When Latham returned to the library he found Helen sitting by the writing-table, one hand lying idly and resting on the jade paper weight. He spoke to her, and she looked up and smiled at him rather vacantly, but she said nothing. He gave her a sharp look, and then picked up a magazine and sat down, pretending to read.
She sat very still. She seemed resting—and though he watched her, he decided not to disturb her, to make no effort to arouse her.
And so they sat without a word until Hugh came back. Latham looked round in surprise, but Helen scarcely seemed to notice.
“An hour’s reprieve,” Hugh said lightly. “Awfully decent chap in there. Knew him at the front. He’ll make it as comfortable for me as he can. I’ve told Barker to do him uncommonly well. And now, to search this room in earnest!”
Stephen followed his brother into the library. “Some one has given you away, Hugh,” he said sorrowfully. “The soldiers knew you were here, when they came—the sergeant was so positive that all my denials were useless. Who could it have been?”
“Don’t you know, Stephen?” Helen said softly, rising—the Joss in her hand, but not even glancing at Pryde.
“How on earth would Stephen know?” Hugh said, going to his brother.
Stephen put out his hand. “I—I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Hugh.”
Hugh smiled at the elder. “I know, old boy, I know. And I’m not worrying. It’ll come all right.”
Helen moved suddenly, sharply, as if some shock of electricity had currented through her. Then she spoke, and her voice was strange. “Blind—blind—blind!” It seemed as if she said it unconsciously. The three men watched her intensely, each moved and apprehensive in a different way, and from a different cause. She spoke again in the same queer, mechanical manner, but this time her voice was louder, clearer, more vibrant. “Blind—blind—blind!” To Hugh and to Latham the one word repeated again and again conveyed nothing, but suddenly Stephen Pryde remembered where he had heard it last, and he shuddered. She spoke on—“As if he were an echo of the morning—‘Blind—blind—blind’!”
“Helen!” Hugh cried, alarmed for her.
“What is it?” Latham said to her insistently.
Stephen went to her quickly. “It’s nothing,” he said sharply. “Nothing—only the parting with Hugh. It’s been a great strain on her.” He turned to Hugh. “You had better go now, quickly.”
“No, no!” she said sharply, but looking at neither of them.
“Helen!” Hugh pled—distracted.
She heard him, and ran to him, brushing by Stephen.
“My dear,” she began, and faltered.
He put his arms about her. “There—there—you’re all right.”
The voice she loved best recalled her. “Of course I am,” she said brightly.
“But why did you say those words just now?” he said, impelled to ask it, though he understood a gesture of Latham’s that forbade all simulation of her strange excitement.
“I don’t know. And I didn’t exactly seem to say them—they said themselves. I don’t know what they mean, or where they come from; but they keep running through my head—I can’t stop them somehow.”
“That’s odd,” Latham remarked, his interest in what seemed to him a unique psychological case out-weighing his fear for the patient, “very odd. I seem to have heard them before too. But I can’t think where. What’s that you have in your hand?”
“Why—why, it’s his paper-weight—Daddy’s.” She held it up and gazed at it intently, as an Indian seer gazes at his crystal. In a moment she spoke again, her voice once more quite changed. “Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?”
“What?” Latham said, unprofessionally tremulous with surprise and with interest.
“Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?” the mechanical voice repeated automatically. The girl’s face was white and expressionless as a death mask.
“‘David Copperfield’!” Stephen Pryde exclaimed hoarsely. And as he said it he knew. And Helen knew too. She had readied the light. At that moment Richard Bransby had got his message through. Stephen’s eyes went to the table where the volume lay when he left the room the night his uncle died—then slowly they traveled to the bookcase. In that moment the whole thing was clear to him—as clear as if he had seen his confession shut in the volume, the volume by some one at sometime replaced on its shelf.
