that another could say or do would estrange them, unless there is an
Iago in the case, and such a man is much rarer than----'
'Than a grand passion?' put in Tareling. 'Ah, Miss Stella, it seems to
me you have a very charming colour this morning.'
She turned on him, and parried the insinuation, with a laughing, radiant
face.
'I don't think I can quite forgive you for not showing me the woman who
wept so copiously when the despairing lovers could not even move a
muscle. How the sight would have consoled me!'
Letters were brought in; several for Stella. Among them she discerned
one addressed in a handwriting the sight of which made her heart throb
stormily.
Laurette was trembling with excitement. She had opened a letter, but
instead of reading it she looked over it furtively at Stella, whose face
at that moment was irradiated as if a rosy flame shone through it--her
lips slightly parted in a happy smile, her eyes lustrous as stars. The
Honourable Talbot Tareling's home correspondence was chiefly of the kind
that takes the disgustingly prosaic form of requesting
payment--applications which, as a rule, rouse neither enthusiasm nor
curiosity in the recipient's breast. Tareling turned over his with an
air of profound indifference; then he glanced from his wife's face to
Stella's with an expression of curious inquiry. Laurette caught the
look, and coloured violently, instantly taking refuge in her open
letter.
'It is evident that I shall have to spend part of the morning at my
desk,' said Stella, rising and gathering up her letters.
'Please remember we are due at Mrs. Joran's in the afternoon,' said
Laurette.
'Who is he?' asked her husband, as the door closed after Stella.
Laurette pretended not to understand.
'Oh, aren't you behind the scenes, then? A young lady does not colour
like Aurora because a handful of letters come from the family circle.
And such a dewy smile! Ye gods, what it must be to be a girl and in
love! The girl has a lovely face!'
'Oh, probably there was a letter from Ted,' returned Laurette, trying to
speak carelessly.
Tareling looked at her narrowly, and then gave a short laugh.
'Fancy a girl like Stella colouring up to the whites of her eyes, and
smiling timidly, because she got one of Ritchie's croppy, jockey-like
epistles! You are sometimes too funny, Laurette. What is your little
game now?'
A sickening fear shot across Laurette's mind. She knew that, in the
decorums of life in which she herself was founded as on a rock, her
husband scarcely knew the draping of virtue's garment. But it was also
equally clear to her that, if he knew a third part of her 'little game,'
in this instance, he would overwhelm her with anger and scorn and
unsparing exposure. It seemed to her as if Stella might appear at any
moment, denouncing the palpable treachery that had been practised on
her. But there was no tremor of fear in her voice as she answered:
'Ted is a dreadful cub, isn't he, except when he signs cheques that may
be treated as blank ones?'
'It appears to me you are acquiring a habit of repeating yourself. Of
course a man doesn't expect to be amused in a _tete-a-tete_ with his
wife. But--ah--don't you think you might hit on a variation?'
Laurette did not permit herself to attempt a reply. Indeed, to do her
justice, it was only at periods of unusual strain or irritation that she
so far tested how bitter and unalloyed are the dregs of a contract
entered upon for life, with out love or mutual respect, when the
advantages which were the governing motive seem to be gradually becoming
less.
When Stella entered her own room, she stood for a moment by the open
window, that soft rapture still kindling her face with which a woman
receives the first love-letters that are precious to her. She opened
it, and after the first strange, unreal moments, sank in a chair,
covering her eyes as if to shut out a sight too terrible to be looked
upon. Again and again she forced herself to read over the words
mechanically:
'At the age of twenty-two, while still a medical student in London, just
a year after my father's death, I met a lady, a good many years older
than myself, who fascinated me greatly. She was an Italian, and very
beautiful. Still, infatuated as I was, I shrank from the idea of
marrying her. But, under circumstances which I need not now detail, I
married her four months after we first met. The marriage turned out a
disastrous failure.' Here there were several lines completely effaced,
and then: 'On these conditions I settled an income on her, which she
named as being adequate, and was to be paid through my lawyer
half-yearly. The letter I opened in the Home Field that day was from my
lawyer. He wrote to say that'--here three more lines were effaced--'the
lady to whom the money was payable had died.' After this, two
half-sheets had been bodily left out by Laurette; and the half-sheet
which concluded bore only the signature, all the writing that preceded
it having been obliterated, and yet not wholly. Looking closely, three
lines at the close could be made out: 'Your timorous confession that you
felt you could have moved or spoken after your accident when I reached
you, only you wished to know how it would really "affect me"?' Then the
concluding terms were obliterated also, but the name 'ANSELM LANGDALE'
was clear and distinct.
