Stella Maris
Stella Maris CHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIVCHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVICHAPTER XVIICHAPTER XVIIICHAPTER XIXCHAPTER XXCHAPTER XXICHAPTER XXIIICHAPTER XXIVCHAPTER XXV,Copyright
Stella Maris
William John Locke
CHAPTER I
STELLA MARIS—Star of the Sea!That was not her real name. No one could have christened an
inoffensive babe so absurdly. Her mother had, indeed, through the
agency of godfathers and godmothers, called her Stella after a rich
old maiden aunt, thereby showing her wisdom; for the maiden aunt
died gratefully a year after the child was born, and bequeathed to
her a comfortable fortune. Her father had given her the respectable
patronymic of Blount, which, as all the world knows, or ought to
know, is not pronounced as it is spelled.It is not pronounced “Maris,” however, as, in view of the
many vagaries of British nomenclature, it might very well be, but
“Blunt.” It was Walter Herold, the fantastic, who tacked on the
Maris to her Christian name, and ran the two words together so that
to all and sundry the poor child became Stellamaris, and to herself
a baptismal puzzle, never being quite certain whether Stella was
not a pert diminutive, and whether she ought to subscribe herself
in formal documents as “Stellamaris Blount.”The invention of this title must not be regarded as the
supreme effort of the imagination of Walter Herold. It would have
been obvious to anybody with a bowing acquaintance with the Latin
tongue.Her name was Stella, and she passed her life by the
sea—passed it away up on top of a cliff on the South coast; passed
it in one big, beautiful room that had big windows south and west;
passed it in bed, flat on her back, with never an outlook on the
outside world save sea and sky. And the curtains of the room were
never drawn, and in the darkness a lamp always shone in the western
window; so that Walter Herold, at the foot of the cliff, one night
of storm and dashing spray, seeing the light burning steadily like
a star, may be excused for a bit of confusion of thought when he
gripped his friend John Risca’s arm with one hand and, pointing
with the other, cried:
“ Stella Maris! What a name for her!”And when he saw her the next morning—she was twelve years old
at the time and had worked out only a short term of her long
imprisonment—he called her Stellamaris to her face, and she laughed
in a sweet, elfin way, and Herold being the Great High Favourite of
her little court (a title conferred by herself), she issued an
edict that by that style and quality was it her pleasure henceforth
to be designated. John Risca, in his capacity of Great High
Belovedest, obeyed the ukase without question; and so did His Great
High Excellency, her uncle, Sir Oliver Blount, and Her Most
Exquisite Auntship, Lady Blount, his wife and first cousin to John
Risca.The events in the life of Stella Blount which this chronicle
will attempt to record did not take place when she was a child of
twelve. But we meet her thus, at this age, ruling to a certain
extent the lives of grown-up men and women by means of a charm, a
mystery, a personality essentially gay and frank, yet, owing to the
circumstances of her life, invested with a morbid, almost
supernatural atmosphere. The trouble in the upper part of her
spine, pronounced incurable by the faculty, compelled a position
rigidly supine. Her bed, ingeniously castored, could be wheeled
about the great room. Sometimes she lay enthroned in the centre;
more often it was brought up close to one of the two windows, so
that she could look out to sea and feed her fancy on the waves, and
the ships passing up and down the Channel, and the white sea-gulls
flashing their wings in mid air. But only this unvibrating movement
was permitted. For all the splints and ambulance contrivances in
the world, she could not be carried into another room, or into the
pleasant, sloping garden of the Channel House, for a jar would have
been fatal. The one room, full of air and sunlight and sweet odours
and exquisite appointments, was the material kingdom in which she
ruled with sweet autocracy; the welter of sea and sky was her
kingdom, too, the gulls and spring and autumn flights of migratory
birds were her subjects, the merchants and princes traversing the
deep in ships, her tributaries.But this was a kingdom of Faerie, over which she ruled by the
aid of Ariels and Nereids and other such elemental and intangible
ministers. The latter had a continuous history, dreamy and
romantic, episodes of which she would in rare moments relate to her
Great High Belovedest and her Great High Favourite; but ordinarily
the two young men were admitted only into the material kingdom,
where, however, they bent the knee with curious humility. To them,
all she seemed to have of human semblance was a pair of frail arms,
a daintily curved neck, a haunting face, and a mass of dark hair
encircling it on the pillow like a nimbus. The face was small,
delicately featured, but the strong sea air maintained a tinge of
colour in it; her mouth, made for smiles and kisses, justified in
practice its formation; her eyes, large and round and of deepest
brown, sometimes glowed with the laughter of the child, sometimes
