However it was, however it came, there was a high something, a fineness, on Stephen Pryde’s face that no one else of his milieu had—not even Helen, certainly not Hugh; but his, for all time, to descend with him into the grave, to go with him wherever he went, Heavenward or Hellward—his gift and his birth-right. Few indeed ever sensed this. Spirituality was almost the last trait friends or relatives would have attributed to him. But one acquaintance had espied it—the American woman, whom he had held in some sneering tolerance in the days of their first meeting. “He has the face of a saint—a sour saint—but a saint, a soul apart,” Angela had said of him the day he had been introduced to her. And he had said of her after the same occasion, “What a preposterous rattle of a woman! She rushes from whim to absurdity, back and forth and getting nowhere—‘cluck, cluck, cluck’—like a hen in front of a motor-car.” And this of the woman who had understood him at a glance, as his own people had not in a lifetime. Why? Another riddle. Perhaps it was because, underneath her cap and bells, Angela Hilary, too, wore the hallmark, smaller, lighter cut—but there, and the same. There is no greater mistake—and none made more often—than to think that those who laugh and dance through life are earthbound. Heaven is full of little children, clustered at her knee, playing with Our Lady’s beads.
After Stephen, dreamer and sinner, Angela Hilary had the most spiritual of all the personalities with which this tale is concerned; and, after her, the self-contained, conventional, well-groomed doctor of Harley Street.
Mrs. Leavitt’s step came along the hall, and her voice, upbraiding some domestic delinquency, ordering tea and toast.
With a shivering effort, Pryde rose from his seat, put the handkerchief away carefully—in his pocket, and strolled nonchalantly into the hall, closing the door behind him.
The jade Joss had the room to himself.
CHAPTER XXIII
About noon the next day Helen motored from London and took them all by surprise.
Mrs. Leavitt was delighted. It was lonely at Deep Dale—very lonely sometimes. For the first time in his life Stephen was sorry to see his cousin. Her visit, he felt, foreboded no good to his momentary enterprise, and her presence could but be something of an entanglement. He was manager—dictator almost—at Cockspur Street, at the Poultry and at Weybridge, and could carry it off with some show of authority, and with some reality of it too. But here he was nothing, nobody. Helen was everything here. No one else counted. Her rule was gentle, but not Bransby’s own had been more autocratic or less to be swayed except by her own fancy or whim.
Only too well he knew how this home-coming would move her. What might she not order and countermand? Her permission to him to search and to docket had been scant and reluctant enough in London. Here, any instant she might rescind it. Above all he dreaded her presence in the library—both for its interference with his further searching (of course he had determined to search the already much-searched room again) and for the effect of the room and its associations upon her.
She had little to say to him, and almost he seemed to avoid her. But he ventured to follow her to the library the afternoon of her arrival—and he did it for her sake almost as much as for his own.