Helen was sitting again at the deal table in the “Room,” trying to balance the accounts of the quarter. A money-box, cheap but not strong, probably made in Germany, with a florid ornament of tin tacked on round its maw, stood open by her left hand, and on the table was a heap of money, consisting chiefly of pennies and small silver coins,—the subscription to the “Room” being threepence a quarter,—while by her right hand was a pile of equally mean bills, chiefly ending with a halfpenny, for brown holland, cotton, slate-pencils, needles, and gum. There was a discrepancy somewhere of ninepence, but add and subtract as she would, that ninepence held its ground like the remnant of the Old Guard. Had it been only deficit, the remedy from her own pocket would have been easy, but, unfortunately, there was ninepence too much, and, though her conscience would not have made any protest at her supplying it, it did not permit her either to pocket it or to forge a non-existent bill. And all the time her natural impatience, mixed luckily with a certain sense of humour, said to her, “Is it possible to conceive a less profitable way of wasting time than in trying to make ninepence vanish?” Her father, however, with the attention to detail which was so marked a characteristic of his, always looked over the accounts afterwards, and whether there was a discrepancy of a thousand pounds or a penny it made no difference, the{198} principle of admitting discrepancy was equally dangerous in either case.

The twins had been at home, in a state of total eclipse for two days of ominous parental silence. Mr. Challoner, as usual, was busy; Helen was busy also, for after her absence there was more than enough at present to occupy her day. But she had not yet broached the subject that was at the root of the silence: until the skies cleared a little she felt absolutely unable to do so. Her father also had said nothing about it; they ate, they drank, the weather was mentioned, and the danger of trouble in the East. Mr. Challoner himself, except when he read prayers, had hardly said half a dozen words in Helen’s presence: it was “good-night” and “good-morning,” and both were bad. Martin also was, so to speak, in prison, though not, like his sister, in the condemned cell. He read Demosthenes in his father’s study while the latter was writing his sermon, fell asleep and was detected, awoke, and wrote a futile supererogatory set of Greek iambics containing several false quantities and forms of aorists previously unknown and very interesting.

This morning Helen had received a letter from Frank that troubled her, for he pressed, where he had only hinted before, for some definite sort of date. Reasonably enough, he saw no cause for delay; he knew that in spite of her father’s feelings she had accepted his devotion; that was all her’s, waiting for her to reward it. The tone was not querulous. If it had been, the letter she must write would have been less difficult. It was simply and sincerely trustful. But before she wrote she must talk to her father; that could be put off no longer.{199}

For the moment, however, the “sad mechanic exercise” of the accounts occupied her attention. But, though the superficial brain which was employed on addition had its work before it, all that was round her—the walls, the floor, the aspect of the room, the neat, new brown-holland covers of the library—took that part of her brain that really felt and lived back to the day when she sat there last. The map of geological strata was there, too, with its auriferous belt, and she remembered very well Frank’s words about that: “There is a gold-bearing vein in all we are set to do. The trouble is to find it.” Yes, indeed, that was the trouble. She did not rebel against the superfluous ninepence, except, indeed, humorously; but what seemed to her such hard and barren rock was the living in this hopeless silence. Her conscience, her whole sense of moral obligation, had accepted the principle indicated to her by the dear aunt—sofa-cushion no longer—of this wider self-completion to be attained by behaving rightly in all relations of life. But at present she had been throwing good money after bad. The dutiful daughter had come home. No more notice was taken of her than of a mended window-pane.

Mr. Challoner always opened doors smartly. Thus, when the outer door of the “Room,” which gave on to a small lobby where wet coats were hung, gave a quick rattle of latch, she knew, with the same certainty as she had known the crisp foot on the gravel, who came.

“Have you finished the accounts?” he said.

“I can’t get them quite right, father,” she said. “I think—-{200}-“

“You have the bills and the receipts, have you not?” he said. “Where are they?”

Helen resented this, but silently; no shadow of it appeared in her face or voice.

“They are all here,” she said. “I have ninepence more than I should.”

Mr. Challoner sat down and counted up the silver and pence, arranging them in neat shilling heaps with all the care he would have given to a total of millions. Then rejecting her addition, he added up the receipted bills, and her mistake, one of pure carelessness, was patent.

