She answered him gently. “Just to think of Daddy. You know I haven’t been here since——”
His love, his tenderness reasserted his manhood then. “Of course—forgive me—I understand—I did not mean to speak sharply—but I hate to see you grieve so.” For a moment he stood looking down on her bowed head. Then he just touched her hand—it lay on the back of her chair—lingeringly, reverently, and said again as he went from the room, “I hate to see you grieve so.”
The girl sat bowed and brooding. After a time she rose and moved about the familiar place, touching old trifles, recalling old scenes. She stood a long time by the bookcase gazing at the volumes he had loved and handled, peering with brimming eyes at their well-known titles. She did not touch the jade Joss, but she lingered at it longest, choking, trembling. Then her face cleared—transfigured. A rapt look came over it—a look of love, longing, great expectation. Men have turned such looks to the bride of an hour. Mothers have bent such looks on the babe first, and new come, at their breast. She reached out her young arms in acceptance, obedience, greeting, entreaty—and said to the air—to the room—“I’m here, Daddy. I’m here.”
CHAPTER XXVII
But no father came to her call, no companion from the void to her tryst. She waited, feeling, or thinking that she felt, the air touch her hair, brush her face, cool but kindly, and once cross her lips. She waited, but only the light air, or her fancy of it, came.
She knelt down by the old chair in which she had seen him last until she had seen him in his majesty, on the floor, in the hall. She laid her head on the seat that had been his, and wept there softly, disappointed, overwrought.
Some one was coming; some one very much of this world. High heels clattered on the inlaid hall floor, silk sounded crisply, and an expensive Persian perfume—attar probably—came in as a hand turned the knob on the other side and pushed the door open, and with the perfume the silken frou-frou, a jumble of several furs, lace and pearls, and Angela in a very big hat and a chinchilla coat. She closed the door behind her—an odd thing for an unexpected, uninvited guest to do, and she closed it quietly, for her very quietly. She tip-toed across the room stealthily, caught sight of Helen and screamed.
At the sound of some one coming Helen had risen to her feet and pulled herself together with the quick pluck of her sex. But she was still too overwrought to grasp entirely the strangeness of her friend’s behavior. Mrs. Hilary was dumfounded. She had thought Helen in London. She had crept into the house through a side door, come through the halls secretly and as silently as such shoes and so much silk and many draperies could, meeting no one and hoping neither to be seen nor heard. Her errand was particularly private. She had not been surprised to find the library door unlocked, for she had not been deeper in the house than the drawing-room since Mr. Bransby’s death. She and Mrs. Leavitt were far from intimate. And Mrs. Hilary had not heard of the taboo Helen had placed on the father’s room. She was dumfounded to find Helen here, and bitterly disappointed. But she noticed little amiss with the girl. Each was too agitated to realize the agitation of the other.
Helen pulled herself together and waited, Angela pulled herself together and gushed; each with the woman’s shrewd instinct to appear natural and much as usual.
Angela supplemented her cry of dismay with an even shriller cry of enthusiastic delight.