They would never know what she had endured. Yet her hopes had once
run so high.... Well, the pendulum swings; and after all there are no
favourites, except perhaps in a whimsical or poetic sense.
Stella and Jerome, at the feet of the everlasting gods; and irony sniffed
and chuckled in the corners. Both were vividly conscious of the play
of forces in their lives, and of that immense quality of change which,
developed through the scenes of the drama that had so capriciously caught
them up, revealed itself now in all they did and said.
Calmer, she asked him about his phase of the drama: how had he come on
the _Star of Troy_ when she had left him irrevocably in the rut of Oaks,
Ferguson & Whitley’s? And he told her a little of his vast adventure,
while her heart was stricken with a curious confusion—partly, no doubt,
because of the aloof manner which, more and more, he was coming to
display toward her.
These were baffling days—and a queer, wrong-way-round business life can
be, she thought, when it has a mind. Jerome’s reactions were rather
simpler: Stella, alive and married to another man, drifted back into the
mere troubled dream which the thought of her death had momentarily broken.
“You’re making something really worth while out of your life, aren’t
you?” she said softly, yet in a voice still strained from emotion;
and her gaze, across the dimness of the temple, seemed compounded of
incredulity, wistfulness, and a wild despair. Occasionally a tiny sob
still caught her breath.
Jerome smiled in his new worldly and rather cynical way. “You mustn’t
forget,” he generously reminded her, “that to begin with I was carried
off like a limp bag of meal!” And then he gave her more details—without
bothering, however, to stick quite so close to all the facts as to make
himself entirely a comic figure, even in the beginning.
“Isn’t it strange, Jerome, how some of the last things we’d ever think
possible are the very things that do happen to us?” Her hands, never
still, stroked her cheeks aimlessly.
“I’ve thought of that sometimes,” he answered. “I guess it would never
have struck any one as likely, a year or two ago, that you’d end by
marrying a man like Mr. King and be carried off to an island to raise
opium! And I guess,” he went on impartially, with again the touch of
grimness, “it never struck us, either, that I was the kind of fellow who
would join an opera troupe and end by letting one of the singers—take my
name....” He never could seem quite to bring it out baldly. He had evaded
a little, also, with Elsa, and had not used the actual word, though in
the end, of course, it amounted to the same thing.
“Married, Jerome? A singer...?”
Her eyes were all amazement and inquiry across the dusk of the temple.
But he tossed his head with a careless fling, for he was fully revived
now, and even if it was difficult, circumstances being what they were, to
make the announcement with real and satisfying bravado, still he wanted
her to know that he, too, had had his taste of matrimony—though he didn’t
mention it had only been after a fashion....
She could hardly believe the things she saw and heard; and she remembered
how she had sent the ring back by Ted without a message.
The moon climbed higher, and a tiny night wind was springing. It made the
tattered leaves of the palms and giant ferns shiver softly, like rain.
Stella felt his aloofness, and a shy reticence came upon her tongue. She
sat silent.
“I guess we’ve both changed some,” Jerome laughed coolly, assuming more
lightness than he perhaps really felt. He was a little ashamed of his
very romantic state of mind an hour ago.
“People couldn’t go through all we have in the past year without
changing.” Her voice reached the heart with its pathetic deadness. The
woman drooped and gently shook before him.
Another silence, with the sad swish of the jungle outside, under a white
moon.
“Hagen’s Island,” she murmured brokenly after awhile, “is a place where
you come to know yourself through and through.” And he saw still more
vividly that this was not the girl he had known in his groping days of
hobbledehoy. “I’ve tried to believe it would come right in the end,” she
resumed in a moment, “—maybe after a long, long time. But all the while—”
it faltered just a little—“all the while I’ve had a feeling I’d never
see home again.” Then she looked up and spoke with a touch of hysterical
brightness: “I used to sit on the rocks, Jerome, and imagine what a
home-coming it would be! You don’t mind my rambling on like this, do you
Jerome?”
“Of course not.” But he was privately marvelling. Stella—great
Scott!—actually sighing over the thought of home, where nothing ever
happened! It made him smile—oh, ever so worldly and sophisticated a
smile; and he couldn’t help remembering again how she used to sail into
him in her impetuous, young, rebellious way, for being so satisfied with
his humdrum lot.
“Jerome,” she said presently, in a voice it was obviously a little
difficult still to control, “you haven’t told me anything about your
wife.”
He made an indefinite sound with his lips, and a look half of amusement,
half of grimness, yet also somewhat of a gentler sadness, came into his
eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he admitted.
“Are you happy, Jerome?”
“Now? Oh, yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Where? Oh, off on the high seas somewhere. The fact is,” he continued
more bluffly, “we’ve separated, Stella. It wasn’t a success. We bored
each other. As Captain Utterbourne would say, these experiments require a
sort of real genius if they’re not to turn out failures. I believe,” he
added with a sparkle, “the Captain speaks from experience.”
Stella looked at him, then her eyes faltered. There was an immense
confusion in her heart. All at once she, too, remembered how she had
scolded him so bitterly that afternoon in the fog. “If I were a man,” she
had cried with high, impatient scorn, “I think I’d discover something
besides being a clerk in a dingy old ship supply store!” And now he had
discovered something besides that. He had discovered another destiny
altogether, and she could play no part in it.
She contemplated, as they sat together on the moonlit temple floor, the
tangle into which their lives had drifted.