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Updated: June 24, 2025
She looked towards the gate in some bewilderment, and saw that Helbeck was holding it open for her. Beside him stood a tall priest not Father Bowles. It was evident that both of them had seen her parting from her cousin. Well, what then? What was there in that, or in Mr. Helbeck's ceremonious greeting, to make her cheeks hot all in a moment?
The house swarmed with priests with old and infirm priests, many of them from a Jesuit house of retreat on the western coast, not far away, who found in a visit to Bannisdale one of the chief pleasures of their suffering or monotonous lives; while the Superiors of Helbeck's own orphanages were always ready to help the Bannisdale chapel, on days of special sanctity, by sending a party of Sisters and children to provide the singing.
That past physical ecstasy in spring in flowing water in flowers in light and colour where was it gone? Let these tears these helpless tears make answer! Music? books? the books that "make incomparable old maids" friends? The thought of the Friedlands made her realise that she could still love. But after all how little! against how much! Religion? All religion need not be as Alan Helbeck's.
Laura looked up Helbeck's eyes, fixed upon the crucifix over the altar, seemed to receive thence a stem and secret message to which the whole man responded. The girl moved restlessly away. "Let us go and see what he is doing."
"Why doesn't he give it all up," she said with energy, "and be an artist? That's where his heart, his strength, lies." Helbeck's manner changed and stiffened. "You are entirely mistaken, dearest. His heart and his strength are in his vocation in making himself a good Jesuit."
The last mental phrase was not so much his own as an echo from Father Leadham. In Helbeck's mind it was spoken very much as the priest had spoken it with that strange tenderness, at once so intimate and so impersonal, which belongs to the spiritual relations of Catholicism. The girl's soul lonely, hostile, uncared for appealed to the charity of the believer.
On the wall above Helbeck's writing-table were ranged the books that had been his mother's, together with those that he himself habitually used. Here every volume was an old friend, a familiar tool. Alan Helbeck was neither a student nor a man of letters; but he had certain passionate prejudices, instincts, emotions, of which some books were the source and sustenance.
The nuns, he repeated with gentle emphasis, had never done such an honour to any sick person before. But for Mr. Helbeck's sister nothing was too much. And a novena had already been started at the convent. The nuns were praying praying hard that the relic might do its holy work. He was still talking when there was a step and a sound of low singing behind the beech hedge.
How could I say I liked it! I told her it was horrible! I wondered how people could tell her such tales." Her bearing was again all hostility a young defiance. She was delighted to confess herself. Her crime, untold, had been pressing upon her conscience, hurting her natural frankness. Helbeck's face changed.
"There are twelve hundred men, my dear, belonging to the Athenaeum Club. I give you the bishops. After them, what do you suppose religion has to say to the rest of the twelve hundred? How many of them ever give a thought to it?" She raised her eyes, furtively, to Helbeck's face. In spite of its melancholy lines, she had lately begun to see that its fundamental expression was a contented one.
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