"Then my grandmother--ah! well, that is too long a story. She was a Frenchwoman--we have some of her books in my study. She never got on with England and English people--and at last, after her husband's death, she never went outside the house and park. My father owed much of his shyness and oddity to her bringing up. When she felt herself dying she went over to her family to die at Nantes. She is buried there; and my father was sent to the Jesuit school at Nantes for a long time. Then my mother--But I mustn't bore you with these family tales."
He turned to look at his listener. Laura was by this time half embarrassed, half touched.
"I should like to hear about your mother," she said rather stiffly.
"You may talk to me if you like, but don't, pray, presume upon it!"--that was what her manner said.
Helbeck smiled a little, unseen, under his black moustache.
"My mother was a great lover of books--the only Helbeck, I think, that ever read anything. She was a friend and correspondent of Cardinal Wiseman's--and she tried to make a family history out of the papers here. But in her later years she was twisted and crippled by rheumatic gout--her poor fingers could not turn the pages. I used to help her sometimes; but we none of us shared her tastes. She was a very happy person, however."
Happy! Why? Laura felt a fresh prick of irritation as he paused. Was she never to escape--not even here, in the April sun, beside the river bank! For, of course, what all this meant was that the really virtuous and admirable woman does not roam the world in search of art and friendship; she makes herself happy at home with religion and rheumatic gout.
But Helbeck resumed. And instantly it struck her that he had dropped a sentence, and was taking up the thread further on.
"But there was no priest in the house then, for the Society could not spare us one; and very few services in the chapel. Through all her young days nothing could be poorer or raggeder than English Catholicism. There was no church at Whinthorpe. Sunday after Sunday my father used to read the prayers in the chapel, which was half a lumber-room. I often think no Dissent could have been barer; but we heard Mass when we could, and that was enough for us. One of the priests from Stonyhurst came when she died. This is her little missal."
