LITTLE BEEDING AGAIN
But though she disappeared Stella Ballantyne was not in flight from men
and women. She avoided them because they did not for the moment count in
her thoughts, except as possible hindrances. She was not so much running
away as running to the place of her desires. She yielded to an impulse
with which they had nothing whatever to do, an impulse so overmastering
that even to the Reptons her precipitancy wore a look of ingratitude. She
drove home with Jane Repton as soon as she was released, to the house on
Khamballa Hill, and while she was still in the carriage she said:
"I must go away to-morrow morning."
She was sitting forward with a tense and eager look upon her face and her
hands clenched tightly in her lap.
"There is no need for that. Make your home with us, Stella, for a little
while and hold your head high."
Jane Repton had talked over this proposal with her husband. Both of
them recognised that the acceptance of it would entail on them some
little sacrifice. Prejudice would be difficult. But they had thrust
these considerations aside in the loyalty of their friendship and Jane
Repton was a little hurt that Stella waved away their invitation
without ceremony.
"I can't. I can't," she said irritably. "Don't try to stop me."
Her nerves were quite on edge and she spoke with a greater violence than
she knew. Jane Repton tried to persuade her.
"Wouldn't it be wiser for you to face things here, even though it means
some effort and pain?"
"I don't know," answered Stella, still in the quick peremptory tone of
one who will not be argued with. "I don't care either. I have nothing to
do with wisdom just now. I don't want people at all. I want--oh, how I
want--" She stopped and then she added vaguely: "Something else," and her
voice trailed away into silence. She sat without a word, all tingling
impatience, during the rest of that drive and continued so to sit after
the carriage had stopped. When Jane Repton descended, and she woke up
with a start and looked at the house, it was as though she brought her
eyes down from heaven to earth. Once within the house she went straight
up to Repton. He had left his wife behind with Stella at the Law Courts
and had come home in advance of them. He had not spoken a word to Stella
that day, and he had not the time now, for she began immediately in an
eager voice and a look of fever in her eyes:
"You won't try to stop me, will you? I must go away to-morrow."
Repton used more tact now than his wife had done. He took the troubled
and excited woman's hand and answered her very gently:
"Of course, Stella. You shall go when you like."
"Oh, thank you," she cried, and was freed to remember the debt which she
owed to these good friends of hers. "You must think me a brute, Jane! I
haven't said a word to you about all your kindness. But--oh, you'll
think me ridiculous, when you know"--and she began to laugh and to sob
in one breath. Stella Ballantyne had remained so sunk in apathy through
all that long trial that her friends were relieved at her outburst of
tears. Jane Repton led her upstairs and put her to bed just as if she
had been a child.
"There! You can get up for dinner if you like, Stella, or stay where you
are. And if you'll tell us what you want to do we'll make the
arrangements for you and not ask you a question."
Jane Repton kissed her and left her alone; and it was while Stella was
sleeping upstairs that Henry Thresk called at the house and was told that
there was no news for him.
"No doubt she will write to you, Mr. Thresk, if she wishes you to know
what she is doing. But I should not count upon it if I were you," said
Jane Repton, in a sweet voice and with eyes like pebbles. "She did not
mention you, I am sorry to say, when the trial was over."
She could not forgive him because of her own share in what she now called
his "treachery" towards Stella. She had no more of the logician in her
composition than Thresk had of the hero. He had committed under a great
stress of emotion and sympathy what the whole experience and method of
his life told him was one of the worst of crimes. And now that its object
was achieved, and Stella Ballantyne free, he was in the mood to see only
the harm which he had done to the majesty of the law; he was uneasy; he
was not troubled by the thought that discovery would absolutely ruin him.
That indeed did not enter into his thoughts. But he could not but make a
picture of himself in the robe of a King's Counsel, claiming sternly the
anger of the Law against some other man who should have done just what he
had done, no more and no less. And so when Mrs. Repton's door was finally
closed upon him, and no message was given to him from the woman he had
saved, he was at once human and unheroic enough to visit a little of his
resentment upon her. He had not spoken to her at all since the night at
Chitipur; he had no knowledge of the stupor and the prostration into
which, after her years of misery, she had fallen; he had no insight into
the one compelling passion which now had her, body and soul, in its grip.
He turned away from the door and went back to the Taj Mahal. A steamer
would be starting for Port Said in two days and by that steamer he would
travel. That Stella was in the house on the Khamballa Hill he did not
doubt, but since she had no word or thought to spare for him he could not
but turn his back and go.
