"Only love us enough and we shall live. Everything lives by love. Touch us with some of your own enchantment. You are calling us back to life by caring for us. . . ." He stopped, his head up, his pen arrested, listening--as though he did in very truth hear voices coming to him from different parts of the room.
What he did hear, however, was the opening of the library door, and what he beheld was Tom Duncombe's bulky figure standing for a moment hesitating in the doorway. He came forward but did not see Henry immediately. He stood again, listening, one finger to his lip like a schoolboy about to steal jam. Henry bent his head over his letters, but with one eye watched. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone with that entrance. He hated Tom Duncombe and hated him for reasons more conclusive than personal, wounded vanity. Duncombe took some further steps and then suddenly saw Henry. He stopped dead, staring, then as Henry did not turn, but stayed with head bent forward, he moved on again still cautiously and with the clumsy hesitating, step that was especially his.
He arrived at his brother's table and stopped there. Henry, looking sideways, could see half Duncombe's heavy body, the red cheek, the thick arm and large, ill-shaped fingers. Those same fingers, he perceived, were taking up letters and papers from the table and putting them down again.
Then, like a sudden blow on the heart, certain words of Sir Charles's spoken a week or two before came back to Henry. "By the way, Trenchard," he had said, "if I'm out and you're ever alone in the library here I want you to be especially careful to allow no one to touch the papers on my table, nor to permit any one to open a drawer--any one, mind you, not even my brother, unless I've told you first that he may. I leave you in charge--you or old Moffatt (the ancient butler), and if you are going, and I'm not yet back, lock the library and give the keys to Moffatt."
He had promised that at the time, feeling rather proud that he should have been charged with so confidential an office. Now the time had come for him to keep his word, and the most difficult crisis of his life was suddenly upon him. There had been difficult moments in the War--Henry alone knew how difficult moments of physical challenge, moments of moral challenge too--but then in that desolate-hell-delivered country thousands of others had been challenged at the same time, and some especial courage seemed to have been given one with special occasion. Here he was alone, and alone in an especially arduous way. He did not know how much authority he really had, he did not know whether Sir Charles had in truth meant all that he had said, he did not know whether Tom Duncombe had not after all some right to be there.
