Stephen spoke first. Latham had intended that he should. “Latham?”
“If you were right,” rising in his tense interest,—“if there had been some papers that caused the shock that killed him—isn’t it possible”—returning to his chair as suddenly as he had quit it—“isn’t it probable that while he had it in his hand, sitting just here perhaps, he tried to rise, he was faint and tried to reach the bell, and the paper fell from his hand, fell into the fire and was destroyed?” As he spoke he enacted, rising, turning ineffectually, convulsively toward the bell, let an imaginary paper drift from his hand. Then he caught the significance of his own excitement, ruled himself, and sauntered to the fireplace.
But the diagnosis was completed. “I dare say that might have happened,” Latham said consideringly.
“It’s the only way I can explain it,” Pryde’s voice vibrated with his infinite relief.
“Explain what, Pryde?” Latham asked in his Harley Street voice. To the insinuation of that deft tone many a patient had yielded a secret unconsciously.
But Stephen recalled himself, and was on his guard again. “Why—why—this sudden death.” A slight smile just flicked the physician’s serene face. Pryde rose once more and stood again gazing, half hypnotized by his own suggestion. “It was a great blow to me, Latham, a great blow”—a sigh, so sharp that it seemed to shake him, ended his sentence. “I torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Latham made no reply. Presently Pryde spoke again, repeating his own words rather wildly. “Torture myself trying to picture just what happened after I left this room.”
Still Latham said nothing. He was considering.
In a little room high up in the house, her very own sitting-room, heaped with roses and heliotrope and carnations, its windows looking out to the Surrey hills and a gurgling brook—blue as steel in the winter cold, its snow-white banks edged with irregular shrubberies icicle-hung, Helen and Latham sat in close conference.
A glorious fire flamed on the broad hearth in the corner. Helen had inherited her father’s love of fires. When the war came, crippling their servant staff both at Curzon Street and at Deep Dale, and making the replenishing of coal cellars arduous, and posters on every hoarding admonished patriotism to economize fuel, Richard Bransby had installed a gas-fire in his library. Helen had opposed this, she had so loved the great mixed fire of logs and of coal before which so many of her childhood’s gloamings had been spent, so many of her acute young dreams dreamed, but for once the father had not yielded to her. In one particular the gas-fire had appealed to him—it minimized the intrusions of servants when he best liked to have his “den” to himself. Humbly born, but with none of the excrescent caddishness of smaller-souled _nouveaux riches_, he had no liking for the visible presence of his domestic retinue, and when servants were ill-trained and imperfectly unobtrusive, little irritated him more than to have them about, and, except by Helen, he was a man easily irritated. So gas had replaced wood and anthracite in his room. But not so in Helen’s. She meant well by her country, but the logs piled high on her hearth. The patriotisms of youth are apt to be thoughtless, in every country. Often Youth makes the great sacrifice—England needs no telling of that—but Age makes the ten thousand daily burnt-offerings that in their infinite aggregate heap high in the scale of a people’s devotion; and, perhaps, win as tender approval from the Angel that records.