And Helen had grasped the meaning of the words she had uttered so oddly, and repeatedly. She shrined the jade god in her hands, and looked raptly at its green and rose surfaces and curves. Then she put it gently down on the table, reverently too, as some devout Catholic might handle and lay down a relic most holy—a relic miraculous and well proven. A dozen lights played and quivered in and out of its multiple indentations and intricate clefts; and the rose-hue petals seemed to quiver and color in response, but the green face of the god was immovable, expressionless, mute. But Latham’s eyes, scalpel-sharp, following Helen’s hands, thought they saw a tiny eidolon star-shaped, yellow and ambient, slip from the deep of the odd little figure, and hover a moment above it significantly, before it broke with a bubble of fiercer light and dissolved in a scintillation of minute flame. And Stephen Pryde, watching only Helen, was sure that a rim of faint haze, impalpable, delicately tinted and living, bordered and framed her.
Richard Bransby had gotten his message through—recorded at the moment of his passing, and held safe ever since in the folds of the toy he had treasured and handled with years-long habit and almost with obsession—or flashed from his heart still living and potent to the soul of his child. Richard Bransby had gotten his message through. And each in their different way knew, received, and accepted it. The old room was strangely cold. But not one of the four waiting and asking felt the smallest sensation of fear—not even Stephen, defeated, convicted.
Helen spoke, and her voice rang clear and assured, the beautiful color creeping back to her face, a great light in her eyes. “Doctor—Hugh—Daddy asked me that very question just before he died.”
“That’s strange,” Latham said musingly, pondering as in all his thoughtful years of reflection he had never pondered before.
Hugh was speechless. Stephen picked up a cigarette, and laid it down again, with a bitter smile—the hopeless smile of final defeat.
“Just before he died,” Helen said.
“‘David Copperfield,’” Latham exclaimed; “of course—I remember now. Those words you just said were a quotation from ‘David Copperfield’—where he passes the blind beggar.”
“I think you are wrong, Latham.” Stephen Pryde made his last throw more in cynical indifference than in desperation. His long game was up: that was the special message that had come through to him. But he’d fight on, cool and callous now, and meet his defeat in the last ditch of all—not an inch sooner.
“No,” Latham said sternly; “I am not wrong.”
“Yes,” Stephen smiled with slight contemptuousness as he said it; “I am sure you are.”
“I’ll show you,” Latham retorted. He went to the bookcase and took down the ‘David Copperfield’ volume.
“Yes,” Helen said quietly; “‘David Copperfield’ has a message for me—from Daddy.”
“This is nonsense,” Stephen said impatiently. “Latham, I appeal to you.”
“I tell you the message is there,” Helen said imperiously.
“It’s impossible,” Pryde began with a shrug.
“Then prove it to me,” the girl said hotly; “prove it to me—that’s the only way you can convince me.”
“She’s right,” Hugh exclaimed; “of course, that’s the only way to help her.”
There was a brief, tense pause, and then Latham, assuming the judiciary and the dictatorship to which his being the one disinterested person there entitled him, said—
“Yes. Well. If there was a message, it would be in the words you just spoke—and their context.”
Helen nodded.
“I could find the place blindfold,” Latham continued. He sat down, the book still in his hand. He opened it, turned but a page or two, and said, “Yes, here it is.” The three listened with breathless eagerness, as he read, “‘There was a beggar in the street when I went down, and as I turned my head towards the window, thinking of her calm, seraphic eyes, he made me start by muttering, as if he were an echo of the morning, “Blind—Blind—Blind.”’” He closed the book and turned to Helen.
“You see,” Stephen remarked quietly, “there’s nothing in it.”
“No,” Latham concurred reluctantly, disappointed, in spite of himself, scientist as he was, skeptic as he once had thought himself; “no, your suddenly remembering those words—it could have been no more than a coincidence.”
“Yes, a coincidence,” Stephen echoed.
“That paper-weight,” the physician analyzed on, “was associated in your mind with your father. When you took it in your hand, unconsciously you went back to the last time you saw him alive.”
“That’s it,” Stephen said cordially. Really Latham could not have given better service if he had briefed him.
Helen looked from one to another, she was on the verge of a breakdown now—and just when she had been so sure. She held out her hands, and Hugh came and led her gently back to the chair by the writing-table. “Rest awhile,” he begged. “I’ll hunt in a moment.” He glanced anxiously up at the clock.
“Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” Helen sobbed; “why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?”
