Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long time. It was while he was lying out under the pine-trees that he had realized what he had got to say to Marian if he ever got back. There was a complicated cipher message for the Government, which he had kept quite clear in his mind, and eventually given to an intelligent doctor to send off; and there was the message to Marian, which he himself would have to say when he saw her.
"I've come back, as I promised; but I can't marry you now, of course. I'm a crock."
The first time he saw Marian he had got through only the first part of the sentence. There was no hurry about the rest of it. The doctor and the sister had both assured him that there was no hurry. They had been very kind, and quite as honest as their profession permitted. They said Marian would come back, and he could tell her then.
They admitted, when he cross-questioned them with all the sharpness of which he was capable, that he would be a cripple. They did not bother him with futile commiserations. They gave him quietly and kindly the facts he asked for. He would never be able to walk again, but he could get about easily on crutches.
Julian did not want to live very much, but his mother's eyes hurt him when he tried not to; and then Marian came again, and he got through the rest of his sentence.
"You see," he explained in a low whisper which sounded in his head like a gong, "marriage is quite out of the question."
Marian was there with smiles and flowers, just as he had so often pictured her; but she sat down with a curious solidity, and her voice sounded clearer than it had sounded in his dreams.
"Nothing alters our engagement, Julian," she said. "Nothing can."
She spoke with a finality that stopped his thinking. He had finished his sentence, and it seemed hardly fair to be expected to start another on the spur of the moment. He gave himself up to a feeling of intense relief: he had got off his cipher to the Government and he had released Marian.
He had known these were going to be difficult things to do. The cipher had been the worst. The French doctor had taken some time to understand that Julian must neither die nor be attended to until he had sent the cipher off; and now the business about Marian was over, too. He had only to lie there and look at her day by day coming in with roses. They did not talk much. Julian never spoke of his symptoms, but they were too radical to free him. He lay under them like a creature pinned under the wreckage of a railway accident.
Slowly, day by day, his strength came back to him; and as it came back, peace receded. His eyes lost their old adoring indulgence; they seemed to be watching Marian covertly, anxious for some gift that she was withholding from him. He did not demand this as a right, as the old Julian would have done, breaking down the barriers of her pride to reach it. He pleaded for it with shamed eyes that met hers only to glance away. Something in her that was not cruelty as much as a baffling desire to escape him made her refuse to give him what his eyes asked.
Julian had loved her for her elusiveness, and the uncaptured does not yield readily to any appeal from the hunter. The prize is to the strong.
She would not have withstood a spoken wish of his; but there is something in speechless suffering from which light sympathies shrink away. Pity lay in Marian a tepid, quickly roused feeling, blowing neither hot nor cold. She cried easily over sad books, but she had none of the maternal instinct which seizes upon the faintest indication of pain with a combative passion for its alleviation. She became antagonistic when she was personally disturbed by suffering.
She was keeping her word to Julian while her heart was drifting away from him; and he, while he desired her to be free, instinctively tried to hold her back. They had both put their theories before their instincts, and they expected their instincts to stand aside until their theories had been carried out.
Perhaps if Julian could have told her his experiences he might have recaptured her imagination; but when she asked him to tell her about them, he said quickly, "I can't," and turned away his head. He was afraid to trust himself. He wanted to tell her everything. He was afraid that if he began, his reticence would break down, and he would tell her things which must never pass his lips. He longed for her to know that every day, and nearly every hour, he had fought and conquered intricate abnormal obstacles. He had slipped across imminent death as a steady climber grips and passes across the face of a precipice.
He had never faltered. All that he had gone to find he had found, and more. At each step he had seen a fresh opportunity, and taken it. He had been like a bicyclist in heavy traffic assailed on every side by converging vehicles, and yet seeing only the one wavering ribbon of his way out. And he had won his way out with knowledge that was worth a king's ransom. He could have borne anything if Marian would realize that what he had borne had been worth while. But after her first unanswered question, Marian never referred again to what he had done. She behaved as if his services had been a regrettable mistake.
She talked with real feeling about the sufferings of those who fought in the war. Her eyes seemed to tell him what her lips refrained from uttering, that she could have been more sorry for him if he had been wounded in a trench, and not shot at and abandoned by a nervous sentry firing in the dark. He could not remember the exact moment when out of the vague turmoil of his weakened mind he gripped this cold truth: Marian was not tender.
When she was not there he could pretend. He could make up all the beautiful, loving little things she had not said, and sometimes he would not remember that he had made them up. Those were the best moments of all. He believed then that she had given him what his heart hungered for. He was too much ashamed of his ruined strength to feel resentment at Marian's coldness. It struck him as natural that she should care less for a broken man.
His mind traveled slowly, knocking against the edges of his old dreams.
He thought perhaps a nursing home wasn't the kind of place in which people could really understand one another, all mixed up with screens and medicine bottles, and nurses bringing things in on trays. If he could see Marian once at Amberley for the last time, so that he could keep the picture of her moving about the dark wainscoted rooms, or looking out from the terrace above the water meadows, he would have something precious to remember for the rest of his life; and she mightn't mind him so much there, surrounded by the dignity of the old background of his race. One day he said to her:
"I want to go to Amberley as soon as I can be moved. I want to see it again with you."
"In December?" asked Marian, with lifted, disapproving brows. "It would be horribly damp, my dear Julian, all water-meadows and mist. You would be much more comfortable here."
Julian frowned. He hated the word "comfort" in connection with himself.
"You don't understand," he said, a little impatiently. "I know every inch of it, and it's quite jolly in the winter. We are above the water. I want to see the downs. One gets tired of milk-carts and barrel organs, and the brown tank on the roof across the way. You remember the downs, Marian?"
His eyes met hers again with that new, curiously weak look of his. Marian turned her head away. How could Julian bear to speak of the downs?
