"But, of course, it isn't my business to live here. I have a great friend—a Cambridge girl—and we have arranged it all. We are to live together, and travel a great deal, and work at music."
"That is what young ladies do nowadays, I understand."
"And why not?"
He lifted his shoulders, as though to decline the answer, and was silent—so silent that she was forced at last to take the field.
"Don't you approve of 'new women,' Mr. Helbeck? Oh! I wish I was a new woman," she threw out defiantly. "But I'm not good enough—I don't know anything."
"I wasn't thinking of them," he said simply. "I was thinking of the life that women used to live here, in this place, in the past—of my mother and my grandmother."
She could not help a stir of interest. What might the Catholic women of Bannisdale have been like? She looked along the path that led downward to the house, and seemed to see their figures upon it—not short and sickly like Augustina, but with the morning in their eyes and on their white brows, like the Romney lady. Helbeck's thoughts meanwhile were peopled by the more solid forms of memory.
"You remember the picture?" he said at last, breaking the silence. "The husband of that lady was a boor and a gambler. He soon broke her heart. But her children consoled her to some extent, especially the daughters, several of whom became nuns. The poor wife came from a large Lancashire family, but she hardly saw her relations after her marriage; she was ashamed of her husband's failings and of their growing poverty. She became very shy and solitary, and very devout. These rock-seats along the river were placed by her. It is said that she used in summer to spend long hours on that very seat where you are sitting, doing needlework, or reading the Little Office of the Virgin, at the hours when her daughters in their French convent would be saying their office in chapel. She died before her husband, a very meek, broken creature. I have a little book of her meditations, that she wrote out by the wish of her confessor.
"Then my grandmother—ah! well, that is too long a story. She was a Frenchwoman—we have some of her books in my study. She never got on with England and English people—and at last, after her husband's death, she never went outside the house and park. My father owed much of his shyness and oddity to her bringing up. When she felt herself dying she went over to her family to die at Nantes. She is buried there; and my father was sent to the Jesuit school at Nantes for a long time. Then my mother—But I mustn't bore you with these family tales."
He turned to look at his listener. Laura was by this time half embarrassed, half touched.