AWHISTLING youth who lumbered up the path saved Stellamaris. There was nothing about him suggestive of the dragon-slaying and princess-rescuing hero of the fairy-tale, nor did he at any time thereafter dream that he had played the part of one; but at the sight of him the she-dragon fled, her ultimate purpose unfulfilled. Stella sank quivering on the bench. The knight-errant touched his cloth cap, and, unaccustomed to the company of princesses, lounged in awkward self-consciousness a few yards away, with his hands in his pockets and pretended to admire the view. Stella, aware of deliverance from physical danger, drank in the unutterable comfort of his presence. After a while he turned and was moving off, when a cry from her checked him.
“Please don't go!”
He advanced a step or two. “Is anything the matter, miss?”
She reflected for a moment. “I came over rather faint,” she said. “I don't know whether I can get down to the house alone.” She was too proud to confess to fear of the evil woman. .
The youth offered help. He could easily carry her home. To have carried the mysterious lady of the Channel House would make him the envy of the village. Such aid, however, she declined.
“Shall I tell them at the house, miss?”
She sprang to unsteady feet.
“No, don't do that! See, I can walk. You go in front, and if I want you, I 'll tell you.”
The youth, somewhat disappointed, lounged ahead, and Stella followed, with shaking knees; so had she progressed during her early lessons in the art of walking. At the turn of the path Stella held her breath, dreading to come upon the woman; but no woman was in sight. She walked more freely. At last they reached the gate of the Channel House, which the youth held open for her. She thanked him, and once within the familiar shelter of the garden she sped into the house and up the stairs into her room, where she fell exhausted on the bed.
The sensation of physical peril was gone,—of that she felt only the weakness of reaction,—but the woman had scorched her soul, shrivelled her brain, burnt up the fount of tears. The elfin child of sea-foam and cloud lay a flaming horror.
They found her there, and saw that she was suffering, and tended her lovingly, with many anxious inquiries; but she could not speak. The touch of ministering hands was torture, almost defilement. All humanity seemed to be unclean. Dr. Ransome, summoned in haste, diagnosed fever, a touch of the sun, and prescribed sedatives. For aught she cared, he might have diagnosed a fractured limb. Of objective things she was barely aware. Figures moved around her like the nightmare shapes of a dream, all abhorrent. She heard their voices dimly. If only they would go! If only they would leave her alone!
Her High-and-Mightiness, the nurse, long since relieved of her occupation, was telegraphed for from London. She came and bent over the familiar bed and put her hand on the hot forehead. But Stella withdrew from the once-cooling touch, and closed her ears to the gentle words, for they seemed to be the touch and the words of the woman with the pale, cruel eyes and the thin lips. All night long she could not sleep, tormented by the presence of the watcher in the room. Outside the night was dark, and a fine rain fell. Within, the lamp of Stellamaris burned in the western window of the sea-chamber. For the first time in her life she longed for the blackness; but she could not speak to the watching shape, and she clenched her teeth. Her brain, on fire, conceived the notion that she was caught in one of the Cities of the Plain, and far above her floated a little, dazzling, white cloud, which mockingly invited her to mount on its back and soar with it into the infinite blue.
After the dawn had broken, she fell asleep exhausted, and the sun was high when she awoke.
The nurse, who had been watching her, bent down.
“Are you feeling better, dear?”
She smiled at the well-known face.
“Yes, High-and-Mightiness,” she said. They were the first words she had spoken since the day before.
She raised her head, and suddenly memory awoke, too, and the horror swooped down upon her like a vast-winged, evil bird. She sank again on the pillow and hid her eyes with her hand.
“The light too strong, dear?”
Stella nodded. Words and shapes were now clearly defined. The nurse took her temperature. It was virtually normal.
“It must have been a touch of the sun, darling, as the doctor said,” remarked the nurse. “But, thank heavens! you 're better. You gave us all such a fright.”
“I'm sorry,” said Stella. “It was n't my fault.”
IT was a new and baffling Stellamaris that entered the world again. She went about the house silent and preoccupied. Joy was quenched in her eyes, and her features hardened. The lifelong terms of endearment from the two old people met with no response. Their morning and evening kisses she endured passively. They had become to her as strangers, having gradually undergone a curious metamorphosis from the Great High Excellency and Most Exquisite Auntship of her childhood into a certain Sir Oliver and Lady Blount, personages of bone and flesh of an abominable world, in whom she could place no trust.
One evening before going up-stairs, she picked up a French novel which Sir Oliver had left in the drawing-room.
“Don't read that, Stella dear,” said Lady Blount.
“Why?” asked Stella.
“I don't think it's suitable for young girls.”
“Is it unclean?”
“My darling, what an extraordinary word!” said Lady Blount.
“Is it unclean?” Stella persisted.
“It deals with a certain side of life that is not wholesome for young girls to dwell upon.”
“You have n't answered my question, Auntie.”
“The fact that your uncle and I have read it is an answer, dear,” said Lady Blount, with some dignity.
“Then I will read it, too,” said Stella.
She took it up to her room and opened it in the middle; but after a few pages her cheeks grew hot and her heart cold, and she threw the book far out of the window.
It was a foul, corrupt world, and all the inhabitants thereof save herself gazed upon its foulness, and took part in its corruption, not only without a shudder, but positively with zest. In the sane lucidity of her mind, humanity was scarcely less intolerable than in the nightmare of her day and night of horror.