Stella herself got up to dinner, and after it was over she told her
friends of the longing which filled her soul.
"All through the trial," she said shyly, with the shrinking of those who
reveal a very secret fancy and are afraid that it will be ridiculed, "in
the heat of the court, in the close captivity of my cell, I was conscious
of just one real unconquerable passion--to feel the wind blowing against
my face upon the Sussex Downs. Can you understand that? Just to see the
broad green hills with the white chalk hollows in their sides and the
forests marching down to the valleys like the Roman soldiers from
Chichester--oh! I was mad for the look and the smell and the sounds of
them! It was all that I thought about. I used to close my eyes in the
dock and I was away in a second riding through Charlton Forest or over
Farm Hill, or looking down to Slindon from Gumber Corner, and over its
woods to the sea. And now that I am free"--she clasped her hands and her
face grew radiant--"oh, I don't want to see people." She reached out a
hand to each of her friends. "I don't call you people, you know. But even
you--you'll understand and forgive and not be hurt--I don't want to see
for a little while."
The beaten look of her took the sting of ingratitude out of her words.
She stood between them, her delicate face worn thin, her eyes unnaturally
big; she had the strange transparent beauty of people who have been lying
for months in a mortal sickness. Jane Repton's eyes filled with tears and
her hand sought for her handkerchief.
"Let's see what can be done," said Repton. "There's a mail-steamer of
course, but you won't want to travel by that."
"No."
Repton worked out the sailings from Bombay and the other ports on the
western coast of India while Stella leaned over his shoulder.
"Look!" he said. "This is the best way. There's a steamer going to
Kurrachee to-morrow, and when you reach Kurrachee you'll just have time
to catch a German Lloyd boat which calls at Southampton. You won't be
home in thirteen days to be sure, but on the other hand you won't be
pestered by curious people."
"Yes, yes," cried Stella eagerly. "I can go to-morrow."
"Very well."
Repton looked at the clock. It was still no more than half-past ten. He
saw with what a fever of impatience Stella was consumed.
"I believe I could lay my hand on the local manager of the line to-night
and fix your journey up for you."
"You could?" cried Stella. He might have been offering her a crown, so
brightly her thanks shone in her eyes.
"I think so."
He got up from the table and stood looking at her, and then away from her
with his lips pursed in doubt.
"Yes?" said she.
"I was thinking. Will you travel under another name? I don't suggest it
really, only it might save you--annoyance."
Repton's hesitation was misplaced, for Stella Ballantyne's pride was
quite beaten to the ground.
"Yes," she said at once. "I should wish to do that"; and both he and his
wife understood from that ready answer more completely than they ever had
before how near Stella had come to the big blank wall at the end of life.
For seven years she had held her head high, never so much as whispering a
reproach against her husband, keeping with a perpetual guard the secret
of her misery. Pride had been her mainspring; now even that was broken.
Repton went out of the house and returned at midnight.
"It's all settled," he said. "You will have a cabin on deck in both
steamers. I gave your name in confidence to the manager here and he will
take care that everything possible is done for you. There will be very
few passengers on the German boat. The season is too early for either the
tourists or the people on leave."
Thus Stella Ballantyne crept away from Bombay and in five weeks' time
she landed at Southampton. There she resumed her name. She travelled into
Sussex and stayed for a few nights at the inn whither Henry Thresk had
come years before on his momentous holiday. She had a little money--the
trifling income which her parents had left to her upon their death--and
she began to look about for a house. By a piece of good fortune she
discovered that the cottage in which she had lived at Little Beeding
would be empty in a few months. She took it and before the summer was out
she was once more established there. It was on an afternoon of August
when Stella made her home in it again. She passed along the yellow lane
driven deep between high banks of earth where the roots of great
elm-trees cropped out. Every step was familiar to her. The lane with many
twists under overarching branches ran down a steep hill and came out into
the open by the big house with its pillared portico and its light grey
stone and its wonderful garden of lawn and flowers and cedars. A tiny
church with a narrow graveyard and strange carefully-trimmed square
bushes of yew stood next to the house, and beyond the church the lane
dipped to the river and the cottage.
Stella went from room to room. She had furnished the cottage simply and
daintily; the walls were bright, her servant-girl had gathered flowers
and set them about. Outside the window the sunlight shone on a green
garden. She was alone. It was the home-coming she had wished for.
For three or four months she was left alone; and then one afternoon as
she came into the cottage after a walk she found a little white card upon
the table. It bore the name of Mr. Hazlewood.