Helbeck of Bannisdale — Volume II

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

But all the while, how deeply were they divided!—how sharp was the clash between the reviving strength of passion, which could not but feed itself on the daily sight and contact of the beloved person, and those facts of character and individuality which held them separated!—facts which are always, and in all cases, the true facts of this world.

In Helbeck the shock of Laura's October flight had worked with profound and transforming power. After those first desperate days in which he had merely sought to recover her, to break down her determination, or to understand if he could the grounds on which she had acted, a new conception of his own life and the meaning of it had taken possession of him. He fell into the profoundest humiliation and self-abasement, denouncing himself as a traitor to his faith, who out of mere self-delusion, and a lawless love of ease, had endangered his own obedience, and neglected the plain task laid upon him. That fear of proselytism, that humble dread of his own influence, which had once determined his whole attitude towards those about him, began now to seem to him mere wretched cowardice and self-will—the caprice of the servant who tries to better his master's instructions.

But now I cast that finer sense
And sorer shame aside;
Such dread of sin was indolence,
Such aim at heaven was pride.

Again and again he said to himself that if he had struck at once for the Church and for the Faith at the moment when Laura's young heart was first opened to him, when under the earliest influences of her love for him—how could he doubt that she had loved him!—her nature was still plastic, still capable of being won to God, as it were, by a coup de main—might not—would not—all have been well? But no!—he must needs believe that God had given her to him for ever, that there was room for all the gradual softening, the imperceptible approaches by which he had hoped to win her. It had seemed to him the process could not be too gentle, too indulgent. And meanwhile the will and mind that might have been captured at a rush had time to harden—the forces of revolt to gather.

What wonder? Oh! blind—infatuate! How could he have hoped to bring her, still untouched, within the circle of his Catholic life, into contact with its secrets and its renunciations, without recoil on her part, without risk of what had actually happened? The strict regulation of every hour, every habit, every thought, at which he aimed as a Catholic—what could it seem to her but a dreary and forbidding tyranny?—to her who had no clue to it, who was still left free, though she loved him, to judge his faith coldly from outside? And when at last he had begun to drop hesitation, to change his tone—then, it was too late!

Tyranny! She had used that word once or twice, in that first letter which had reached him on the evening of her flight, and in a subsequent one. Not of anything that had been, apparently—but of that which might be. It had wounded him to the very quick.

And yet, in truth, the course of his present thoughts—plainly interpreted—meant little else than this—that if, at the right moment, he had coerced her with success, they might both have been happy.

Later on he had seen his own self-judgment reflected in the faces, the consolations, of his few intimate friends. Father Leadham, for instance—whose letters had been his chief support during a period of dumb agony when he had felt himself more than once on the brink of some morbid trouble of brain.

"I found her adamant," said Father Leadham. "Never was I so powerless with any human soul. She would not discuss anything. She would only say that she was born in freedom—and free she would remain. All that I urged upon her implied beliefs in which she had not been brought up, which were not her father's and were not hers. Nor on closer experience had she been any more drawn to them—quite the contrary; whatever—and there, poor child! her eyes filled with tears—whatever she might feel towards those who held them. She said fiercely that you had never argued with her or persuaded her—or perhaps only once; that you had promised—this with an indignant look at me—that there should be no pressure upon her. And I could but feel sadly, dear friend, that you only, under our Blessed Lord, could have influenced her; and that you, by some deplorable mistake of judgment, had been led to feel that it was wrong to do so. And if ever, I will even venture to say, violence—spiritual violence, the violence that taketh by storm—could have been justified, it would have been in this case. Her affections were all yours; she was, but for you and her stepmother, alone in the world; and amid all her charms and gifts, a soul more starved and destitute I never met with. May our Lord and His Immaculate Mother strengthen you to bear your sorrow! For your friends, there are and must be consolations in this catastrophe. The cross that such a marriage would have laid upon you must have been heavy indeed."

Harassed by such thoughts and memories Helbeck passed through these strange, these miserable days—when he and Laura were once more under the same roof, living the same household life. Like Laura, he clung to every hour; like Laura, he found it almost more than he could bear. He suffered now with a fierceness, a moroseness, unknown to him of old. Every permitted mortification that could torment the body or humble the mind he brought into play during these weeks, and still could not prevent himself from feeling every sound of Laura's voice and every rustle of her dress as a rough touch upon a sore.