it is worth making some little sacrifice for it.”
“Sacrifice?” asked the girl.
“Yes. I cannot tell you in great language what I mean, because I am not great in any way, so I will give you my advice in one short word. Wait. Love is so good that it will not spoil by being kept; it will only get more mature, more exquisite. And in the mean time you will have proved yourself a good daughter, too.”
“But why—why?” asked the girl. “Nothing will ever change what father feels about it, nor what I feel. It only means that for six months more, or for a year more, or however long I wait, he and I will go through dreadful days. It is awful at home, Aunt Susan; you have no idea how awful. If it would get any better with waiting, I would do as you suggest.”
The older woman was still smiling in the habitual way which Helen had so often thought so meaningless, so objectless. But now, as she looked, she saw there was a very cheerful patience about the smile which somehow she had not noticed before.
“It is true it may not get better with waiting,” she said, “for it is possible it may not. But you will have done your best, not only thought your best. You will have made your action not, as you say, the parody ofyourself, but the faithful expression of your very best self. You will have put your speech into no unsympathetic mouth, but into the mouth of a fine actor.”
Another current seized the girl, sweeping her impetuously away. She laid her hand on her aunt’s knee.
“Are you unhappy, Aunt Susan?” she asked. “Oh, I hope not. I always thought you were so contented, so—so occupied with all the duties you do so well.”
Lady Susan, with the only movement of impatience that she had made perhaps for years, swept her hand away.
“Ah, that is because you are young,” she said, “and because you think that any one who feels an impulse must act on it, if she wants to realise her life. It is not so. You know what I have always called you and Martin, the Volcanoes—dear Volcanoes. When you feel pressure you burst, and scatter burning ashes anywhere and everywhere, and say with great good-humour, ‘But I am I. If I want to burst, I must.’ And when you see an old woman like me, just getting through the day’s work, day after day, week after week, with a little dinner-party here, and a little walk there, and a little ordering of the household all through, you think ‘Is that all? Is that life?’ And I answer you, ‘Yes; that is life.’”
Helen was silent a moment, suddenly aware that for the time it was perhaps wiser to listen and attend than talk about her own individuality.
“Tell me, tell me,” she said.
“My dear, there is very little to tell,” she said. “But you in your heyday do not allow, it seems to me, for the fact of other quiet people living and feeling perhaps just as much as you do. Because you feel athing you scream. You will learn to feel a thing, we hope, without screaming. I think young people tend to scream rather more than we used. They call it living their own lives. That possibly may be a mistaken, or, anyhow, a misleading name for it.”
Again Helen had no reply. But this did not seem to her at all like want of individuality. There was no screaming, it is true, and no assertion, but just as certainly there was “something there.” And, to do her justice, she respected that. But her aunt paused also, waiting for her answer, and after a minute she spoke.
“Live your own life, then, in talk with me,” she said. “Let me understand it. It is quite true, Aunt Susan, I have judged as if there was no other view than mine, while the whole time my complaint—no, not that exactly, but you understand—has been that other people behave as if there was no other view than theirs! About you, for instance. I didn’t know, I didn’t guess. I thought you were—you were what you appeared.”
Lady Susan seemed to repent of her hasty movement, and recaptured Helen’s soft, brown-skinned hand.
“Yes, dear, I am,” she said, quietly. “At least, I choose to let that be my outward expression of myself, the expression by which you, Martin, anybody, may judge me. That certainly is my affair, and nobody else’s.”
She ceased stroking Helen’s hand a moment and looked up at her.
“But, dear, would you like to come inside me a moment? There is only one thing there, but it fills my house. Oh, Helen, if I had had a child!”
At that all the girl’s nature rose.
“Ah, dear aunt, dear aunt!” she said.
Lady Susan’s pretty patient smile did not leave her lips, nor did any tear come to her eyes. The sorrow was too old and too eternally alive for her to weep over it now. And she went on quite quietly:
“If only I had been given the chance even to be made as unhappy as you are making your father, dear, I should have loved it so. But it was denied me, and by no fault of mine. So I am learning, I hope, not to grumble. Ah, but it is hard sometimes, and I think I miss the joys of love as you would count joys, Helen, less than I miss what you would count its sorrows. But those are its opportunities. Dear, its possibilities in self-denial and self-abandonment. That is Love triumphant, not crowned with roses, but crowned with sharp, beloved thorns. And the tragedy of love is when there is none for whom it can sacrifice itself.”