She saw for a moment the old Julian springing up the hillside assured and eager, the fine, strong lover who had taken her heart by storm. She spoke coldly to this weaker Julian.
"Yes," she said, "I am not likely to forget the downs. I spent the last happy hours of my life there; but I cannot say I ever wish to see them again."
Julian's eyes fell, so that she could not see if he had even noticed how bitterly she remembered Amberley.
The next day she found him sitting up for the first time. He was propped up by cushions, but it made him look as if he had gained some of his old incisive strength.
The other two men had been moved, and they had the large, bare room to themselves.
No sound came from the square beneath them; in the house itself there were passing footsteps and the occasional persistent buzzing of an electric bell.
"Look here," said Julian in a queer, dry voice, "I've got an awful lot to say to you—d'you mind drawing your chair nearer? I meant to say it at Amberley. I'd have liked it better there. I rather hate this kind of disinfected, sloppy place for talk. You must loathe it, too. But here or there it's got to be said. You said something or other when I first put it to you—about our engagement never being broken. It was awfully good of you, of course. I couldn't see through it at the time. I wanted to let things slide. But it's all nonsense my dear girl. Women like you can't marry logs of wood."
He looked at her anxiously. Her eyes were shut to expression. She sat there, just as lovely, just as sphinx-like as some old smiling portrait. There was the same unfluctuating, delicate color in her face, and the same unharassed, straightforward glancing of the eyes. She was not the least perturbed by what he said; she expected him to say it.
"We should be foolish," she answered quietly, "to try to ignore the terrible difference in our lives, Julian, and I was sure you would want to set me free; but you cannot do it. I took the risk of your accident, unwillingly at first; but, still, eventually I accepted it, and I will not be set free."
His eyes held hers compellingly, as if he were searching for some inner truth behind her words, and then slowly reluctant tears gathered across the keenness of his vision. He leaned his head back on his pillow and looked away.
"I don't think," he said slowly, "you're glad to have me back. I don't want to marry you, I couldn't marry you; but I wish to Heaven you'd been glad! O Marian, I'm a coward and a fool, but if you'd been glad, I'd have gone down under it! I'd have married you then. I oughtn't to say this. It's all nonsense, and you're quite right. It's awfully fine of you to want to keep your word; but, you see, I didn't want your word. It's your heart I wanted. I used to say out there sometimes, when things were a bit thick, 'Never mind. If I get through, she'll be glad.'"
Marian drew herself up. This did not seem to her fair of Julian. She had prayed very earnestly to God for his safe return. Neither God nor he had been quite fair about it. This was not a safe return.
"I don't know what more I can do, Julian," she said steadily, "than offer to share my life with you."
"That's just it," said Julian, with that curious look in his eyes which kept fighting her, and yet appealing to her simultaneously. "You can't do more. If you could, I'm such a weak hound, I'd lie here and take it. If you wanted me, Marian,—wanted a broken fragment of a man fit for a dust-pan,—I'd land you with it. But, 'pon my word, it's too steep when you don't want it. Out of some curious sense of duty toward the dust-pan—I'm afraid I'm being uncivil to the universe, but I feel a little uncivil to it just now. No; you've got to go. I'm sorry. Don't touch me. Just let me be; but if you could say just where you are before you go! But it doesn't matter. I shouldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe the mother that bore me now. I've seen the end of love."
The tears burned themselves away from his eyes; they gazed at her as sunken and blue as the sea whipped by an east wind. She turned slowly toward the door.
"I want you to remember, Julian," she said, "that I meant what I said. I mean it still. Iwishto carry out our engagement."
Julian said something in reply that Marian didn't understand. He was repeating out loud and very slowly the cipher he had sent to the Government.
After all, it had been easier to send the cipher to the Government than to release Marian. His mind had sprung back to the easier task.
It was not often that Stella took anything for herself, least of all Saturday afternoons. They belonged by a kind of sacred right to Eurydice, and what was left over from Eurydice was used on the weekly accounts. Mrs. Waring found it easier to explain to Stella than to any one else why one and sixpence that was really due to the butcher should have been expended upon "The Will of God," bound in white and gold for eighteenpence, an indisputable spiritual bargain, but a poor equivalent to the butcher.
But this Saturday afternoon Stella hardened her heart against Eurydice and turned her mind away from the vista of the weekly bills. She wanted to think about Julian.
Marian had left London the day after her interview with him. She belonged to that class of people which invariably follows a disagreeable event by a change of address; but she had found time before she went to write to Stella. There was something she wanted Stella to send on after her from the Army and Navy stores. She was really too upset and rushed to go there herself. Julian had been so extraordinary; he apparently expected her to be fonder of him now than when he was all right. She had really made tremendous sacrifices going to that horrid nursing home every day for a month. Both her parents were delighted that the engagement was at an end, and of course it was a relief in some ways, though horribly sad and upsetting, especially as Julian behaved as if she were to blame. Marian was afraid he wasn't as chivalrous as she had always thought. She had idealized him. One does when one is in love with people; but it doesn't last. One wakes up and finds everything different.
Stella wanted to forget Marian's letter. It seemed to her as cursory and callous as a newspaper account of a storm in China. It was all so far off, and drowned Chinamen are so much alike; and yet she had written to tell Stella about Julian and the end of love. "Many waters cannot quench love"; it had not taken many waters to quench Marian's. It occurred to Stella for the first time that the quality of love depends solely upon the heart that holds it; not even divine fire can burn on an untended hearth.
It was a mild December day; winter had given itself a few soft hours in which to brood upon the spring. London, the last of places to feel the touch of nature and the first to profit by it, had passed into a golden mist.
Stella left the town hall at two o'clock, and walked down the busy highway. All the little, lively shops were awake and doing their noisy business of the week, while farther west all the big, quiet shops, with other habits, closed on the heels of their departing customers. Stella slipped away from the eager friendly crowd, glued together in indissoluble groups upon the pavement. She wanted to be alone and not to have to keep reminding herself not to think of Julian until she had finished what she had to do.
