The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of
flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the
agony of the nations, and the pitiful grief in one English girl’s
inconsolable heart.
Other girls lost their lovers. Never a home in England but held some
bereavement now, never a heart in Christendom but nursed some ache. But
most of the sorrow and suffering was ennobled and blazoned. Other girls
walked proud with their memories—_his_ D.S.O. pinned in their black,
the ribbon of _his_ Military Cross worn on their heart, tiny wings of
tinsel, of gold, or of diamonds rising and falling with their breath, a
regimental badge pinning their lace, a sailor’s button warm at a soft
white throat—telling of a “boy” sleeping cold, unafraid in the North
Sea, or (proudest of all these) a new wedding-ring under a little black
glove—and, perhaps——
Other girls packed weekly boxes for Ruhleben, or walked the London
streets and the Sussex lanes with the man on whose arm they had used to
lean leaning on theirs, blinded, a leg gone, or trembling still from
shell-shock, a face mutilated, broken and scarred in body,
nerve-wrecked, but _hers_, hers to have and to hold, to love and to
mother, to lean on her love, to respond to her shy wooing, to beget her
children; to show the world, and God, how English women love.
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.”
“No one to be with you at all—to take care of you,” Stephen had
contributed once to Mrs. Leavitt’s urgency.
“No one at all, until Hugh comes home to take care of me.”
Pryde bit his lip angrily, and said no more.
Helen was her own mistress absolutely.
A will disposing of so large a fortune had not often been briefer than
Richard Bransby’s, and no will had ever been clearer.
There were a few minor bequests. Caroline Leavitt was provided for
handsomely, and so also were Stephen and Hugh. (The will had been signed
in 1911.) To Stephen had been left the management of the vast business.
Everything else—and it was more than nine-tenths of the immense
estate—was Helen’s, absolutely, without condition or control. And even
Stephen’s management was subject to her veto, even the legacies to
others subject to her approval. She had approved, of course, at once,
and the legacies were now irrevocable. But Stephen’s dictatorship she
could terminate a year from the day she expressed and recorded her
desire to do so, and in the meantime she could greatly curtail it.
Bransby had left her heir to an autocracy. And already, in several small
ways, her rule had been autocratic. Always willful, her sorrow had
hardened her, and Stephen knew that when their wills clashed, hers would
be maintained, no matter at what cost to him. Where she was indifferent,
he could have his way absolutely. Where she was interested, he could
have no part of it, unless it luckily chanced to be identical with hers.
He understood, and he chafed. But also he was very careful.
He lived still in Pont Street, in the bachelor rooms he and Hugh had had
since their ’Varsity days; for Bransby had liked to have Helen to
himself often.
Stephen spent as much time with his cousin as she would let him, and he
had from the day of his uncle’s death. And he “looked after” her as much
as she would brook.
Vast as the Bransby fortune had been, even in this short time of his
stewardship he had increased it by leaps and bounds. A great fortune a
year ago, now it was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the
war-fortunes. They still built ships and sailed them. He had suggested
nothing less to Helen—he had not dared. But they dealt in aircraft too.
Stephen had suggested that at a favorable moment, and she had conceded
it listlessly.
Air was still his element, and its conquest his desire. His own room at
Pont Street was now, as it had been all along, and as every nook of his
very own when a boy had been, an ordered-litter of aeroplane models,
aerodrome plans, “parts,” schemes, dreams sketched out, estimates,
schedules, inventions tried and untried, lame and perfected. They knew
him at the Patent Office, and at least one of his own contrivances was
known and flown in both hemispheres.
For Helen’s love he still waited, hungry and denied. But his dreams of
the air were fast coming true.
Helen had no comrades in these drear days, and scarcely kept up an
acquaintance. Angela Hilary had refused to be “shunted,” as she termed
it, and she and Horace Latham gained Helen’s odd half-hours oftener than
any one else did. The girl had always “enjoyed” Angela, and when sorrow
came, gifting her with some of its own wonderful clairvoyance, she had
quickly sensed the worth and the tenderness of the persistent woman. And
Dr. Latham was secure in her interest and liking, because she associated
him closely with her father, and remembered warmly his tact and kindness
in the first hours of her bereavement. And, sorry as her own plight was,
and dreary as her daily life, she could not be altogether dull to the
pretty contrivances and the nice management of the older girl’s
love-affair. Grief itself could but find some amusement and take some
warmth from Angela’s brilliant, deft handling of that difficult matter.
It would have made a colder onlooker than Helen tingle—and sometimes
gasp. It certainly made Latham tingle, and not infrequently gasp.