She stroked Helen’s hand again gently.
“Make yourself complete, dear,” she said; “there I am entirely at one with you. But, remember, our souls are like rose-trees, I think. You cut and prune them, if you are a wise gardener, for you know that by the cutting, the renunciation, you do not check or hinder your development, but you encourage it. You will be the more fragrant, the fuller of blossom by that which you might hastily say was a piece of cruelty, a stunting of your growth.”
Her kind eyes looked away from Helen, and out over the sun-baked lawn, bordered with flower-beds, in which, clearly to comply with preconceived notions of a garden on the part of a gardener, lobelias were set in a formal row in front, and behind them terrible, speckled calceolarias and hard, crude geraniums. Thatgarden had often seemed to Helen very typical of her aunt: it was orderly and completely conventional. Beyond Dr. Arne’s study windows looked from the red-brick house across the grass, and from where they sat she could see him at a table littered with books and manuscripts, with head bent over his work, or rising now and then to consult some book of reference which he took from the volume-lined walls. That sight, also, had often seemed to her very typical; the Cambridge professor was at his work (as, indeed, it was most right and proper that he should be), but that to him was all. His little life was bounded with books; on all sides stretched limitless deserts of particles and chorus-metres. But now, for the first time, Helen knew how erroneous all her judgments with regard to Aunt Susan had been,—for a real heart beat there, and it was somebody, somebody very distinct and individual, who ordered dinner and played picquet. Her life was not negative, emotionless; it was only her own obtuseness of perception that had so labelled it. Instead it was sad; in spite of all its quiet cheerfulness it was as sad as the level rays of the sun striking hazily across the lawn; as sad as the grey spires of Kings which rose against the clear, hot blue of the sky.
And the pathos of it suddenly moved her. Was that all that the good fairies had brought to her aunt’s cradle, just to grow quietly and gently old, she, who might have been so fine, missing all the joy and riot of life, missing, too, the crown of womanhood? “To live, to live!” that demand was battering at her doors with buffets that made the panels start. Yet here was the dear aunt, who had heard often the same insistent visitor, old, but sweet and unembittered, though it hadnever been given to her to let him in, knowing all she had missed, yet not soured at having missed it.
“Oh, Aunt Susan,” she cried, forgetting herself, forgetting all else in a young creature’s somewhat insolent pity for the old, “is it not too sad? Is it not too terribly sad? Is that everybody’s fate, just to get older and older——“
Then, with the strong, unconscious egotism of her years:
“And me?” she said. “Will that happen to me, too?”
“What? Sadness? Yes, dear Helen, I hope so. No woman is worth very much until she has been through a good deal of sadness, a great deal of wanting what she cannot get. I hope you will go through that. But, dear, if you turn bitter under it, you had almost better not have lived; and certainly you had better die, for death is better than bitterness. But if you take the love and the sadness, which is inseparable, from life without bitterness, it strengthens and cleanses you. And you will certainly emerge from it a far finer creature than if you had never been through it. Emerge? Ah, it may last to the day of your death; but what then? What does that matter?”
There was a long silence, and the shadows grew and lengthened on the grass as Helen sat unseeing, but absorbed, gazing wide-eyed in front of her. She felt ashamed, humiliated at her own blindness; she had thought of her aunt as some dweller in the valley, while she herself was climbing the snowfields far above with eager, untiring foot. But now at the summit, or near it, she saw sitting the quiet, patient figure, so high up that she had not seen her before.
Then, in her gentle voice, Aunt Susan broke in on her reverie.
“There, dear,” she said, “the sun has set; let us go in. And do tell me, Helen, before you go home, what you decide to do about this very difficult choice that is before you. Of course, you will not give Lord Yorkshire up. I think that would be very wrong. Do not be hasty; do not judge quickly. But do confide in me again, if you can. It is a great privilege, you know, for old people to be confided in by the young. Come, it is time to dress; there are a few people to dinner. Ah, Martin comes, too. I had quite forgotten. Dear me, how careless! I must go and see if there is enough to eat.”
Helen rose and gave her a great, tempestuous hug.
“You dear, you dear,” she said.
And then Aunt Susan, after her excursion into realities, hurried to the kitchen, the excellent housekeeper again.