seemed to hold in their depths holy mysteries, gleams of things
hidden and divine, unsealed revelations of another world, before
which the two young men, each sensitive in his peculiar fashion,
bowed their young and impressionable heads. When they came down to
commonplace, it was her serene happiness that mystified them. She
gave absolute acceptance to the conditions of her existence, as
though no other conditions were desirable or acceptable. She was
delicate joyousness just incarnate and no more—“the music from the
hyacinth bell,” said Herold. In the early days of his acquaintance
with Stellamaris, Herold was young, fresh from the university,
practising every one of the arts with feverish simultaneousness and
mimetic in each; so when he waxed poetical, he made use of
Shelley.Stella was an orphan, both her parents having died before the
obscure spinal disease manifested itself. To the child they were
vague, far-off memories. Inloco
parentium, and trustees of her fortune, were the
uncle and aunt above mentioned. Sir Oliver, as a young man, had
distinguished himself so far in the colonial service as to obtain
his K.C.M.G. As a man nearing middle age, he had so played the fool
with a governorship as to be recalled and permanently shelved. To
the end of his days Sir Oliver was a man with a grievance. His
wife, publicly siding with him, and privately resentful against
him, was a woman with two grievances. Now, one grievance on one
side and two on the other, instead of making three, according to
the rules of arithmetic, made legion, according to the law of the
multiplication of grievances. Even Herold, the Optimist, introduced
by his college friend John Risca into the intimacies of the
household, could not call them a happy couple. In company they
treated each other with chilling courtesy; before the servants they
bickered very slightly; when they wanted to quarrel, they retired,
with true British decorum, to their respective apartments and
quarreled over the house telephone.There was one spot on the earth, however, which by common
consent they regarded as a sanctuary,—I on whose threshold
grievances and differences and bickerings and curses (his imperial
career had given Sir Oliver an imperial vocabulary) and tears and
quarrelings were left like the earth-stained shoes of the Faithful
on the threshold of a mosque,—and that was the wide sea-chamber of
Stellamaris. That threshold crossed, Sir Oliver became bluff and
hearty; on Julia, Lady Blount, fell a mantle of tender womanhood.
They “my-deared” and “my-darlinged” each other until the very dog
(the Lord High Constable), a Great Dane, of vast affection and
courage, but of limited intelligence, whose post of duty was beside
Stella’s couch, would raise his head for a disgusted second and
sniff and snort from his deep lungs. But dogs are dogs, and in
their doggy way see a lot of the world which is a sealed book to
humans, especially to those who pass their lives in a room on the
top of a cliff overlooking the sea.It was the unwritten law of the house: Stella’s room was
sacrosanct. An invisible spirit guarded the threshold and forbade
entrance to anything evil or mean or sordid or even sorrowful, and
had inscribed on the portal in unseen, but compelling,
charactersNever harm nor spell nor charmCome our lovely lady nigh.Whence came the spirit, from Stella Herself or from the
divine lingering in the faulty folks who made her world, who can
tell? There never was an invisible spirit guarding doors and
opening hearts, since the earth began, who had not a human genesis.
From man alone, in this myriad-faceted cosmos, can a compassionate
God, in the form of angels and ministering spirits, he reflected.
Perhaps the radiant spirit of the child herself, triumphing over
disastrous circumstances, instilled a sacred awe in those who
surrounded her; perhaps the pathos of her lifelong condemnation
stirred unusual depths of pity. At all events, the unwritten law
was irrefragable. Outside Stella’s door the wicked must cast their
evil thoughts, the gloomy shed their cloak of cloud, and the
wretched unpack their burden of suffering. Whether it was for the
ultimate welfare of Stellamaris to live in this land of illusion is
another matter.
“ Save her from knowledge of pain and from suspicion of
evil,” John Risca would cry, when discussing the matter. “Let us
make sure of one perfect flower in this poisonous fungus garden of
a world.”
“ Great High Belovedest,” Stellamaris would say when they
were alone together, “what about the palace to-day?”And the light would break upon the young man’s grim face, and
he would tell her of the palace in which he dwelt in the magic city
of London.
“ I have got a beautiful new Persian carpet,” he would say,
“with blues in it like that band of sea over there, for the marble
floor of the vestibule.”
“ I hope it matches the Gobelin tapestry.”
“ You couldn’t have chosen it better yourself,
Stellamaris.”The great eyes looked at him in humorous dubiety. He was
wearing a faded mauve shirt and a flagrantly blue tie.
“ I am not so sure of your eye for colour, Great High
Belovedest, and it would be a pity to have the beautiful palace
spoiled.”
“ I assure you that East and West in this instance are
blended in perfect harmony.”
