STELLA RUNS TO EARTH
"You have been back in England long?" asked Stella Croyle.
"A little while," said Hillyard evasively.
It was the first week of September. But since his return from Rackham
Park to London his days had been passed in the examination of files of
documents; and what little time he had enjoyed free from that labour had
been given to quiet preparations for his departure.
"You might have come to see me," Stella Croyle suggested. "You knew that
I wished to see you."
"Yes, but I have been very busy," he answered. "I am going away."
Stella Croyle looked at him curiously.
"You too! You have joined up?"
Hillyard shook his head.
"No good," he answered. "I told you my lungs were my weak point. I am
turned down--and I am going abroad. It's not very pleasant to find
oneself staying on in London, going to a little dinner party here and
there where all the men are oldish, when all of one's friends have
gone."
Stella Croyle's face and voice softened.
"Yes. I can understand that," she said.
Hillyard watched her narrowly, but there was no doubt that she was
sincere. She had received him with an air of grievance, and a hard
accent in her voice. But she was entering now into a comprehension of
the regrets which must be troubling him.
"I am sorry," she continued. "I never cared very much for women. I have
very few friends amongst them. And so I am losing--every one." She held
out her hand to him in sympathy. "But if I were a man and had been
turned down by the doctors, I don't think that I could stay. I should
go like you and hide."
She smiled and poured out two cups of tea.
"That is a habit of yours, even though you are not a man," Hillyard
replied.
"What do you mean?"
"You run away and hide."
Stella looked at her visitor in surprise.
"Who told you that?"
"Sir Charles Hardiman."
Stella Croyle was silent for a few moments.
"Yes, that's true," and she laughed suddenly. "When things go wrong, I
become rather impossible. I have often made up my mind to live entirely
in the country, but I never carry the plan out."
She let Hillyard drink his tea and light a cigarette before she
approached the question which was torturing her.
"You had a good time in the Sudan!" she began. "Lots of heads?"
"Yes. I had a perfect time."
"And your friend? Captain Luttrell. Did you meet him?"
Hillyard had pondered on the answer which he would give to her when she
asked that question. If he answered, "Yes,"--why, then he must go on, he
must tell her something of what passed between Luttrell and himself, how
he delivered his message and what answer he received. Let him wrap that
answer up in words, however delicate and vague, she would see straight
to the answer. Her heart would lead her there. To plead forgetfulness
would be merely to acknowledge that he slighted her; and she would not
believe him. So he lied.
"No. I never met Luttrell. He was away down in Khordofan when I was on
the White Nile."
Stella Croyle had turned a little away from Hillyard when she put the
question; and she sat now with her face averted for a long while.
Nothing broke the silence but the ticking of the clock.
"I am sorry," said Hillyard.
No doubt her disappointment was bitter. She had counted very much, no
doubt, on this chance of the two men meeting; on her message reaching
her lover, and a "little word" now and again from him coming to her
hands. Some morning she would wake up and find an envelope in the
familiar writing waiting upon the tray beside her tea--that, no doubt,
had been the hope which she had lived on this many a day. Hillyard was
not fool enough to hold that he understood either the conclusions at
which women arrived, or the emotions by which they jumped to them. But
he attributed these hopes and thoughts with some confidence to Stella
Croyle--until she turned and showed him her face. The sympathy and
gentleness had gone from it. She was white with passion and her eyes
blazed.
"Why do you lie to me?" she cried. "I met Harry this morning."
Hillyard was more startled by the news of Luttrell's presence in London
than confused by the detection of his lie.
"Harry Luttrell!" he exclaimed. "You are sure? He is in England?"
"Yes. I met him in Piccadilly outside Jerningham's"--she mentioned the
great outfitters and provision merchants--"he told me that he had run
across you in the Sudan. What made you say that you hadn't?"
Hillyard was taken at a loss.
"Well?" she insisted.
Hillyard could see no escape except by the way of absolute frankness.
"Because I gave him your message, Mrs. Croyle," he replied slowly, "and
I judged that he was not going to answer it."