There must have been something in the conjunctivity of the twins—except, indeed, at the vicarage at Chartries—which disposed the beholder to indefensible levity. London had felt their spell, and even Cambridge, it appeared, that home of sweet and sober seriousness, went a little off its head about them. The spell, whatever it was, lay in their combination. Helen alone, it is true, could rouse that impulse of social gaiety which is evoked so easily by a girl’s beauty and high spirits, and Martin could make other people enjoy themselves by the sight of his own enormous power that way; but it was when they were together thatresistance was clearly hopeless, and it is worthy of record that to-night, after dinner, Dr. Arne and a professor of poetry, with their respective wives and the twins played “Ghosts” in the garden. Why these elderly people did it they could not have told you; but Martin proposed “Ghosts,” Helen explained it in three sentences, and the studious shades were awakened and appalled by wild shrieks.
For the night was dark and moonless, and while five out of these six foolish people hid in asparagus beds, behind tree-trunks, in the wood-shed, and in other black and dreadful places, the professor of poetry (selected by lot) was in honour bound to make the complete circuit of the garden, conscious that at any moment a ghost with curdling yells might spring out on him, or even worse, scuttle quickly up behind him, or perhaps, worst of all, he might suddenly be conscious of a small, crouching figure by his side which accompanied him in awful silence, ready to break forth into who knew what hideous and babbling speech? Thus one eye had to be kept on this dreadful object, while simultaneously the whole attention had to be on the alert in case of some new reverent from the bushes. The professor was a man on whom, as far as was known, the imputation of cowardice had never yet been laid, but at the first attempt to make the black circuit of the garden he found he could not possibly face the corner by the wood-shed, his nerves being already utterly unstrung by a vague form that groaned among the gooseberry bushes. He paused while still a few yards distant from this dreadful being, and then fled with flying coat-tails back to the house, where in the safety of the lit drawing-room he wiped the dews ofstrangling anguish from his forehead and called lamentably on his courage.
“‘Not a glimmer from the worm, in the darkness thick and hot,’”he half moaned to himself. “Oh, this will never do! I am aware it is probably only Dr. Arne, and I am not really frightened of him. Come, come.”
And, with his heart in his mouth, he set out again on his fascinating and abhorred errand, murmuring again, “‘In the darkness thick and hot. In the darkness thick and hot. In the dark——’ Oh, dear me, what is that?”
The poor professor suffered for his momentary panic, for Helen had, in his hour of weakness in the drawing-room, changed her place to behind a large flower-tub, which had concealed nobody before. Consequently, he approached it inattentively, without caution or misgiving, to be confronted, shuddering, by a flapping form which gasped and panted.
He made a fruitless appeal.
“Dear Miss Helen,” he said, “I can’t go on. I really do not think it would be right. My work will suffer. But is it Dr. Arne among the gooseberry bushes or is it Martin? I think I could run as fast as Dr. Arne, but if——“
Hoots of unearthly laughter assailed him on the other side.
Afterwards they played “Dumb Crambo.” Lady Susan, in a college cap and a dust-coat of Martin’s, was Alfred letting the cakes burn. At another time Dr. Arne found himself to be Cleopatra, with Helen as Mark Antony. He chose his dresses from Helen’swardrobe—they were much too large for him—with immense care, and subsequently applied a paper-weight, in the form of a snake, to his bosom. The professor of poetry became a prize-fighter, his wife, a godly and virtuous woman hitherto, unexpectedly turned out to be Peace the murderer, and did a deed of blood with immense gusto and a paper-knife. Yet, all the time, nobody asked himself why he did these silly things; the twins had said it was to be so, and that was enough. At their order, too, it seemed as if the golden gates of youth had swung open, and the tired and the patient and the elderly and the wise were bidden to enter once more and be children again.
Helen’s visit to Cambridge had been restricted by no statute of limitations in regard to time, and the days passed on, the vague “few nights” growing to a week, and the week to a magnified fortnight. For these quiet, uneventful hours in which (except when the twin was with her) even the ticking of clocks seemed muffled had an extraordinary and growing charm for her, since she had learned that behind the outward placidity in her aunt there lay a very real inward life in which she longed without possibility of satisfaction and suffered without bitterness. That somehow to the girl seemed to lift up and consecrate Aunt Susan’s homely little employments, which, so sweetly and patiently performed, became symbols and signs of a very beautiful character, and that which Helen had thought dull, unperceptive, unemotional, was now lit from within, as it were, by the uncomplaining cheerfulness which gave such gentle, unquestioning welcome to the limitations set about her. For Lady Susan, soher niece had now learned, had not from her own defective eyesight set her horizons so close about her; circumstances, childlessness had imposed them, and that being so, she had taken up her place in the narrowed circle with resignation so cheerful that it could scarcely be called by that rather depressing name. In fact, the gentle old lady was put on a pedestal in the girl’s mind, and offerings of incense were made her, a position which now and then she found slightly embarrassing, for Helen, in her first moment of understanding and in the reaction from her previous hasty and mistaken judgment, was one torrent of warm-hearted sympathy, and was disposed to magnify into heroism the performance of those common tasks, just because she had before labelled them trivial.
