privations and persecutions, their faults, their dumb or stupid
fidelities, their very vices even, had been the source in him of a
constant and secret affection. For their vices came from their long
martyrdom, and their martyrdom from their faith. New influences had
worked upon himself, influences linking him with a more European and
militant Catholicism, as compared with that starved and local type from
which he sprang. But through it all his family pride, his sense of
ancestry with all its stimulus and obligations, had but grown. He was
proud of calamity, impoverishment, isolation; they were the scars on
pilgrims' feet--honour-marks left by the oppressor. His bare and rained
house, his melancholy garden, where not a bed or path had suffered change
since the man who planned them had refused to comply with the Test Act,
and so forfeited his seat in Parliament; his dwindling resources, his
hermit's life and fare--were they not all joy to him? For years he had
desired to be a Jesuit; the obligations of his place and name had stood
in the way. And short of being a son of St. Ignatius, he exulted in being
a Helbeck--the more stripped and despised, the more happy--with those
maimed generations behind him, and the triumph of his faith, his faith
and theirs, gilding the mind's horizon.

And now after just four months of temptation he stands there, racked with
desire for this little pagan creature, this girl without a single
Christian sentiment or tradition, the child of an infidel father, herself
steeped in denial and cradled in doubt, with nothing meekly feminine
about her on which to press new stamps--and knowing well why she denies,
if not personally and consciously, at least by a kind of inheritance.

The tangled garden, slowly yielding its splendours to the morning light,
the walls of the old house, springing sheer from the grass like the
native rock itself--for the first time he feels a gulf between himself