She turned down a narrow lane with high brick walls. Silence and solitude were at the turn of a corner. London fell away from her like a jangling dream.
She passed an iron-scrolled gateway which led into an old garden. The low-browed house, with its overhanging eaves, was once the home of a famous poet. Poetry clung about it still; it was in the air, and met her like the touch of a friend's hand. A little farther along the lane she came to an opening in the wall, and saw before her a small, surrounded field of grass. It was a Quaker burial-ground. This unique and quiet people, in their enmity with form, had chosen of all forms the most resilient. They had made in the heart of London a picture, and a place of peace for death.
There was no sense of desolation in the silent field; only the sunshine, the old walls, and the green emptiness. It might have been the grass-grown citadel of Tusculum spread out at Stella's feet, it was a spot so acquainted with the air, with solitude, and with a nameless history.
Beyond it lay a maze of old and narrow streets, with quaint, lop-sided houses, uneven roofs, and winding causeways.
At the end of one of these she came suddenly upon a waste of waters the color of a moonstone. Stella had never been abroad; but she felt as if a wall between her mind and space had broken down and shown her Venice. Drifting slowly down the broad stream were two white swans, and across the river a green bank stood beneath a row of shining towers.
They were a row of factory chimneys; but rising out of the mist, above the moonstone flood, they looked like ancient towers. Stella sat upon a wooden float; it made a luxurious seat for her opposite the drifting swans. She felt as if all her thoughts at last were free. There was no one in sight; old and dignified houses leaned toward the water-front: but for all the life that inhabited them, they might have been the ghosts of houses. Nothing stirred, but sometimes up the river a sea-gull, on level wings, with wary eyes, wandered above the watery highway, challenging the unaccustomed small spaces of the sky.
Stella wished for the first time that Julian were dead. She did not believe in a capricious or an impatient God, moved by well-timed petitions; but all her being absorbed itself into an unconscious prayer for Julian's peace.
She could not have told how long she had been there when she heard the sound of footsteps, strangely familiar footsteps, direct, regular, and swift. She looked up, to meet the grave, intent gaze of Mr. Leslie Travers.
Stella rubbed her eyes as if she had been asleep. Surely in a place of whispering silences, town clerks did not burst upon you except in dreams?
Of course Mr. Travers might live in one of these old, quiet houses, though it did not seem very likely to Stella. She thought he must live in some place where the houses looked as if they knew more what they were about, and did not brood over a deserted waterway
Seeing all their own mischanceWith a glassy countenance,
Seeing all their own mischanceWith a glassy countenance,
like that immortal gazer, theLady of Shalott.
Mr. Travers did not pass Stella with his usual air of cutting through space like a knife. He crossed the float gingerly, and asked firmly, but with kindness, if he might sit down.
Stella gave a helpless gesture of assent. She could not stop him, but he was inappropriate. The row of factory chimneys ceased to disguise themselves as towers; the float looked as if it knew suddenly how unsuitable it was for a winter afternoon's repose. The swans, approaching fatally near for the ideal, were very nearly black.
"Do you not find it damp here?" asked Mr. Travers.
Stella said:
"Yes, very"; and then, meeting his surprised eyes, she hastily corrected herself. "No, not at all." Then gave a little, helpless laugh. "Forgive me!" she said. "You surprised me so. Has anything gone wrong at the town hall?"
Mr. Travers did not immediately answer her question. He had never sat on a float before. Still, it was not this fact which silenced him. He had not been sure when he approached if Stella was crying or not. There was still something that looked suspiciously like the pathway of a tear upon the cheek next him, and though she was laughing now, it had not the sound of her usual laughter; it stirred in him a sense of tears.
"I think I shall confess at once," he said finally, "that I followed you. I wanted to talk to you without interruption. I might have called upon you at your home, of course, but I have not had the pleasure of meeting your family, and in this instance my business was with you."
Stella gave a faint sigh of relief. She was glad it was business. She was used to business with Mr. Travers. She was not used to pleasure with him, and she was not in the mood for new experiences.
"I shall be glad to talk over anything with you about which I can be of use," she said gently, "and I think this is a beautiful place to do it in."
"The rents," said Mr. Travers, glancing critically at the silent houses, "must be very low, necessarily low. I hope you do not often come here," he added after a pause. "It is the kind of place in which I should strongly suspect drains. We might mention it to the sanitary inspector and ask him for a report upon it."
"Oh, must we?" murmured Stella.
"Not if you would rather not," said Mr. Travers, unexpectedly. "In that case I would waive the question."
Stella glanced at him in alarm. Was Mr. Travers going mad from overstrain at the town hall? He must be very nearly mad to come and sit upon a float with his secretary on Saturday afternoon, and waive a question of drains.
"But that wouldn't be business," she said gravely.
"Yes, it would," said Mr. Travers, relentlessly. "It is my immediate business to please you."
Stella's alarm deepened; but it became solely for Mr. Travers. She did not mind if he was sane or not if only he refrained from saying anything that he would ultimately regret.
"I don't know whether you realize, Miss Waring," Mr. Travers continued, "that I am a very lonely man. I have no contemporary relatives. My father died when I was a young child. I lost my mother two years ago. My work has not entailed many friendships. I began office work very young, and it has to a great extent absorbed me. I think I should be afraid to say it to any one but you,—it would sound laughable,—but my chief attachment of late years has been to a cat."
It was curious that, though Mr. Travers had often been nervous of his secretary's humor, he understood that she would not laugh at him about his cat.