To perform an act of ethical judgment, no matter how rough and elementary, one must have a standard. The fact, too, of ethical judgment being inherent in the conditions of human existence, implies faultiness in those conditions. In an ideal state of being, such as the evangelical heaven, where there is no faultiness, there can be no possible process of judgment, and thereby no standard whereby to measure right and wrong. If a dweller about the Throne were to visit the earth, and even limit his visit to Cheltenham or a New England township, the record of his impressions would be, from our point of view, both grotesque and unjust. He would have no standard, save the infinite purity of the Godhead (and an infinite standard is a contradiction in terms) whereby to measure human actions. He would be a lost and horrified seraph. His opinions would not be a criticism, but an utterly valueless denunciation of life.
Stellamaris, for all the imperfections inseparable from humanity, had been a dweller about the Throne in her mystical Land of Illusion. Evil, or the whisper of evil, or the thought of evil, had, by the Unwritten Law, never been allowed to enter the sea-chamber. She issued therefrom, like the unfortunate seraph, without a standard. Her impressions of life (from our worldly point of view) were grotesque and unjust. John was condemned by her unheard. Like the seraph, she was lost and horrified. But, unlike the seraph—and here lies the tragedy, for no one of us would break his heart over the horrification of a seraph, as he has only to fly back whence he came to be perfectly happy—unlike the seraph, Stellamaris was just poor human clay, and she could not fly back to her Land of Illusion, because it did not exist. It was her fate to lead the common life of imperfect mortals, feeling the common human physical and spiritual pangs, with all the delicate tendrils of her nature inextricably intertwined in human things, and to focus the myriad sensations afforded by the bewildering panorama of life from the false and futile point of view of the seraph. In consequence, she suffered agonies inconceivable—agonies all the more torturing because she could not turn for alleviation to any human being. She shrank from contact with her kind, wandered lonely in the garden, save for the attendance of the old dog, and sat for hours by the window of the sea-chamber looking with yearning eyes at sea and sky.
But no more could sea and sky, cloud and sunset, foam and mist, take Stellamaris into their communion. She had put on mortality, and they had cast her out from their elemental sphere. The sea-gulls flashed their wings in the sun and circled up the cliff and hovered at her window, fixing her with their round, yellow eyes, but they were no longer the interpreting angels of wind and wave. The glory of all the mysteries had faded into the light of common day, and the memory of them was only the confused and unrecallable tangle of a dream. And Stellamaris cried passionately in her heart for the days when she had not set foot in the world of men, and when she lived somewhere out there in the salt sea-spray, and felt her soul flooded with happiness great and exquisite. But such days could never dawn again. She, too, had become bone and flesh of an abominable world.
Herold came down again, and found her white and pinched, with dark lines beneath her eyes. She scarcely spoke, replied in monosyllables, only made such appearances as the conventions of life demanded, and craftily avoided meeting him alone. She was no longer Stellamaris.
“What 's the matter with her, for pity's sake?” asked Herold.
“She has not yet got over that touch of the sun,” said Sir Oliver.
“This has nothing to do with the sun,” Herold declared.
Lady Blount sighed. “Perhaps it 's a phase. Young girls often pass through it, though earlier. But Stella is different.”
Herold saw that they did not understand, and, knowing their limitations, felt that even if they were enlightened, they would do more harm than good. As soon as he returned to town he tracked John to his office. John looked up from proof-sheets.
“Just back? I nearly ran down yesterday. I should have done so if I had n't promised my aunt to go to church with her.”
“You've quite taken to church-going lately,” said Herold, dryly.
John laughed. “It pleases the old soul.”
“And keeps you in Kilburn,” said Herold.
“It might be something worse,” John growled. Then he banged the table with his fist. “Can you realize what it means to keep away from her? I think of her all day long, and I can't sleep at night for thinking of her. It 's idiotic, weak, disgraceful, wicked, any damned thing you like, but it's so.” And he glowered up into Herold's face. “I am eating myself out for her.”
“What about Stella?” Herold asked.
“That you can tell me. You've just come from her. I don't know. I 've kept away scrupulously enough, Heaven knows, and my letters are just footling things. But I've not heard from her for over a week. I waylay the postman and look over my letters like a silly ass of a boy.”
“Have you told her about your marriage?”
“Not yet.”
Herold drew a deep breath and turned away and pretended to study a proof of the contents-bill of the next number of the Review that was pinned against the wall. He had come there to ask that question. He had half expected and wholly hoped for an answer in the affirmative. Stella's knowledge might have accounted for her metamorphosis.
“She must be told at once,” he said, returning to the table.
“Why?”
“Because she loves you. You fool!” he exclaimed, “have n't I seen it? Has n't she all but told me so herself? And she has told you, in some sort of way, only you have made up your mind not to listen. Let me put matters plain before you. She says good-bye to you here in London, and goes home full of happiness and looks forward to your coming down invested in a new halo, and to your letters,—you know what sort of letters a man writes to the woman he loves,—and instead of all that you never go near her and you write her footling notes. What do you imagine she's thinking and feeling? What do you think any ordinary decent girl would think and feel in the circumstances?”
“Stella is n't an ordinary girl,” said John, leaning back in his writing-chair and looking at Herold from beneath his heavy brows.
“For that reason she thinks and feels a thousand times more acutely. She's ill, she's changed, she's the shadow of herself,” he went on fiercely, “and it's all through you.”
He broke off and, as John said nothing, he put both hands on the table and leaned over and looked into John's eyes.
