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Updated: June 15, 2025
Meanwhile Laura, mainly to avoid Polly's conversation, was looking hard out of window. They were running along the southern shore of a great estuary. Behind the loitering train rose the hills they had just left, the hills that sheltered the stream and the woods of Bannisdale. That rich, dark patch beneath the further brow was the wood in which the house stood.
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.
In Helbeck of Bannisdale we have the world and life of Roman Catholicism displayed with a minuteness and a precision which I should have thought scarcely possible to one not "of the household of the faith". It is, indeed, an ideal world, a world that belongs to the past, for the Helbecks have all but passed away.
For some three weeks, after this April night, the old house of Bannisdale was the scene of one of those dramas of life and death which depend, not upon external incident, but upon the inner realities of the heart, its inextinguishable affections, hopes, and agonies. Helbeck and Laura were once more during this time brought into close and intimate contact by the claims of a common humanity.
If hell is indeed "open to Christians," and if the path to life be exceeding strait and narrow, our bounden duty, as men of common sense, would be to "go sell all we had and give to" orphanages, like the Squire of Bannisdale, and appease this gloomy God by a life of austerity and utter renunciation. Why, then, do not all Christians turn Helbecks?
But this radiant, tender Laura with this touch of feverish extravagance in her love and her humiliation she bewildered him; or rather she roused a new response; he must learn new ways of loving her. Once, as he was holding her hand, she looked at him timidly. "You would have left Bannisdale, wouldn't you?" He quickly replied that he had been in correspondence with his old Jesuit friends.
Her gaze swept the distant water of the estuary mouth, as it lay alternately dark and shining under the storm lights of the clouds. "An I'll juist warn yo o' yan thing, Laura," said Polly, with fresh energy. "There's soom one at Bannisdale itsel, as spreads aw maks o' tales. There's a body theer, as is noa friend o' yours." "Oh! Mrs. Denton," said Laura languidly. "Of course."
Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism: On Sunday I read Helbeck of Bannisdale, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes.
George Meredith wrote: Your Helbeck of Bannisdale held me firmly in the reading and remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme rapt or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland.
But now They were at Bannisdale again, and he was once more Helbeck of Bannisdale, a man sixteen years older than she, wound round with the habits and friendship and ideals which had been the slow and firm deposit of those years habits and ideals which were not hers, which were at the opposite pole from hers, of which she still only dimly guessed the motives and foundations.
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