“Afraid of a dead man!” He laughed at the very thought. But the living—ah, that was very much another matter. He was afraid of the living, deadly afraid of his own brother—of poor hunted Hugh—of a slip of a girl, and of every breathing creature that might find, through search or by accident, and disclose, the incriminating document. For it, murder had been in his heart, in the hour he had written it. And because of it, something akin to murder throbbed and sickened in him now.
He looked about the room again and again for some possible hiding-place. Then all at once he looked at the door through which Hugh had gone, and his face grew livid and terrible. Hugh _must_ go. He must not, he should not, search this room and its hideous possibilities again. He must go: he should. If only the boy’d go and go into safety! How gladly he, Stephen, would aid him, and provide for him too. But, if Hugh would not go in that way, why, then he should go in another. Pryde had taken his resolve. He would not waver now.
He rang the bell, and moved to the table, and stood looking down on the notepaper there.
“Yes. There’s a camp near here, I believe?”
“Simmons the gardener still lives in the cottage?”
“Yes, sir.” The girl glowed, and was almost inarticulate with eagerness. “But, sir, if you want some one to go over to the camp, sir——”
“Very—very good, sir,” she almost sobbed it, and slunk out, disappointed and abashed.
Stephen watched her go impatiently, and then turned back to the table, his face tense and set. He picked up a piece of paper, sat down, dipped a pen in the ink—and then laid the pen down, remembering what had, in all probability, been last written at that table, with ink from this well—perhaps with this penholder! The nib was new, and careful “Aunt Caroline” had had the inkstand cleaned and filled. Stephen sighed and took up the pen. Then he frowned—at the embossed address at the head of the sheet. He tore it off, looked at the waste-paper basket, then at the fire, but neither seemed quite safe enough to share this latest secret of his penmanship. He put the torn-off engraved bit of paper carefully in his pocket, and began to write very slowly, with wonderful care.
The writing was not his own. Versatility in hand-writings had always been the greatest deftness of his versatile hands. “Hugh Pryde, wanted for desertion, is in hiding at Deep Dale. A Friend.” He wrote it relentlessly, his lip curving in scorn at the threadbare pseudonym. Then he gave a long look up at Helen’s portrait still radiant over the mantel. Then a thought of Hugh, and of the boyhood days they had shared, came to him chokingly. He propped his head in his hands, and sat and gazed ruefully at the treachery he had just written. So absorbed was he in his sorry scrutiny that he did not hear a step in the hall, and he jumped a little, woman-like, when his cousin closed the door behind her. With a quick, stealthy movement he folded the sheet of paper and thrust it into his coat “Oh, Helen, it’s you!” he said rather jerkily.