As the fussy, bustling footsteps died away Stephen sank into an
easy-chair—Richard’s own, as it chanced—and laid his head on a table.
He was worn out with tension and uncertainty.
The tall clock in the corner had run down. The gas fire made no sound.
No room could have been stiller.
The day was mending toward its close, and the late level sun flooded in
from the windows, as if to make up for lost time and eight months of
exclusion. The light of the fire lit up the room’s other side, and
between the two riots of light and of warmth the man sat dejected,
distraught and shivering—alone with his self-knowledge, his fear and
his gruesome task.
Where was the damnatory sheet of paper? In this room in all human
probability. Its ink had scarcely dried when Bransby had died, and it
had not been found on the body; Stephen Pryde had made sure of that.
For eight terrible months he had schemed and tortured to get here and
find it—even playing housebreaker in his desperation. Yet now here at
long last he shrank inexplicably from beginning the search. Why? That he
knew not in the least. But, for one thing, he was hideously cold, almost
cramped with chill. The arms of the chair felt like ice. Little billows
of cold seemed to buffet against his face. The room had been shut up and
fireless for so long. His feet ached with cold, almost they felt
paralyzed. His legs were quivering, and so cold! And his hands were
blueing.
At last he forced his numb frame from the seat.
He looked about with frightened, agonized eyes.
No paper lay on any one of the tables apparently. The wastepaper basket!
He seized it with a hand that shook as if palsied. Oh—a crumpled
whiteness lay on the bottom of the basket. Pray Heaven—he thrust in a
fumbling hand—and gave a cry of disappointment. This was not paper, but
some bit of soft cloth. He jerked it out impatiently, and then, when he
saw what it was, dropped it on the table with a sharp sigh; a
handkerchief—Helen’s.
From table to table he went, examining each article on them, searching
every crevice. Each drawer he searched again and again. He looked in
every possible place, and, as the anxious searchers for lost things have
from time immemorial, in many impossible places. He overlooked
nothing—he was sure of that. Again and again he searched the tables and
then researched them.
With a puzzled frown he rose and stared about the room. Then he moved
about it slowly and carefully, looking for some possible hidden
cupboard. He sounded the wainscoting. He scrutinized the ceiling, he
pulled at the seats of the chairs.
Finally he halted before the bookcase and stood staring at it a long
time. He drew out one or two volumes. Could the thin sheet be behind
one? But the dust came out thickly, and he put them back. Something
seemed to pull him away, and drive him back to the table. Why, of
course, it must be there. Where else would the dead man have hidden it?
Nowhere, of course. Why waste time looking anywhere else? Again he began
the weary business all over. Again and again his cold, trembling hands
felt and searched, and his eyes, wild now and baffled, peered and
studied. Almost he prayed. His breath came in gasps. Sweat stood on his
forehead and around his clenched lips.
Nothing! Nowhere! He sank back in his seat, convinced and defeated. The
confession was not here; or, if it was, he could not find it. And it
_might_ be somewhere else. Probably it had been destroyed, intentionally
or accidentally, by some one else. But it _might_ be in existence. And
some day it might be found to damn and to ruin.
How tired he was—and how cold! Why couldn’t he get warmer? And where
did those icy drifts of wind come from, goose-fleshing his face and his
hands and making his spine creep?
He crouched over the fire, and held out his blue hands to its heat. No
use! He was growing colder and colder.
Then he began in his groping misery to think of birds flying. That was
always his vision in moments of over-tension or of great
aspiration—birds in full flight. To watch such flight had been the
purest joy of his boyhood. To contrive and to achieve its emulation had
been the fight and the triumph of his manhood.
He lifted the morsel of cambric to his face, saluting it, and wiping
away with it the cold moisture on his cheek and his lips. Who should say
his extraordinary ambition, extraordinarily pursued, extraordinarily
fulfilled, ignoble? No one quite justly. Certainly he had wanted
success, power, prestige and great wealth for himself. But, as much as
he had desired them for himself, no less had he desired them for
Helen—to lay at her feet, to keep in her hands.
