CHAPTER XXX. HELEN AWAKE.

That Sunday-dinner was a very quiet meal. An old friend of Mrs. Ramshorn, a lady-ecclesiastic like herself, dined with them; what the two may have said to each other in secret conclave, I cannot tell, but not a word of remark upon Mr. Wingfold or his sermon was heard at table.

As she was leaving the room, Bascombe whispered Helen to put on something and come to him in the garden. Helen glanced at the window as if doubtful. It was cold, but the sun was shining; the weather had nothing to do with it; she had but taken a moment to think. She pressed her lips together—and consented. George saw she would rather not go, but he set it down to a sisterly unwillingness to enjoy herself when her brother could no longer behold the sun, and such mere sentiment must not be encouraged.

When the cypresses and box-trees had come betwixt them and the house, he offered his arm, but Helen preferred being free. She did not refuse to go into the summer-house with him; but she took her place on the opposite side of the little table. George however spied no hint of approaching doom.

"I am sorry to have to alter my opinion of that curate," he said as he seated himself. "There was so much in him that I took to promise well. But old habit, the necessities of existence, and the fear of society have been too much for him—as they will always be for most men. He has succumbed at last, and I am sorry! I did think he was going to turn out an honest man!"

"And you have come to the certain conclusion that he is not an honest man, George?"

"Assuredly."

"Why?"

"Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure about."

"He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure about.—You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain there is not?"

"Yes; absolutely certain."

"On what grounds?"

"On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear," answered George a little impatiently. "I am not inclined to talk about them now.—I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon."

"And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time actually exist."

"Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a false one."

"A truer one than you think, perhaps," said Helen. "That a thing should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while yours is not."

"By Jove, Helen! you've got on with your logic. I feel quite flattered! So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch but myself! You'll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!"

Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said seriously,

"Well, George, all I have to suggest is—What if, after all your inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to your—satisfaction, shall I say?—that there IS a God?"

"Don't trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen," returned George, whose mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was anxiously, and heedlessly, clearing the way: "I am prepared to take my chance, and all I care about is whether you will take your chance with me. Helen, I love you with my whole soul."

"Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn't!"

"It IS a foolish form of speech, no doubt," returned Bascombe, a little disconcerted, as was natural. "—But to be serious, Helen, I do love you."

"How long will you love me if I tell you I don't love you?"

"Really, Helen, I don't see how to answer such a question. I don't understand you at all to-day! Have I offended you? I am very sorry if I have, but I am quite in the dark as to when or where or how."

"Tell me then," said Helen, heedless of his evident annoyance and discomfort, "how long will you love me if I love you in return?"

"For ever and ever."

"Another form of speech?"

"You know what I mean well enough. I shall love you as long as I live."

"George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die for ever."

"But, Helen," pleaded Bascombe, "if it can't be helped, you know!"

"But you are content it should be so. You believe it willingly. You scoff at any hint of a possible immortality."

"Well, but, Helen, what difference can it make between you and me?" returned George, whom the danger of losing her had rendered for the moment indifferent even to his most cherished theory. "If there should be anything afterwards, of course I should go on loving you to the very extreme of the possible."

"While now you don't love me enough to wish I may live and not die! Leaving that out of view however, it makes all the difference to the love I should have to expect of you. It may be only a whim—I can prove nothing any more than you—but I have a—whim then—to be loved as an immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a helpless bastard of Nature!—I beg your pardon—I forget my manners."

That a lady should utter such a word!—and that lady, Helen!—George was shocked. Coming on the rest, it absolutely bewildered him. He sat silent perforce. Helen saw it, and yielded to a moment's annoyance with herself, but presently resumed:

"I have given you the advantage, George, and wronged myself. But I don't care MUCH. I shall only take the better courage to speak my mind.—You come asking me to love you, and my brother lying mouldering in the earth—all there is of him, you tell me! If you believed he was alive still, and I should find him again some day, there would be no reason why you should not speak of love even now; for where does anyone need love more than at the brink of the grave? But to come talking of love to me, with the same voice that has but just been teaching me that the grave is the end of all, and my brother gone down into it for ever—I tell you, cousin—I must say it—it seems to me hardly decent. For me at least—I will NOT be loved with the love that can calmly accept such a fate. And I will never love any man, believing that, if I outlive him, my love must thereafter be but a homeless torrent, falling ever into a bottomless abyss. Why should I make of my heart a roaring furnace of regrets and self-accusations? The memory of my brother is for me enough. Let me keep what freedom is possible to me; let me rather live the life of a cold-blooded animal, and die in the ice that gathers about me. But before I sit down to await such an end, I shall know whether I am indeed compelled to believe as you do that there is no God, that Death is my lord and master, that he will take me as he has taken my brother and yet I shall never see him more. No, cousin George, I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? Yes, I know you think you can explain it all, but the way you account for it is just as miserable as what you would put in its place. I am not complete in myself like you. I am not able to live without a God. I will seek him until I find him, or drop into the abyss where all question and answer ceases. Then in the end I shall be no worse than you would have me at the beginning—no, it will be nothing so bad, for then I shall not know my misery as you would have me know it now. If we are creatures of nothing, in spite of all the outcry of our souls against that fate, what mighty matter is it if, thus utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves, by believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems as if it ought to be true? How can a devotion to the facts of her existence be required of one whose nature has been proved to her a lie?—You speak from the facts of your nature, George; I speak from the facts of mine."

Helen had come awake at last! It would have suited George better had she remained a half-quickened statue, responsive only to himself, her not over-potent Pygmalion. He sat speechless—with his eyes fixed on her.

"You need no God," she went on, "therefore you seek none. If you need none, you are right to seek none, I dare say. But I need a God—oh, I cannot tell how I need him, if he be to be found! and by the same reasoning I will give my life to the search for him. To the last I will go on seeking him, for if once I give in, and confess there is no God, I shall go mad—mad, and perhaps kill somebody like poor Poldie. George, I have said my say. I would not have come into the garden but to say it. Good-bye."

As she spoke she rose and held out her hand to him. But in the tumult of more emotions than I can well name—amongst the rest indignation, dismay, disappointment, pride, and chagrin, he lost himself while searching in vain for words, paid no heed to her movement, and lifted no hand to take that she offered.

With head erect she walked from the summer-house.

"The love of a lifetime!—a sweet invitation!" she said to herself, as with the slow step of restrained wrath she went up the garden.

George sat for some minutes as she had left him. Then he broke the silence in his own ears and said,

"Well, I'm damned!"

And so he was—for the time—and a very good thing too, for he required it.