"Oh," she cried, "I hope it loves you as well. They won't sometimes, I know; you can pour devotion out on them, and they won't turn a hair. But when they do, it's so wonderfully reassuring. Dogs will love almost any one, but cats discriminate. I do hope your cat discriminates toward you, Mr. Travers?"
"I think it was attached to me in its way," said Mr. Travers, clearing his throat. "It was an old cat, and now it is dead. I merely mention it in passing."
"Yes, yes," said Stella, quickly. "But I'm so sorry! I hate to think you had to lose what you loved."
"You would," said Mr. Travers. "But the point I wish to make to you is that a man whose sole dependence is upon the attachment of a cat does not know much about human relationships. I fear I am exceedingly ignorant upon this subject. Until lately this had not particularly disturbed me. Now I should wish to have given it more consideration."
"But I think you have," said Stella, eagerly; "I mean I think you've changed lately about relationships. Now I think of it, I'm quite sure you have. I have always enjoyed my work with you, and you have never been inconsiderate to me. But I used to think people weren't very real to you, as if you wanted to hurry through them and stick them on a neat, tight file, like the letters, according to their alphabetical order. But now I know you're not like that. Even if you hadn't told me about the cat I should have known it."
"Thank you," said Mr. Travers. "Thank you very much."
For a while he said nothing at all, and Stella wondered if that was all he wanted. She hoped it was all he wanted. Then he turned and looked down at her.
"I have formed an attachment now, Miss Waring," he said, "and I am in a suitable position to carry it out. You have been the best secretary a man ever had. Could you undertake to become my wife?"
Stella bowed her head. She had come here to think about Julian, but she had not been able to think about him for very long. She did not think about him at all now. She thought only about Mr. Travers. She was so sorry for him that she could not look at him. What compensation was there for what she had not got to give him, and in what mad directions does not pity sometimes drive? For a moment she felt as if she could not say "No" to him; but to say "Yes" would make nothing any easier, for after she had said "Yes" she would have nothing more to give.
There is seldom any disastrous situation in which there is not something that can be saved. Stella saw in a flash what she might still save out of it. She could save Mr. Travers's pride at the cost of hers. She was a very proud and a very reticent woman; she would take the deepest thing in her heart and show it to Mr. Travers that he might not feel ashamed at having shown her his own.
"I can't," she said quickly, slipping her small, firm hand over his; "not because it isn't beautiful of you. It is, of course; it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever known, because you know nothing about me, and I'm so glad I'm not what you would really like if you did know me. Remember that afterward."
"Excuse me," interrupted Mr. Travers, dryly; "I am the best judge of what I like."
"I wonder if you really are," said Stella, with a little gasp, as if she had been running. "I wonder if I really am myself. But we both think we are, don't we? We can't help that—and the very same thing has happened to us both: we've seen and wanted a little—something that wouldn't do—that wouldn't do at all for either of us ever. If youhadto like somebody that wouldn't do, I think I'm glad you came to me, because, you see, I know what it feels like. I can be sorry and proud and glad you've given it to me, and then we need never talk about it any more."
Mr. Travers looked straight in front of him. Stella had not withdrawn her hand; but Mr. Travers pressed it, and laid it down reverentially between them. He would never forget that he had held it, but to continue to hold it until she had accepted him would have seemed to Mr. Travers a false position.
"There is another point to which I should like to draw your attention," he said after a slight pause. "Marriage does not necessarily imply any feeling of an intense nature by both parties. I wish to offer you security and companionship. As I told you before, I am a lonely man; I could be content with very little. I have noticed that when you come into a room it makes a difference to me."
"Don't make me cry!" said Stella, suddenly, and then she did cry a little, a nervous flurry of tears that shook her for a brief moment and left her laughing at the consternation in his face.
"You see how silly I am!" she said. "But however silly, I'm not a cheat. You offer me everything. I couldn't take it and not offer you everything back. To me marriage means everything. It isn't only—is it?—a perpetual companionship, though when you think of it, that's tremendous,—almost all the other companionships of life are intermittent, but it's the building up of fresh life out of a single love."
Mr. Travers looked away. He was surprised that Stella had not shocked him. The idea of any woman mentioning the existence of a child until she had a child might have shocked him; but Stella failed to move his sense of propriety. It even struck him that marriage would be less inclined to lapse into the sordid and irregular struggles of his experience if it was based upon so plain a foundation. He looked away because he felt that now he could not change her.
Stella wished that they were in a house. It struck her that a room would give more of the advantages of a retreat to Mr. Travers. She was very anxious to make his retreat easy for him.
"Would you do me a tremendous service?" she asked gently.
He turned quickly to face her.
"That is what I should like to do you," he said. But he looked at her a little suspiciously, for he was not sure that the service Stella asked wouldn't, after all, be only some new way of helping him.
"You said the other day," she said, meeting his eyes with unswerving candor, "that I might have extra help if I wanted it. I do want very much to find some work for my sister, Eurydice. She is very clever; cleverer than I am a great deal, only in a different way. She used to write books, but that did not pay her very well, and when the war came, she went into the city and worked for a secretarial diploma. I think she would be of use to you, if you would go slowly with her and make allowances for her different ways of being clever. Would you like to help her?"
Mr. Travers hesitated. Then he stood up and held out his hand to her.
"The sun has begun to go," he said; "I assure you it is not healthy for you to linger here. Of course I will engage your sister."
Stella gave a little sigh of relief. She had found a way out for Mr. Travers.
After the arrival of Eurydice, Mr. Travers saw very little of Stella. At certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from personal contact. She had been impersonal before, but only in a businesslike and friendly way. She was impersonal now as if she was not there.
She could control her attention, but she no longer felt any vitality behind it. She knew where her life had gone, and she was powerless to call it back to her. It hovered restlessly about the spirit of Julian. Stella had never known what it was to repine at her own fate. If there were many things she wanted that she could not have, she had consoled herself with driving her desires into what was left to her. But she could not do this for Julian.
