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?
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.