Helbeck of Bannisdale, vol 2 | Page 3

* * *
How the scene penetrated!--leaving great stabbing lines never to be
effaced in the quivering tissues of the girl's nature. Once before she had
heard the English Burial Service. Her father--groaning and fretting
under the penalties of friendship--had taken her, when she was fifteen,
to the funeral of an old Cambridge colleague. She remembered still the
cold cemetery chapel, the gowned mourners, the academic decorum, or
the mild regret amid which the function passed. Then her father's sharp
impatience as they walked home--that reasonable men in a reasonable
age should be asked to sit and listen to Paul's logic, and the absurdities
of Paul's cosmical speculations!
And now--from what movements, what obscurities of change within
herself, had come this new sense, half loathing, half attraction, that
could not withdraw itself from the stroke, from the attack of this
Christian poetry--these cries of the soul, now from the Psalms, now
from Paul, now from the unknown voices of the Church?
Was it merely the setting that made the difference--the horror of what
had passed, the infinite relief to eye and heart of this sudden calm that
had fallen on the terror and distraction of the workmen--the strangeness
of this vast shed for church, with its fierce perpetual drama of
assaulting flame and flying shadow, and the gaunt tangled forms of its
machinery--the dull glare of that distant furnace that had made so
little--hardly an added throb, hardly a leaping flame! of the living man
thrown to it half an hour before, and seemed to be still murmuring and
growling there, behind this great act of human pity, in a dying
discontent?
Whence was it--this stilling, pacifying power?
All around her men were sobbing and groaning, but as the wave dies
after the storm. They seemed to feel themselves in some grasp that
sustained, some hold that made life tolerable again. "Amens" came
thick and fast. The convulsion of the faces was abating; a natural
human courage was flowing back into contracted hearts.

"_Blessed are the dead--for they rest from their labours_--" "_as our
hope is this our brother doth._"
Laura shivered. The constant agony of the world, in its constant search
for all that consoles, all that eases, laid its compelling hand upon her.
By a natural instinct she wrapped her arms closer, more passionately,
round the child upon her knee.
* * * * *
"Won't she come?" said Mason.
He and Seaton were standing in the downstairs parlour of a small house
in a row of workmen's cottages, about half a mile from the steel works.
Mason still showed traces, in look and bearing, of the horror he had
witnessed. But he had sufficiently recovered from it to be conscious
into the bargain of his own personal grievance, of their spoilt day, and
his lost chances. Seaton, too, showed annoyance and impatience; and as
Polly entered the room he echoed Mason's question.
Polly shook her head.
"She says she won't leave the child till the last moment. We must go
and have our tea, and come back for her."
"Come along then!" said Mason gloomily, as he led the way to the
door.
The little garden outside, as they passed through it, was crowded with
women discussing the accident, and every now and then a crowd would
gather on the pavement and disperse again. To each and all the speakers,
the one intolerable thing was the total disappearance of the poor lost
one. No body--no clothes--no tangible relic of the dead: it was a sore
trial to customary beliefs. Heaven and hell seemed alike inconceivable
when there was no phantom grave-body to make trial of them. One
woman after another declared that it would send her mad if it ever
happened to any belonging of hers. "But it's a mercy there's no one to
fret--nobbut t' little gell--an she's too sma'." There was much talk about
the young lady that had come home with her--"a nesh pretty-lukin
yoong creetur"--to whom little Nelly clung strangely--no doubt because
she and her father had been so few weeks in Froswick that there had
been scarcely time for them to make friends of their own. The child
held the lady's gown in her clutch perpetually, Mr. Dixon
reported--would not lose sight of her for a moment. But the lady herself
was only a visitor to Froswick, was being just taken through the works,

when the accident happened, and was to leave the town by an evening
train--so it was said. However, there would be those left behind who
would look after the poor lamb--Mrs. Starr, who had taken the tea to
the works, and Mrs. Dixon, the Overtons' landlady. They were in the
house now; but the lady had begged everyone else to keep outside.
The summer evening crept on.
At half-past six