And, too, he had dreamed to make England mightier yet by his air fleets
and their victories. Patriotism is a virtue enhanced and embellished by
all other virtues, even as it enhances and embellishes all other
virtues. But it is a virtue sole and apart, and not impossible to hearts
and to lives in all else besotted and ignoble. Only yesterday Stephen
himself had seen an example of this. Waiting at Victoria, he had watched
some hundreds of German prisoners detrained and retrained. As they sat
waiting and guarded, a bunch of English convicts, manacled and pallid,
had slouched on to the platform—“old timers” of the worst type, from
their looks, with heads ill-shaped and shapeless, more appropriate to an
asylum for idiots than a prison for miscreants, and with countenances
that would have disgraced and branded the lowest form of quadruped brute
life—“men” compared with whom, unless their appearance grossly libeled
them, Bill Sykes must have been quite the gentleman and no little of an
Adonis. But not one of them all, bestial, hardened and deficient, but
slunk or weakly brazened as they shuffled along, ashamed and unnerved,
abashed of God’s daylight and of the glance of their unincarcerated
fellows. Among them was chained one boy (he was scarcely older than
that) with a fine head and a gifted face—a boy, not unlike what Stephen
remembered himself in his unscorched days. It was a spiritual face even
now, as Stephen’s own was. Probably the boy’s crime had been some sin of
passion. Murderers often are of the spiritual type, but very rarely
housebreakers or thugs. Perhaps he had murdered a brother, loved by the
girl he himself craved. Perhaps he had killed some enemy or friend who
well deserved such slaughter. Or had his guilt been more sordid,
begotten in some schoolboy escapade, growing and nourished fœtuslike in
the fructive womb of youth’s temptations and young manhood’s cowardice:
money misused, trust betrayed, sex tarnished? Whatever his crime it had
left no scar on his face, no record except of suffering. And of them
all, this young convict’s plight was the most pitiful, his chagrin the
most woeful, of all that sorry gang. At a word from a warder, they
turned their poor cropped heads and saw the Hun prisoners. The cravened
faces cleared, the handcuffed figures straightened, the haggard, clouded
eyes brightened, the broken gait mended; criminals, exhibited in their
hideous livery of shame, for the moment they were men once
more—Englishmen, belligerent, proud and rejoiced—of the race of the
victors, lifted out and above the slime of their personal defeat—all of
them, the oldest and most beast-like, and the boy with the finely
chiseled face and the heart-broken eyes.
Stephen Pryde’s own eyes, as he sat brooding between the fire and the
sunshine, were as haggard as any of those cinnamon-clad miserables had
been. He was ill—with the inexplicable chill, the grave-smell of the
room, and the nausea of disappointment and of his dilemma. He was at bay
indeed now.
But the face that hung over the fire was a spiritual face. He had
betrayed a trust. He had stolen. He had borne false witness. In this
very room he had knotted his fist to do murder—and against the man who
had given him home, affection, position and luxury; and against his own
brother, whose mother and his had placed their hands palm in palm when
death already had muted her lips—his kiddy brother!—he had sinned with
a sin and a dastardy, compared to which Cain’s was venial and kind. Why?
And having so sinned, why was his face still fine, the hallmark of the
spiritual type still stamped there, clear and unblurred?
Ah, who shall say? The riddle is dense.
Perhaps ’twas because his vice was indeed “but virtue misapplied,”
because circumstances had betrayed him. Mary Magdalene in her common
days probably had some foretelling of saintship on her lureful face, and
might more easily have nursed babes on her breast than lured men to her
lair, been mother more gladly than wanton.
However it was, however it came, there was a high something, a fineness,
on Stephen Pryde’s face that no one else of his milieu had—not even
Helen, certainly not Hugh; but his, for all time, to descend with him
into the grave, to go with him wherever he went, Heavenward or
Hellward—his gift and his birth-right. Few indeed ever sensed this.
Spirituality was almost the last trait friends or relatives would have
attributed to him. But one acquaintance had espied it—the American
woman, whom he had held in some sneering tolerance in the days of their
first meeting. “He has the face of a saint—a sour saint—but a saint, a
soul apart,” Angela had said of him the day he had been introduced to
her. And he had said of her after the same occasion, “What a
preposterous rattle of a woman! She rushes from whim to absurdity, back
and forth and getting nowhere—‘cluck, cluck, cluck’—like a hen in
front of a motor-car.” And this of the woman who had understood him at a
glance, as his own people had not in a lifetime. Why? Another riddle.
Perhaps it was because, underneath her cap and bells, Angela Hilary,
too, wore the hallmark, smaller, lighter cut—but there, and the same.
There is no greater mistake—and none made more often—than to think
that those who laugh and dance through life are earthbound. Heaven is
full of little children, clustered at her knee, playing with Our Lady’s
beads.
After Stephen, dreamer and sinner, Angela Hilary had the most spiritual
of all the personalities with which this tale is concerned; and, after
her, the self-contained, conventional, well-groomed doctor of Harley
Street.
Mrs. Leavitt’s step came along the hall, and her voice, upbraiding some
domestic delinquency, ordering tea and toast.
With a shivering effort, Pryde rose from his seat, put the handkerchief
away carefully—in his pocket, and strolled nonchalantly into the hall,
closing the door behind him.
The jade Joss had the room to himself.