Servants carried high-tea in just then, and Stephen slipped into the room with it.
Caroline Leavitt rolled up her crocheting disapprovingly. She detested having food carried all over the house and devoured in inappropriate places, and she disliked high-tea. Crumbs got on the Persian carpet and cream on the carved chairs, and once, when the hybrid refection had been served in the drawing-room, jam had encrusted the piano. Caroline had gained a prize for “piano proficiency” in her girlhood’s long-ago. Every day at four-fifteen it was her habit to commemorate that old victory by playing at least a few bars of the Moonlight Sonata. For some time after the episode of the jam, whenever she touched the instrument’s ivory, small bubbles of thickly boiled blackberry and apple billowed up on to her manicured nails and her rings. No—she did not approve of “high-tea”—and such high-tea “all over the house.” But this was the children’s hour at Deep Dale, and the children’s feast—and wherever Helen chanced to be at that hour, there that meal was served. Helen willed it so. Richard Bransby willed it so. Against such an adamant combine of power and of will-force determined and arrogant, Caroline knew herself a mere nothing, and she wisely withheld a protest she realized hopeless.
So now, she laid her lace-work carefully away, and addressed herself to the silver tea-pot. And she did it in a cheerful manner. She was not a profound woman, but she was a wise one. The unprofound are often very wise. And this is especially true of women.
CHAPTER V
It was not a boisterous meal. There was not a naturally noisy person there. Bransby was too cold, Stephen too sensitive, Hugh too heavy, to be given to the creation of noise. Mrs. Leavitt thought it bad form, and she was just lowly enough of birth to be tormentedly anxious about good form. And she was inclined to be fat. Helen was ebullient at times, but never noisily so; her voice and her motions, her mirth and her reprovings, were all silvery.
It was a homely hour, and they were all in homely and friendly mood. But it was Stephen who made himself useful. It was Stephen who remembered that Aunt Caroline preferred buttered toast to cream sandwiches, and he carried her the plate on which the toast looked hottest and crispest. And it was Stephen who checked her hand unobtrusively when she came near to putting sugar in Bransby’s tea.
Helen had slipped from her father’s knee—she was a hearty little thing—and motioned Hugh to put one of a nest of tables before the chair she had selected, and dragged close to Richard’s.
“And what have you been doing all afternoon?” he asked Stephen, as the boy brought him the cake.
“Thinking.”
“Story,” Helen said promptly, through a mouthful of cream and cocoanut “You wus just watching the birds.”