But from home—she must begin taking up her own little burdens at once—there came no word for her. She herself wrote regularly to her father, but morning after morning passed, bringing its posts, and still no answer came to her. Once she saw among the letters laid out for Aunt Susan one addressed in the brisk, scholarly handwriting, and could not help glancing at her aunt’s face as she read it. But she said nothing to Helen, and replaced the letter in its envelope with a troubled little sigh. Martin, also, she knew had heard from him, but there had been no message for her, no mention even of her. This omission, this intentional disregard of her, though it hurt her, made her sorry also, not for herself, but for him. It was inhuman, but she knew that it was the depth and earnestness of his feeling about her engagement that made him inhuman. On the other hand, she heard constantly from Frank, who hinted that if not a day, at any rate aseason might be ever so vaguely indicated to which he could look forward.
The term was drawing to its close, and Martin would go home in a few days’ time. It was understood that Helen would go with him; and as the day of departure got near, she knew that her decision must be made, so far as it concerned herself, as to whether she should put off her marriage for some definite time, and do the daughter’s part to her father, living at home, obeying him, performing her parish duties as before, makingamende, as far as she could, for the great act of disobedience which she was going to commit. Practically, she did not see the use of it; no good, as far as she could judge, would come of it; yet, in a way, Aunt Susan was right, the meaning of it, the sentiment of it, was sound. It would not be easy; it would be full of sustained effort, of sustained self-repression. Intercourse would be crammed with misunderstanding, the atmosphere would be full of frictional disturbances, but she saw there would be a certain moral gain to set against this. Also, and this, too, had a very sensible weight with her, there would be gain to her in the completeness of which her aunt had spoken. Ever since she had consciously woke to her own individuality her eagerness for her own improvement and enlargement had been of a very vivid sort. And perhaps the most excellent way of all had been here set before her to compass that, not by working for it, but by apparently limiting, maiming, discouraging it. That was a very simple, very elementary suggestion, yet it had never occurred to her in this connection. And it was, well, less crude than the other method.
The evening before her departure she took the opportunity provided by Dr. Arne’s going to his chorus-metres after tea to talk to her aunt again. It had been a chilly day, touched with the autumnal sadness of early-falling leaves, and early-falling dusk, and the window-panes streamed. Though it was still August, a fire burned in the grate, and she sat down on the floor by her aunt’s chair.
“Father has not written to me once since I came here,” she said. “He has written to you and to Martin I know, but there has never been a message to me. I don’t say this in any complaint, Aunt Susan; but what is one to do when that happens?”
Lady Susan shut the book she was reading. She had been expecting Helen to mention this, but was unwilling to open the subject herself.
“I know he has not, dear,” she said, “and I think it very wrong of him. I have told him so. But don’t let it hurt you, Helen. If other people, yes, misbehave, there is never anything to be done except to go on ‘behaving’ one’s self. And never let what other people do hurt you. For nothing can really hurt us except what we do ourselves.”
“Ah, but in a way I have done it,” said the girl. “At least, it is in consequence of what I have done.”
“No; your father is wrong, I think,” said Lady Susan, with gentle decision. “And now, dear, as you are going away to-morrow, I want to ask you something. You go home with Martin, do you not? And then? Have you made up your mind?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will not give up Frank, but I will put it all off till next May. Of course, if he wishes, he is absolutely free.”
“Ah,” said Aunt Susan, gently. “It is likely he would wish that, I suppose.”
Helen laughed.
“Well, no; not very. But till then I shall live at home, if father will let me, and try in every way to please him.”
Her voice trembled a little.
“And I hope he will accept that,” she said. “And I hope he will be good to me and forgive me.”
Lady Susan stroked her hair in silence a moment.
“You have chosen right, dear,” she said.