“Helen,” Stephen said gravely, bending over her chair, “that question is answered. Your father’s dead—the dead never return. All this belief of yours in immortality is a delusion. If you had listened to me, you would have understood. But you wouldn’t. I tried to spare you suffering, but you were so obstinate. You made me fight this dead man—” His voice, which at first had been bitter but even, grew angry and discordant. His iron nerve was cracking and bleating under the hideous strain—“you tried to haunt me with some presence in this room—it’s been ghastly—ghastly”—he was so cold he could scarcely articulate, his tongue clicked icily against his stiffening cheek, and grew thicker and thicker—“but this invisible foe, I’ve conquered it—this obsession of yours, I’ve shown you how false, how hopeless it is—all this rubbish about this book of Copperfield—and now you must put it all away for the sake of others as well as yourself.” Helen rose very slowly, paying her cousin not the slightest attention. Suddenly she grew rigid again; Hugh and Latham, who had been regarding Stephen in amazement, looked only at her now. Stephen continued speaking to her peremptorily, haranguing her almost, “You understood that now, don’t you?”
Very slowly, again almost somnambulant, Helen turned, her hand outstretched as it was before, towards the bookcase.
“Well,” Stephen Pryde cried roughly, “why don’t you answer me? Why don’t you answer me? You heard what I said!” She moved slowly across the room. “For the future you must rely on me, on me,” Pryde pounded on. “Your father can’t help you now,” he added brutally. Still she paid no heed. Still she moved—so slowly that she scarcely seemed to move, across the room. All at once Pryde understood where she was going, what she was going to do. He was horror-struck, and made as if to pull her back roughly, but Latham moved in between them.
“Helen, what are you doing?” Stephen shrieked—“what are you doing?”
Still she paid no attention, but moved slowly, serenely on, until she reached the mahogany table on which Latham had placed “David Copperfield.” Not looking at it, her head held high, her eyes wide but sightless and glazed, she put out her hand and lifted up the volume, holding it by one cover only. An instant she stood with the book at arm’s length.
Stephen’s breath came in great noisy pants, audible both to Hugh and Latham.
Helen moved her arm gently, shaking the volume she held. Slowly, quietly, as if conscious of its own significance, a paper slipped from between the inverted pages, and fell to the floor.
“Oh, my God!” Stephen sobbed with a nasty choke. Then he swooped towards the paper. But Latham, who had been watching him again, and this time with a physician’s taut scrutiny, reached it first and secured it. Pryde fell back with a piteous laugh, maudlin, pathetic.
“Read it, I can’t,” Helen said, pointing to the paper. Latham and Hugh bent over it together.
Hugh read only the first few lines, and then hid his shamed face in his hands, and sobbed like a child. But Latham read on till he had read it all.
Helen hurried to Hugh, but Latham held out the document to her with a gesture not to be disregarded, even for a moment. She went to him, and took the paper. For an instant she shook so that the writing danced and mocked her. Then she drew herself up, and read it through, slowly and carefully—from its first word to its last. Read, she refolded it, and with an earnest look handed it back to Latham.
Slowly, quietly she turned—not to Hugh, but to Stephen. He stood near the door, trembling and cringing, his eyes fixed and staring—at something—cringing as if some terrible hand clutched or menaced him. With a cry of pain and of terror, such as the sufferers in Purgatory may shriek, he rushed from the room, sobbing and gibbering,
“Don’t touch me, Uncle Dick! Don’t touch me!”
Helen, scorn, hatred on her face, and no atom of pity, was following him; but Latham stayed her.
“I’ll go,” he said; “there is mania in his eyes. Stay with Hugh, he needs you. I’ll see to Pryde.” He thrust the confession in his pocket-book, the pocket-book in his coat. “That paper,” he told her, “will straighten out Hugh’s trouble. He’ll be free and clear to-morrow, believe me. But stay with him now; he needs you.”
Helen yielded. She went and knelt down by Hugh and laid her hands on his knee. As Latham was leaving the room, she said to him, with a grave smile—
“You see, you were wrong, Doctor. Daddy did come to me.”
“I wonder,” was his reply. “I wonder. Finding the paper in that book may all have been coincidence—who knows?”
“Daddy and I know,” Helen said; “Daddy and I know.”