“ And how are Lilias and Niphetos?”Lilias and Niphetos were two imaginary Angora cats, nearly
the size of the Lord High Constable, who generally sat on the
newel-posts of the great marble staircase. They were fed on
chickens’ livers and Devonshire cream.
“ Arachne,” he replied gravely, referring to a mythical
attendant of Circassian beauty—“Arachne thought they were suffering
from ennui, and so she brought them some white mice—and what do you
think happened?”
“ Why, they gobbled them up, of course.”
“ That’s where you ‘re wrong, Stellamaris. Those aristocratic
cats turned up their noses at them. They looked at each other
pityingly, as if to say, ‘Does the foolish woman really think we
can be amused by white mice?’”Stella laughed. “Don’t they ever have any
kittens?”
“ My dear,” said Risca, “they would die if I suggested such a
thing to them.”It had been begun long ago, this fabulous history of the
palace, and the beauty and luxury with which he was surrounded; and
Stella knew it all to its tiniest detail—the names of the roses in
his gardens, the pictures on his walls, the shapes and sizes of the
ornaments on his marquetry writing-table; and as her memory was
tenacious and he dared not be caught tripping, his wonder-house
gradually crystallized in his mind to the startling definiteness of
a material creation. Its suites of apartments and corridors, the
decoration and furniture of each room, became as vividly familiar
as the dreary abode in which he really had his being. He could
wander about through house and grounds with unerring certainty of
plan. The phantom creatures with whom he had peopled the domain had
become invested with clear-cut personalities; he had visualized
them until he could conjure up their faces at will.He had begun the building of the dream palace first with the
mere object of amusing a sick child and hiding from her things
forlorn and drab; gradually, in the course of years, it had grown
to be almost a refuge for the man himself. When the child developed
into the young girl he did not undeceive her. More and more was it
necessary, if their sweet comradeship was to last, that he should
extend the boundaries of her Land of Illusion; for the high
ambitions which had made him laugh at poverty remained unsatisfied,
the promise of life had been hopelessly broken, and he saw before
him nothing but a stretch of dull, laborious years unlit by a gleam
of joy. Only in the sea-chamber of Stella-maris was life
transformed into a glowing romance. Only there could he inhabit a
palace and walk the sweet, music-haunted, fragrant streets of an
apocalyptic London, where all women were fair and true, and all men
were generous, and all work, even his own slavery at the press, was
noble and inspired by pure ideals.
“ What exactly is your work, Belovedest?” she asked one
day.He replied: “I teach the great and good men who are the
King’s ministers of state how to govern the country. I show
philanthropists how to spend their money. I read many books and
tell people how beautiful and wise the books are, so that people
should read them and become beautiful and wise, too. Sometimes I
preach to foreign sovereigns on the way in which their countries
should be ruled. I am what is called a journalist,
dear.”
“ It must be the most wonderful work in the world,” cried
Stella, aglow with enthusiasm, “and they must pay you lots and lots
of money.”
“ Lots and lots.”
“ And how you must love it—the work, I mean!”
“ Every hour spent in the newspaper-office is a dream of
delight,” said Risca.Walter Herold, who happened to be present during this
conversation, remarked, with a shake of his head, as soon as they
had left the room:
“ God forgive you, John, for an amazing liar!”Risca shrugged his round, thick shoulders.
“ He will,” said he, “if He has a sense of humour.” Then he
turned upon his friend somewhat roughly. “What would you have me
tell the child?”
“ My dear fellow,” said Herold, “if you would only give the
world at large some of the imaginative effort you expend in that
room, you would not need to wear your soul to shreds in a
newspaper-office.”
“ What is the good of telling me that?” growled Risca, the
deep lines of care returning to his dark, loose-featured face.
“Don’t I know it already? It’s just the irony of things. There’s an
artist somewhere about me. If there was n’t, why should I have
wanted to write novels and plays and poetry ever since I was a boy?
It’s a question of outlet. There are women I know who can’t do a
blessed thing except write letters; there they find their artistic
outlet. I can find my artistic outlet only in telling lies to
Stella. Would you deny me that?”
“ Not at all,” said Herold, with a gay laugh. “The strain of
having to remember another fellow’s lies, in addition to one’s own,
is heavy, I admit, but for friendship’s sake I can bear it. Only
the next time you add on a new wing to that infernal house and fill
it with majolica vases, for Heaven’s sake tell me.”For Herold, being Risca’s intimate, had, for corroborative
purposes, to be familiar with the dream palace, and when Risca made
important additions or alterations without informing him, was apt
to be sore beset with perplexities during his next interview with
Stella-maris. But being an actor by profession (at the same time
being an amateur in all other arts), he was quick to interpret
another man’s dream, and once, being rather at a loss, improved on
his author and interpolated a billiard-room, much to Risca’s
disgust. Where the deuce, he asked, in angry and childlike
seriousness, was there a place for a billiard-room in his palace?
