“No one to be with you at all—to take care of you,” Stephen had contributed once to Mrs. Leavitt’s urgency.
“No one at all, until Hugh comes home to take care of me.”
Pryde bit his lip angrily, and said no more.
Helen was her own mistress absolutely.
A will disposing of so large a fortune had not often been briefer than Richard Bransby’s, and no will had ever been clearer.
There were a few minor bequests. Caroline Leavitt was provided for handsomely, and so also were Stephen and Hugh. (The will had been signed in 1911.) To Stephen had been left the management of the vast business. Everything else—and it was more than nine-tenths of the immense estate—was Helen’s, absolutely, without condition or control. And even Stephen’s management was subject to her veto, even the legacies to others subject to her approval. She had approved, of course, at once, and the legacies were now irrevocable. But Stephen’s dictatorship she could terminate a year from the day she expressed and recorded her desire to do so, and in the meantime she could greatly curtail it. Bransby had left her heir to an autocracy. And already, in several small ways, her rule had been autocratic. Always willful, her sorrow had hardened her, and Stephen knew that when their wills clashed, hers would be maintained, no matter at what cost to him. Where she was indifferent, he could have his way absolutely. Where she was interested, he could have no part of it, unless it luckily chanced to be identical with hers. He understood, and he chafed. But also he was very careful.
He lived still in Pont Street, in the bachelor rooms he and Hugh had had since their ’Varsity days; for Bransby had liked to have Helen to himself often.
Stephen spent as much time with his cousin as she would let him, and he had from the day of his uncle’s death. And he “looked after” her as much as she would brook.
Vast as the Bransby fortune had been, even in this short time of his stewardship he had increased it by leaps and bounds. A great fortune a year ago, now it was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the war-fortunes. They still built ships and sailed them. He had suggested nothing less to Helen—he had not dared. But they dealt in aircraft too. Stephen had suggested that at a favorable moment, and she had conceded it listlessly.
Air was still his element, and its conquest his desire. His own room at Pont Street was now, as it had been all along, and as every nook of his very own when a boy had been, an ordered-litter of aeroplane models, aerodrome plans, “parts,” schemes, dreams sketched out, estimates, schedules, inventions tried and untried, lame and perfected. They knew him at the Patent Office, and at least one of his own contrivances was known and flown in both hemispheres.