He had had so much farther to fall. She saw his face as she had seen it first, with its look of human strength; his frosty, blue eyes, his heavy sledge-hammer chin, and all the alertness, the controlled activity, of his young figure. She saw him again like something made of wax, emaciated and helpless, with flickering eyes. He had not believed in knocking under, and he had felt defeat incredible.
But defeat had met him, a blundering defeat that wrecked his body and left his unprotected heart to face disaster.
Would he have courage enough for this restricted battle against adversity? Courage did strange things with pain. It transformed and utilized it; but courage does not spring readily from a mortally wounded pride. Marian, with a complete lack of intention, had robbed Julian of his first weapon. She had dissipated his resources by undermining his confidence, and left him perilously near to the stultification of personal bitterness.
Would it be possible for Julian to escape resentment? Or would he pass down that long lane which has no turning, and ends in the bottomless bog of self-pity, in which the finest qualities of the human spirit sink like a stone?
Step by step Stella passed with him, by all the hidden and vivid obstacles between his soul and victory, between it and defeat.
She could do nothing, but she could not stop her ceaseless watchfulness. She was like some one who strains his eyes forever down an empty road. The days began to lengthen into a long cold spring. There were no outward changes in her life: the drafty town hall, the long bus-rides, the bad news from France, and at home the pinch and ugliness of poverty. She had stopped being afraid that people would notice a difference in her. Nobody noticed any difference. She behaved in the same way and did the same things. She had gone down under the waters of life without so much as a splash.
"I suppose," Stella said to herself, "lots of us see ghosts every day without knowing it." She had a vague feeling that Mr. Travers knew it, but that he kept it in the back of his mind like an important paper in a case, which it was no use producing unless you could act upon it.
It was an awful day of snow and wind. Everybody but Stella and the porter had gone home. She had been stupid over the municipal accounts; over and over again her flagging mind stuck at the same mistake. At last she finished. She was still sixpence out; but she might see the sixpence in a flash the next morning, and there would be no flash in anything she could see to-night.
When she reached the door she found the gale had become formidable and chaotic. She staggered out of the town hall into the grip of a fury. All London shook and quivered; trees were torn down and flung across the road like broken twigs; taxis were blown into lamp-posts; the icy air tore and raged and screamed as if the elements had set out to match and overwhelm the puny internecine struggles of man. "This," Stella thought to herself, "is like a battle—noise, confusion, senselessness. I must hold on to whatever keeps stillest, and get home in rushes."
But nothing kept very still. She was doubtful about trembling lamp-posts, and area-railings twitched and shook under her hands. Her skirts whipped themselves about her like whom panic was overcoming fury, "why not send for her? Lizzie, here are two shillings; go out and see if you can find a taxi."
Stella tried to say what might happen to Lizzie in the search for a taxi, but the effort to speak finished her strength. When she could realize what was happening again, Cicely had arrived. She pounced upon the emergency as a cat upon a mouse.
In a few minutes Stella was tucked up warm and dry, poulticed and eased, capable of a little very short breath, propped up by pillows. The professor had retired to his study with a cup of cocoa hotter than he had known this cheering vegetable to be since Cicely's departure.
Mrs. Waring was breathing very slowly in her bedroom to restore calm to the household, and Eurydice was crying bitterly into the kitchen sink. She was quite sure that Stella was going to die, and that Cicely would save her.
The second of these two calamities took place. Stella was very ill with pleurisy, and remained very ill for several days. Cicely interfered with death as drastically as she interfered with everything else. She dragged Stella reluctantly back into a shaky convalescence.
"Now you're going to get well," she announced to her in a tone of abrupt reproach. "But what I don't understand is the appalling state of weakness you're in. You must have been living under some kind of strain. I don't mean work. Work alone wouldn't have made such a hash of you. Come, you may as well own up. What was it?"
Stella blinked her eyes, and looked round her like a dazzled stranger. Usually she was very fond of her room,—it was a small back room, over a yard full of London cats,—but it struck her now that there were too many things with which she was familiar. It was the same with Cicely. She dearly loved and valued Cicely, but she knew the sight and sound of her extraordinarily well.
"Nothing," said Stella, deprecatingly. "It's no use applying gimlets and tweezers to my moral sense, Cicely. Not even the Inquisition could deal with a hole. Heretics were solid. I have a perfect right to be ill from a cold wind. The world seemed made of it that night, and I swallowed half the world. It must be rather a strain for a thin person to swallow half the world on an empty stomach. I'm quite all right now, thanks to you. I was thinking I ought to get back to the town hall next week. Only, queerly enough, I had another offer of work. Still, it's so sketchy, that I couldn't honestly fling up my own job for it, though it sounds rather attractive."
"Let's see it," said Cicely, succinctly. "You do conceal things, Stella."
Stella withdrew an envelop from under her pillow. She looked a little anxious after its surrender. Cicely always made her a little anxious over a tentative idea. She had a way of materializing a stray thought, and flinging it back upon Stella as an incontrovertible fact. Stella was very anxious not to think that what was in the letter she gave to Cicely was really a fact. It was like some strange dream that hasn't any right to come true. Cicely read:
Dear Miss Waring: You will think this a most extraordinary request for me to make, and in many ways it is too unformulated to be a request. You will have heard from Marian that six months ago her engagement with my son came to an end. This was the natural and right thing to happen, but it has left him in his invalid condition very much without resources.You were, I remember your telling me, a secretary to Professor Paulson. I am inclined to think that my son might have his mind directed to some scientific work if he could meet any one who would interest him anew in the subject. Probably you are immersed in other work, but if by any possible chance you should be at liberty and cared to make the experiment, could you come here for a few weeks? You would be conferring a great favor upon us, and if the secretaryship developed out of your little visit, we would arrange any terms that suited you. I may add that I find my son has no remembrance of your association with Marian; indeed, he has forgotten the occasion of your meeting.He has been so very ill that you will understand and excuse this, I feel sure; and in the circumstances I think we had better not refer to it. I am very anxious to divert his mind from the past, and I have a feeling that if I could count upon your cooperation, we might succeed.Yours sincerely,Helen Verny.