“That balances them,” he said. “Perhaps I had better do the accounts for the future. If I have to do them in the long run, I may as well do them at once, instead of wasting your time over them.”

Helen stood up, her resentment shewing itself a little.

“Certainly, if you prefer,” she said.

He did not answer, but ran a metal clip neatly through the receipted bills, and swept the coins back into the money-box. Then he turned to her quickly.

“What do you intend to do, Helen?” he asked. “As your father, I think I have a right to ask you, since you have shewn no sign of wishing to tell me.”

The gulf between them seemed to her at that moment immeasurably wide, and his tone was harsh and cruel,—it cut her, but cut like a blunt knife, with sawing and tearing.

“Father, don’t speak to me like that,” she said. “I can’t bear it, and it does no good. I am trying, and I am going to continue trying, to do my duty to you—-{201}-“

For one moment the sternness vanished from his face.

“You are going to give him up?” he asked.

“No; but I am going to live quietly here if you will have me, for the next six months,” she said, “doing my work in the parish just as usual. During that time I will not see Frank. If you wish, I will not even write to him, except just once.”

She sat down again opposite him.

“I want to do something for you, which is hard for me,” she said. “I want to make you believe that I am trying to be a good daughter to you. I know we disagree vitally and essentially. But is that any reason why the dearness of our human relations should be diminished?”

Her voice sank, but looking at his face she could see that the momentary brightness as he asked the last question had vanished again, and he sat looking, not at her, but out of the window, without replying.

“Father,” she said, gently, “I have spoken to you.”

He shook his head, then looked at her.

“It is useless,” he said.

Then suddenly the chilling reserve and silence of the last days gave way like ice before the South wind.

“My God!” he said, speaking more to himself than to her. “What have I done? What have I done? Has this come for some dreadful fault of mine of which I am ignorant? All your life, Helen, I have tried to train and teach you in the knowledge and fear of God. As He sees me, I have done my best, according to my lights. Never once to my knowledge have I not prayed every day that His blessing should guide and illuminate every step you take. And I cannot believe—that{202} is my difficulty—that you try to follow His will in this. It is impossible that——“

He broke off with a sudden helpless raising of his hands indescribably pathetic.

“God help us both,” he said.

There was a long silence, and his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves as he sat staring dismally out of the window. All her life, as he had said with absolute honesty, he had tried to bring Helen up in the knowledge and fear of God, and this decision of hers, from which he now realised he was powerless to move her, was like some overwhelming blow struck at him from the dark. He could not understand, he could not even conjecture in the vaguest way, what it meant or how he was meant to take it. In sorrow, renunciation, bereavement, it was, at any rate, possible to acquiesce in there being a design. But that his child should do this was inexplicable. It could not be the will of God. Something of this Helen read in his face, and she saw, for the first time fully, how the blow had staggered him. His strength had given way under it; all vehemence and anger was dead; and dead, too, was the hope that she would come round to him. He was helpless. And the strangeness of that in one so certain, so accustomed to go without hinderance or obstacle along the straight road of his God-fearing life touched her with a profound pity, so that for a moment, had he but known it, her decision flickered and wavered like a candle-flame blown about in a draught. She questioned herself whether such suffering could be right, whether that which caused it could be justifiable, whether at whatever cost to herself or another she could permit it to be. It was like the{203} suffering of some animal,—blind, uncomprehending, a thing intolerable. And the animal that suffered was a strong man and a wise, and her father.

She sat down on the edge of the table beside him.

“Oh, poor father, poor father!” she said.

He looked at her with a wretched semblance of a smile.

“Ah, that is not the point, Helen,” he said. “What I feel, all my pain, is nothing, nothing. Why I feel it is everything, dear. Oh, you poor girl, blind, blind.”

Then, at last, that tie between father and daughter or mother and son, one of the immutable and indestructible things of the world, stirred, vibrated, made music, and for a moment across the infinite gulf between them their spirits and their hands met.

“Dear girl,” he said, “it will be delightful to have you at home. I was afraid that those happy days of work, you and I, side by side in this home, were over. I thank you for that, Helen; your father blesses you for that. Stop with me as long as you can. How long you—and he must settle. And, my dear, I am so selfish as to take your offer fully. Do not see him or write to him. Perhaps——“

He paused a moment, stroking her hand.