Stephen turned restlessly on his pillows, and Angela Latham bent down and cozied them deftly.
“You’re a wonderful nurse,” he told her gratefully.
“Not bad, am I?”
“I’ve made you a great deal of trouble.”
“You have,” Mrs. Latham returned cordially. “But you know what Mrs. Hemans says, or perhaps it’s Mark Twain, I always get them mixed, ‘the labor we delight in physics pain’—I’ve quite enjoyed the trouble—and Georgie Washington, but you begin to do me credit. You’re going to be a good boy now and do just as I say.”
“Am I?” Pryde said skeptically.
Angela held out her ring-heavy hand. “Put it there, pard,” she commanded. And after a moment the sick man lifted his thin, bloodless hand and laid it in hers. “Perhaps I’m going to be good—though it hadn’t occurred to me till you mentioned it—but I can scarcely be required to be a boy. I was quite a year or two old at your birth.”
“Never mind, I’ve been a mother to you.”
“Heavens, yes; you have,” Stephen replied.
He lay in his own bed in Pont Street, and nothing was much changed in his room from what it had been for years; a temple and workshop of flight. Pictures of birds, of bats and of butterflies and of man-made aircraft covered the walls. The skeleton of a flying fox shared the glass case of a flying fish. A long workmanlike table stretched the length of the room—a table stacked with orderly piles of plans and designs, groups of models, trays of “parts” and of tools. Every book in the room (and they were many) treated of the air and air navigation. “Not a novel in the whole show,” Angela had told her husband disgustedly. And on Stephen’s desk lay a half-finished manuscript positively bristling with small detail drawings of rotary and fixed engines, sketches of exhaust manifolds and working diagrams of many-bladed propellers, his pen beside it, as he had left it on the last day he had journeyed to Oxshott.
The woman bustled about the room and the man lay and watched her, a gentler look in his eyes than those poor anxious organs had shown for years.
“That’s a wonderful frock,” he said lazily.
“Great Scott, and I with no apron on! Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said excitedly, and dashed to the chest of drawers, opened one drawer, and shook out a voluminous apron, all-covering as a hospital apron, but more decorative.
“It’s a shame to cover it,” Stephen objected.
“It’s my going-away dress, the very first dress Angela M. Latham ever was hooked and laced into, and you needn’t think I’m going to spill ox tail soup, Top Bronnen water, peaches and wine over it. The chinchilla it’s trimmed with cost eighty guineas, and every inch of the lace cost half a crown—hand crocheted.” She relentlessly tied the frilled and ribboned strings of the apron about her slim waist. “If you like this, I wonder what you’d have said to my wedding dress. I’m going to be painted in it—by one of the very biggest big-bugs. I want Poynter, because he’s the president of the brush and paint boys, and the president seemed about the right thing to draw an American’s picture, but Horace says Poynter doesn’t do portraits. My wedding dress was—well, really it was—and I designed it two minutes after we were engaged. Quick work. It was velvet, justnotwhite, the faintest, loveliest tinge of green you ever saw; there was white fox at the hem, not too much, that’s half the art of dressing—narrow really in front, but it widened out as it went around till it measured over two feet at the very back. And my bonnet, not much bigger than a big butterfly, nothing but pearls and one ear of point lace, lined with green—emerald green to show it up—You’re not listening.”
“Look here,” Stephen told her. “You are simply marking time. You have something to tell me, and you are nervous and afraid to say it. The sooner such things are said and done with the better. But first there are one or two things I want to know, that I must know and am going to know. So we’ll have them now, please.”
“I quite agree,” Angela said, relieved at the prospect of the immediate passing of a tension. “Fire ahead. Question number one?”
“I want to know just what happened—when I was taken ill—what happened afterwards and all along. My mind’s a bit blank. But first tell me about—Helen.”
Angela busied herself desperately at the toilet-table, dusting already speckless silver with her absurd apron, sniffing interrogatively at toilet bottles with the contents of which she was perfectly familiar, moving brushes recklessly, but she answered briskly, and with merciful promptitude.
