Page:The council of seven.djvu/44

 Helen rose rather nervously from her chair. She was never quite at her ease in this man's presence. Few were. Before she could muster wits enough to say anything, Saul Hartz had gone on developing his theme in the hushed, far-away voice which only one person at a time was ever able to hear and yet in the ear of that person every syllable was like a bell. "Madness in the mother's family. Got his dossier—dear fellow! Brilliant at Oxford. At Eton, too. Geared a little too high, just a little too high—that's all. Great pity! A second Gladstone might have been so useful just now. But"—the shrug of the Colossus almost seemed in the tranced eyes of Helen to set the cosmos whirling—"over the verge already. Dear fellow!"

The finality of that gentle, rather eerie voice turned her soul faint. She could not repress a shudder. The sense of fate as adumbrated in the personality of this man was overpowering.

"Dear fellow!" He developed his theme with a cadence ever-recurring, yet of a slightly fantastic irrelevance, like a leit-motif of the later Wagner. "You've seen his speech, I daresay, to his constituents. Proud people—they must be—dear fellow! Mother, you know, was one of the mad Dinneford lot."

So intense was his absorption in his subject that it might be said to evoke an atmosphere. The room itself became submerged in a miasma that was almost deadly. Helen had a sensation of being stifled by a lurking, unknown force. It was very difficult to inter