Stella Croyle was inclined to think that the world was banded against
her, to deceive her and to do her harm. They had all been engaged,
Hardiman and the rest of them, in keeping Harry Luttrell away from her:
in defending him, whether he wished it or not, from the wiles of the
enchantress. Stella Croyle was quick enough in the up-take where her
wounded heart was not concerned, but she was never very clear in any
judgment which affected Harry Luttrell. Passion and disappointment and
hope drew veils between the truth and her, and she dived below the plain
reason to this or that far-fetched notion for the springs of his
conduct. Almost she had persuaded herself that Harry Luttrell, by the
powerful influence of friends, was being kept against his will from her
side. Her anger against Hillyard had sprung, not from the mere fact that
he had lied to her, but from her fancy that he had joined the imaginary
band of her enemies. She understood now that in this she had been wrong.
"I see," she said gently. "It was to spare me pain?"
"Yes."
Suddenly Stella Croyle laughed--and with triumph. She showed to Hillyard
a face from which all the anger had gone.
"You need not have been so anxious to spare me. Harry is coming here
this afternoon."
She saw the incredulity flicker in Hillyard's eyes, but she did not
mind.
"Yes," she asserted. "He goes down this evening to a camp in the New
Forest where his battalion is waiting to go to France. He starts at six
from Waterloo. He promised to run in here first."
Hillyard looked at the clock. It was already half-past four. He had not
the faintest hope that Luttrell would come. Stella had no doubt pressed
him to come. She had probably been a little importunate. Luttrell's
promise was an excuse, just an excuse to be rid of her--nothing more.
"Luttrell has probably a great deal to do on this last afternoon," he
suggested.
"Of course, he won't be able to stay long," Stella Croyle agreed.
"Still, five minutes are worth a good deal, aren't they, if you have
waited for them two years?"
She was impenetrable in her confidence. It clothed her about like
armour. Not for a moment would she doubt--she dared not! Harry was
coming back to the house that afternoon. Would he break something--some
little china ornament upon the mantel-shelf? He generally knocked over
something. What would it be to-day, the mandarin with the nodding head,
or the funny little pot-bellied dwarf which she had picked up at
Christie's the day before? Stella smiled delightedly as she selected
this and that of her little treasures for destruction. Oh, to-day Harry
Luttrell could sweep every glass or porcelain trinket she possessed
into the grate--when once he had passed through the doorway--when once
again he stood within her room. She sat with folded hands, hope like a
rose in her heart, sure of him, so sure of him that she did not even
watch the hands of her clock.
But the hands moved on.
"I will stay, if I may," said Hillyard uncomfortably. "I will go, of
course, when----" and he could not bring himself to complete the
sentence.
Stella, however, added the words, though in a quieter voice and with
less triumph than she had used before.
"When he comes. Yes, do stay. I shall be glad."
Slowly the day drew in. The sunlight died away from the trees in the
park. In the tiny garden great shadows fell. The dusk gathered and
Hillyard and Stella Croyle sat without a word in the darkening room. But
Stella had lost her pride of carriage. On the mantelpiece the clock
struck the hour--six little tinkling silvery strokes. At that moment a
guard was blowing his whistle on a platform of Waterloo and a train
beginning slowly to move.
"He will have missed his train," said Stella in an unhappy whisper. "He
will be here later."
"My dear," replied Hillyard, and leaning forward he took and gently
shook her hand. "Soldiers don't miss their trains."
Stella did not answer. She sat on until the lamps were lit in the
streets outside and in this room the dusk had changed to black night.
"No, he will not come," she said at last, in a low wail of anguish. She
rose and turned to Hillyard. Her face glimmered against the darkness
deathly white and her eyes shone with sorrow.
"It was kind and wise of you to wish to spare me," she said. "Oh, I can
picture to myself how coldly he heard you. He never meant to come here
this afternoon."
Stella Croyle was wrong, just as Hillyard had been. Harry Luttrell had
meant to pay his farewell visit to Stella Croyle, knowing well that he
was unlikely ever to come back, and understanding that he owed her it.
But an incident drove the whole matter from his thoughts, and the
incident was just one instance to show how wide a gulf now separated
these two.
He had called at a nursing home close to Portland Place where a Colonel
Oakley lay dying of a malignant disease. Oakley had been the chief
spirit of reviving the moral and the confidence of the disgraced
Clayfords. He had laboured unflinchingly to restore its discipline, to
weld it into one mind, with dishonour to redeem, and a single arm to
redeem it. He had lived for nothing else--until the internal trouble
laid him aside. Luttrell called at half-past three to tell him that all
was well with his old battalion, and was met by a nurse who shook her
head.