“And try to make allowance for me,” he went on, “when I am hard or gloomy or out of spirits. But I am so utterly at sea: my landmarks have gone. I don’t understand. I can only pray that you and I may have light. God bless you, my dear, now and always.”

Helen wrote the same day to Frank:

“My Dearest,—I have just come home, and I have settled to do a thing which is very hard on both of us; but I cannot do otherwise. Frank, we cannot be married yet. We must put it{204} off for six months, or seven, is it not,—till next May. And for six months I must live quietly at home here, and not see you. There, it is written. This, too: you are absolutely free. Ah, in spite of all these troubles, I can’t help smiling when I write that.

“But I can’t act otherwise. My father is in a state of misery about it which I can’t describe to you. Somebody he loves is deliberately—this is how he sees it—going to do a wicked thing. This morning, when he talked to me about it, I wondered whether I could be right in continuing our engagement at all. But I can’t give you up. My love for you is the best part of me, and the most living part. You see I am yours. Oh, my dear, if only things had been otherwise,—if you could believe! If you could only have not told me, have let me think you were a Christian. No, I don’t wish that really. It would not have been you.

“He is my father. All my life he has watched over me, prayed for me, loved me. Even if he had been a bad father, I should still have owed him all I am, until the day I met you. And the only way in which I can repay him anything is by doing this. It is small change, I know, for all his gold, but it is all I have. At least, then, and at most I must do it. I must stop here with him,—he was such an old darling when I told him,—trying to be cheerful, trying in little, tiny human ways to be a good daughter to him. And it is all so infinitesimal. It is as if I gave him remedies for a cold in the head when he had cancer. I feel so mean in offering him so little. But there is only one other thing that I could offer him, and that I cannot. And, indeed, though this looks so little and makes little show, it costs me something. It does indeed.

“And I must do something more. I think I must not even write to you. While I am here I must have no connection with you. It would be incomplete without that. One letter you must send me, when you have thought this over, to say that you agree with me, if you can.

“And if you cannot? I must do it all the same.

“Do you remember telling me of Magda’s cry? That, too, tells me to do it. I should be stunted, selfish, if I did not.

“Ah, Frank, my darling, be good to me. I long for you every day, and it is going to be so awfully dreary without you.

“Helen.

{205}

“I walked through the wood to-day where you set the hare free. I shall walk there every day. And I looked at the geological map with the ‘auriferous reef in it. Martin is here.”

The letter was not difficult to write, though the final determination to write it was so hard that when it came to the paper and ink she sat long with pen undipped, unable to begin. But the memory of the bewildered misery in her father’s face that morning as he sat looking out of the window in the Room had given her a real sense of responsibility towards him. It was her business to find some anodyne for that. Perhaps the proof before his eyes, kept there day after day and week after week, that she wanted to do her best, might serve. Anyhow, at the moment it had awakened his humanity and his fatherhood; his hand had reached to her across the gulf; two puzzled, blind folk had clasped hands in the darkness.

Nor was the waiting for Frank’s answer difficult,—she knew him so well. And she was not disappointed here; the very brevity of the reply was honey to her.

“Dearest,—You must do as you must do. Magda says so, and so do I. But I am rather low, though she tells me not to be.

“Frank.”

But it was then, when she had made the difficult determination, and Frank had so ungrudgingly consented, that Helen’s difficulties began. Each day was an endless series of infinitesimal knots, not to be cut, but each to be patiently, cheerfully unravelled. Each singly she could tackle, but she had to avert her eyes from the future, for the series of knots stretched into dim distance. All day, too, there was with her the{206} desire to see Frank, just once to see him, and perhaps cry a little on his shoulder; all day, too, there was the face of her father, always sunless, always grave. He had never, it is true, been other than austere in his domestic life, but then Helen had always known how deep was his love for her. But now it seemed to her sometimes as if he was trying to stifle and extinguish it; that knowing, as he did, there was soon to be an irrevocable rupture between them, a rupture that would divide them further than death divides, he was schooling himself to get used to it, as a man may school himself, when he sees one he loves in the pangs of mortal illness, to adjust himself beforehand to the loss that is coming. The marks of his suffering, too, were pathetically plain, and again and again she asked herself whether she had not only increased it by doing that which cost herself so much. Was it only an impulse of barren sentimentality that she had followed? Was she like a surgeon who gives an ineffective an?sthetic which should not deaden or mitigate the wrench and shock that was coming?