“I 'll tell you another thing. The whole lot of us have caused her endless misery. We 've fed her all her life on lies. God knows how I hated them! Her coming out in the world has been a gradual discovery of them. She has had shock after shock. She has n't told me,—she's too proud,—but I know, I can read it in her face, in her eyes, in the tone of her voice. And now she's going through the biggest disillusion of all—you.”
“Do you mean,” said John, frowning heavily, “that she thinks I'm a blackguard because I seem—you put the phrase in my head by talking of the ordinary young woman—because I seem to have thrown her over?”
“She's wondering whether you are a lie, like most other things. And it's killing her.”
“What am I to do?”
“Tell her straight. You ought to have done so from the first.”
“If she feels it as deeply as you say, it might kill her outright.”
“It won't,” said Herold. “She 's made of metal too fine. But even if it did, it were better so, for she would die knowing you to be an honest man.”
John put his elbows on the table and tugged at his hair with his big fingers. He could not resent Herold's fiery speech, for he felt that he spoke with the tongue of an archangel. Presently he raised a suffering face.
“You 're right, Wallie. It has got to be done; but I feel as if I'm taking a knife to her.”
He rose and pushed away the pile of proofs. “All this,” said he, “is going to the devil. I 've got to work through it over and over again, because I can't concentrate my mind on anything.” He walked about the room and then came down with both hands on Herold's shoulders.
“For God's sake, Wallie, tell me that you understand how it has all come about! Heaven knows she has had the purest and the highest I've had to give her. I 'm a rough, selfish brute, but for all those years she stood to me for something superhuman, a bit of God fallen on the earth, if you like. And then she came out in woman's form and walked about among us—I could n't help it. Say that you understand.”
“I can quite understand you falling in love with her,” said Herold, quietly.
“And you 'll help to set me right with her—as far as this damnable matter can be set right?”
“You two are dearer to me than anything in life,” said Herold. “There is nothing too difficult for me to undertake for you; but whether I succeed is another question.”
“I wish I were like you,” said John. He shook him with rough tenderness and turned away. “God! It is n't the first time I've wished it.”
“In what way like me?”
“You've kept your old, high ideals. She's still to you Stellamaris—the bit of God. You have n't wanted to drag her down to—to flesh and blood—as I have.”
Herold grew white to the lips and took up his hat and stick. “Never mind about me,” he said, steadying his voice. “I don't count. She's all that matters. What are you going to do? See her or write?”
“I 'll write,” said John.
Herold went out, carrying with him the memory of words he had spoken to John many years before—words of which afterwards he had been ashamed, for no man likes to think that he has spoken foolishly, but words which now had come true: “I have walked on, roses all my life; but my hell is before me... my roses shall turn into red-hot ploughshares, and my soul shall be on fire.” And he remembered how he had spoken of the unforgivable sin—high treason against friendship. But in one respect his words had not come true. He had said that in his evil hour he would have a great, strong friend to stand by his side. He was walking over the ploughshares alone. And that evening, in their wait on the stairs during the first act, in retort to some jesting reply, Leonora Gurney said:
“I believe you 're the chilliest-natured and most heartless thing that ever walked the earth, and how you can play that love-scene in the third act will always be a mystery to me.”
“Perhaps that's the very reason I can play it,” said Herold.
His heart wrung in a vice, John wrote the letter to Stellamaris. He was “killing the thing he loved.” Good men, and even some bad ones, who have done it, do not like to dwell upon the memory. He posted the letter on his way home from the office. It dropped into the letter-box with the dull thud of the first clod of earth thrown upon a coffin. At dinner Miss Lindon talked in her usual discursive way on the warm weather and sun-spots and the curious phenomenon observable on the countenance of a pious curate friend of her youth, who had spots, not sun-spots, but birth-marks, on brow, chin, and cheeks, making a perfect sign of the cross. But the dear fellow unfortunately was afflicted with a red tip to his nose, wherefore a profane uncle—“your great-uncle Randolph, dear”—used to call him the five of diamonds.
“But he was a great gambler—your uncle, I mean. I remember his once losing thirty shillings at whist at a sitting.”
To all of which irrelevant chatter John made replies equally irrelevant. And Unity dumbly watched him. She had been at great pains to prepare a savoury dish that he loved. He, ordinarily of Gargantuan appetite, as befitted the great-framed man that he was, scarcely touched it. Unity was distressed.
“Is n't it all right, Guardian?” she asked.
“Yes, dear; delicious.”
Yet he did not eat, and Unity knew that his heart was not in his food. It was elsewhere. He was unhappy. He had been unhappy for some time. Two lines had come between the corners of his lips and his chin, and there was a queer, pained look in his eyes. A far lesser-hearted and weaker-brained thing in petticoats than Unity would have known that John loved the radiant princess of Wonderland. Unity dreamed of it—the love between her king and her princess. Of herself she scarcely thought. Her humility—not without its pride and beauty—placed her far beneath them both. Her king was suffering. The feminine in her put aside such reasons as would have occurred to the unintuitive male—business cares, disappointed ambition, internal pain, or discomfort. He was suffering; he went about with a mountain of care on his brow that made her heart ache; he answered remarks at random; he had no appetite for the dish he adored—lamb-chopsen casserole, which she had learned to make from a recipe in “The Daily Mirror.” He was pining away for love of Stellamaris.
So deeply engaged was Unity with these thoughts that it was not until she had switched on the light in her bedroom and was preparing to undress that she remembered, with a pang of dismay, that the Olympian tobacco box (old pewter, a present years ago from Herold), one of her own peculiar and precious cares, was empty. She went down-stairs to the store-cupboard, where she hoarded the tobacco and, with it in her hand, she proceeded to the study, and opened the door softly.