“They were married six weeks ago. No fuss, not even a cake, a gray dress plainer’n plain. A week knocking about in a motor-car, Heaven knows where. Hugh is doing some fool thing or other at the War Office. Temporary something or other. He goes back to the front next week. Now I’ll go back to the beginning and tell you everything.”
“Please don’t,” Stephen said grimly. “Just the important items briefly.”
“Right-o,” Mrs. Latham said amicably, perching herself on the foot of the bed—“perfectly plain, no trimming, no colored lights, no slow music. Well! Helen found a paper that cleared Hugh. There were Tommies in the morning room, or somewhere, sent to arrest Hugh, but when he and Horace went in, nary a Tommy was there—and the silver was all right too—and not even the beer touched. Barker had got rid of them—charmed them away: awfully clever girl, Barker, only your aunt never could see it. Well, Hugh couldn’t be arrested because there was nobody there to arrest him, but he went up to Whitehall the next day with Horace and Sir Somebody Something who’s no end of a lawyer and a very big-wig, and after a few miles of your charming British red tape, well, that was O.K.! See? Forgiven. Forgotten. Commission restored.” She slid from the bed and strutted daintily about the room tooting the Anthem from an imaginary bugle, its mouthpiece her own sparkling hand. It was a pretty piece of burlesque—delicately done—and briefly.
Pryde waited quietly; it was simplest, easiest so, he thought, and far quickest. “Rule, Britannia,” followed the Anthem, “John Brown’s Body” followed “Rule, Britannia,” and then she discoursed “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” But Pryde was invulnerable, not to be teased as Horace Latham was; and she ceased as suddenly as she had begun and perched back on the bed. “By the way,” she said, “Hugh burned that—that—document thing Helen’d found in the Thackeray book—or perhaps it was Charlotte Brontë, or ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ We Southerners don’t think any too much of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”
“Burned it?” Stephen said sharply. “Are you sure?”
“Quite.” Mrs. Latham nodded.
“Why?”
“You can search me. But far’s I remember, it was to get rid of it—and that seems a likely reason. I think Hugh said it wouldn’t be needed again. Helen is ‘Bransby’s’—no one else could make any trouble—and something had been fixed up—all hunky-dorey and everything.”
“Was—was she willing—willing it should be burned?”
“She was not. But Hugh had his way. Men do in this upside-down, inside-out old country. But I bet you a gooseberry to a guinea Horace Latham won’t—not so you’d notice it.”
“I decline the wager,” Pryde told her. “Go on.”
“Well, you—you were feverish, and fancied all sorts of things that time—when the paper was found. Thought you saw things.”
“I saw Uncle Dick, if that’s what you mean,” Stephen said quietly. “I know I’ve been very ill—had brain fever, and all that—but I did see Uncle Dick. It was no delusion.”
Angela nodded gravely. “Of course you did.I’venever doubted it for a moment. Isn’t it perfectly wonderful—oh!—if they’d only let the Spiritualists run this war, we’d have the poor old Kaiser dished in a jiff. But they won’t.”
“No, probably not,” Pryde concurred. “Go on.”
“I am going on—as fast as I can. Well, you sailed out of the library, the night you fell ill, and went up to your room, and rammed some things in a bag—Horace followed you up and found you doing it. He saw you were queer, and he ordered you to bed, but you just ordered him out of your room and left the house. No one could stop you. I don’t think Hugh or Horace really wanted to: anyway they couldn’t and they didn’t. You piled up here to London. Where you went here or what you did here, I can’t tell you, for nobody knows. But two days after you left Oxshott, I was having tea in my sitting-room at my hotel—I’d come up to hustle my dressmakers—when in you walked. You were as mad as six March hares—and in about five minutes you fell down with a fit.”
“Fit?” Stephen said it rather indignantly.
“Well—if it wasn’t, it was a pretty good imitation one. I called it a fit. Horace called it something in Latin. And you began saying things you’d no business to say, so I wasn’t going to call any one in. So I just got you into the next room, and on to the bed.”
“You?”
“Me!”
“But you couldn’t.”