Dear Miss Waring: You will think this a most extraordinary request for me to make, and in many ways it is too unformulated to be a request. You will have heard from Marian that six months ago her engagement with my son came to an end. This was the natural and right thing to happen, but it has left him in his invalid condition very much without resources.
You were, I remember your telling me, a secretary to Professor Paulson. I am inclined to think that my son might have his mind directed to some scientific work if he could meet any one who would interest him anew in the subject. Probably you are immersed in other work, but if by any possible chance you should be at liberty and cared to make the experiment, could you come here for a few weeks? You would be conferring a great favor upon us, and if the secretaryship developed out of your little visit, we would arrange any terms that suited you. I may add that I find my son has no remembrance of your association with Marian; indeed, he has forgotten the occasion of your meeting.
He has been so very ill that you will understand and excuse this, I feel sure; and in the circumstances I think we had better not refer to it. I am very anxious to divert his mind from the past, and I have a feeling that if I could count upon your cooperation, we might succeed.
Yours sincerely,Helen Verny.
"I don't see anything sketchy about it," said Cicely, slowly; "in the circumstances, I mean. You needn't definitely chuck the town hall. You'll get a couple of weeks' holiday. They'll give you a fortnight's extension easily, and if the job comes your way, it would be a suitable one. Anyway, you must of course accept it provisionally—"
"I don't see why I must of course accept it," said Stella. "You never see any alternatives, Cicely. Your mind is like one of those sign-posts that have only one name on it, with fields all round and heaps of other places to go to. It must be awfully confusing to be as simple as you are. Why couldn't I go back to the town hall next week?"
"Well, I'll tell you one reason why," said Cicely, grimly. "Simple or not, your heart's as weak as a toy watch; you very nearly died a week ago, and in my opinion if you went back to the town hall, you'd be signing your own death-certificate."
"I couldn't do that," said Stella, gravely; "it's not legal. I'm not the next of kin to myself. I know much more about death-certificates than you do. If I go to Lady Verny at Amberley, what's to become of Eurydice?"
"Eurydice will stay where she is," said Cicely. "If you ever saw to the end of your nose, you'd know that she is as glued to the town hall as she used to be to 'Shocks,' only this time, let us hope, more successfully. Some women have to be married. They contract a fatal desire for it, like the influenza habit every winter. Eurydice is one of them. It takes different forms, of course. This time it's Mr. Travers; the Mr. Bolt attachment was far more dangerous. I have made up my mind that she will marry Mr. Travers, if it's humanly speaking possible."
"Oh," said Stella, "will she? How clever you are, Cicely! You know nearly everything. Why do you say 'humanly speaking possible?'"
"Because you've always made him out as cold as a fish and as hard as iron," said Cicely. "He may be one of the few men who won't yield to vanity or fancy."
"I see," said Stella. "It's not very nice of you to want Eurydice to marry an iron fish. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not quite so certain about Mr. Travers. The iron and the fish are only on the top. I think, humanly speaking, he's quite possible. I'm going to sleep now. When you've made up your mind about Amberley you can wake me up."
There are two winds in March; one comes in like a tight-lipped school-master set on punishment. It is frequently accompanied by dust, sunshine, and influenza. It has all the cold of winter, and acts as if life could be produced solely by formidable harshness.
But there is another wind, a mild, sensitive wind which carries the secrets of the spring—a wind that wanders and sings on sunless days, penetrating the hard crust of the earth as softly and as inveterately as love, a wind that opens while its forceful brother shuts.
It was this wind, calling along the railway lines against the swinging train, that brought Stella to Amberley. It lifted her out of her carriage to the small, wayside station, embracing her with its welcome under shaking trees. The air was full of the earth scents of growing fields. The sky was wide and very near and without strangeness.
A porter, lurching out of the surrounding darkness, told Stella there was a car from Amberley House waiting for her. It could only be for her, because no one else was on the platform.
The station-master himself put her into it. She sank into soft cushions, and shut her eyes to feel the soundless speed. Stella had been on rare occasions in a taxi; but this creature that leaped without friction forward into the darkness, flinging a long road behind it with the ease with which an orange is peeled, was a wholly new experience. When she opened her eyes again they became gradually accustomed to the flying darkness, which was not wholly dark; trees loomed up mysteriously out of it, and the tender shapes of little hills as soft and vague as clouds.
Stella was sorry when the car stopped; she could not see the doorway of Amberley House, hidden under a mass of ivy. It opened suddenly before her into a dusky hall lighted by tall candles in silver candle-sticks.
The hall was full of shadows. There was a fragrance in it of old roses and lavender, and it was quiet. It was so quiet that Stella held her breath. She felt as if for centuries it had been still, and as if no one who had ever lived there had made a noise in it. She was afraid of the sound of her own voice.
At the farther end of the hall there was a glow of firelight on old oak panels. A door opened, and Lady Verny came toward her, very tall and stately, but with the same kind, steady eyes.
Lady Verny came all the way across the long, shadowy room to meet Stella, and held out both her hands; but when she came near, Stella saw that only her eyes were the same. Her face was incredibly older. The firm lines were blurred, the delicate color was gone. The woman who looked down at her was at the mercy of the years. Grief had forced her prematurely out of her comfortable upward path. Even her smile had changed; it carried no serenity.
"I am very glad you have come," Lady Verny said gently. "We will have tea in my room, I think, and then you must rest. I can see you have been ill."