Her guardian, her king of men, her beginning and end of existence, sat in his writing-chair, his head bowed on his arms, folded on the table. A blank sheet of paper lay on the blotter. She saw that his great shoulders shook. As he did not hear her enter, she stole on tiptoe to the table, and laid the packet of tobacco on the corner. She tiptoed back to the door, and turned and stayed there for a moment, watching him, soul-racked with futile longing to bring him comfort.
She caught muffled words. She knew in her heart that nothing she could do would be of any avail. In an instinctive gesture she stretched out her hands piteously toward the bowed head and went out of the room, noiselessly closing the door behind her.
That night, she cried as she had never cried before, not even when hot irons had seared her flesh.
An hour or so afterwards John Risca put out the lights in his study and went up-stairs to bed. He could not sleep, and he thought, after the poor, but human, manner of men, not so much of the killing of the thing he loved, as of the unimaginable, intolerable blank in his own life when the thing he loved should be killed.
In the morning he said to himself, “She has got my letter,” and fell into a frenzy of speculation.
That day he watched the post for an answer, and the next day and the next and the next; but no answer came. For the irony of fate had so ordained that, as with the other unanswered letters, Stellamaris, her finger-tips quivering with shame and horror at contact with the envelope, had destroyed it unopened.
UNITY watched the beloved being as only a woman can watch man or a sailor can watch sea and sky. To each, signs and portents are vital matters. She noted every shadow on his face, every deepening line, every trick of his eyes, every mouthful that he ate, and the very working of his throat as he swallowed. She noted the handwriting on envelopes and unfinished manuscript, the ashes knocked out of pipes, the amount of evening whisky consumed, and the morning muddle of pillow and bedclothes. She was alive to his every footstep in the house. She knew, without entering the study, whether he was working, or sitting morose in his old leather arm-chair, or pacing the room. She knew whether he slept or was restless of nights.
One day she made a discovery, and in consequence took the first opportunity of private use of the telephone, and rang up Herold. She was anxious about her guardian. Could she see Herold as soon as possible without Aunt Gladys or guardian knowing? They arranged a meeting just inside the park, by the Marble Arch.
Herold, who knew Unity to be a young woman of practical common sense, had readily assented to her proposal, and in considerable perturbation of mind started from his home in Kensington. He arrived punctually at the Marble Arch end of the park, but found her already there, a patient, undistinguished little figure in her tartan blouse and nondescript hat adorned with impossible roses. The latter article of attire was her best hat. She had bought it already trimmed for seven-and-six, which had seemed a reckless expenditure of her guardian's money.
She was sitting on a bench of the broad carriage-drive, watching with a London child's interest, despite her preoccupation, the gorgeous equipages, carriages, and automobiles transporting the loveliest ladies (save one) in the world, ravishingly raimented, from one strange haunt of joyousness to another. For it was half-past three of the clock on a beautiful day in the height of the London season, and, as everybody knows, Hyde Park is a royal park, and along that stretch of road from Hyde Park Corner to the marble arch no cart or omnibus or hackney cab or pretentious taxi is allowed under penalty of instant annihilation. Only the splendour (in eyes such as Unity's) of plutocratically owned vehicles meets the enraptured vision. Pedestrian fashion, however, does not haunt that end of the road, which is mostly given up to nurse-maids and drab members of the proletariat; but the flowerbeds make compensation by blazing with colour, and the plane-trees wave their greenery over everything.
Herold raised his hat, shook hands, and sat down by Unity's side.
“Itwasgood of you to come, Mr. Herold. I scarcely dared ask you, but—”
“What's gone wrong?” he asked, with a smile.
She began her tale: how her guardian neither ate nor slept, how he tore up page after page of copy,—he who used to write straight ahead; she found the pieces in the waste paper basket,—how he was growing gloomy and haggard and ill. Her woman's mind laid pathetic stress on these outward and visible signs.
“You must have noticed the difference in him, Mr. Herold,” she said tearfully.
He nodded. John took trouble badly, which was one of the reasons that endeared Herold to him. In some aspects he was nothing but a Pantagruelian infant; but it was no use discoursing on this to Unity.
“He feels things very deeply,” he said instead.
“Would n't you, if you loved Miss Stella, and never saw or heard from her?”
“I should,” said he, with a smile.
“And she loves him. I know it. And she feels deeply, too.”
He acquiesced. “She, too, is very unhappy.”
“And they 're separated forever because they can't marry?”
“That is so, Unity,” said he.
“Why can't he get rid of her—the other woman I mean?” cried Unity, fiercely.
“She has given him no grounds for divorce.”
Unity twisted her handkerchief in her hands. “I suppose there comes a time,” she said, “when people can't stand any more suffering, and they break down or do something dreadful.”
“Your guardian is too strong for that,” replied Herold.
“I don't know. I don't know.” The mothering instinct spoke. “That 's what I 've come to ask you about. I'm frightened.”
0294
She turned on him a miserable, scared face and told him of her discovery. She had gone into her guardian's study that morning in order to tidy up, and had seen that he had left the key in the lock of his private drawer, with the rest of the bunch hanging from it. She had opened the drawer and found, lying on top of some documents one of which was a sealed envelope endorsed “My Will,” a loaded revolver and a case of cartridges. She knew that the revolver was loaded because she had examined it. Then, hearing his step, she had shut the drawer, and gone on with her dusting. He had entered, locked the drawer, put the bunch in his pocket, and gone out without a word.
