“What do you go to church for?” he asked, half-petulantly, like a spoilt child, with languid eyes whence the hard fire had vanished. “What’s the use of it?”
He looked at her, waiting an answer.
“Not much,” replied Helen. “I like the quiet and the music. That’s all.”
He seemed disappointed, and lay still for a few moments.
“In old times,” he said at last, “the churches used to be a refuge: I suppose that is why one can’t help feeling as if some safety were to be got from them yet.—Was your cousin George there this morning?”
“Yes, he went with us,” answered Helen.
“I should like to see him. I want somebody to talk to.”
Helen was silent. She was more occupied however in answering to herself the question why she shrank so decidedly from bringing Bascombe into the sick-room, than in thinking what she should say to Leopold. The truth was the truth, and why should she object to Leopold’s knowing, or at least being told as well as herself, that he need fear no punishment in the next world, whatever he might have to encounter in this; that there was no frightful God who hated wrong-doing to be terrified at; that even the badness of his own action need not distress him, for he and it would pass away as the blood he had shed had already vanished from the earth? Ought it not to encourage the poor fellow?—But to what? To live on and endure his misery, or to put an end to it and himself at once? Or perhaps to plunge into vice that he might escape the consciousness of guilt and the dread of the law?
I will not say that exactly such a train of thought as this passed through her mind, but of whatever sort it was, it brought her no nearer to a desire for the light of George Bascombe’s presence by the bedside of her guilty brother. At the same time her partiality for her cousin made her justify his exclusion thus: “George is so good himself, he is only fit for the company of good people. He would not in the least understand my poor Poldie, and would be too hard upon him.”
Since her brother’s appearance, in fact, she had seen very little of her cousin, and this not merely because her presence was so much required in the sick-chamber, but because she was herself unwilling to meet him. She had felt, almost without knowing it, that his character was unsympathetic, and that his loud, cold good-nature could never recognise or justify such love as she bore to her brother! Nor was this all; for, remembering how he had upon one occasion expressed himself with regard to criminals, she feared even to look in his face, lest his keen, questioning, unsparing eye should read in her soul that she was the sister of a murderer.