Helbeck of Bannisdale, vol 1 | Page 8

tower; so Mrs. Denton had told
her. The thought of all the locked and empty rooms in it,--dark, cold
spaces,--haunted perhaps by strange sounds and presences of the past,
seemed to let loose upon her all at once a little whirlwind of fear. She
hurried into her room, and was just setting down her candle before
turning to lock her door, when a sound from the distant hall caught her
ear.
A deep monotonous sound, rising and falling at regular intervals, Mr.
Helbeck reading prayers, with the two maids, who represented the only
service of the house.
Laura lingered with her hand on the door. In the silence of the ancient
house, there was something touching in the sound, a kind of appeal.
But it was an appeal which, in the girl's mind, passed instantly into
reaction. She locked the door, and turned away, breathing fast as
though under some excitement.

The tears, long held down, were rising, and the room, where a large
wood fire was burning,--wood was the only provision of which there
was a plenty at Bannisdale,--seemed to her suddenly stifling. She went
to the casement window and threw it open. A rush of mild wind came
through, and with it, the roar of the swollen river.
The girl leant forward, bathing her hot face in the wild air. There was a
dark mist of trees below her, trees tossed by the wind; then, far down, a
ray of moonlight on water; beyond, a fell-side, clear a moment beneath
a sky of sweeping cloud; and last of all, highest of all, amid the clouds,
a dim radiance, intermittent and yet steady, like the radiance of moonlit
snow.
A strange nobility and freedom breathed from the wide scene; from its
mere depth below her; from the spacious curve of the river, the
mountains half shown, half hidden, the great race of the clouds, the
fresh beating of the wind. The north spoke to her and the mountains. It
was like the rush of something passionate and straining through her
girlish sense, intensifying all that was already there. What was this
thirst, this yearning, this physical anguish of pity that crept back upon
her in all the pauses of the day and night?
It was nine months since she had lost her father, but all the scenes of
his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often sheer
incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise of the
breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the doctor, the
gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and phantoms of
the past,--that the house was empty, the bed sold, the patient gone. Oh!
the clinging of the thin hand round her own, the piteousness of
suffering--of failure! Poor, poor papa!--he would not say, even to
comfort her, that they would meet again. He had not believed it, and so
she must not.
No, and she would not! She raised her head fiercely and dried her tears.
Only, why was she here, in the house of a man who had never spoken
to her father--his brother-in-law--for thirteen years; who had made his
sister feel that her marriage had been a disgrace; who was all the time,
no doubt, cherishing such thoughts in that black, proud head of his,

while she, her father's daughter, was sitting opposite to him?
"How am I ever going to bear it--all these months?" she asked herself.

CHAPTER II
But the causes which had brought Laura Fountain to Bannisdale were
very simple. It had all come about in the most natural inevitable way.
When Laura was eight years old--nearly thirteen years before this
date--her father, then a widower with one child, had fallen in with and
married Alan Helbeck's sister. At the time of their first meeting with
the little Catholic spinster, Stephen Fountain and his child were
spending part of the Cambridge vacation at a village on the
Cumberland coast where a fine air could be combined with cheap
lodgings. Fountain himself was from the North Country. His
grandfather had been a small Lancashire yeoman, and Stephen
Fountain had an inbred liking for the fells, the farmhouses, and even
the rain of his native district. Before descending to the sea, he and his
child had spent a couple of days with his cousin by marriage, James
Mason, in the lonely stone house among the hills, which had belonged
to the family since the Revolution. He left it gladly, however, for the
farm life seemed to him much harder and more squalid than he had
remembered it to be, and he disliked James Mason's wife. As he and
Laura walked down the long, rough track connecting the farm with the
main road on the day