Herold looked grave. More in order to gain time for reflection than to administer a moral lesson, he said:
“You should n't have searched his private drawer, Unity.”
“I'd search anything, if only I could find a way of helping him,” she replied impetuously. “When I see him suffer and can't do anything for him, I feel crazy. I can't sleep sometimes, and stand outside his door in the middle of the night. It does n't matter whether I ought n't to have done it or not,” she cried with an awkward and impatient gesture; “I did it, and I found what I found. What I want to know is, Why should my guardian make his will and keep a loaded revolver in his room unless he thought that—that he was going to die?”
Her eyes filled with tears. Herold, alarmed by her news and touched by her devotion, took her cheap-gloved hand and pressed it. Occupants of the dazzling equipages stared at the elegantly attired gentleman and the dowdy little girl love-making on the public seat. He tried to reassure her.
“Every man with folks depending on him makes a will, so we can dismiss that; and I know heaps of men who keep revolvers.”
“But why should the will be dated two days ago?” asked Unity.
“Was it?”
“The date was written on the envelope, with 'My Will' and his name.”
“In all probability,” said Herold, “the cloud that has come between him and Stellamaris has made him decide to make a fresh will. I know he made one some years ago.”
“But why the revolver?”
“He spoke to me, also some years ago, about getting one. There had been one or two burglaries and an ugly murder—don't you remember?—in the neighbourhood. He must have got it then.”
“It looks too new,” said Unity.
“Those things keep new for ever so long, if they 're not used,” he argued.
“Then you think there 's no danger?” she askeds with both her hands on his wrist.
“Not at present,” he said, with a smile. “Look after him as closely as you can and keep up your brave little heart, or we 'll have you too going about with hollow eyes and gaunt cheeks, and we can't afford it.”
“Me?” She sniffed derisively. “I'm as tough as a horse. And what do I matter?”
“Your guardian would have a pretty poor time of it if he had only Aunt Gladys to look after him.”
The shadow of a grin flickered over Unity's face.
“I suppose he would,” she said.
She went away half-comforted. She had shared her terrifying secret with Herold, which was a good and consoling thing; but she had not been quite convinced by his easy arguments. And Herold went away entirely unconvinced. He knew John as no one, not even Unity, who had made him the passionate study of her life, could know him. It was his peculiarity to pursue his right-headed ideas with far less obstinacy than his wrong-headed ones. In the former case he had a child's (and sometimes a naughty child's) hesitations, and was amenable to argument; but when bent on a course of folly, he charged blindly, and could be stopped only with great difficulty. Herold walked through the park in anxious thought, and, at a loose end for an hour or two, took a taxi to the club to which both he and John belonged. Avoiding the lounge and its cheery talk, he mounted to the deserted morning-room, and, having ordered tea, settled down to an evening newspaper, the pages of which he stared at, but did not read.
Presently, to his surprise, John, who had avoided the club for some little time, burly and gloomy, entered the room.
“I thought I'd come in for a quiet talk with somebody; but there's that ass Simmons down-stairs. He makes me sick.”
Simmons was the wit and brilliant raconteur of the club.
“You can have a quiet talk with me, if I'm good enough,” said Herold. “I 've been wanting to see you. What line are you going to take in the 'Review' on this latest freak of the censor?”
The prohibition of a famous Continental play had aroused the usual storm in the theatrical and journalistic world. Every one who wrote turned his back on the harmless and ridiculously situated man, and in cuttlefish fashion squirted ink at him. But John Risca took no interest in the question, and stated the fact with unnecessary violence. He, on his side, had wanted to see Herold. He had taken his advice and written to Stella and had received no reply. More than a week had passed. The whole thing was driving him mad.
Herold made a proposal which had been vaguely in his head for some days, and to which Unity's communication had given definiteness.
“Come away with me on a sea-voyage—a couple of months—South Africa, anywhere you like. I'm tired out. As for the piece, it's near the end of the run, and it 'll hurt no one if I go out and let Brooke play my part. I have n't had a holiday for two years. It would be an act of charity. You can get away; no man is indispensable, and you can afford it. If you stay here, you 'll lose your balance and very likely commit some act of idiotic folly. By our return, time will have done its soothing work, and the relations between Stella and yourself will have been readjusted.”
Such was the substance of that which for a solid hour he strove to nail into John's armour-clad mind. His efforts were vain. In the first place, John was not going to accept such a quixotic sacrifice of professional interests from any man, even from Herold; secondly, he could n't get away from London, and did n't want to; thirdly, if he were being driven mad within a journey of an hour or so from Stellamaris, he would become a raving maniac if he were separated from her by half the length of the earth; fourthly, he was in perfect health and perfect command of his faculties, and the only meaning he could attach to Herold's insinuation regarding idiotic folly was that he might forget himself so far as to go down to Southcliff and make a scene with Stellamaris, thereby acting with insensate cruelty toward her: all of which was ludicrous, and it was insulting on Herold's part to make such a suggestion.
Herold called him a fool and said that he did not mean that at all.
“Then what did you mean?”
“When a man loses control over himself and lets himself be obsessed by a fixed idea, his brain 's not right, and he's capable of anything. The only chance for him is change of scene and interests, and that's why I've been imploring you to come away with me.”
