"It's what he cared for more than anything," Henry cried. "It's got to be beautiful."
"I'll be here to-morrow then," said Spencer, gathered his papers together and went.
Henry walked round, touching the backs of the books with his hand. He had known that this would be. There was no surprise here. But that he would never see Sir Charles again nor hear his odd, dry, ironical voice, nor see his long nose raise itself across the table—that was strange. That was indeed incredible. His mind wandered back to that day when Duncombe had first looked at the letters and then, when Henry was expecting curses, had blessed him instead. That indeed had been a crisis in his life—a crisis like the elopement of Katherine with Philip, the outbreak of the War, the meeting with Christina—one of the great steps of the ladder of life. He felt now, as we all must feel when some one we love has gone, the burden of all the kindness undone, the courtesy unexpressed, the tenderness untended.
And then he comforted himself, still wandering, pressing with his hands the old leather backs and the faded gilding, with the thought that at least, out there at Duncombe, Sir Charles had loved him and had spoken out the things that were really in his heart, the things that he would not have said to any one for whom he had not cared. That last night in Duncombe, the candle lighting the old room, Sir Charles had kissed him as he might his own dearly loved son. And perhaps even now he had not gone very far away.
Henry climbed the little staircase into the gallery and moved into the dusky corners. He came to the place that he always loved best, where the old English novelists were, Bage and Mackenzie and absurd Clara Reeved and Mrs. Opie and Godwin.
He took out Barham Downs and turned over the leaves, repeating to himself the old artificial sentences, the redundant moralizing; the library closed about him, put its arms around him, and told him once again, as it had told him once before, that death is not the end and that friendship and love know no physical boundaries.
Hearing a step he looked up and saw below him Lady Bell-Hall. She raised her little pig-face to the gallery and then waited, a black doll, for him to come down to her.
When he was close to her she said very quietly: "My brother died under the operation."
"Yes, I have heard," Henry said.
She put out her hand and timidly touched him on the arm: "Every one matters now for whom he cared," she said. "And he cared for you very much. Only yesterday when I saw in the nursing-home he said how much he owed to you. He wanted us to be friends. I hope that we shall be."