"The last two days he has been lying, except for a minute here and
there, in a coma. You may see him if you like, but it is a question of
hours."
Luttrell went into the bedroom where the sick man lay, so thin of face
and hand, so bloodless. But it seemed that the Fates wished to deal the
Colonel one last ironic stroke, before they let him die. For, while
Luttrell yet stood in the room, Colonel Oakley's eyes opened. This last
moment of consciousness was his, the very last; and while it still
endured, suddenly, down Portland Place, with its drums beating, its
soldiers singing, marched a battalion. The song and the music swelled,
the tramp of young, active, vigorous soldiers echoed and reached down
the quiet street. Colonel Oakley turned his face to his pillow and burst
into tears; the bitterness of death was given him to drink in
overflowing measure. It seemed as though a jibe was flung at him.
The tramp of the battalion had not yet died away when Oakley sank again
into unconsciousness.
"It was pretty rough that he should just wake up to hear that and to
know that he would never have part in it, eh?" said Luttrell, speaking
in a low voice more to himself than to the nurse. "What he did for us!
Pretty hard treatment, eh?"
Luttrell left the home with one thought filling his mind--the regiment.
It had got to justify all Oakley's devotion; it had got somehow to make
amends to him, even if he never was to know of it, for this last unfair
stroke of destiny. Luttrell walked across London, dwelling upon the
qualities of individual men in the company which was his command--how
this man was quick, and that man stupid, and that other inclined to
swank, and a fourth had a gift for reading maps, and a fifth would make
a real marksman; and so he woke up to find himself before the bookstall
in the station at Waterloo. Then he remembered the visit he had
promised, but there was no longer any time. He took the train to the New
Forest, and three days later went to France.
But of Luttrell's visit to Colonel Oakley, Stella Croyle never knew.
And, again, very likely it would not have mattered if she had. They were
parted too widely for insight and clear vision.
* * * * *
Hillyard carried away with him a picture of Stella's haunted and
despairing face. It was over against him as he dined at his club,
gleaming palely from out of darkness, the lips quivering, the eyes sad
with all the sorrows of women. He could blame neither the one nor the
other--neither Stella Croyle nor Harry Luttrell. One heart called to the
other across too wide a gulf, and this heart on the hither side was
listening to quite other voices and was deaf to her cry for help. But
Hillyard was on the road along which Millicent Splay had already
travelled. More and more he felt the case for compassion. He carried the
picture of Stella's face home with him. It troubled his sleep; by
constant gazing upon it he became afraid....
He waked with a start to hear a question whispered at his ear. "Where is
she? How has she passed this night?" The morning light was glimmering
between the curtains. The room was empty. Yet surely those words had
been spoken, actually spoken by a human voice.... He took his telephone
instrument in his hand and lifted the receiver. In a little while--but a
while too long for his impatience--his call was acknowledged at the
exchange. He gave Stella Croyle's number and waited. Whilst he waited he
looked at his watch. The time was a quarter past seven.
An unfamiliar and sleepy voice answered him from her house.
"Will you put me on to Mrs. Croyle?" he requested, and the reply came
back:
"Mrs. Croyle went away with her maid last night."
"Last night?" cried Hillyard incredulously. "But I did not leave the
house myself until well after six, and she had then no plans for
leaving."
Further details, however, were given to him. Mrs. Croyle had called up a
garage whence cars can be hired. She had packed hurriedly. She had left
at nine by motor.
"Where for?" asked Hillyard.
The name of an hotel in the pine country of Surrey was given.
"Thank you," said Hillyard, and he rang off.
She had run to earth in her usual way, when trouble and grief broke
through her woman's armour and struck her down--that was all! Hillyard
lighted a cigarette and rang for his tea. Yes, that was all! She was
acting true to her type, as the jargon has it. But against his will, her
face took shape before him, as he had seen it in the darkness of her
room and ever since--ever since!