Then there was a sheet of paper, which was evidently part of a letter.
'You are entirely in error in every particular regarding your wife.
Return as quickly as possible, and all these miserable misunderstandings
will be explained and set right. You need not hesitate nor imagine that
you will be asked to believe this merely on bare assertion. Proofs are
forthcoming. As to the rumour of death, it is as ill-founded as the
first mistakes. But your long-continued absence has reduced my poor
friend to such a state of despair that she is too indifferent to take
even the slightest trouble. Pray--pray do not lose any time after
getting this. Return to her, and all will yet be well.'
When a great blow suddenly falls on one, it can hardly be said that at
first coherent thought is possible. The throbbing temples, the parched
throat and flickering vision, the slow, dull, cold beating of the heart,
make the physical anguish as pressing as the mental suffering. Then the
creeping stupor that succeeds the swift exhaustion of all the faculties
paralyzes coherent thought. It is as though all the powers of the mind
and body were concentrated in sullenly keeping hold on life--dreary and
hopeless as it has been made in a few wild incredible moments. Cold and
trembling in every limb, Stella cowered by the window over these
fragmentary sentences. Every feature that under other circumstances
would have thrown discredit on these strange communications was even, at
the first glance, a strong link in a chain of crushing evidence. Here
there was no hearsay--no perhaps. It was a bald, commonplace little
story. An unhappy early marriage--a separation years ago. Then the
news of his wife's death. That was the letter he read out in the Home
Field that happy spring day--O God! how long, how long ago! She seemed
to see herself through the lapse of gray years out in the sunshine with
the birds singing all round, and her heart leaping with a sudden passion
of joy as Anselm asked leave in a broken voice to write to her from the
other side of the world. She went over all that followed--moaning
faintly now and again as her breath failed her. Already all the rapture
and bounding hope and insane gladness were part of an unreal fable. She
turned to his letter written the day after they parted. She knew it by
heart. She had read it the last thing at night, and had wakened up with
the first, faint approach of day to read it again. Then this letter had
come to him. No wonder he wrote in a disjointed, halting fashion,
blotting out almost as much as remained legible--beginning and closing
abruptly. Where was he now? Oh, she must see him. She opened a letter
from Louise, and near the beginning of the letter she read: 'You will,
of course, have seen Dr. Langdale before he sailed on the 22nd'--that
was two days back. Why had not the letter reached her before? Ah, he
had taken precautions. Would it not have been kinder to see her when
this torturing revelation was to be made--or did he understand her too
well? Did he know that she would have thrown herself at his feet and
implored him not to leave her--not to believe this woman who urged his
return? Merciful Heaven! what frantic thoughts were these? Would she
indeed have been so lost to pride and maidenly reticence? She went and
confronted herself in the looking-glass. But the face she met
there--the eyes like those of a creature trapped and wounded to
death--made her turn away shuddering. He was gone. He had found it
possible to leave without one more look or word, though they were never
to meet again. There was something in this that wounded her beyond
endurance. And he had not made one allusion to her long letter.
Perhaps it was wiser. Wiser? Yes, wiser--she repeated the word as if
trying to understand it. She felt dimly that to her wisdom, prudence or
caution were but empty word-echoes in face of this overwhelming
calamity. How could she have looked at him and borne the thought--'It is
for the last time'? Yes, he had been wise and reasonable. As for her,
she could not have left him thus if ten thousand obstacles had stood
between them. Ah, yes, he understood the wild passion of which her
nature was capable. Sometimes she walked up and down the room; at other
times she stood staring out of the window, trying to recall what she had
been thinking of. And so the hours wore on to noon.... Then there was
a tap at her door, and Maisie came in asking something about a dress.
