A WHISTLING 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-chops _en 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.