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some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from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.
"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."