'Oh, Miss Stella!' she suddenly cried out in dismay, as she looked full
in her mistress's face, waiting for an answer which did not come.
'There's ill news--there's ill news! Is it from Fairacre, dear Miss
Stella?' cried the maid, overcome with terror at the white impassive
face.
'No--no--it is only--a little faintness,' murmured Stella. It was all
over, and the world swept on as usual, and she had somehow to face the
lie that life still went on with her. Maisie bathed her face and hands,
and stood fanning her by the open window. She was still half fearful
that the news of some catastrophe had wrought this sudden change--but
when she saw that her mistress shed no tears she was reassured. Maisie,
fortunately, had no knowledge of those stabs which are so deadly that
they bleed but little outwardly.
'You were to go out in the afternoon, Miss Stella--but I doubt you
suldna,' said Maisie, who in moments of agitation returned on her
mother's accent and phrases with curious fidelity.
'Oh yes--yes; don't speak so loud, Maisie,' and then Stella forced
herself to open the Fairacre letters, and read bits of them to Maisie,
who at once became certain as she listened that all was well. There
were honeybirds in swarms in the Park-lands, especially the Botanic
Park, all during the spring. The Torrens was determined, so Alice
wrote, not to give up running and singing as it went till Stella
returned. The roses were extraordinarily fine this season, especially
Stella's favourite white fairy and Macartney roses----
The girl dropped the letter with a little miserable moan. Then she
compelled herself to read on. Weighty changes were imminent in the old
home. Felix Harrison had won so many distinctions of late, and his
income showed so liberal a margin over former years, that he and Allie
were to be married at Christmas. Then Tom was also an accepted lover,
and there was not a single reason forthcoming why their wedding should
be delayed. 'Can you fancy only you and mother in the old home?' wrote
Allie. 'You would have to see all the visitors that came, instead of
retreating to the library, you spoilt child! But no; Esther and the
children will share the old home with you. It is time Clem went to
college--and, after all, no one expects you to linger long in the
paternal nest. Oh, you monkey, what secrets have you not kept from me!'
She crushed the letter into the envelope--and there was the maid still
waiting an answer.
'Thank you, Maisie. I must write some letters. The dress--the
navy-blue velvet? Oh, any way you like.'
She was left alone--but she tried to read no more of her letters just
then. She was stunned, insensible, though not unconscious. There is a
kind of moral syncope which falls on the heart and brain after the first
shock of a great calamity. A sort of lethargy crept over Stella, in
which no thought, no feeling, was acutely present. She read the words
over repeatedly, till she could have said them by heart. She could so
well understand those erasures--that stern avoidance of all empty words
of regret. And then the lines at the close, which had been so hurriedly
blotted that the forms of the letters were still traceable, caught her
attention: 'Your timorous confession that you felt you could have moved
or spoken after your accident when I reached you, only you wished to
know how it would "affect me"?' Her heart gave a strange leap, and the
blood came back to her face in an overflowing wave.
As if the anguish and despair that held her did not fill the cup of her
supreme agony to the brim, she saw in the words, coupled with the cold,
bald statement that preceded them, a record of Langdale's consciousness
that her love for him had caused the avowal of his when he had meant to
keep silent. It had been his intention to sail for England without
making a sign--merely asking leave to write to her from there. She had
been quite happy in her confidence that he loved her, even before his
avowal. Oh, what madness, when the mere thought that he cared at all
for her, and kept silence, should have at once suggested some
insuperable obstacle! She, who had ever been so ready to question, to
doubt things that were beyond the scope of human knowledge, while here,
in a simple every-day matter, in which silence was in itself suspicion
ready forged, she had found no cause for inquiry, for a moment's
uneasiness! He loved her; he did not wish to say so for a time--that
had been quite enough. Oh, fool and blind that she had been!--ready to
give her love before it was asked--ready to see no peril in anything so
long as she knew that he held her dear.
He had loved this woman once, then, that he had made his wife? His
wife!--she shuddered and cowered down on her bed as if seeking to hide
herself; and then she rose up and read over again and again the words
written in a woman's hand--in fair, even, well-formed characters, on the
face of them the writing of a lady: 'All will yet be well!' Was this
possible? Would he, perhaps, learn that he had been in error--that the
wretchedness of the marriage had been caused by misunderstandings on
which light would be now thrown? Would he be thankful that the rumour
of her death was untrue? Would he, perhaps, learn to love her? Oh, God
in heaven forbid!
The next moment she was thrilled with horror at the prayer--the
imprecation, rather. But no quick involuntary horror, no reasoning,
could hide the truth which forced itself on her--that the thought that
he should love this woman was even more torturing than the knowledge
that she was his wife. Should not this in itself serve to loosen the
dominion of this love--this passion that had insidiously rooted itself
in every fibre of her nature?
She satisfied herself that he had really sailed. Every hour that passed
widened the distance between them--brought him nearer to her who might
win his love. The thought worked like poison in her veins. She threw
her unread letters aside, she put away out of sight these miserable
fragmentary ones that had brought her the tidings which seemed more to
wreck her soul than her life--even the envelope, with its firm, clear
writing, her name written in full, as if he had lingered over it in the
old lover-like way, hurt her intolerably. And his ring which she wore
next her heart like a charm, with its noble motto, now the bitterest
irony. All that was best and highest to her seemed touched with this
mildew of mockery. Yet she would keep this to the day of her death.
When the world was mercifully shrouded in oblivion, this golden amulet
would lie against her heart, while all its stormy throbbings were
overpast. But oh, merciful Heaven, what a long and weary eternity lay
between! She had come to one of those epochs that arise in the lives of
women who have souls, when nothing is left but death and the love of
God--both seemed equally remote.
Dustiefoot, who had patiently waited for his mistress, finding that she
did not come as usual to caress and talk to him, jumped lightly through
the open window. When she spoke to him he instantly noticed the change
in her voice, and looked at her with that keen, almost human
intelligence in his eyes which Langdale had once compared to those of a
dog painted by Piero di Cosimo in his picture of the death of Procris.
Ah! those endless memories! Each thought, and emotion, and association,
all were steeped in the dye of those days which seemed to hem her in on
every side.
Laurette waited in almost trembling impatience for Stella's appearance.
She did not leave her room at luncheon-time; she had letters to write,
and could not eat. Maisie brought her some tea, and biscuits for
Dustiefoot, who lay at his mistress's feet, looking up in her face from
time to time with watchful solicitude.
Laurette longed to go into her room--to know in what way the letter that
had been so subtly changed had wrought. 'If she takes it fighting,'
thought Laurette, 'I shall send for Ted this very afternoon.'
Four o'clock was the hour at which they were to leave for Mrs. Joran's.
A few minutes before that time Stella joined her hostess in the
drawing-room, faultlessly dressed, a damask flush on her cheeks. Her
eyes glistened like those of a creature that has been dangerously
wounded, and there was a livid aureole round them; but beyond this, and
a curiously toneless timbre of voice, there was no outward sign of the
fierce storm which had swept over her.
If she could have been thankful for anything at that time, it would have
been that no one knew, as she believed, of the disaster which had
overtaken her. A weight seemed to press on her head, and voices that
were near sounded at times as if they came from a great distance. Her
lips were hot and parched; occasionally a shuddering sigh, that
threatened to become a low moan, roused her to greater vigilance. She
had not shed a tear, but at times a film came over her eyes as if a mist
fell on all around. The strain of bearing such torture, without the
relief of solitude or rest, or any touch of gentle resignation as to an
inevitable grief, was cruel in the extreme. But it seemed to induce an
apathy and a deadly fatigue, so that sleep came to her almost at once
when, late that night, she went to bed. She slept for two or three
hours, and then she woke up sobbing uncontrollably, with tearless eyes.
She rose up and lit her lamp, trembling in every limb. There was an
unbearable burning weight on her head. She opened her desk, hardly
knowing why. She searched for those fragmentary letters, and sat down,
going over every word afresh. The thought had suddenly lodged in her
mind that she was the victim of some strange delusion. But as she read,
all the thoughts and events of the past day came crowding back. The
contrast between the overflowing happiness of the woman who had opened
this miserable letter, and the stony misery which had fallen on her,
fortunately touched the source of tears. 'Oh, my lost love! my lost
love!' she moaned, and the tears rained down and blistered the paper
through and through. The light of day surprised her still crouching
over that strangely-pathetic record of the days that had been
illuminated with a light now quenched in the darkness of despair. She
knew that the new-born loveliness of the day flooded the sky with its
accustomed tenderness and splendour, but she shrank from the sight as
though it had the poison of asps in it for eyes outworn with weeping.
Turn where she would, she saw no gleam of consolation. And in these
first hours of intolerable suffering, pain and anguish were more hateful
to her than they had ever been before. She was scorched under the agony
that had fallen on her, as a flower exposed in its opening freshness is
shrivelled by a furious hot wind. All those tendrils of hope, of
dawning love to God--those moments of exalted consciousness in which she
seemed to draw closer to the vivid faith that had once kindled her
heart--were put to flight, withered, and entirely slain. It was as
though the air around her, which had before been fanned by the
dove-wings of ethereal hours, was suddenly darkened by the sweep of
vulture wings. Even that last resource of an unhappy love--the
remembrance of happier days--was impossible to her. She knew that for
her these days had been the flowering point of her life; but as for him,
was it more than a brief episode--one soon to be forgotten, perhaps, in
a happy and unlooked-for reconciliation with _his wife_? The words had
in them something that crushed all the finer tissues of thought and
sensation. She lay hiding her face from the light, quivering at times
from head to foot. She was thankful to feel that apathy creeping over
her that comes to the overstrained mind like the insensibility of
muscles which have been severely bruised or scalded.
She rose at the usual hour, and Maisie was again startled at the sight
of her mistress's face. It was one in which expression played so large
a part that the absence of vivacity and light, of a quickly mantling
colour, as well as the dark rings round the heavily-lashed eyes, made a
startling change.
'Indeed, Miss Stella, I doubt but we should get away home sooner than
you spoke of. This place doesna agree with you. The room is too small,
and ye miss the woods, and the birds, and your rides. Wouldn't you be
glad, ma'am, to leave for Fairacre soon?'
Stella, at the words, swiftly realized what a terror the thought of
returning to her peaceful home had for her. Those calm existences--her
mother and sister, who had lived their lives, who had passed their
keenest joys and sorrows; the children whose lives were to come, whose
life was made up of sunshine, and flowers, and gentle schooling, and all
the healthful, untroubled influences that for the more fortunate bridge
the isthmus from infancy to maturity--how could she take up the ravelled
threads amongst them? Nature and books, and the sweet serenity of home,
all had become equally impossible. All the force of her strong, complex
organization rose in revolt against the perspective of a faded, insipid
existence which the prospect called up. How could she endure that faint
replica of life with those agonizing memories in the background? Birds,
and flowers, and trees, and running water, the dawn of day, and the
music of childish voices--they had not only lost their enchantment:
their very memories were barbed with fiery darts--part of a past which
had worn a faint simulacrum of happiness before the keen flame of love
had breathed on her and transformed her being. What were they all now
to her--the persons and scenes and events that had made up existence?
Links in an inexorable chain that bound her, like a galley-slave, to her
ineffectual, inept post in the world, when life itself had really passed
from her grasp! Oh no; she had not lost all affection for those dear,
but they could do without her, and she could do without them for a time.
She must throw the past from her like a stained chalice emptied of all
the wine of life. She must be somewhere in the stir and tumult of the
world, where things would hold her and draw her away from herself--where
she could live without happiness, and those foolish dreams that had been
the dearest possession of her soul.
'But maybe ye would like to stay for the ball?'
'Oh, of course, Maisie. Use the hard brushes for my hair this morning.'
She spoke in an impatient, imperative tone, which surprised the maid so
much that she offered no further suggestions.