She led the way into a room that seemed curiously like her. It was spacious and convenient, with very few small objects in it. Even the pictures on the walls had the same quality: they were very definite, clear-colored French landscapes, graceful and reticent.
The china, on a low table by the fire, was old and valuable; but it was used every day. Lady Verny had no special occasions, and nothing that she possessed was ever too priceless or too important for use.
"I hope you did not have a very tiresome journey," she continued. "I do not like a change on so short a run, but we have not been able to arrange to have a train straight through from town. Julian was thinking of doing something about it some time ago, but the matter has dropped."
Stella noticed that as Lady Verny spoke of Julian her voice hurried a little. It did not shake; but it passed over his name quickly as if she were afraid that it might shake.
"Since his illness he has taken less interest in local matters," she finished tranquilly.
Stella did not dare to ask if Julian was better. She did not like to speak about his interests; it seemed to her as if almost anything would be better than to say something stupid to Lady Verny about Julian.
"It was a lovely journey," she said quickly, "and I would have hated not to change at Horsham. I was so sorry it was nearly dark. Shelley lived there once, didn't he? I wanted to go and look for the pond where he had sailed five-pound notes because he hadn't anything else to make boats with. Amberley came much too soon; and I couldn't see anything but a bundle of dark clouds. I could only feel it, awfully friendly and kind, blowing across the fields!"
"Yes," said Lady Verny, consideringly, giving Stella her tea; "I think it is a kind little place. There is nothing dreadful about it, not even an ugly chapel, or one of those quite terrible little artist's houses,—you know the type I mean,—as uncomfortable as a three-cornered chair. The kind that clever people live in and call cottages. They've quite spoiled the country round Pulborough; but mercifully the station is inconvenient here, and a good deal of the land is Julian's. I hope you will like it,"—she met Stella's eyes with a long, questioning look,—"because I hope you will stay here for a long time."
"As long as you want me to stay," said Stella, firmly.
"We must not spoil your other opportunities for work," said Lady Verny; "that would be most unfair. I must confess to you, Miss Waring, that I am leaving the whole question very much in the air. It would be more satisfactory to have the arrangement come direct from Julian. If, as I hope, by your presence the old interest and the old questions come back to him, he will ask you to stay himself. For the present I have simply told him that you are my friend and that you have given up your secretarial work to come here for a much-needed holiday; but we must not waste your time or do anything against your interests. I could not allow that."
"It won't take very long, I expect," Stella answered, "because he would take a dislike so quickly. And if he did that, it wouldn't do, of course. We should see in a week or two. If hedoesn'tdislike me; I can easily talk to him about Professor Paulson. I remember they had an argument once—about reindeer-moss. Your son said he had discovered it where Professor Paulson had said it didn't exist. I could bring that up quite comfortably. The mere mention of a fellow-laborer's effort stings a man into the wish to prove something or other about it; and once you start proving, secretaries follow."
"Make them follow," said Lady Verny, smiling. "I don't think he will dislike you,—we usually dislike the same people,—only Julian always goes further than I do; he dislikes them more." Then her smile faded. "You will see him to-night at dinner," she said gravely. She could not smile again after she had said that; but she took Stella herself through the dark oak hall and up the broad, winding staircase to a little, old, square room that looked out over the garden to the flooded water-meadows.
"I don't know if you like gardens," Lady Verny said a little shyly. "It's rather a hobby of mine. You'll see it to-morrow."
"I like even my own," said Stella, "though it only holds one plane-tree and ten cats. At least it doesn't reallyholdthe cats. They spill in and out of it in showers like the soot, only more noisily; and I pretend there's a lilac-bush in the corner."
Lady Verny stood by the door for a moment as if she were making up her mind for an immense advance, an almost dazzling plunge into confidence.
"I have a feeling," she said slowly, "as if you would make agoodgardener."
After she had gone, Stella opened the window, and leaned out into the garden. She could see nothing but the soft darkness, sometimes massed in the thickness of the yew-hedges, and sometimes tenuous and spread out over the empty spaces of the lawns.
The air blew fresh upon her face, full of sweetness and the promise of life. Stella told herself bitterly that nature was cruel; it let strong young things die, and if that didn't matter (and she sometimes thought dying didn't), nature did worse: it maimed and held youth down. But nothing in her responded to the thought that nature was cruel. A tiny crescent moon shone out between the hurrying clouds, and cast a slim shadow of silver across the dark waters. "Things are cruel," Stella said to herself, "but what is behind them is not cruel, and it must come through. And I'm little and stupid and shy; but some of it is in me for Julian, and he'll have to have it. I shan't know how to give it to him. I shall make hideous blunders and muddles, and the more I want to give, the harder it'll be to do it. Fortunately, it does not depend on me. I can be as stupid as I like if I'm only thinking of him and only caring for him and only wanting it to come through me. Nothing can stop it but minding because I'm stupid. And as for being in love, the more I'm in it the better. For that's what we're all in really, only we're none of us in it enough. As long as I'm not in it for anything I can get out of it, everything will be all right. If I do mind, it doesn't matter if only what I want gets through to Julian."
She lay down on the bed and listened to the wind in the garden playing among the tree-tops. She listened for a long time, until she thought that the garden was upon her side, and then she heard another sound. She knew in a moment what it was; it struck straight against her heart: it was thetap-tapalong the passage of wooden crutches.
Lady Verny and Julian were sitting in the hall when Stella joined them. It wasn't in the least terrible meeting Julian; he had reduced his physical disabilities to the minimum of trouble for other people. He swung himself about on his crutches with an extraordinary ease, and he had taught himself to deal with his straitened powers so that he needed very little assistance; he had even controlled himself sufficiently to bear without apparent dislike the occasional help that he was forced to accept.
It was the Vernys' religion that one shouldn't make a fuss over anything larger than a broken boot-lace. Temper could be let loose over the trivial, but it must be kept if there was any grave cause for it.