“And that's why I'm going to do nothing of the kind,” said John, rising and looking down upon his friend with blood-shot eyes. “I'm pretty miserable, I own. Lots of men are, and they have to keep their mouths shut, because they have n't any one before whom they 're not ashamed to let off steam. I've got you. I've had you all my man's life. I've told you everything. Somehow I've not been ashamed to tell you things I would n't dream of breathing to any other man living. There 's a kind of woman, I believe, whom I might have talked to as I do to you. I've not met her, so I've got into the habit of coming to you with whatever worries me; and you 've never failed me. And I've come to you now. But there are limits beyond which even a friend like you has no right to go. You've no right to tell me I'm going out of my mind and to warn me against behaving like the inmate of a lunatic asylum. You've no right. I resent it. I'm not going to stand it.”
Herold's reply was checked by the creaking of the door and the entrance of the bent figure of an old member, a county court judge who, on his way to a writing-table by the window, nodded courteously to the two younger men and remarked that it was a fine day.
“I suppose most people would call it so,” said John.
“Don't you?”
“I hate it,” cried John. “I wish it would rain. I wish it would rain like the devil. I would give my ears for a pea-soup fog. Sunshine is too blightingly ironical in this country.”
The old judge lifted his eyebrows. “The metaphysics of meteorology are beyond me,” he said, with a smile and a bow, and sat down to write.
John lingered for a second or two by the side of his friend, tracing the pattern of the Turkey carpet with the toe of his boot; then he swung round abruptly.
“Excuse me,” said he. “I 've got to look at Baxter's imbecile article in 'The Contemporary.' ”
He went to the table where the current magazines and reviews were tidily displayed, and Herold, sitting in an arm-chair some distance away, with his back to the table, pondered over the discussion that had just taken place. But for the rumble and clatter of London that came through the open windows, the ceaseless choric ode to all the drama of the vast city, there was silence in the spacious room, broken only by the scratching of the old judge's quill pen. Herold resumed his aimless skimming of the evening newspaper. What further appeal could he make to John in his contradictory and violent mood?
At last the old judge, having scribbled his note, got up and left the room. Herold turned and found himself alone. John had gone without drum or trumpet. In the lounge down-stairs there was no John, and in the hall the porter told him that Mr. Risca had left the club.
He went home to his actor's six o'clock dinner, and found a letter from Lady Blount imploring him to come to Southcliff at once. Stella was getting worse day by day. Sir Oliver and she were in despair, Dr. Ransome was at his wits' ends. In a woman's frantic helplessness she adjured him to come and work a miracle. Now, it so happened that on the early afternoon of the next day he had a very important appointment. It was a question of his going into nominal management in the autumn. Suitable pieces, a theatre, and financial backers, obscure but vital elements in theatrical business, had been found, and it was with these last that the morrow's all-important interview was to take place. He turned up the railway time-table, and saw that by leaving London by the first train in the morning, and probably skipping lunch, he could spend a couple of hours in Southcliff and get back in time for his engagement. He telegraphed to Lady Blount, dined, and went to the theatre. For perhaps the first time in his pleasant life he was overwhelmed that evening by the sense of the futility of his work, which every artist, actor, painter, and poet is doomed to feel at times. The painted faces of his colleagues, the vain canvas of the sets, the stereotyped words, gestures, inflections, repeated without variation for more than the two hundredth time, the whole elaborate make-believe of life that at once is, and is not, the theatre,—all this oppressed him, filled him with shame and disgust. It had no meaning. It was an idle show. He had given to inanity a life that might have been devoted to the pursuit of noble ideals.
Folks are apt to imagine that, when the pains of the actual world get round about an artist's soul, the supreme moment has arrived for him to deliver himself in immortal utterances. This is untrue. He does n't so deliver himself. On the contrary, he cuts up his canvas, smashes his piano, and kicks his manuscript about the room. What interpretation of life, however celestially inspired, can have the all-annihilating poignancy of life itself? Your poet may write an immortal lyric by the death-bed of his mistress; but it is a proof that he did not care a brass farthing for the lady: he is expressing the grief that he might have felt if he had loved her. For the suffering artist, at grips with the great realities, art is only a trumpery matter. It is only when he is getting, or has got, better, that he composes his masterpieces working
... the world to sympathy
With hopes and fears it heeded not.
So Herold, instinctively obeying the common law, as all poor humans in one way or another have to do, grew heartsick at the vanity of his calling, and, after a mechanically perfect performance, wondered how an honest man could live such a life of shameless fraud.
After a night and dawn of rain the sun shone from a blue sky when he reached the Channel House next morning. Sir Oliver and Lady Blount received him in the dining-room. They looked very old and careworn. Like Constable, they had nothing to live for save Stellamaris; and now Stellamaris, stricken by an obscure but mortal malady, was dying before their eyes. So, antiphonally, and at first with singularly little bickering, they told Herold their story of despair. It added little to his knowledge. The symptoms of which he was already aware had intensified; that was all. But the two guardians had altered their opinion as to the cause. Sir Oliver ruefully discarded the theory of the touch of the sun, and his wife now realized that the state of Stellamaris was not merely the morbid phase through which most maidens are supposed to pass. Dr. Ransome, with intuition none too miraculous, had emitted the theory that she had something on her mind. “But what could the poor darling innocent child have on her mind?” cried Sir Oliver.
“What, indeed,” echoed Lady Blount, “unless her mind is affected?”
“Don't be a fool, Julia,” said Sir Oliver.
“I'm not such a fool as you think, Oliver. Stella has n't lived a normal life, and who knows but what the change of the last year may have done harm? Dr. Ransome himself said that if we could cure the mind, we could cure the body, and advised us to take her abroad so that she could be distracted by fresh scenes.”
“He hinted nothing about insanity. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Sir Oliver, with querulous asperity.
Then Herold saw that the truth must be told.
