But she—Helen—was alone. No field-card for her—no last kiss at Victoria, no trophy, no hope.
Hugh had been posted as a deserter. It was some hideous mistake, Helen knew that, but the world did not know. Hugh! Hugh dishonored, despised. She knew that he had not deserted. But what had happened? Had he been killed? Had his mind broken? That he had not taken his own life—at least not knowingly—that she knew. But what, what, then, had happened? He had disappeared from her, as from every one else—no trace—not a clue. Where was he? How was he? Did he live? Not a word came—not a whisper—not a hint. And his name was branded. Her name—the name she had dreamed to wear in bridal white and in motherhood. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde”—“Helen Pryde”—how often she had written those, alone in her room—as girls will. “Mrs. Hugh Pryde,” she had liked it the better of the two, and sometimes she had held it to her dimpling, flushed face before she had burned it.
For what the world thought, for what the world said, she held her young head but the higher, and went among men but the more proudly. But under her pride and her scorn her heart ached until she felt old and palsied—and some days she looked it.
She put pictures of Hugh about her rooms conspicuously. Caroline Leavitt and Stephen both wished she had not, but neither commented on it; neither dared. Angela Hilary loved her for it as she had not done before. And for it Horace Latham formed a far higher estimate of her than he had in her happier girl-days.
Spring grew to summer, summer sickened to winter. Still Hugh did not come, or send even a word. The wind whined and sneered in the leafless trees, rattling their naked branches. The snow lay cold on the ground.
A few days after her father’s funeral, Helen left Deep Dale—forever, she thought. But such servants as the war had left them there, she retained there, and there she established her “Aunt Caroline.”
Mrs. Leavitt had been well enough pleased to stay as vicereine at Deep Dale. She would have preferred to come and go with Helen; Curzon Street had its points, but Helen preferred to be alone and said so simply, brooking no dispute. If the girl had been willful before, she was adamant now. Even Stephen found it not easy to suggest or to argue, and never once when he did carried his point.
She locked up the library herself, and forbade that any should enter it in her absence. She pocketed her father’s keys, and scarcely troubled to reply to the suggestion that they might be needed by her cousin.
She had lived alone—except for her servants—in Curzon Street. At that Caroline Leavitt had protested—“so young a girl without even a figure head of a chaperon will be misunderstood”—and as much more along the same lines of social rectitude and prudence as Helen would tolerate.
Helen’s toleration was brief. “My mourning is chaperon enough,” she said curtly, “and if it isn’t, it is all I shall ever have. I wish to be alone. I intend to be.”