The encouragement she could find was but small. But it was this, that in any case she had done what was most difficult and what seemed, not only to her, but to Aunt Susan, to be right, and as such was fully accepted by her lover. Yet what if, after all, this was a mere senseless mutilation of herself, an objectless asceticism?

It was this doubt that day after day most troubled her. Had she seen the least sign of bud on the barren stem she would have been much more than content. But the days became weeks, and there was still none, not even any return of the moment’s tenderness her{207} father had shewn at their first talk. She could not see that any practical good was coming of her renunciation. Like a wrecked sailor on a raft, she watched, as for a sail, for any horizon-distant sign that her father accepted her marriage and gave her credit—though she did not want the credit herself, but only longed for the evidence of it—for doing her best. But there was no such sign. He continued to use the prayer for Turks, infidels, and heretics.

What made things worse was that Martin, the beloved twin, with whom disagreement was a thing unthinkable, radically disapproved of what she was doing, and his disapproval, she was afraid, was terribly practical,—namely, that it was quite certainly no use. Two things, however, after some three weeks of what seemed fruitless endeavour, kept her to it. One was a letter from Aunt Susan, to whom she had sent a despairing sheet, containing a memorable sentence: “God does not always pay on Saturday, Helen,” she had said. The other was an innate pride that forbade her to accept defeat. Here she feared also to lose the respect not only of her father, but of Frank.

“Yes, my darling, you tried it,” she imagined him saying, “and you found it was doing no good.”

And that he should say that was somehow intolerable to her. Whatever she might be, she would not be feeble. “The lame and the blind that are hated of David’s soul” seemed to her a very legitimate object of detestation. She would not give a thing up because she mistrusted her power of doing it.

Thus her apparent failure consumed itself. With the divine confidence of youth, the less successful she seemed to be the more she spurred herself on to strive.{208} All her sense of right had told her, when she made her decision, that she would thus be doing her best; her judgment was arrived at coolly and sanely, and the present practical ill-success of it argued nothing against the principle.

Then came a crowning despondency and agitation in something Martin told her after he returned from a visit to Lady Sunningdale. The short history of that visit, however, claims an episodic precedence.

 

Lady Sunningdale had sent her motor over from Fareham to fetch Martin, and when he arrived, about tea-time, he rushed straight out on to the lawn to find her, but only encountered the chilling looks of several total strangers who were talking about fiscal problems and seemed surprised, if not pained, to see him. This was discouraging; and he was wondering what place there was to flee unto, when a footman came out after him to say that her ladyship was in her bedroom and wished to see him there immediately. Martin could not help giving a little giggle of amusement at this, and the footman, preceding him upstairs, threw open the door and announced him.

The room was large and very rose-coloured, on the principle of Lady Sunningdale’s famous maxim that bedrooms should be optimistic. She herself was reclining on the optimistic silk coverlet of her bed, with her shoes off and the blinds down.

“Is that you, monster?” she asked. “I am an absolute wreck. Yes, pull up one blind and sit down at a respectful distance. Martin, you must promise to play absolutely all the time you are here, like a barrel organ, or I shall die. I shall send a footman to you{209} after each time with twopence on a tray and orders that you are not to move on. The house is crammed with perfectly dreadful people. I cannot imagine why I asked them. I hope you have not brought your gun, because I shan’t let you go shooting. You will have to talk to me all day, except when you are playing. Don’t tread on Suez Canal, or you’ll be drowned. Frank is here, and Stella. Otherwise—my dear, why are politicians so impossible? And why is Helen behaving like a mad-woman. Really, I thought she had more brains.”

Martin had pulled up one blind during this and revealed the room. There were pink-silk walls, on which were several pictures of Lady Sunningdale of not very recent date, a pink carpet, white furniture, and a particularly large and pink bed. Lady Sunningdale, fenced, like Egypt, on the one side by Suez Canal and on the other by Sahara, was lying propped up by a quantity of huge pillows and cushions. French books with yellow covers bestrewed the bed, and fragments of chewed pages suggested that the dogs had eaten one, like Jezebel, leaving only a few very indigestible pieces. A French maid hovered uneasily about a toilet-table, and appeared to be putting things in drawers. Considered as a wreck, finally, Lady Sunningdale looked particularly large and sea-worthy.

