Stella was afraid that when she went down to dinner it would be like
slipping into another life--a life to which she was attached by her love
for Julian, but to which she did not belong. It did not seem possible to
her that Lady Verny would be able to bear her as a daughter-in-law. As a
secretary it had not mattered in the least that she was shabby and
socially ineffective. And she couldn't be different; they'd have to take
her like that if they took her at all. She ranged them together in her
fear of their stateliness; she almost wished that they wouldn't take her
at all, but let her slink back to Redcliffe Square and bury herself in
her own insignificance.
But when she went down-stairs she found herself caught in a swift
embrace by Lady Verny, and meeting without any barrier the adoration of
Julian's eyes.
"My dear, my dear," said Lady Verny, "I always felt that you belonged to
me."
"But are you pleased?" whispered Stella in astonishment.
"Pleased!" cried Lady Verny, with a little shaken laugh. "I'm satisfied;
a thing that at my age I hardly had the right to expect."
"Mother thinks it's all her doing," Julian explained. "It's her theory
that we've shown no more initiative than a couple of guaranteed Dutch
bulbs. Shall I tell you what she was saying before you came
down-stairs?"
"Dear Julian," said Lady Verny, blushing like a girl, "you're so
dreadfully modern, you will frighten Stella if you say things to her so
quickly before she has got used to the idea of you."
"She's perfectly used to the idea of me," laughed Julian, "and I've
tried frightening her already without the slightest success. Besides,
there's nothing modern about a madonna lily, which is what we were
discussing. My mother said, Stella, that she didn't care very much for
madonna lilies in the garden. They're too ecclesiastical for the other
flowers, but very suitable in church for weddings. And out in ten days'
time, didn't you say, Mother? I hope they haven't any of Stella's
procrastinating habits."
"You mustn't mind his teasing, dear," Lady Verny said, smiling. "We will
go in to dinner now. You're a little late, but no wonder. I am delighted
to feel that now I have a right to scold you."
"The thing that pleases me most," said Julian, "is that I shall be able
to remove Stella's apples and pears forcibly from her plate and peel
them myself. I forget how long she has been here, but the anguish I have
suffered meal by meal as I saw her plod her unreflecting way over their
delicate surfaces, beginning at the stalk and slashing upward without
consideration for any of the laws of nature, nothing but the
self-control of a host could have compelled me to endure. I offered to
peel them for her once, but she said she liked peeling them; and I was
far too polite to say, 'Darling, you've got to hand them over to me.'
I'm going to say it now, though, every time."
"Hush, dear," said Lady Verny, nervously. "Thompson has barely shut the
door. I really don't know what has happened to your behavior."
"I haven't any," said Julian. "I'm like the old lady in the earthquake
who found herself in the street with no clothes on. She bowed gravely to
a gentleman she had met the day before and said, 'I should be happy to
give you my card, Mr. Jones, but I have lost the receptacle.' Things
like that happen in earthquakes. I have lost my receptacle." He met
Stella's eyes and took the consent of her laughter. He was as happy with
her as a boy set loose from school.
Lady Verny, watching him, was almost frightened at his lack of
self-restraint. "He has never trusted any one like this before," she
thought. "He is keeping nothing back." It was like seeing the released
waters of a frozen stream.
While they sat in the hall before Julian rejoined them, Lady Verny
showed Stella all the photographs of Julian taken since he was a baby.
There was a singularly truculent one of him, at three years old, with a
menacingly poised cricket-bat, which Stella liked best of all. Lady
Verny had no copy of it, but she pressed Stella to take it.
"Julian will give you so many things," she said; "but I want to give you
something that you will value, and which is quite my own." So Stella
took the truculent baby, which was Lady Verny's own.
"You look very comfortable sitting there together; I won't disturb you
for chess," Julian observed when he came in shortly afterward. "I was
wondering if you would like to hear what I did in Germany. It's a year
old now and as safe with you as with me, but it mustn't go any further."
Julian told his story very quietly, leaning back against the cushions of
a couch by the open window. Above his head, Stella could see the dark
shapes of the black yew hedges and the wheeling of the bats as they
scurried to and fro upon their secret errands.
Neither Lady Verny nor Stella moved until Julian had finished speaking.
It was the most thrilling of detective stories; but it is not often that
the roots of our being are involved in detective stories.
They could not believe that he lay there before them, tranquilly
smoking a cigarette and breathed on by the soft June air. As they
watched his face comfort and security vanished. They were in a ruthless
world where a false step meant death. Julian had been in danger, but it
was never the danger which he had been in that he described; it was the
work he had set out to do and the way he had done it. He noticed danger
only when it obstructed him. Then he put his wits to meet it. They were,
as Stella realized, very exceptional wits for meeting things. Julian
combined imagination with strict adherence to fact. He had the courage
which never broods over an essential risk and the caution which avoids
all unnecessary ones.
"Of course," he broke off for a moment, "you felt all the time rather
like a flea under a microscope. Don't underrate the Germans. As a
microscope there's nothing to beat them; where the microscope leaves off
is where their miscalculations begin. A microscope can tell everything
about a flea except where it is going to hop.
"I had a lively time over my hopping; but the odd part of it was the
sense of security I often had, as if some one back of me was giving me
a straight tip. I don't understand concentration. You'd say it is your
own doing, of course, and yet behind your power of holding on to things,
it seems as if Something Else was holding on much harder. It's as if you
set a ball rolling, and some one else kicked it in the right direction.