Helenwas sitting again at the deal table in the “Room,” trying to balance the accounts of the quarter. A money-box, cheap but not strong, probably made in Germany, with a florid ornament of tin tacked on round its maw, stood open by her left hand, and on the table was a heap of money, consisting chiefly of pennies and small silver coins,—the subscription to the “Room” being threepence a quarter,—while by her right hand was a pile of equally mean bills, chiefly ending with a halfpenny, for brown holland, cotton, slate-pencils, needles, and gum. There was a discrepancy somewhere of ninepence, but add and subtract as she would, that ninepence held its ground like the remnant of the Old Guard. Had it been only deficit, the remedy from her own pocket would have been easy, but, unfortunately, there was ninepence too much, and, though her conscience would not have made any protest at her supplying it, it did not permit her either to pocket it or to forge a non-existent bill. And all the time her natural impatience, mixed luckily with a certain sense of humour, said to her, “Is it possible to conceive a less profitable way of wasting time than in trying to make ninepence vanish?” Her father, however, with the attention to detail which was so marked a characteristic of his, always looked over the accounts afterwards, and whether there was a discrepancy of a thousand pounds or a penny it made no difference, theprinciple of admitting discrepancy was equally dangerous in either case.
The twins had been at home, in a state of total eclipse for two days of ominous parental silence. Mr. Challoner, as usual, was busy; Helen was busy also, for after her absence there was more than enough at present to occupy her day. But she had not yet broached the subject that was at the root of the silence: until the skies cleared a little she felt absolutely unable to do so. Her father also had said nothing about it; they ate, they drank, the weather was mentioned, and the danger of trouble in the East. Mr. Challoner himself, except when he read prayers, had hardly said half a dozen words in Helen’s presence: it was “good-night” and “good-morning,” and both were bad. Martin also was, so to speak, in prison, though not, like his sister, in the condemned cell. He read Demosthenes in his father’s study while the latter was writing his sermon, fell asleep and was detected, awoke, and wrote a futile supererogatory set of Greek iambics containing several false quantities and forms of aorists previously unknown and very interesting.
This morning Helen had received a letter from Frank that troubled her, for he pressed, where he had only hinted before, for some definite sort of date. Reasonably enough, he saw no cause for delay; he knew that in spite of her father’s feelings she had accepted his devotion; that was all her’s, waiting for her to reward it. The tone was not querulous. If it had been, the letter she must write would have been less difficult. It was simply and sincerely trustful. But before she wrote she must talk to her father; that could be put off no longer.
For the moment, however, the “sad mechanic exercise” of the accounts occupied her attention. But, though the superficial brain which was employed on addition had its work before it, all that was round her—the walls, the floor, the aspect of the room, the neat, new brown-holland covers of the library—took that part of her brain that really felt and lived back to the day when she sat there last. The map of geological strata was there, too, with its auriferous belt, and she remembered very well Frank’s words about that: “There is a gold-bearing vein in all we are set to do. The trouble is to find it.” Yes, indeed, that was the trouble. She did not rebel against the superfluous ninepence, except, indeed, humorously; but what seemed to her such hard and barren rock was the living in this hopeless silence. Her conscience, her whole sense of moral obligation, had accepted the principle indicated to her by the dear aunt—sofa-cushion no longer—of this wider self-completion to be attained by behaving rightly in all relations of life. But at present she had been throwing good money after bad. The dutiful daughter had come home. No more notice was taken of her than of a mended window-pane.
Mr. Challoner always opened doors smartly. Thus, when the outer door of the “Room,” which gave on to a small lobby where wet coats were hung, gave a quick rattle of latch, she knew, with the same certainty as she had known the crisp foot on the gravel, who came.
“Have you finished the accounts?” he said.
“I can’t get them quite right, father,” she said. “I think—--“
“You have the bills and the receipts, have you not?” he said. “Where are they?”
Helen resented this, but silently; no shadow of it appeared in her face or voice.
“They are all here,” she said. “I have ninepence more than I should.”
Mr. Challoner sat down and counted up the silver and pence, arranging them in neat shilling heaps with all the care he would have given to a total of millions. Then rejecting her addition, he added up the receipted bills, and her mistake, one of pure carelessness, was patent.
“That balances them,” he said. “Perhaps I had better do the accounts for the future. If I have to do them in the long run, I may as well do them at once, instead of wasting your time over them.”