“No, of course I couldn’t. But I did. You can’t faze an American woman. We’re not made that way. You’re not so awfully heavy, and I just hauled and twisted until I’d done it. You never know till you try. I don’t go in much for horses—I never did. But once I held a runaway team of Blue Grass Kentuckies for three miles on the Shell Road, outside ’Frisco. They pulled. But I held on. And I slowed them down all right in the end. I got you on to the bed and telephoned for Horace. No strangers wanted! You fussed about a bit—but I managed.”
“Why did you bother?” he asked in a curious tone. Her answer was prompt. “Because I like you. I always have liked you—very much indeed.”
The sick man’s thin hand crept over the eiderdown and rested on hers.
“Horace came,” she continued, “and we bundled you up in blankets and things and brought you around here. At first I said you shouldn’t be moved. But Horace said you’d be better here than so near Bond Street, and, after all, he’s a doctor. So—well, we just moved you.”
“And you’ve nursed me ever since.”
“I’ve done most of it,” Angela said proudly. “I’m some nurse. I always was. And you did talk so. Talk about women! I simply couldn’t let a stranger come pothering. You were very ill, but you soon got better, and Mr. Grant helped me.”
“Yes—I’ve known he was here.” Stephen had thought Grant on guard for Helen and Hugh. He knew better now. He lay for a while very quiet, thinking it over.
“He stayed with you all the time the week we were married. It didn’t take long—getting married doesn’t take long, if you go about it the right way.”
“It takes more than a lifetime sometimes,” Stephen said bitterly.
Angela rubbed his thin hand against her face. “I know, dear,” she said.
“You had a very short honeymoon. Was that on my account?”
“Four days. Yes, you poor child, I wasn’t going to leave you too long.”
Stephen said nothing. He couldn’t—say anything.
“Are you happy?” he asked after a time.
“Me and Horace? Oh! so-so.” But she dimpled and flushed eloquently. “So-so—but our troubles have begun already: servants. Horace’s have all given us notice—the silly old frumps. They don’t like me chattering German all over the house. You English haven’t much sense of humor, and English servants have none. Noah—the butler, his name is Ryder, but I call him ‘Noah,’ he’s been with Horace since the flood—Noah sulked whenever I spoke to him in German, and the housekeeper was rude. Well, I bundled her off lickety-click. Then I began to teach Horace German. He read it well enough, but his accent was awful. So I took him in hand. And last night—after dinner—he’d been singing to me—the sweetest love song ever made—in Germany—don’t you think so? ‘Du bist wie eine Blume, So hold, und schön und rein!’—The head parlor-maid and the cook—and the buttons and all the rest, flounced in and gave notice in a bunch. When this war’s over, I shall send to a woman I know in Hong Kong to send me a boat-load of decent servants. I never had real-servant comfort but once in all my life—and that was in ’Frisco, where every maid we had was a Chinaman.”
“I doubt if they’d fit in in Harley Street,” Stephen said lazily. “I’d try ’em at Oxshott first, if I were you.”
“They’ll fit in anywhere; that’s the beauty of them. I’ll have them in both places—no fear! I’m not very sure that I like Harley Street—and there isn’t a nook, or a twist or a turn in our entire house. But I’m going to have Horace stick a roof-garden on.”
“Why don’t you make him move?”
“He won’t. I’ve told him to over and over. Oh! I can manage Horace easy enough—exceptwhere his profession comes in; he will have his own way there—and, after all, he is a doctor, you know.”
Pryde smiled.
“Have you thought of what you’d do the next few years?” Angela asked rather timidly when some silent moments had passed.
“A deuce of a lot!”
“Well—that’s one of the two thingsIwant to talk about, only it’s hard to begin. But I’ve got it all planned—every bit—”
Stephen Pryde laughed.
“You’ve nothing at all to do, but agree—not a thing. First of all, guess who’s coming?”
“Hugh?”
The woman nodded.
“I’d rather he didn’t.”
“I know,” she said—“but please—”
Pryde shrugged his shoulder against the pillow. “Oh! all right. What does it matter? He coming here? When?”
Mrs. Latham glanced at the clock. “In about half an hour.”
Hugh was embarrassed and awkward when he came in; Stephen was neither. He lay comfortably on his plumped-up pillows and regarded his brother with a slight, cynical smile.
“Hello, Steve,” the younger said.