“Has it never struck you that John may be the cause of it all?”
Sir Oliver jerked himself round in his chair. “John? What do you mean?”
“Why, I wrote to John at the same time that I did to you,” said Lady Blount, “begging him to come down in almost the same words; for you know, dear Walter, I 'm not a clever woman and can't say the same thing in two different ways. She does n't know I did so, for she's so strange and won't talk to any one alone, if she can help it. I thought John and you might succeed in getting something out of her. But John has n't replied at all. I can't understand it.”
“Does n't that bear out what I say?” asked Herold.
“But John—what do you mean?” Sir Oliver repeated.
“Yes, dear, what do you mean? Of course John has behaved in an extraordinary way lately. He has n't been to see us for ever so long. But the dear fellow has explained. He is overwhelmed with work, especially at week-ends. He writes me charming letters, and he corresponds regularly with Stella. I don't see—“.
“Oh, for heaven's sake, Julia, let Walter put in a word!” cried Sir Oliver, rising and throwing his cigarette-end into the bank of flowering-plants that filled the summer fireplace, a domestic outrage that always irritated Lady Blount, and even now caused her to wince and dart an angry glance at the perpetrator. “Go on. Tell us what you mean.”
“Has it never occurred to you that Stella and John may have fallen in love with each other—with the ghastly barrier of the wife between them?”
The two old people looked at him wide-eyed and drooping-mouthed. That Stellamaris, their fragile, impalpable child of mystery, more precious to them than a child of their own bodies, over whom they might have quarrelled—that Stellamaris should be a grown woman, capable of a grown woman's passions, was a proposition bewilderingly preposterous. Sir Oliver found speech first.
“Stella in love with John? It 's absurd; it's ludicrous. Why, bless my soul! you might just as well say she was in love with me! It's nonsense—ridiculous nonsense.”
He walked up and down beside the dining-room table, with arms outstretched, shaking his thin hands in protest.
Lady Blount, her elbow resting on the table, looked at Walter.
“The barrier of the wife? Who could have told her?”
“John himself.”
“How much?”
“I don't know.”
Sir Oliver brought himself to an abrupt standstill by the side of his wife.
“He ought n't to have done anything of the kind. Such things are not fit for her to hear.”
“That's the dreadful mistake we've made all along, my dear Oliver,” said Herold, sadly; and he disclosed to them probabilities of which they had not dreamed.
Lady Blount began to cry silently, and her husband laid his hand on her shoulder. She put up her own and clasped it. They looked very forlorn, robbed of the darling they loved. The new Stellamaris was alien to their conservatism. They did not know her. They were lost. Like children they clasped hands, and their hearts were united at last in common dismay.
Herold turned and looked out of the window. Presently he said:
“She 's in the garden. I 'll go and talk to her, if she will let me.”
“Do, Walter dear. Try to make her speak. It's that awful silence that we can't bear.”
“She has always been devilish fond of you,” said Sir Oliver.
Herold went out and came upon her, escorted by Constable, in a path bordered on each side by Canterbury bells and fox-gloves and sweet-william. She drew herself up as he approached, and looked at him like some wraith or White Lady caught in the daylight, with no gleam of welcome in her glance. The old dog, however, pushed by her to greet Herold, whom he held in vast approbation. Then, aware of being relieved from duty, he wandered down the path, where he lay down and, like a kindly elder, suffered the frisky impudence of a stray kitten of the household.
“I suppose they 've sent for you because they think I am ill,” Stella began suspiciously.
“You are ill, dearest,” he replied in a quiet voice, “and it's causing us all very deep grief.”
“I'm not ill,” she retorted. “But every one's worrying me. I wish you would tell them to leave me alone.”
He took a nerveless, unresponsive hand and put it to his lips. “Stellamaris, Stella darling, don't you know how we all love you? How we would give everything, life itself, to make you happy?”
She withdrew her hand. “Don't talk of happiness. It's a delusion.”
“Every living thing can be happy after its kind,” said Herold. “Look at this great bumble-bee swinging in the campanula.”
“You were n't sent here to talk to me about bumble-bees,” she said with an air of defiance.
“No. I came to speak to you about John.”
It was a thrust of the scalpel. It hurt him cruelly to deal it, but it had to be dealt. He closely watched its effect. Her wan face grew even whiter, and her lips grew white, and she held herself rigid. Her eyes were hard.
“I forbid you to mention his name to me.”
“I must disobey you. No, my dearest,” said he, gently barring the path, “you must listen. John is as unhappy and as ill as you yourself. He is suffering greatly. I don't know what to do with him. He 's going on like a madman. You must not be unjust.”
“I 'm not unjust. I know the truth at last, and I judge accordingly.”
“You are hard, Stella. Perhaps that's the first unkind word anybody has ever spoken to you—and I've got to speak it, worse luck! John would have told you long ago of the unhappy things in his life if he had thought they could possibly concern you. As soon as he found that they might do so, he told you frankly.”
“He has told me nothing,” said Stella, icily.
“He wrote to you about his marriage over a week ago.”
“I did n't read the letter. I never read his letters. I don't take them out of the envelopes. I destroy them.”
Herold stared in amazement. “Then how,” he cried, “do you know what you call the truth? What do you know?”
“He married a woman who is still alive. I know a great deal more,” she added, ingenuous still in her cold disdain.
“More?” His brain worked against baffling conjecture. Who could have told her? Suddenly his eyes caught the shadow of tragedy. He made a step forward and closed his hands on her arms, and even then he felt the shock and pain of their fragility. In London, a short time ago, they were round and delicately full.
