Then a cold, gray cloud obscured the vision, a gust of cold air set him shivering, and he was alone once more with his silent fear.
In his own home his conduct was marked by the same contradictions. He would arrive from the city at nightfall, enter the house in a fierce bustle of energy, talking eagerly, laughing loudly; and then, as like as not, in the midst of dinner, would relapse into a heavy silence. The chief subject of his talk on these occasions, was the things he meant to do with his increasing wealth. He had engaged a firm of architects to plan a country house for him, although the site was not yet found nor the estate bought. He would spend hours over the details of this house. It would be such a house as was never built before. It should have a marble swimming-pool, electric ovens, and a vast palm-garden. For its decoration he would import marble fireplaces from Italian palaces, tapestries from France, oak carving from Holland. Of course it would have a picture-gallery—every gentleman had that. He would employ an expert to collect the pictures. And of course there would be a great library, and vast stables, and a private golf-course, and sheets of ornamental water, and extensive gardens.
"Have you done anything more about the new house?" Helen would ask, as she fluttered up to him with a perfunctory kiss.
"Not to-day. It's been a busy day in the city. But we'll have a look at the plans presently."
And then the plans would be unrolled, and the details once more discussed, and new features added.
"I'm tired of this old house," Helen would cry, with pretty petulance. "I don't see the good of being rich if you've got to live here."
"And you won't live here much longer. Wait till the war is over, and then you shall take your place with the greatest ladies of the land."
And then Helen would blush with pleasure, her light mind inflated with pride, her imagination picturing a bright butterfly flight through all kinds of glittering scenes. Mrs. Masterman, silent as ever, took no part in these conversations. They were to her a source of pain; but to Helen they were the breath of life. In the future she pictured to herself her mother had no part. But she saw herself with singular distinctness moving on a high plane of circumstance and pleasure, and she made it her aim to foster her father's vanity as a means of gratifying her own.
"Father's easy enough to manage," she often told herself. And yet there were many occasions when her boast was rudely falsified. Did she never notice the sudden shadow that fell across her father's face? Did she never ask why it was he would angrily sweep the plans of his new house aside, crying that, maybe, he would never want them after all, and would stalk off in gloomy silence to his own room, where he sat alone until long after the midnight hour had struck? No; she never guessed the cause of these explosions. But her mother did, and trembled.
And amid all these aberrations, perhaps the most curious was that his mind appeared to have received a new bias toward religion.