Julian wished to disembarrass the casual eye of pity, partly because it was a nuisance to make people feel uncomfortable, and partly because it infuriated him to be the cause of compassion. Lady Verny had not pointed this out to Stella; she had left her to draw her own inferences from her own instincts. Lady Verny did not believe in either warnings or corrections after the days of infancy were passed.
She smiled across at Stella and said quietly:
"My son—Miss Waring."
Stella was for an instant aware of Julian's eyes dealing sharply and defensively with hers. He wanted to see if she was going to be such a fool as to pity him. She wasn't such a fool. Without a protest she let him swing himself heavily to his feet before he held out his hand to her. Her eyes met his without shrinking and without emphasis. She knew she must look rather wooden and stupid, but anything was better than looking too intelligent or too kind.
She realized that she hadn't made any mistake from the fact that Lady Verny laid down her embroidery. She would have continued it steadily if anything had gone wrong.
There was no recognition in Julian's eyes except the recognition that his mother's new friend looked as if she wasn't going to be a bother. Stella hadn't mattered when he met her before, and she didn't matter now. She had the satisfaction of knowing that she owed his oblivion of her to her own insignificance.
"I'm sure it's awfully good of you," Julian said, "to come down here and enliven my mother when we've nothing to offer you but some uncommonly bad weather."
"I find we have one thing," Lady Verny interposed. "Miss Waring is interested in Horsham. You must motor her over there. She wants to see Shelley's pond."
"Do you?" asked Julian. "I'll take you with pleasure, but I must admit that I think Shelley was an uncommonly poor specimen; never been able to stand all that shrill, woolly prettiness of his. It sets my teeth on edge. I don't think much of a man, either, who breaks laws, and then wants his conduct to be swallowed like an angel's. Have you ever watched a dog that's funked a scrap kick up the earth all round him and bark himself into thinking he's no end of a fine fellow in spite of it?"
"I don't believe you've read Shelley," cried Stella, stammering with eagerness. "I mean properly. You've only skimmed the fanciest bits. And he never saw the sense of laws. They weren't his own; he didn't breakthem. The laws he broke were only the dreadful, muddled notions of respectable people who didn't want to be inconvenienced by facts. I dare say it did make him a little shrill and frightened flying in the face of the whole world. However stupid a face it has, it's a massive one; but he didn't, for all the fright and the defiance, funk his fight."
"Let us settle Shelley at the dinner-table," said Lady Verny, drawing Stella's arm into hers and leaving Julian to follow. "Personally I do not agree with either of you. I do not think Shelley was a coward, and I do not think that as a man he was admirable. He has always seemed to me apart from his species, like his own skylark; 'Birdthounever wert.' He was an 'unpremeditated art,' a 'clear, keen joyance,' anything you like; but he hadn't the rudiments of a man in him. He was neither tough nor tender, and he never looked a fact in the face."
"There are plenty of people to look at facts," objected Stella, "Surely we can spare one to live in clouds and light and give us, in return for a few immunities, their elemental spirit."
"People shouldn't expect to be given immunities," said Julian. "They should take 'em if they want 'em, and then be ready to pay for 'em; nobody is forced to run with the crowd. What I object to is their taking to their heels in the opposite direction, and then complaining of loneliness. Besides, start giving people immunities, and see what it leads to—a dozen Shelleys without poems and God knows how many Harriets. What you want in a poet is a man who has something to say and sticks to the path while he's saying it."
"Oh, you might be talking about bishops!" cried Stella, indignantly. "How far would you have gone yourself on your Arctic explorations if you'd stuck to paths? Why should a poet run on a given line, like an electric tram-car?"
"I think Miss Waring has rather got the better of you, Julian," said Lady Verny, smiling. "You chose an unfortunate metaphor."
"Not a bit of it," said Julian, with a gleam of amusement. "I chose a jolly good one, and she's improved it. You can go some distance with a decent poet, but you can't with your man, Miss Waring. He twiddles up into the sky before you've got your foot on the step."
"That's a direct challenge," said Lady Verny. "I think after dinner we must produce something of Shelley's in contradiction. Can you think of anything solid enough to bear Julian?"
"Yes," said Stella. "All the way here in the train I was thinking of one of Shelley's poems. Have you read it—'The Ode to the West Wind'?"
"No," said Julian, smiling at her; "but it doesn't sound at all substantial. You started your argument on a cloud, and you finish off with wind. The Lord has delivered you into my hand."
"Not yet, Julian," said Lady Verny. "Wait till you've heard the poem."
It did not seem in the least surprising to Stella to find herself, half an hour later, sitting in a patch of candle-light, on a high-backed oak chair, saying aloud without effort or self-consciousness Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
Neither Lady Verny nor Julian ever made a guest feel strange. There was in them both an innate courtesy, which was there to protect the feelings of others. They did not seem to be protecting Stella. They left her alone, but in the act of doing so they set her free from criticism. Lady Verny took up her embroidery, and Julian, sitting in the shadow of an old oak settle, contentedly smoked a cigarette. He did not appear to be watching Stella, but neither her movements nor her expressions escaped him. She was quite different from any one he had seen before. She wore a curious little black dress, too high to be smart, but low enough to set in relief her white, slim throat. She carried her head badly, so that it was difficult to see at first the beauty of the lines from brow to chin. She had a curious, irregular face, like one of the more playful and less attentive angels in a group round a Botticelli Madonna. She had no color, and all the life of her face was concentrated in her gray, far-seeing eyes. Julian had never seen a pair of eyes in any face so alert and fiery. They were without hardness, and the fire in them melted easily into laughter. But they changed with the tones of her voice, with the rapid words she said, so that to watch them was almost to know before she spoke what her swift spirit meant. Her voice was unfettered music, low, with quick changes of tone and intonation.