CHAPTER VI.
“You are altogether governed by humours.”—King Henry IV.
The crisis did come, though not as Miss Insches anticipated. Helen carefully guarded herself, as they returned home, from the society of the Reverend Robert, and managed that the opportunity he sought should not be afforded to him. She was thoughtful and grave that night, Mrs Buchanan perceived; for the shadow of a selfish pride had darkened for the time the firmament of Helen. The banker showed no sign of courtesy or kindness; the banker’s wife, on the rare occasions when she met her, never mentioned William’s name. William himself, busy in the distant city, seemed to have given up the contest; to have forgotten the romance of his youth; to have left Helen as he had left Fendie, because she was too humble and too quiet. She did not care—she would not care! she protested to herself, with a proud flush on her cheek, and proud tears in her eyes, that it was nothing to her; but involuntarily an evil, angry feeling had sprung up in her mind—she could avenge herself!
A week ago she had felt painfully that it was just possible that even she might be inconstant—that the Reverend Robert might some time glide into William’s place. She felt now that this was impossible; that her own rapid pace could never harmonize with that slightly ostentatious dignity of the Reverend Robert’s; that her impetuous mind must be chafed and irritated beyond measure, if it ever were yoke-fellow with his; yet the very discovery goaded her to go blindly on. In the bitterness of her pride she thought she could not reject the only man who thought her good enough to be his equal; and when she remembered how long a time it took before even he ceased to be ashamed of his incipient tenderness for the poor schoolmistress, the bitterness increased until it flooded her very heart. There was a gloom upon the world; the evil and misery over which she had spread the golden tissue of young hope began to appear darkly exaggerated to the opposite extreme. Those whom she would have remembered for ever, forgot her, and those who made her their choice, were ashamed of the power which compelled them so to do. Her deep melancholy fell upon Helen, as it had never fallen before; the coming of a new day did not dispel it. It was such a sorrow as she could not tell, and so she bore it proudly, bitterly, and in silence.
At the mid-day interval the watchful Mrs Buchanan prevailed on her daughter to go out, to do some simple errands in the town. She generally managed all these matters herself; but the good mother was a skilled physician, and knew how something, trivial enough in itself, might clear the atmosphere in a moment and bring out the sunshine. Mrs Buchanan too was anxious and uneasy: when it seemed now sure that the Reverend Robert must succeed, she thought remorsefully of William, the son of her own training, to whom her house had been so long a second home. She remembered the confidence that there had been between them, and how old ties would have been made stronger and tenderer, had it been he who was the new son; and then she began to feel that Mr Insches, with all his good qualities, was a stranger; that he would introduce a new intruding element—that her sole child would be no more her own.
So the mother sent Helen forth with quiet sighs, and Helen went about her errand sadly, the gloom in her heart obscuring the gentle skies of May.
She walked slowly as her manner was in her times of depression, taking in the common sights and sounds around her into the mist in her own heart, where they remained to bring back in other moods remembrances of that dark hour. She had executed all her mother’s commissions, and concluded her business by a visit to Maxwell Dickson’s low dark shop, on her way home. She got such literature as he had from the librarian of Fendie, and it served now and then to enliven the long solitary evenings—the evenings which were not sufficiently solitary now.
On Maxwell Dickson’s counter lay an unbound book, very clean and very new. Helen took it up as she put the volumes which she brought with her into the librarian’s dingy hands. It was still damp from the press; no one had opened it before. The subject attracted her; it was one of the publications of the New Crusade.
The social science—how to make men better, nobler, purer: how to attack in their own camp the declared evils of our land and time—was the subject of this book; the science of that great discontent which has seized upon so many able minds, happily, now—the science of aggression against all vileness, all pollution. This was the subject of the book, and the name of it kindled a little the dim light in the eyes of Helen. She turned it over rapidly to glean what she could of its contents.
Maxwell Dickson in vain tries to make his young customer hear what he is saying to her. A sudden flush has covered her face—a sudden thrill springs up through the bounding pulses which were so languid a moment before; the slight nervous start—the head lifted so swiftly—the motion of the eager fingers which hold these pages open. From some unseen hand the electric touch is given: what is the cause? Helen is reading in the new book.