“I will try, father,” said she.
“I know you will. Your holiday, all the mirth and innocent pleasure you have had in London, ought to help you to it. Those times of refreshment are given us not to make us discontented with our work, but to enable us to bring to it a rested and more active industry.”
But this morning it seemed to have brought to Helen nothing of the kind, but only a rested and more active doubt as to whether any of the things that filled her day could possibly, in the doing, be good for her, or when done for others. The “Sunday Magazine,” for instance, of which at this moment she was pasting the torn pages, seemed to her to be singularly ill adapted to do anything for anybody. There was an essay on the habits of mice, another on the temptations of engine-drivers; answers to correspondents dealt with lotions for the hair and the best treatment for burns; while in the forefront of each number was an instalment of a serial story connected with incredible ranches and mining in California. But, in spite of her conscientious doubts, her fingers moved apace, and the stack of healed and mended volumes at her right hand grew quickly tall.
She worked on till about twelve without pause, and then pushed back her chair and began carrying the mended volumes to their shelves. If only she could have entertained any hopes as to the utility of what she was doing she would have accepted her occupation with cheerfulness, for her nature was one of that practical kind which finds almost any pursuit, so long as it has definite and profitable aim, congenial. This afternoon again she would have to take choir-practice in the Room, and even with the eager desire to find “good in everything” she could not see who profited by the cacophonous result. And to add to her labours, the ill-inspired ambitions of Mr. Milton had caused him to learn with infinite pains and groanings of the organ in evening hours nothing less than an anthem for the Harvest Festival, and it remained for her to teach the choir. Hours would go to the repetition of it before that unmelodious festival; and even if it had been possible that relentless practice could make the choir tolerably secure of their notes (which it could not), yet the result, even if it were faultlessly performed, would be deplorable, since it was an anthem of that peculiarly depressing kind produced by minor organists, contained a fugal passage which was not a fugue, and, musically speaking, was of the most suburban and jerry-built construction.
Helen pushed back her hair, and, slightly amused at the greyness of her own thoughts, smiled to herself as she went backward and forward between table and bookcase. If only she had some one, another sister, to share in these farthing woes of a rector’s daughter, she could have laughed at them; she and a friend, at any rate, could have read each other striking extracts from the mended leaves of the “Sunday Magazine.” Then suddenly she heard a step on the gravel outside, a step not her father’s, but strangely familiar, and the door opened.
“Why, Lord Yorkshire,” she said. “How delightful! Do come in.”
Frank had the enviable faculty of keeping comparatively cool on very hot days, just as on occasions heating and stirring to the spirit his nature seldom boiled. But to-day he was much hotter spiritually than physically, and Helen’s genuine pleasure to see him, which shone in her eyes and her smile and vibrated in her voice, did not reduce this genial heat.
“I have not done wrong,” he asked, “to come and interrupt you? They told me at the vicarage that you were here.”
“No, indeed, you have not,” said she, shaking hands. “Really, I was longing for an interruption. Look!” and she pointed to the titles of her mended stack of books.
He glanced at them with a smile.