“Miss Plympton?” asked Martin, in an extremely disengaged voice, but with his face suddenly infected by the prevailing optimism.

Lady Sunningdale drew conclusions before most people could have arrived at data.

“Yes; ever since you played to us at Chartries she has been trying to learn the ‘Merry Peasant,’” she{210} said. “She is not getting on very well; but art is long, is it not. So is life. Too long, I think, sometimes. But, my dear, the rest of them! They talk about fiscal problems and what they’ve shot. Even Frank appears to be vaguely interested in free trade or free food or free drinks or something, which is deplorable of him. I expect him here immediately. My bedroom is the only place where one can be free from those intolerable bores. There are three, three cabinet ministers in the house! Really, politics ought to be considered a dangerous habit, like morphia. In fact, there is a very great resemblance between them. They are both drugs that send me to sleep, and the habit grows on one. You have to take more and more, and the result is death of the intellect, which is quite as lamentable as death of the body, and renders you far more tiresome to other people. For, after all, when one’s body is dead one is put away. But people whose intellect is dead are not put away at all; they pervade society. There is no one in the world so lost as the intellectually lost. How big hell must be! Talking of that, how is your father? What a bear!”

Martin had settled himself in a rose-coloured chair, and gave a great shout of laughter, suddenly checked.

“Quite well,” he said. “He always is.”

“Yes, that is so like him,” said she. “But, really, have you any strain of insanity in your very extraordinary family? My darlings, did I kick you? Oh, Sahara, naughty! All that book, and I hadn’t read it. Commandez du thé, Hortense. So convenient, she doesn’t know a word of English. Did you ever see such a murderish-looking woman? But she can make hats out of a tooth-brush and some waste-paper. Some{211} day she will kill me for my diamonds, and find out afterwards that they are paste. Then she will be sorry, and so shall I. Do attend, monster. Can you tell me why Helen, head over ears in love with him,—that was why I brought them together,—should behave like that? Shutting herself up with the bear and that dreadful aunt of yours who plays Patience. And Frank thinks, in some confused way, that it is so beautiful. He looks so funny when Helen’s name is mentioned, rather like a widower, who hears a hymn-tune in four sharps on Sunday evening. So frightfully old-fashioned, that sort of thing. Those two find a sort of spiritual thrill in standing a hundred miles apart and shouting ‘Caro mio! O Carissima!’ to each other at the tops of their voices. I can’t bear that sort of Platonic love. Yes, you Challoners are all mad. If Becky Sharp lived with Savonarola in a grand piano, you would find a little Challoner crying on the drawing-room carpet one morning.”

“Why Becky Sharp?” he inquired, parenthetically.

“Only to add a little joie-de-vivre. No imputation on your morals.”

Lady Sunningdale struggled to a sitting attitude on the bed. Several French books flopped to the ground, and were instantly worried by the dogs: Zó’hár and A Rebours flew in gnawed fragments about the room.

Martin agreed with Lady Sunningdale in the view she took of Helen’s conduct, but he felt bound to defend his sister against so wild an attack.

“Anyhow, she’s doing a difficult thing because she thinks it right,” he said. “Give her credit for the difficulty.”

“Difficult?” cried Lady Sunningdale. “There is{212} no merit in doing a difficult thing just because it’s difficult. I might just as well try to stand on my head in the drawing-room and say to my wondering guests, ‘Admire me, please. Though foolish, this is difficult, and is only accomplished by prayer and fasting.’ Is that profane? I think it must be, because my father was a Nonconformist, and whenever I say anything without thinking, it is nearly sure to be a reminiscence of my unhappy childish days, and comes out of the Bible. But it doesn’t prove that a thing is the least worth doing because it is difficult. She is standing on her head, then? And in a parsonage, too!”

“Yes, it amounts to that,” said Martin. “But with a moral purpose.”

There was a discreet tap at the door and Hortense entered with tea.

“Ah, muffins,” said Lady Sunningdale, in a mollified tone. “The under-piece, please, Martin. How delicious! But, though I am not cynical, I always a little distrust moral purposes. ............