"No," said Alicia. "But that reminds me. Benjy Porker owes me five quid off a game a fortnight ago at Addy Blake's. Glad you've reminded me, Thomas. That young man wants watching. Plays badly too—why in that very game he had four hearts——"
Henry's cup was full. Why, again, had he spoken? When would he learn the right words on the right occasion? Why had he painted himself even blacker than before in Lady Bell-Hall's sight?
He went up to the library hating Tom Duncombe, but hating himself even more.
He sat down at his table determining to put in an hour at such slave-driving over the letters as they had never known in all their little lives. At four o'clock punctually he intended to present himself in Mrs. Tenssen's sitting-room.
When he had been stirring the letters about for some ten minutes or so the quiet and peace of the library once again settled beautifully around him. It seemed to enfold him as though it loved him and wished him to know it. Once again the strange hallucination stole into his soul that the past was the present and the present the past, that there was no time nor place and that only thinking made it so, and that the only reality, the only faith, the only purpose in this life or in any other was love—love of beauty, of character, of truth, love above all of one human being for another. He was touched to an almost emotional softness by Duncombe's action that morning. Touched, too, to the very soul by his own love affair, and touched finally to-day by the sense that he had that old books in the library, and the times and the places and the people that they stood for, were stretching out hands to him, trying to make him hear their voices.
"Only love us enough and we shall live. Everything lives by love. Touch us with some of your own enchantment. You are calling us back to life by caring for us. . . ." He stopped, his head up, his pen arrested, listening—as though he did in very truth hear voices coming to him from different parts of the room.
What he did hear, however, was the opening of the library door, and what he beheld was Tom Duncombe's bulky figure standing for a moment hesitating in the doorway. He came forward but did not see Henry immediately. He stood again, listening, one finger to his lip like a schoolboy about to steal jam. Henry bent his head over his letters, but with one eye watched. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone with that entrance. He hated Tom Duncombe and hated him for reasons more conclusive than personal, wounded vanity. Duncombe took some further steps and then suddenly saw Henry. He stopped dead, staring, then as Henry did not turn, but stayed with head bent forward, he moved on again still cautiously and with the clumsy hesitating, step that was especially his.
He arrived at his brother's table and stopped there. Henry, looking sideways, could see half Duncombe's heavy body, the red cheek, the thick arm and large, ill-shaped fingers. Those same fingers, he perceived, were taking up letters and papers from the table and putting them down again.
Then, like a sudden blow on the heart, certain words of Sir Charles's spoken a week or two before came back to Henry. "By the way, Trenchard," he had said, "if I'm out and you're ever alone in the library here I want you to be especially careful to allow no one to touch the papers on my table, nor to permit any one to open a drawer—any one, mind you, not even my brother, unless I've told you first that he may. I leave you in charge—you or old Moffatt (the ancient butler), and if you are going, and I'm not yet back, lock the library and give the keys to Moffatt."