Stephen said nothing.
“Jolly fine to see you getting on—Ripping—what—”
“Take it easy,” Stephen said amusedly. “I don’t worry: you needn’t.”
Mrs. Latham pushed a chair to the bed, and Hugh sat down awkwardly, and put down on the small table near Stephen’s pillow a parcel. Stephen eyed it quizzically. “Grapes,” Hugh remarked lamely.
“Why have you come?” the elder demanded.
“To see you, old fellow,” his brother told him.
“What do you want?”
“Haven’t you told him?” Hugh asked Angela, in a palpable panic. She shook her head. “Funked it?”
“Certainly not,” she replied severely. “Merely I hadn’t got to it yet.”
“See here.” Stephen spoke crisply. “We’ll cut all the circumlocutions out. You needn’t be so damned crumpled up, Hugh. If you’ve come here with any idea of letting me down easy, you’ve wasted your time.”
He raised himself up on his pillows and faced his brother defiantly. Hugh blushed like a girl, and fumbled his cap—but sat speechless.
“When we were children you had all the best of it,” Stephen continued. “You’ve had all the best of it all along. You’ve got the best of it now.” Hugh dropped his eyes to his boots, a picture of guilt and discomfort. “We both cared—a good deal—for—Mother. You were her favorite. I was willing. You were the kid—and, believe it or not, I was willing. And I was good to you—for years.”
“God—yes—very,” Hugh said heartily, lifting his troubled eyes to Stephen’s.
“We came to Deep Dale. My heart was sorer than yours. I’d known Mother longer; I missed her more than you did; I needed her more. Well—you had all the fat of it—at Oxshott: there was none of it I grudged you, none—but I was a boy too, and I wanted my share; and I didn’t get it. I had clothes, and food, and servants, and saw a future open up before me, a future of wealth and power. But I wanted love too. I had more brains in my toe than you had in your carcass—and Uncle Dick saw it. He began to take interest in me, to talk to me, to draw me out, he took no end of pains over my education, and before long to plan my future as his ultimate successor at ‘Bransby’s’—but he loved you. And I would have given my poor little hide to have had just half of that love. All my life—ever since I can remember—every day of it, I’ve wanted some one to love me—and no one ever has really—Mother—did half; since she died, no one.”
The fire hissed and flamed in the hearth, and Stephen lay watching it moodily. No one spoke for a long time. It seemed as if none of them could. Hugh was choking. Angela Latham was crying.
At last Stephen spoke, taking up again the sorry parable of his tragedy. “I waited on Aunt Caroline; she waited on you—and I—I wanted a little mothering so. I worked like a navvy, and won prizes at Harrow and Oxford. Uncle Dick said, ‘Creditable, Stephen, quite creditable,’ and gave me a fiver—and I—I wanted the feel of his hand on my shoulder. You played the silly goat at Harrow and at Magdalen, and Uncle Dick said, ‘Tut-tut,’ and bought you a hunter, and coddled you generally. I was driven in on myself, I tell you, at every point. I wanted human affection, and I was left alone to browse on my own canker. Well—I did—I lived alone. There wasn’t a beast on the place, or a servant either, that didn’t come at your whistle and fawn on you, and run from me, if it dared. I lived alone—and was lonely. I lay in the woods as a boy. I worked at that bench when I was older. I dreamed and I planned and I schemed to do a big thing, a damned fine thing too—a bigger thing than you ever could have understood. But Richard Bransby could have understood; he had brains. If you’d wanted to fly on a contrivance of dragon-flies to the moon, he’d have considered whether he couldn’t gratify you, and have turned you down in the end, kindly and generously—but me—it wasn’t the flying and the aircraft I cared about really in the first place; it was the dreaming, and something to take the place of people—the people I wanted and couldn’t have—” Mrs. Latham was sobbing. “Then, presently, I got caught in the charm of the wonderful thing—and went mad—dæmonized, as the old Greeks were—the men who did the great things, the greatest the world has ever had done. Birds were my prophets—my playfellows, the only ones I had, poor little devil. You played with Helen, I sat apart—and watched you—and then I got to watching the birds and the bats and the insects that flew instead—sometimes. I worked tremendously at drawing and maths and fifty other things that I might be able to invent aircraft and perfect it. But no—Uncle Dick would have none of it. But, by God, I’ll do it yet, I tell you—”
Angela slipped in between the bed and the table, and sat down on the coverlet.