“Stellamaris darling, tell me. It is I, Walter, who have loved you all your life, and to whom you have always told everything. Something none of us know has happened. What is it?”
She swayed back from him, and half closed her eyes.
“Let me go,” she said faintly. “Such things are not to be spoken of. They are not to be thought of. They only come in horrible dreams one can't help.”
He put an arm round her instinctively to save her from falling.
“Who told you? You must speak.”
She wrenched herself free and stood rigid again.
“She told me, his wife herself.”
“His wife!” His head reeled.
“His deserted wife, a woman with green eyes and thin lips. I suppose you know her. She came down here to tell me.”
“My God!” cried Herold. “My God in heaven!”
And for the first time Stella saw a man in white, shaking anger, showing his teeth and shaking his fists.
“When was it?”
She told him. He controlled the riot within him and questioned her further, almost hectoringly, masterfully, and she replied like a woman compelled to obey, yet flinging her answers defiantly. And he went on unrelenting, fighting not her, but the devil that had got possession of her, until she told him all, even the final horror, as far as he could wring confession from her virgin fierceness; for, in the white-hot passion of his anger he had challenged her knowledge of evil almost as directly as the woman had done.
“And you believe her?” he cried. “You, Stellamaris, believe that murderous thing of infamy, when you 've known John Risca and his love and his tenderness all your life? You believe it possible—John and Unity? Good God! It 's monstrous! It 's hellish!”
He planted himself on the path before her, hands on hips, his sensitive face set, his blue eyes aflame, and looked at her as no man or woman had ever yet looked at Stellamaris. And she met his look, and her eyes, despite the battle her proud soul was fighting, lost their hardness, and new light flashed into them, as though they had changed from agate to diamond.
“She loves him, body and soul,” she said. “I ought to have recognized it in London. I did n't know the meaning of things then. I do now.”
“Yes, she does love him; she loves him as I love you,”—and, unrealized by him, there came into his voice the vibrating notes of passion that had stirred Stellamaris to the depths at the theatre,—“with every quivering fibre, heart and spirit, body and soul.” He flung both hands before his face,—these were words of madness,—and went on hurriedly: “She loves him as John loves you, as the great souls of the earth can love, without thought of hope, just because they love.”
She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they stood, as they had been standing all the time, in the pathway, between the gay borders of flowers; and the sky was blue overhead, and the noonday sun caressed the ivy and lichens on the Georgian front of the Channel House, which basked peacefully on the farther side of the lawn. The kitten had frisked away with feline inconsequence, and Constable sprawled stiffly asleep on the gravel, like a dead dog.
“You say you love me like that?” said Stellamaris.
“You command love. Unity herself loves you like that,” replied Herold, loyally.
“What reason should she have for loving me? She should be jealous of me, as I was of her. And who is she? Who is Unity?” she asked with an imperious little stamp. “I 've been lied to about her for many years. She too lied. Will you explain her? If she's not what that woman said, what is she?”
“I 'll tell you,” he said.
He spared her nothing. It was not the hour for glossing over unpleasant things. Let her judge out of the fullness of knowledge. At his tale of the torturing—he gave her the details—she shrank back, covering her eyes and uttered a sobbing cry.
“It 's too horrible! I can't bear it; I can't believe it.”
He waited a while to give her time for recovery.
“It's true,” said he.
“I don't believe it,” she cried, facing him again. “The woman warned me against lies that were being told about her—lies to screen Unity.”
“It 's true,” he repeated. “If you want proofs, I could get you the newspaper reports of the trial. She was put into prison for three years. Then John swore that Unity should never suffer again, and, by way of reparation, adopted her as his own daughter. He came like a god and lifted her from misery to happiness. That 's why she loves him, as you say, body and soul.”
“And he loves her.”
Her tone staggered him. “He loves her as a father loves a daughter.”
“And she as a woman loves a lover. I'm no longer a child. I know what I 'm talking about.”
Then he saw how deep the poison had gone. It was a ghastly travesty of Stellamaris that spoke.
“You are talking wickedness, Stellamaris,” he said sternly. “Go on your knees and pray to God for forgiveness.”
She threw back her head. “There is n't a God, or He would not allow such foulness and horror to be on His earth. I believe in nothing. I believe nobody. I would just as soon believe that woman as you. At least she did n't pretend to be good. She rejoiced in her vileness. She hid nothing, as every one else hides things. And now—” her voice dropped to a tone of great weariness—“don't you think you've tortured me enough?”
The word was a sword through his heart. He stretched out reproachful hands.
“Stella, dearest, dearest—”
“Forgive me,” she said. “Sometimes I hardly know what I'm saying.”
“If you would only trust me!”
She shook her head sadly.
“I can trust no one, not even you. Let me go now.”
He saw that she was at the end of her strength. Any concession that she might make now would be for him a Pyrrhic victory. And it was true that he had tortured her—tortured her, as his whole being asserted, for her soul's welfare. But he could probe her no further.
They walked in silence toward the house. Constable, as soon as they had passed, rose and followed them. It is for the greater happiness of big-hearted dogs that they do not understand all things human.
At the foot of the staircase leading to Stella's wing they parted.
“Stella, darling,” said he, taking her hand, “if you will believe nothing else, believe this: all our hearts are breaking for you.”
She looked at him for a long, odd moment, with the diamond glitter in her eyes.
“Mine is broken,” she said.
He stood and watched her wearily mounting the stairs until she disappeared at the turn of the landing, the old hound scrabbling up behind her.