Helbeck of Bannisdale, vol 1 | Page 9

of their departure, Stephen Fountain whistled so
loud and merrily that the skipping child beside him looked at him with
astonishment.
It was his way no doubt of thanking Providence for the happy chance
that had sent his father to a small local government post at Newcastle,
and himself to a grammar school with openings on the University. Yet
as a rule he thought himself anything but a successful man. He held a
lectureship at Cambridge in an obscure scientific subject; and was in
his way both learned and diligent. But he had few pupils, and had never
cared to have them. They interfered with his own research, and he had

the passionate scorn for popularity which grows up naturally in those
who have no power with the crowd. His religious opinions, or rather
the manner in which he chose to express them, divided him from many
good men. He was poor, and he hated his poverty. A rather imprudent
marriage had turned out neither particularly well nor particularly ill.
His wife had some beauty, however, and there was hardly time for
disillusion. She died when Laura was still a tottering baby, and Stephen
had missed her sorely for a while. Since her death he had grown to be a
very lonely man, silently discontented with himself and sourly critical
of his neighbours. Yet all the same he thanked God that he was not his
cousin James.
Potter's Beach as a watering-place was neither beautiful nor amusing.
Laura was happy there, but that said nothing. All her childhood through,
she had the most surprising gift for happiness. From morning till night
she lived in a flutter of delicious nothings. Unless he watched her
closely, Stephen Fountain could not tell for the life of him what she
was about all day. But he saw that she was endlessly about something;
her little hands and legs never rested; she dug, bathed, dabbled, raced,
kissed, ate, slept, in one happy bustle, which never slackened except for
the hours when she lay rosy and still in her bed. And even then the
pretty mouth was still eagerly open, as though sleep had just breathed
upon its chatter for a few charmed moments, and "the joy within" was
already breaking from the spell.
Stephen Fountain adored her, but his affections were never enough for
him. In spite of the child's spirits he himself found Potter's Beach a
desolation, all the more that he was cut off from his books for a time by
doctor's orders and his own common sense. Suddenly, as he took his
daily walk over the sands with Laura, he began to notice a thin lady in
black, sitting alone under a bank of sea-thistles, and generally
struggling with an umbrella which she had put up to shelter herself and
her book from a prevailing and boisterous wind. Sometimes when he
passed her in the little street, he caught a glimpse of timid eyes, or he
saw and pitied the slight involuntary jerk of the head and shoulders,
which seemed to tell of nervous delicacy. Presently they made friends,
and he found her lonely and discontented like himself. She was a

Catholic, he discovered; but her Catholicism was not that of the convert,
but of an old inherited sort which sat easily enough on a light nature.
Then, to his astonishment, it appeared that she lived with a brother at
an old house in North Lancashire--a well-known and even, in its degree,
famous house--which lay not seven miles distant from his grandfather's
little property, and had been quite familiar to him by repute, and even
by sight as a child. When he was a small lad staying at Browhead Farm,
he had once or twice found his way to the Greet, and had strayed along
its course through Bannisdale Park. Once even, when he was in the act
of fishing a particular pool where the trout were rising in a manner to
tempt a very archangel, he had been seized and his primitive rod broken
over his shoulder by an old man whom he believed to have been the
owner, Mr. Helbeck himself,--a magnificent white-haired person, about
whom tales ran freely in the country-side.
So this little, shabby old maid was a Helbeck of Bannisdale! As he
looked at her, Fountain could not help thinking with a hidden
amusement of all the awesome prestige the name had once carried with
it for his boyish ear. Thirty years back, what a gulf had seemed to yawn
between the yeoman's grandson and the lofty owners of that stern and
ancient house upon the Greet! And now, how glad was old Helbeck's
daughter to sit or walk with him and his child!--and how plain it grew,
as the weeks passed on, that if he, Stephen Fountain, willed