“Why, Laura was the youngest, and would scarcely dare to speak to Bertha as I did, and they were more confidential with one another than with me, though now that Laura is a woman, I know that she has learned to love me the best.”
“Laura was her confidant.”
“At one time very much so. Partly it was my fault—perhaps I made too few allowances for Bertha’s nature, and partly, dear, it was your own, for I was thinking a great deal more about your letters, and your making your way upwards in life, to care for the girls’ chatter about the heroes of novels, and the divinely handsome men they had seen riding through the village.”
“Come, I am leading you into cheerfulness, dear, and now be prepared to laugh at what I am going to ask.”
“Will I laugh if it is anything that shows me daylight?”
“It seems to me possible that Bertha, in some of those sentimental moods, as you very properly call them, may have got entangled in some of the meshes which are constantly spread for the young, by Catholic missionaries, some of whom, I dare say, believe that they are doing good work, and that she may have drawn in Laura with her. What particular form of entanglement it may have been I don’t just now try to guess, but such things are.”
“Those Jesuits, perhaps, who are so clever.”
“Well, they tell us that they are. I have met a good many, and thought them much too clever to do harm, seeing that ‘Beware of Mantraps’ was as plainly to be read in the down look, in the impertinent curiosity, and in the unfrank conversation, as ever one read it in the preserves of the squirearchy. But they manage to lay hold on the minds of the young, I fancy, and especially of girls of a mopish turn, and it is only when the young lady gets married that she recognises the absolute fitness of the Jesuit’s being kicked down stairs. Before that time he may have wound his way into some of her secrets, and may afterwards use them in his own fashion. Were there any Jesuits at Lipthwaite?—if so, they have not done you much harm.”
“Well, there was a dear old Catholic priest who was never out of the houses of the poor, and who died at last of typhus caught by a sick bed.”
“Ah! but he was a gentleman as well as a priest. I remember his white hands and courtly manner, though I saw him but once. But you had no real Jesuit at Lipthwaite.”
“No. There was a writing-master at Mrs. Spagley’s, a man whom I detested, though he was a clever man, too, and some of us elder girls had a notion that he was a Jesuit, but I suppose, now, that it was all nonsense, and that we thought him one only because he dressed in black, and made silky kinds of answers to questions, never telling you what you wanted to know.”
“That is a little in their line, too. Did Bertha know him?”
“Yes, I tell you, he was our writing-master.”
“What was his name?”
“Hardwick—Mr. Ernest Hardwick—I remember it well by a girl’s joke that he was never in earnest.”
“He dressed in black,” repeated Charles Hawkesley, “but, pooh, that is nothing—a good many thousands of honest men do that—but I feel it is nonsense, and yet, while one is holding an imaginary thread, tell me—was he intimate with you beyond the relations of teacher and pupil?”
“He used to call sometimes at the Hut, but papa’s talk was too much in earnest for him, and he had a scoffing kind of manner with men, which papa did not like, so there was not much intimacy. But, my dearest Charles, how on earth can you connect a country writing-master with Laura’s disappearance?”
“Perhaps not at all, and yet I have an odd persistence in following up a trace of a story. Beatrice, what was Laura’s reason, when she sat for that portrait, for being painted with a rosary?”
“Is she? To be sure she is, I have seen it a thousand times. It never occurred to me to think why. I supposed that it was a fancy of the painter.”
“Very likely it was. I dare say that it was. But suppose that it was not, and that something was symbolised.”
“Do you mean to say that you think Laura is a concealed Catholic, and that some one has come to claim her and take her away to a convent. Good Heavens, Charles, can such things be done?”
“My dearest, you hasten to fill up a very imperfect outline of mine, and not exactly in the way I intended. We have not the least real basis upon which to build our conjectures, but having nothing to do but conjecture—except one thing, which I will tell you presently—a sort of idea, hardly worth calling one, presents itself. My dear Beatrice, Laura is too good to be suspected of wrong, Laura is too wise to be suspected of aberration, but is it on the cards that Bertha—”
“Bertha!”
“Stop. That Bertha, who does not love her husband,” said Hawkesley, speaking slowly and distinctly, as if he wished her to scan every idea as he presented it,—“that Bertha, who, at all events, appears not to love her husband, which, the husband considered, is a very singular fact—should have united herself, in other days, to the Catholic church, and should have induced Laura to do the same?”
“Impossible.”
“I may think so too, but hear me out. Bertha has long been residing in a Catholic country, and old feelings may have revived, to say nothing of the system of proselytism, which is always on the look out for its prey, and which would not be long in discovering an impressionable woman who had once believed.”
“When you put such an idea into words it seems reasonable,” said Beatrice, “but I feel it is the vaguest guessing.”
“So it is, and let us guess on. Bertha has been re-converted, and I need not tell you that the first result of such a process would be to alienate her from her heretic husband, and to withdraw her confidences from him. Hence, we may get at that estrangement which we were deploring the other morning, and acquit Bertha of the horrible stupidity of not appreciating such a man as Robert Urquhart.”