He rang again, and more insistently. He possessed a small, swift
motor-car. Before the clocks of London had struck eight he was
travelling westwards along the King's Road. Hillyard was afraid. He did
not formulate his fears. He was not sure of what he feared. But he was
afraid--terribly afraid; and for the first time anger rose up in his
heart against his friend. Luttrell! Harry Luttrell! At this very moment
he was changing direction in columns of fours upon the drill ground,
happy in the smooth execution of the manoeuvre by his men and
untroubled by any thought of the distress of Stella Croyle. Well, little
things must give way to great--women to the exigencies of drill!
Meanwhile, Hillyard grew more afraid, and yet more afraid. He swept down
the hill to Cobham, passed between the Hut and the lake, and was through
Ripley before the shutters in the shops were down. The dew was heavy in
the air; all the fresh, clean smell of the earth was in that September
morning. And as yet the morning itself was only half awake. At last the
Hog's Back rose, and at a little inn, known for its comfort--and its
_chef_--Hillyard's car was stopped.
"Mrs. Croyle?" Hillyard asked at the office.
"Her maid is here," said the girl clerk, and pointed.
Hillyard turned to a girl, pretty and, by a few years, younger than
Stella Croyle.
"I have orders not to wake Mrs. Croyle until she rings," said the maid.
Jenny Prask, she was called, and she spoke with just a touch of pleasant
Sussex drawl. "Mrs. Croyle has not been sleeping well, and she looked
for a good night's rest in country air."
The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her
argument, that Hillyard's terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose
their vivid colours.
"I understand that," he stammered. "Yet, Jenny----"
Jenny Prask smiled.
"You are Mr. Hillyard, I think?"
"Yes."
"I have heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids
to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it
seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly
Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the
recognition of a mistress.
"If you wish, I will wake her."
Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels. She knocked upon
the door. No answer was returned. She opened it and entered.
Stella Croyle was up and dressed. She was sitting at a table by the
window with some sheets of notepaper and some envelopes in front of her,
and her back was towards Hillyard and the open door. But she was dressed
as she had been dressed the evening before when he had left her; the
curtains in the room were drawn, and the electric lights on the
writing-table and the walls were still burning. The bed had not been
slept in.
Stella Croyle rose and turned towards her visitors. She tottered a
little as she stood up, and her eyes were dazed.
"Why have you come here?" she asked faintly, and she fell rather than
sat again in her chair.
Hillyard sprang forward and tore the curtains aside so that the
sunlight poured into the room, and Stella opened and shut her eyes with
a contraction of pain.
"I had so many letters to write," she explained, "I thought that I would
sit up and get through with them."
Hillyard looked at the table. There were great black dashes on the
notepaper and lines, and here and there a scribbled picture of a face,
and perhaps now and again half a word. She had sat at that table all
night and had not even begun a letter. Hillyard's heart was torn with
pity as he looked from her white, tired face to the sheets of notepaper.
What misery and unhappiness did those broad, black dashes and idle lines
express?
"You must have some breakfast," he said. "I'll order it and have it
ready for you downstairs by the time you are ready. Then I'll take you
back to London."
The blood suddenly mounted into her face.
"You will?" she cried wildly. "In a reserved compartment, so that I may
do nothing rash and foolish? Are you going to be kind too?"
She broke into a peal of shrill and bitter laughter. Then her head went
down upon her hands, and she gave herself up to such a passion of
sobbing and tears as was quite beyond all Hillyard's experience. Yet he
would rather hear those sobs and see her bowed shoulders shaking under
the violence of them than listen again to the dreadful laughter which
had gone before. He had not the knowledge which could enable him to
understand her sudden outburst, nor did he acquire that knowledge until
long afterwards. But he understood that quite unwittingly he had touched
some painful chord in that wayward nature.
"I am going to take you back in my motor-car," he said. "I'll be
downstairs with the breakfast ready."
She had probably eaten nothing, he reckoned, since teatime the day
before. Food was the steadying thing she needed now. He went to the door
which Jenny Prask held open for him.
"Don't leave her!" he breathed in a whisper.
Jenny Prask smiled.
"Not me, sir," she said fervently.
Hillyard remembered with comfort some words which she had spoken in
appreciation of the loving devotion of her maid.
"In three-quarters of an hour," said Jenny; and later on that morning,
with a great fear removed from his heart, Hillyard drove Stella Croyle
back to London.