"After I'd been in Germany for a month I began to believe in an
Invisible Kicker-Off. It was company for me, for I was lonely. I had to
calculate every word I said, and there's no sense of companionship where
one has to calculate. The feeling that there was something back of me
was quite a help. I'd get to the end of my job, and then something fresh
would be pushed toward me.
"For instance, I met a couple of naval officers by chance,--I wasn't out
for anything naval,--and they poured submarine facts into me as you pour
milk into a jug--facts that we needed more than the points I'd come to
find out.
"I'm not at all sure," Julian finished reflectively, "that if you grip
hard enough under pressure, you don't tap facts.
"Have you ever watched a crane work? You shift a lever, and it comes
down as easily as a parrot picks up a pencil; it'll lift a weight that a
hundred men can't move an inch, and swing it up as if it were packing
feathers. Funny idea, if there's a law that works like that.
"I came back through Alsace and Lorraine, meaning to slip through the
French lines. A sentry winged me in the woods. Pure funk on his part; he
never even came to hunt up what he'd let fly at. But it finished my
job."
Lady Verny folded up her embroidery.
"It was worth the finish, Julian," she said quickly. "I am glad you told
me, because I had not thought so before." Then she left them.
"It isn't finished, Julian," murmured Stella in a low voice. "It never
can be when it's you."
"Well," said Julian, "it's all I've got to give you; so I'm rather glad
you like it, Stella."
They talked till half the long summer night was gone. She sat near him,
and sometimes Julian let his hand touch her shoulder or her hair while
he unpacked his heart to her. The bitterness of his reserve was gone.
"I think perhaps I could have stood it decently if it hadn't been for
Marian," he explained. "I was damned weak about her, and that's a fact.
You see, I thought she had the kind of feeling for me that women
sometimes have and which some men deserve; but I'm bound to admit I
wasn't one of them. When I saw that Marian took things rather the way I
should have taken them myself, I went down under it. I said, 'That's the
end of love.' It was the end of the kind I was fit for, the kind that
has an end.
"Now I'm going to tell you something. I never shall again, so you must
make the most of it, and keep it to hold on to when I behave badly.
You've put the fear of God into me, Stella. Nothing else would have made
me give in to you; and you know I have given in to you, don't you?"
"You've given me everything in the world I want," said Stella, gently,
"if that's what you call giving in to me."
"I've done more than that," said Julian, quietly. "I've let you take my
will and turn it with that steady little hand of yours; and it's the
first time--and I don't say it won't be the last--that I've let any man
or woman change my will for me.
"Now I'm going to send you to bed. I oughtn't to have you kept you up
like this; but if I've got to let you go back to your people to-morrow,
we had to know each other a little better first, hadn't we? I've been
trying not to know you all these months.
"Before you go, would you mind telling me about Mr. Travers and the
cat?"
"No," said Stella, with a startled look; "anything else in the world,
Julian, but not Mr. Travers and the cat."
"Ostrog and I are frightfully jealous by nature," Julian pleaded. "He
wouldn't be at all nice to that cat if he met it without knowing its
history."
"He can't be unkind to the poor cat," said Stella; "it's dead."
"And is Mr. Travers dead, too?" asked Julian.
"I should think," said Stella, "that he was about as dead as the
red-haired girl in the library."
"What red-haired girl?" cried Julian, sharply. "Who's been telling
you--I mean what made you think I knew her? It's a remarkably fine bit
of painting."
"But you did know her," said Stella; "only don't tell me anything about
her unless you want to."
"I won't refuse to answer any questions you ask," said Julian after a
pause, "but I'd much rather wait until we're married. I am a little
afraid of hurting you; you wouldn't be hurt, you see, if you were used
to me and knew more about men. You're an awfully clever woman, Stella,
but the silliest little girl I ever knew."
"I'll give up the red-haired girl if you'll give up Mr. Travers," said
Stella. She rose, and stood by his side, looking out of the window.
"Do you want to say good night, or would you rather go to bed without?"
he asked her.
"Of course I'll say good night," said Stella. "But, Julian, there are
some things I so awfully hate your doing. Saying good night doesn't
happen to be one of them. It's lighting my candle unless I'm sure you
want to. I want to be quite certain you don't mind me in little things
like that."
Julian put his arms round her and kissed her as gently as he would have
kissed a child. "Of course you shall light your candle," he said
tenderly, "just to show I don't mind you. But it isn't my pride now. I
don't a bit object to your seeing I can't. I'm quite sure of you, you
see; unless you meant to hurt me, you simply couldn't do it. And if you
meant to hurt me, it would be because you wanted to stop me hurting
myself, like this afternoon, wouldn't it?"
Stella nodded. She wanted to tell him that she had always loved him,
long before he remembered that she existed. All the while he had felt
himself alone, she was as near him as the air that touched his cheek.
But she could not find words in which to tell him of her secret
companionship. The instinct that would have saved them only brushed her
heart in passing.
Julian was alarmed at her continued silence.
"You're not frightened or worried or anything, are you?" he asked
anxiously. "Sure you didn't mind saying good night? It's not
compulsory, you know, even if we are engaged. I'd hate to bother you."
"I'm not bothered," Stella whispered; "I--only love you. I was saying it
to you in my own way."
"I'll wait three days for you," said Julian, firmly. "Not an hour more.
You quite understand, don't you, that I'm coming up at the end of three
days to bring you home for good?"
Stella shivered as she thought of Redcliffe Square. Julian wouldn't like
Redcliffe Square, and she wouldn't be able to make him like it; and yet
she wouldn't be able not to mind his not liking it.
Julian knew nothing about Redcliffe Square, but he noticed that Stella
shivered when he told her that he was going to bring her home for good.