Volume Ii Part 5 (1/2)
”Oh, _Alan_!--where is she?”
”I got a telegram through to the station-master. Don't be anxious, Augustina. I asked him to direct her to the inn. The old White Hart, they say, has pa.s.sed into new management and is quite comfortable. She may arrive by the first train--7.20. Anyway I shall meet it.”
Augustina pursued him with fretful inquiries and surmises. Helbeck, pale and gloomy, threw himself down on the settle, and produced the story of the accident, so far as the garrulous and incoherent Polly had enabled him to understand it. Fresh wails on Augustina's part. What a horrible, horrible thing! Why, of course the child was terribly upset--hurt perhaps--or she would never have been so foolish about the trains. And now one could not even be sure that she had found a place to sleep in!
She would come home a wreck--a simple wreck. Helbeck moved uneasily.
”She was not hurt, according to Miss Mason.”
”I suppose young Mason saw her off?”
”I suppose so.”
”What were they all about, to make such a blunder?”
Helbeck shrugged his shoulders, and at last he succeeded in quieting his sister, by dint of a resolute suppression of all but the most ordinary and comforting suggestions.
”Well, after all, thank goodness, Laura has a great deal of common sense--she always had,” said Mrs. Fountain, with a clearing countenance.
”Of course. She will be here, I have little doubt, before you are ready for your breakfast. It is unlucky, but it should not disturb your night's rest. Please go to bed.” With some difficulty he drove her there.
Augustina retired, but it was to spend a broken and often tearful night.
Alan might say what he liked--it was all most disagreeable. Why!--would the inn take her in? Mrs. Fountain had often been told that an inn, a respectable inn, required a trunk as well as a person. And Laura had not even a bag--positively not a hand-bag. A reflection which was the starting-point of a hundred new alarms, under which poor Mrs. Fountain tossed till the morning.
Meanwhile Helbeck went to his study. It was nearly one o'clock when he entered it, but the thought of sleep never occurred to him. He took out of his pocket the telegram from Braeside, re-read it, and destroyed it.
So Mason was with her--for of course it was Mason. Not one word of such a conjunction was to be gathered from the sister. She had clearly supposed that Laura would start alone and arrive alone. Or was she in the plot?
Had Mason simply arranged the whole ”mistake,” jumped into the same train with her, and confronted her at the junction?
Helbeck moved blindly up and down the room, traversed by one of those storms of excitement to which the men of his stock were liable. The thought of those two figures leaving the Braeside station together at midnight roused in him a madness half jealousy, half pride. He saw the dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had wors.h.i.+pped through his pain these many weeks. To think of them in the mere neighbourhood of that coa.r.s.e and sensual lad had always been profanation.
And now who would not be free to talk, to spatter her girlish name? The sheer unseemliness of such a kins.h.i.+p!--such a juxtaposition.
If he could only know the true reason of that persistency she had shown about the expedition, in the face of Augustina's wailings, and his own silence? She had been dull--Heaven knows she had been dull at Bannisdale, for these two months. On every occasion of his return from those intermediate absences to which he had forced himself, he had perceived that she drooped, that she was dumbly at war with the barriers that shut her youth away from change and laughter, and the natural amus.e.m.e.nts, flatteries and courtings that wait, or should wait, on sweet-and-twenty.
More than once he had realised the fever pulsing through the girl's unrest. Of course she was dissatisfied and starved. She was not of the sort that accepts the _role_ of companion or sick nurse without a murmur.
What could he do--he, into whose being she had crept with torturing power--he who could not marry her even if she should cease to hate him--who could only helplessly put land and distance between them? And then, who knows what a girl plans, to what she will stoop, out of the mere ebullience and rush of her youth--with what haloes she will surround even the meanest heads? Her blood calls her--not this man or that! She takes her decisions--behind that veil of mystery that masks the woman at her will. And who knows---who can know? A mother, perhaps. Not Augustina--not he--nor another.
Groans broke from him. In vain he scourged himself and the vileness of his own thoughts. In vain he said to himself, ”All her instincts, her preferences, are pure, guileless, delicate--I could swear it, I, who have watched her every look and motion.” Temper?--yes. Caprice?--yes. A hundred immaturities and rawnesses?--yes! but at the root of all, the most dazzling, the most convincing maidenliness. Not the down-dropt eyes, the shrinking modesties of your old Christian or Catholic types--far from it. But something that, as you dwelt upon it, seemed to make doubt a mere folly.
And yet his very self-a.s.surances, his very protests, left him in torment.
There is something in the Catholic discipline on points of s.e.x-relation that perhaps weakens a man's instinctive confidence in women. Evil and its varieties, in this field, are pressed upon his thoughts perpetually with a scholastic fulness so complete, a deductive frankness so compelling, that nothing stands against the process. He sees corruption everywhere--dreads it everywhere. There is no part of its empire, or its action, that his imagination is allowed to leave in shadow. It is the confessional that works. The devout Catholic sees all the world _sub specie peccati_. The flesh seems to him always ready to fall--the devil always at hand.
--Little restless proud creature! What a riddle she has been to him all the time--flitting about the house so pale and inaccessible, so silent, too, in general, since that night when he had wrestled with her in the drawing-room. One moment of fresh battle between them there has been--in the park--on the subject of old Scarsbrook. Preposterous!--that she should think for one moment she could be allowed to confess herself--and so bring all the low talk of the neighbourhood about her ears. He could hear the old man's plaintive cogitations over the strange experience which had blanched his hair and beard and brought him a visible step nearer to his end. ”s...o...b..dy towd my owd woman tudther day, Misther Helbeck, at yoong Mason o' t' Browhead had been i' th' park that neet.
Mappen tha'll tell me it was soom gell body he'd been coortin. Noa!--he doan't gaa about wi' the likes o' thattens! Theer was never a soun' ov her feet, Misther Helbeck! She gaed ower t' gra.s.s like a bit cloud i'
summer, an she wor sma' an nesh as a wagtail on t' steeans. I ha seen aw maks o' gells, but this one bet 'em aw.” And after that, to think of her pouring herself out in impetuous explanation to the old peasant and his wife! It had needed a strong will to stop her. ”Mr. Helbeck, I wish to tell the truth, and I ought to tell it! And your arguments have no weight with me whatever.”
But he had made them prevail. And she had not punished him too severely.