“You must not talk too long,” she said gently.
“Won’t you try some grapes?” Hugh said huskily.
Stephen laughed mirthlessly. “No.” To Mrs. Latham he said, “I’m almost done. There was something I wanted more than I wanted an aerial career,” he went on, looking Hugh full in the face—“more than you ever wanted anything in your life—or could want anything—or many men could. It was not for me. And I might have won it, if it hadn’t been for Uncle Dick. Oh! it wasn’t you who thwarted me—you needn’t think it was—it was he. Always he thwarted me. I did my best to thwart him in return. I wasn’t glad to hurt you, Hugh, truly I wasn’t—” For just an instant his voice softened and suspended. Then he went bitterly on, “You were in the way, and you had to go—that was all—but I’d very much rather it had been any one else. I owed Uncle Dick a good deal, and I tried to pay it. And I’d do it again.”
Hugh held out his hand timidly; it was in apology too. Stephen ignored it, and bent his eyes to the fire.
“Now,” he said, after a long, brooding pause, “you know the depth of my penitence. We’ll talk about something else.”
“We will,” Angela said briskly, but her voice shook. “You say you are going to succeed at the aircraft thing yet. Do you know how you are going to do it?”
“No,” Stephen said gruffly.
“Well, then, I do. We’ve planned it all—Hugh and I.”
Stephen sat up in the bed, he shot her a glance, and then fixed his eyes on his brother. Hugh nodded and went horribly red.
“You are going to do it in South America. That’s the place, where you won’t be overlooked, and half your inventions and things stolen before you’ve perfected them. It’s going to be an enormous thing, our firm—just we three partners. Your brains, your control, my money—and a little from Hugh, and your own too, of course—and all ‘Bransby’s,’ influence and co-operation back of us. It will need a rare lot of capital. Well, it’s ready.”
Stephen paid no attention to her, but he said to his brother—
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes, Stevie—and jolly glad, and pleased—”
Stephen silenced him with a gesture. “Well, I don’t. I’d die first.”
“You’ll die after,” Mrs. Latham remarked.
She put her hand on his face. “You are going to do this for me. I’ve millions, and you are going to double them.”
“I could.”
“You are going to.”
He looked at her then. “Why do you wish to do this—this big thing?”
“Because I like you. And when I like, I like. Never again dare say no one cares for you, Stephen. I care. I liked you cordially from the very first—and believed in you. I like you a thousand times more now. Next to Horace, there is no one in all the world I care for half so much. Won’t you do this for me—consent for my sake?”
A slow color crept into the sick, white face. “I’d like to,” Pryde said gently—“but I can’t. Don’t—don’t say any more about it—please.”
Then Hugh Pryde did the one dramatic thing of his life. A calendar hung on the wall. Hugh pointed to it.
“Do you know what day this is, Stephen?”
Stephen nodded. “I never forget—” There was mist in his stubborn eyes. And in a flash of intuition, Angela understood: this was Violet Pryde’s birthday.
“Won’t you consent, for her sake?” Hugh said. “She would ask you to if she could.”
“Perhaps she is asking you to?” Angela whispered.
Half a moment beat out in silence. Then Stephen said—
“Yes, Hugh, I’ll do it—and thank you both—I’ll do it for Mrs. Latham’s sake—and for Mother’s.” He held out his thin hand—Hugh gripped it. But Angela bent swiftly over Stephen—and kissed him.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:
Minor printer errors have been corrected without note. Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained. Other errors have been corrected as noted below:
On page 193 of the book, Paul Latham was used as a name for Dr. Latham.In all other locations in the book, he was named Horace.Paul has been replaced with Horace.Paul Latham shook his head ==>HoraceLatham shook his head
On page 193 of the book, Paul Latham was used as a name for Dr. Latham.
In all other locations in the book, he was named Horace.
Paul has been replaced with Horace.
Paul Latham shook his head ==>HoraceLatham shook his head