The Challoners

by E. F. Benson

“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 his failures 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.