Helen stood up, her resentment shewing itself a little.
“Certainly, if you prefer,” she said.
He did not answer, but ran a metal clip neatly through the receipted bills, and swept the coins back into the money-box. Then he turned to her quickly.
“What do you intend to do, Helen?” he asked. “As your father, I think I have a right to ask you, since you have shewn no sign of wishing to tell me.”
The gulf between them seemed to her at that moment immeasurably wide, and his tone was harsh and cruel,—it cut her, but cut like a blunt knife, with sawing and tearing.
“Father, don’t speak to me like that,” she said. “I can’t bear it, and it does no good. I am trying, and I am going to continue trying, to do my duty to you—--“
For one moment the sternness vanished from his face.
“You are going to give him up?” he asked.
“No; but I am going to live quietly here if you will have me, for the next six months,” she said, “doing my work in the parish just as usual. During that time I will not see Frank. If you wish, I will not even write to him, except just once.”
She sat down again opposite him.
“I want to do something for you, which is hard for me,” she said. “I want to make you believe that I am trying to be a good daughter to you. I know we disagree vitally and essentially. But is that any reason why the dearness of our human relations should be diminished?”
Her voice sank, but looking at his face she could see that the momentary brightness as he asked the last question had vanished again, and he sat looking, not at her, but out of the window, without replying.
“Father,” she said, gently, “I have spoken to you.”
He shook his head, then looked at her.
“It is useless,” he said.
Then suddenly the chilling reserve and silence of the last days gave way like ice before the South wind.
“My God!” he said, speaking more to himself than to her. “What have I done? What have I done? Has this come for some dreadful fault of mine of which I am ignorant? All your life, Helen, I have tried to train and teach you in the knowledge and fear of God. As He sees me, I have done my best, according to my lights. Never once to my knowledge have I not prayed every day that His blessing should guide and illuminate every step you take. And I cannot believe—thatis my difficulty—that you try to follow His will in this. It is impossible that——“
He broke off with a sudden helpless raising of his hands indescribably pathetic.
“God help us both,” he said.
There was a long silence, and his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves as he sat staring dismally out of the window. All her life, as he had said with absolute honesty, he had tried to bring Helen up in the knowledge and fear of God, and this decision of hers, from which he now realised he was powerless to move her, was like some overwhelming blow struck at him from the dark. He could not understand, he could not even conjecture in the vaguest way, what it meant or how he was meant to take it. In sorrow, renunciation, bereavement, it was, at any rate, possible to acquiesce in there being a design. But that his child should do this was inexplicable. It could not be the will of God. Something of this Helen read in his face, and she saw, for the first time fully, how the blow had staggered him. His strength had given way under it; all vehemence and anger was dead; and dead, too, was the hope that she would come round to him. He was helpless. And the strangeness of that in one so certain, so accustomed to go without hinderance or obstacle along the straight road of his God-fearing life touched her with a profound pity, so that for a moment, had he but known it, her decision flickered and wavered like a candle-flame blown about in a draught. She questioned herself whether such suffering could be right, whether that which caused it could be justifiable, whether at whatever cost to herself or another she could permit it to be. It was like thesuffering of some animal,—blind, uncomprehending, a thing intolerable. And the animal that suffered was a strong man and a wise, and her father.
She sat down on the edge of the table beside him.
“Oh, poor father, poor father!” she said.
He looked at her with a wretched semblance of a smile.
“Ah, that is not the point, Helen,” he said. “What I feel, all my pain, is nothing, nothing. Why I feel it is everything, dear. Oh, you poor girl, blind, blind.”
Then, at last, that tie between father and daughter or mother and son, one of the immutable and indestructible things of the world, stirred, vibrated, made music, and for a moment across the infinite gulf between them their spirits and their hands met.
“Dear girl,” he said, “it will be delightful to have you at home. I was afraid that those happy days of work, you and I, side by side in this home, were over. I thank you for that, Helen; your father blesses you for that. Stop with me as long as you can. How long you—and he must settle. And, my dear, I am so selfish as to take your offer fully. Do not see him or write to him. Perhaps——“
He paused a moment, stroking her hand.
“And try to make allowance for me,” he went on, “when I am hard or gloomy or out of spirits. But I am so utterly at sea: my landmarks have gone. I don’t understand. I can only pray that you and I may have light. God bless you, my dear, now and always.”
Helen wrote the same day to Frank: