pungent aromatic vinegar. The delicate skin responded at once to the
touch, and her determination to keep at bay the rising sorrow that at
times threatened like a great flood to sweep all embankments into its
whirling eddies, kept the colour in her cheeks and the fire in her eyes.
'Only four more days till our ball,' said Laurette, who in her heart had
ejaculated a fervent little thanksgiving to Providence at sight of
Stella entering the breakfast-room. She had looked so deadly weary and
done on the previous night, fear, like a chilly snake, had lodged in
Laurette's bosom that the girl would certainly fall ill.
'I think, Miss Stella, you had better come with me for a riding
expedition till the evening of the ball,' said the master of the house,
who, with the wisdom of the serpent, generally cleared out on the days
immediately preceding such festivities.
'But I thought you were to be the villain in Mrs. Joran's comedietta
to-morrow night,' answered Stella, with a faint smile.
'Ah, true--the man who drugs people and steals letters.'
'Surely that is not the _role_ of a real villain--to drug and steal
letters merely. You are going to be a philanthropist in disguise.'
'Thank Heaven! she believes it all,' thought Laurette.
'Do you know, Miss Stella, that sounds a little misanthropical for one
who gets letters in handfuls.'
'But how should I know it would be a boon from the gods to have them
stolen if I did not get a few?'
'Still, you would not like them all stolen?' He could not help watching
her a little curiously. There was some inexplicable change in her whole
face and bearing since she had sat in the same place twenty-four hours
ago. He saw that, notwithstanding her effort to keep an indifferent,
smiling look, her face hardened, and he hastened to change the
conversation. 'Are you going to fall into Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs' plan of
getting you for the heroine of her little adaptation from the French?'
'No, I think not. One's own little part in life gives me so many _jours
insipides_, without dabbling in other people's.'
'Thank God! she is in a fighting mood,' thought Laurette.
'I am sorry. Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs consulted me, and I told her I thought
her idea was an inspiration, as you constantly remind me of a cousin of
my own, of whom a French diplomat once said that she had a Parisian edge
to her mind. She had, too, as he said, that vivacity _dans ses moindres
mouvements_ which Englishwomen so rarely possessed. She had, in fact,
an infusion of Irish blood, as you have of Highland.'
'Wasn't Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs shocked at the mention of anything Parisian in
connection with Stella? You never told _me_ the funny story Ted was
laughing about once. I shouldn't wonder if he turned up to-morrow.'
This remark seemed to be addressed to the teapot more than to anyone in
particular.
'But shearing is in full swing at Strathhaye,' said Tareling, who
instantly connected this announcement with Stella's presence, and began
vaguely to speculate whether, after all, there was anything in it.
Women were such queer conundrums--one could never tell. How many
impossible marriages he, Tareling, had seen in his day! But Australian
girls were not as a rule so keenly alive to the fascinations of wealth
as those inoculated with the aims and standard of London society, where
to lack money was to be out of the swim of everything that held life
together. That same Lady Mary, his cousin, who in Tareling's memory held
the shadowy place of what might have been; who had at times scolded him,
and somehow got him out of his first serious scrape at Eton, and written
him letters, and promised to marry him if a Chinese mandarin left him a
mine in Golconda; whose radiant gray eyes and brilliant sallies had
often been recalled by Stella Courtland--what a strange hash she had
made of her life, first marrying the wrong man, then running away with
the wrong one, and finally taking the wrong dose of chloral!
Would she have fared so very much worse if she had married him, though
they were both as poor as church mice, with something less than nine
hundred a year between them, and no one likely to leave them a mine in
Golconda? She in her dishonoured grave--and he in his dishonoured life,
gambling, and drinking deep at times, and playing the _roue_ generally
in third-rate society at the far ends of the earth, 'sponging on his
wife's relations,' as old Ritchie had once said in a fury, after he had
been called on to shell out a thousand pounds or so to keep a very shady
story from the light of day? Probably they would have quarrelled; and
to quarrel in one of those tiny establishments in which people lived on
nine hundred a year was the very deuce--one had to get down so
completely to hard pan--or be a plumb idiot the next moment, and kiss
and be friends. He rather thought they would have done the latter. But
at any rate would they quite have come to this; she in a nameless grave
at Monte Carlo--he married to a colonial heiress, intriguing to keep a
firm hold among the mixed lot that formed the _creme demi-double_ in a
pushing, vulgar colonial city? Yet even Lady Mary's marriage lacked
some of the utter incongruity that would attend one between Ritchie and
this young woman. A mammoth scratched on a bone by a prehistoric man,
and a statuette by one of the old Grecian sculptors, that was what would
represent the comparative quality of their minds.
Tareling was not a man who had retained much of the faculty of being
even touched by the higher possibilities of human life. He would have
had to purge and live cleanly before he could be the moral equal of many
among those he contemptuously classed as a 'mixed lot.' Whatever
semblance of the hero had once lived in his heart had long since
atrophied. His aims and ideals were to the full as ignoble as those of
that lower division of the common herd who value money chiefly for the
physical excesses and mental excitements that it commands. Yet it may
be taken for granted that one has not generations of well-born and
cultured people behind him, without retaining some keenness of
perception that belongs to a well-descended creature, whether he be man,
horse, or dog. Stella interested him not only because of the
resemblance he fancied in her to the unhappy girl who, in her brilliant
youth, had been so much his friend, but also because of that element of
personal fascination which is inseparable from some women. Why had the
glow and the sparkle of her face been suddenly quenched? Why those
livid circles round the eyes that did not in the least respond to the
smile she called up?
'You will be glad to have some riding, Stella. No doubt Ted will bring
a hack or two a lady can ride,' said Laurette, emboldened by the
inferences she drew from observing the girl to handle her subject 'like
a lad of mettle.' She began to think that Stella, after all, was not
such a very bad sort of nettle to manage.
'Would you like to ride to-day?' said Tareling suddenly. But it seemed
there were too many engagements of one sort or another. Indeed, if
there had not been such, Laurette would have invented them. No one
allowed himself to be more easily hoodwinked than Talbot when it suited
him; but, on the other hand, no one had a more unerring vision in
piecing broken hints into a whole, once his suspicion or interest was
thoroughly roused. He had, too, curious tact with people whom Laurette
herself might deceive or mislead, but whose confidence she could never
win. She could see by the way he glanced under his heavy, deeply-lined
eyelids from herself to Stella, that something had presented itself to
him as a problem.
'Oh, it will be delightful to ride!' Stella said, looking up, with a
faint flush rising on her face.
The word 'delightful' had a sardonic ring in her ears. But language
cannot serve its purpose, as legal tender between beings whose first
care often is that nothing of what surges most vividly in the mind
should pass into speech, without at times sounding in the ears like a
mocking echo.
*CHAPTER XL.*
Ritchie arrived at Monico Lodge on the forenoon of the next day.
Laurette met him in the hall, and drew him into the breakfast-room.
'Yes, Stella is in; she is in the drawing-room,' she said in answer to
her brother's eager inquiries. 'But, Ted, I am in despair. I
absolutely do not know what to think. Heaven knows if ever a woman tried
to serve a brother as I have.'
'Well, what's in the wind now--anything fresh?'
'Oh, goodness only knows! When she came, she was in almost wild
spirits; one would say she counted the moments till you came. Now----'
'Now she ain't so jolly! Well, that is Stella all over. What is there
to wonder at in that? Hurry up, Larry, if you've got anything to say; I
am famishing to see her.'
'Only this, Ted. Feel your way cautiously; and whatever you do, don't
breathe a word of anything I said to you before you went to Strathhaye.'
'Of course not--I told you before I wouldn't,' answered Ted impatiently;
'but look here, Larry, you're a trump to take so much trouble on my
account.'
'Oh, if one could only be sure of her; but one day to be full of hope
and all smooth sailing, and the next----' Laurette gave a deep sigh, as
if she were in the depths of perplexity. Then Ted made his escape into
the drawing-room.
'Well, Stella, are you still cross with me?' he said gently, holding her
hand.
'No, I think not,' she said with a wan smile, endeavouring to recollect
the reason why she should cherish offence. Everything was so incredibly
misty at times, so far away and indifferent. The days seemed to stretch
on and on, like eternity. Three had not yet passed since the morning on
which she opened that letter with its pitiless tidings. Yet the most
remote epoch of her life seemed to be the days in which supreme
happiness was neither a threat nor a vague possibility, but a secure
possession. And now it was all over--all over, with nothing left but
those recurring periods in which she was alive in every nerve to the
horrible misery that had overtaken her--periods in which she seemed to
see nothing but a ship that sailed on, night and day, bearing the only
man she had ever loved, or could love, to his _wife_. The thought stung
her so intolerably that she often rose up, seeking for relief in motion,
as if a heavy physical load crushed her which she must endeavour to
throw off.
Ritchie looked into her face with startled inquiry. What ailed her?
Was it possible that the knowledge which Laurette said had partly come
to the girl should give her so much pain? The thought touched him
strongly. But he remembered Laurette's warning. He might interrupt her
counsels and little incipient homilies roughly; but yet no one else
could help him so much, nor tell so well what motives swayed Stella.
'I don't believe Melbourne agrees with you one bit,' he said, still
holding her hand, which she left passively in his.
'No, perhaps not; and yet I don't want to go back to Fairacre.' They
stood side by side in the bay-window, she looking out with heavy, tired
eyes at the scrubby little trees and scantily-flowering rose-bushes that
decorated the 'grounds' of Monico Lodge, but seeing nought of all that
was around her.
'Where would you like to go, Stella?' said Ritchie slowly. His breath
came fast, but some instinct warned him to keep down his rising joy.
'Oh, I don't know I where I would not see these woods and skies
eternally--away to the far ends of the world.'
'Stella, let me take you wherever you would like to go. It's all I've
got to live or care for.' He was looking eagerly into her face, and
suddenly saw a gray paleness creeping over it. All became dim around
her. She put her hands out like one groping in the dark. He passed his
arm round her, and for a moment her head fell on his shoulder. Her face
was like that of one dead, and its pallor terrified him. But she did not
entirely lose consciousness.
'How dark it has grown!' she said in a faint whisper.
'It will soon be light again, Stella,' answered Ted, hardly knowing what
he said. The profound sadness of her face, and her sudden,
unaccountable weakness, smote him to the heart. 'Stella, has anything
happened that hurts you? Is there anything in the world I can do for
you?'
His voice trembled, and he tried to draw her nearer to him. This roused
her, and sighing heavily once or twice, she disengaged herself, and sat
on the seat that ran round the window. Ritchie's presence had recalled,
with a paroxysm of acute agony, all that lay between now and their last
parting. Such moments of overpowering pain were succeeded by hours that
were passed rather than felt. The intolerable edge of suffering was
gradually dulled--became for the time blunted. Apathy put a foil on
grief, and robbed memory of its piercing barbs. In the reaction, Ted's
familiar voice and unswerving devotion soothed, nay, even reassured her.
Her stern, proud self-control had not broken down before anyone till
now. And with her self-possession came the thought that he had claims
on her. She had once consented to be his wife. But her heart had
rebelled against a marriage without the quickening pulse of love and
tender mutual sympathy. Now she knew that these were forever sealed
against her. The glow and romance of youth were over. She had loved
and lost. But the years could not be thrown aside like a stupid story.
She had dreamed a dream of life, and it was over, but existence still
remained to be got through.
'Stella, we have been friends since we were little children. You do care
a little for me. Be my wife!'
She heard the voice so long familiar pleading with her brokenly, and it
touched her in that strange hour as it had never touched her before.
The thought welled up strongly in her heart: 'This love is to him what
mine was to me--the one great affection of his life.... In this was
centred the keenest possibilities of his happiness.' The very depth of
her own suffering and infinite loneliness moved her to compassionate
sympathy. She had almost forgotten him in the brief triumphant days of
her joy. But no one had ever usurped her place with him. Could she now
confer on him the boon that was so priceless in his estimation--for
which he had so long pleaded? And for herself? ... Would this not,
after all, be the best solution of the cruel enigma into which existence
had resolved itself? The old home life, full of leisure and calm and
well-loved books--how could she take that up when her one fierce longing
was to forget? It would be an endless stifling life in death, in which
the weary days would stretch before her, to be filled only with bleeding
recollections, with famished imaginings of what might have been. Her
pursuits and meditations there would touch those treacherous springs
which woke all the cells of memory, and flooded her being with
unbearable agony, with the wild, baleful pangs of jealousy. Yes,
jealousy unreasonable, uncontrollable.
It was the bitter humiliation of this that stung her beyond endurance.
Sorrow in any other form she might have borne--but this scorched her,
degraded her, bit into her like some virulent, immaterial poison which
nourishes the blood in order that it may consume the soul. Jealous of a
man's wife! These were the words that came to her perpetually, more
venomous than the hiss of a serpent. A marriage in which some kind of
friendship was possible--in which travel, movement, variety, were open
to her--this was the least objectionable scheme that remained to her.
Ted's allegiance was so unshaken--he exacted so little. He watched her
face with keen emotion.
'Stella, you are going to consent,' he said, drawing near to her. But
she drew back.
'Don't, Ted. You must not be affectionate if you want me to marry you.'
Ted smiled under his moustache. Then a servant came to announce the
arrival of his groom with the horses.
The day was perfect in its warm, serene loveliness. The sky was like a
vast bed of blue hyacinths, bending above the earth with angelic
benedictions. Already the sun-rays had something of the ardour of
summer heat, but there was a cool southerly breeze, and a recent fall of
rain had laid the dust.
The sight of the sea lying as calm as a great lake, its bosom glancing
in silvery sheaves rather than waves, brought back to Stella, with
irresistible vividness, the memorable ride over the wide Peeloo plain.
A great wave of anguish swept over her afresh, in which it seemed as if
she must call aloud to find some relief from the fierce torment. So
great was the agony, that for a little time she could neither hear nor
see. 'Oh, my love, my love, have I indeed lost you?' were the words
that rose to her lips. For a moment a wild revolt rose within her
against all the obstacles that could part them. On the wide horizon she
seemed to see the faint film of smoke which a great steamer leaves as it
speeds on its way to the old world. 'All will yet be well.' Did this
hope animate his heart? Did he, perchance, count the hours till he saw
her again--till those proofs were given him of faults imputed that were
groundless--of years made dark with undeserved blame? Would a fresher,
stronger bond rise up in place of the old unhappiness? Would he learn
to love her--his _wife_? Ah, what a pitiful, humiliated creature had
she become to harbour such thoughts! Hell seemed to yawn at her feet
when she found her heart torn with savage jealousy as these thoughts
rose in quick succession.
The riders had ridden fast, and Dustiefoot, who could not bear to lag
far behind his mistress, panted and showed such signs of being overdone
that they rode back slowly.
'Will you take him with you on your travels, Stella?' asked Ted, who
watched with a feeling akin to envy the tenderness with which Stella
regarded her dog.
'On my travels? Oh yes, wherever I go. One should always have a dog to
keep one in countenance.'
'In countenance?'
'Yes. Most human creatures remind one of the characters in an old
morality. As--enter God's Visitation; enter Time, who maketh people
weary and melancholy with a similitude of rust and dust.'
'And what is an "old morality," Stella?'
'Well, Ted, you really must go to school.' She laughed, and the sound
was music in his ears, though it was a strange, mirthless little laugh.
'Yes, I should like that very much--if you keep school, and take just
one scholar. Where would you begin with me, Stella? How many books
have you read?'
'Heaven only knows! Quite enough to convince me that I do not know
anything.'
'O Jupiter! is it worth while learning so much to know that? What is
the good of reading so many dry old fogies of books?'
'Well, sometimes it makes people better companions for themselves; but
other times it makes them the worst of all company, I believe.'
'I read very slowly. If it is a dull book like the Bible and poetry, I
forget what one page is about before I get to the next. It would take
me a thundering long time to read books, and if they don't teach me much
in the end, and make me worse company for myself, why, we'll give books
the go-by. What's the next on your list, Stella?'
'I haven't got a list--and there isn't a next. Ted, you mustn't ask me
questions. I do that to myself endlessly, and I hate them; there are no
answers to most, and those that have answers are scorpions.'
'What questions do you ask yourself? There, I've put my foot in it
again! Well, look here, Stella, your school will be the jolliest affair
going. You only teach reading, and that game isn't worth the candle.
So there I'll be, bright and early, and nothing to learn but to stay
with you. But I'll pick up a lot in that way. Why, some time ago I put
the stuns on a fellow with just only remembering that the line, "Where
is the land to which yon ship must go?" is in one of Wordsworth's
sonnets. Oh, he's just a racing fellow! he comes from one of the old
swell families in England, but nothing like such a bad lot as Tareling.
He's as straight as a die, and never borrows money, and he's quite gone
on books, though he took his degree at Oxford. He and another fellow
were talking about poetry in the smoking-room after dinner at the club
the last time I was in town, and the other fellow asked Dacre, that's
his name, where that line came from. I was reading the sporting part of
the _Australasian_, but the words came on me like seeing you
unexpectedly, and I looked up and said: "Why, that's from one of
Wordsworth's sonnets." By George! they were more astonished than if I
had stood on my head. Yes, upon my soul, they both stared as if they
had paid a bob to see me! "Why, Ritchie, do you actually read sonnets?"
said Dacre. He has written a bookful himself. He is one of those
fellows who think that all men write poetry when they are spoony. I
could tell him better than that. Do you remember, Stella, one Sunday
evening when I was staying from Saturday till Monday at Fairacre? Billy
Stein and Herby Lindsay were there, too. Billy knew a fearful lot of
German stuff that you were always fond of, and as for poetry, he could
spout it by the hour. It was shortly before I left for Strathhaye--I
suppose you were fifteen at the time--you used sometimes to get
perfectly wild with making fun of one thing or another, and your eyes,
and cheeks, and lips all used to make flashes. Oh, you may laugh! but I
know what I mean. Your eyes are awfully heavy just now, Stella. Well,
you put the four of us in a row--Cuthbert, and me, and the other
two--and you wouldn't let us move till we each made some sort of verses.
'Pon my soul, I nearly squirmed my eyes out trying to think of words
that sounded alike. When I did get any, the spelling was out, and there
was that little beggar Billy making up something as long as my arm about
a rose, and a maiden, and a nightingale. But I put the kybosh on him
there, for I said there were no nightingales in Australia, and how did
we know whether they sang as he said? And you took my side, but I think
it was out of pure wickedness. Everyone got finished long before I did,
and at the end I could only make up four lines. Oh, I remember them
well enough:
'"A lamb's tail
Caught on a rail;
The mother humming,
The crow a-coming."'
Stella laughed again.
'Why, Ted, you are one of the dumb poets? What in the world put that
into your head?'
'Oh, don't suppose I made up the adventure. I took it from life. I saw
a little lunatic of a lamb caught by his hind end before he was tailed,
and if I hadn't taken him to his mother, the old crow would have scooped
his optics out in no time. You all objected to "humming." I didn't
want the darned sheep to hum; it was you that would have rhyme, and how
could you make "bleating" into poetry there? I very nearly got into a
scot with Stein, he kept on laughing so much. But then you walked with
me up to the Spanish reeds, and showed me the nest of a superb warbler
there--domed, I think you called it--and told me how you watched the old
mater teaching the young 'uns to fly. And then I made up my mind to ask
you if I might write to you. My heart beat so hard I thought it would
crack, and you said quite carelessly: "Oh yes, Ted, why shouldn't you?"
I couldn't have told why it gave me a lump in the throat the way you
spoke. Then I thought, That little wretch Billy will want to write,
too, and spin away about nightingales, and the Lord knows what! I never
feel such a duffer as I do when I take a pen. I say, Stella, did you
ever keep any of my letters?'
'Oh yes, I think so.'
'I expect you've got a nice pile of love-letters by this time? Now,
tell me true--are there any of them you like better than mine?'
'No; not one.'
The thought welled up bitterly of the letter she had opened with such
insane joy three short days ago. And with this came recollections of
the long faithful wooing of her companion--of the devotion she had taken
as carelessly as an unset pebble; and yet, was there anything in the
world more rare, more precious? These reminiscences of her untroubled
girlhood touched a tender chord. She realized that a love which had its
roots so far back in the past had a claim on her loyalty. At the worst,
it was less humiliating to marry a man without loving him than to love
one already married. Ted, watching her face closely, noted its wistful,
softening expression.
'Lookee here, Stella,' he burst out suddenly. 'I am going to run away
with you. You will be cross at first, but you will get over it. You
know you looked as if you could not speak with passion when I held you
that night and asked that I might kiss you. But when we met, you never
once thought of bringing it up against me; now did you?'
'No.'