Helen’s presence, her nearness to the library all the time, and her actual occupation of it whenever she chose, disconcerted him. He hoped that she would go back to Curzon Street almost at once. Anxious as he was to go over his feverish searching again and still again, he would eagerly have turned the key in the library door, and taken her back to London, deferring for a few days what he again believed and hoped would be the result and the reward of yet one more hunt. It had been great relief to feel that the deadly document was already destroyed. It would be a thousandfold more comfort to see it burn—and ten thousand times more satisfactory. He should know then. He could never know else. He should be free and unafraid then. In no other way could he ever attain unalloyed freedom, in no other way escape the rough clutch of fear.
But Helen had come to Oxshott to stay—for the present. And on the second day Pryde learned to his annoyance that she was expecting Dr. Latham by an afternoon train.
Well, what would be would be, more especially if Helen had decreed it, and he accepted the physician’s appearance with a patient shrug—as patient a shrug as he could muster.
It naturally fell to him to act host to this man guest of Helen’s, and he liked Latham more than he liked most men, and resented his intrusion as little as he could any one’s, unless Angela Hilary might have come in the doctor’s stead. Angela would have played the better into his hands, by the shrill claim she would have made upon Helen with a chatter of frocks and a running hither and thither. And, too, he had come to enjoy Mrs. Hilary quite apart from any usefulness to be wrung from the vibrant personality. He enjoyed the breeze of it, and often turned into her hotel as other overworked and brain-fagged men run down to Brighton or Folkestone for a day of relaxation, and the tonic sea-air. He had come to find positive refreshment in occasional whiffs of her saline sparkle, and no little diversion in speculating as to what she would say next, and about what. And this of the woman of whom he had once said that she and her inconsequent chatter of kaleidoscope nonsenses reminded him of nothing but the wild fluttings and distraught flutterings of a hen in front of a motor! Truly with him she was an acquired taste. But as truly he had acquired it. He had come more nearly to know her—her as she was, as well as her as she seemed. Many people acquired that taste—when they came to more know the blithe alien—and not a few felt it instinctively at the first of acquaintance.
But Angela Hilary was not here, and Horace Latham was—and Pryde did his best to make the latter’s visit pleasant, but without the slightest effort or wish to prolong it.
“Do you know, Pryde,” Latham said musingly, as they smoked together after dinner—alone for the moment in the library—“it always puzzled me——”
“Puzzled you?”
“I have so often wondered about it—it came so suddenly—Bransby’s death. As a physician I could not just understand it then, and I have never been quite able to understand it since. And as a physician—I’d like to. It’s been rather like losing track of the end of a case you’ve been at particular pains to diagnose. It’s unsatisfactory.”
“I don’t quite see——”
“It must have been a shock that killed him—a great shock.” Latham’s voice and manner were the manner and voice of his consulting-room. He was probing—kindly and easily—but probing skillfully. Pryde felt it distinctly. “Did he, by any chance, know that your brother intended to desert?”