Did n’t he know the whole lay-out of the thing by this time? It was
inexcusable impertinence!
“ Then why did n’t you tell me about the music-room?” cried
Herold, hotly, on this particular occasion. “How should I guess
that an unmusical dog like you would want a music-room? In order
not to give you away, I had to invent the billiard-room. A rotten
house without a billiard-room!”
“ I suppose you think it’s a commodious mansion, with five
reception-rooms, fourteen bedrooms and baths, hot and
cold.”The two men nearly quarreled.But no hard words followed the discussion of Risca’s
rose-coloured and woefully ironical description of his work. Herold
knew what pains of hell had got round about the man he loved, and
strove to mitigate them with gaiety and affection. And while the
Great High Belovedest and the Great High Favourite were grappling
together with a tragedy not referred to in speech between them, and
as remote from Stella’s purview of life as the Lupanaria of
Hong-Kong, she, with her white hand on the head of the blue Great
Dane, who regarded her with patient, topaz eyes, looked out from
her western window, over the channel, on the gold and crimson lake
and royal purple of the sunset, and built out of the masses of
gloried cloud and streaks of lapis lazuli and daffodil gem a castle
of dreams compared with which poor John Ris-ca’s trumpery palace,
with its Arachnes and Liliases and Niphetoses, was only a vulgar
hotel in a new and perky town.
CHAPTER II
THE judge pronounced sentence: three years’
penal servitude. The condemned woman, ashen-cheeked, thin-lipped,
gave never a glance to right or left, and disappeared from the dock
like a John Risca, the woman’s husband, who had been sitting at the
solicitor’s table, rose, watched her disappear, and then, the
object of all curious eyes, with black brow and square jaw strode
out of the court. Walter Herold, following him, joined him in the
corridor, and took his arm in a protective way and guided him down
the great staircase into the indifferent street. Then he hailed a
cab.
“‘ May I come with you?”
Risca nodded assent. It was a comfort to feel by his side
something human in this pandemonium of a world.
“ Eighty-four Fenton Square, Westminster.” Herold gave the
address of Risca’s lodgings, and entered the cab. During the
journey through the wide thoroughfares hurrying with London’s
afternoon traffic neither spoke. There are ghastly tragedies in
life for which words, however sympathetic and comprehending, are
ludicrously inadequate. Now and then Herold glanced at the heavy,
set face of the man who was dear to him and cursed below his
breath. Of course nothing but morbid pig-headedness in the first
fatal instance had brought him to this disaster. But, after all, is
pig-headedness a crime meriting so overwhelming a punishment? Why
should fortune favour some, like himself, who just danced lightly
upon life, and take a diabolical delight in breaking others upon
her wheel? Was it because John Risca could dance no better than a
bull, and, like a bull, charged through life insensately, with
lowered horns and blundering hoofs? This lunatic marriage, six
years ago, when Risca was three and twenty, with a common
landlady’s commoner pretty vixen of a daughter, he himself had done
his best to prevent. He had pleaded with the tongue of an angel and
vituperated in the vocabulary of a bargee. He might as well have
played “Home, Sweet Home,” on the flute or recited Bishop
Ernulphus’s curse to the charging bull. But still, however
unconsidered, honourable marriage ought not of itself to bring down
from heaven the doom of the house of Atreus. This particular union
was bound to be unhappy; but why should it have been Æschylean in
its catastrophe?
As Risca uttered no word, Herold, with the ultimate wisdom of
despair, held his peace.
At last they arrived at the old-world, dilapidated square,
where Risca lodged. Children, mostly dirty-faced, those of the
well-to-do being distinguished at this post-tea hour of the
afternoon by a circle of treacle encrusting like gems the
circumambient grime about their little mouths, squabbled shrilly on
the pavement. Torn oilcloth and the smell of the sprats fried the
night before last for the landlord’s supper greeted him who entered
the house. Risca, the aristocrat of the establishment, rented the
drawing-room floor. Herold, sensitive artist, successful actor,
appreciated by dramatic authors and managers and the public as a
Meissonier of small parts, and therefore seldom out of an
engagement, who had created for himself a Queen Anne gem of a tiny
house in Kensington, could never enter Risca’s home without a
shiver. To him it was horror incarnate, the last word of
unpenurious squalor. There were material shapes to sit down upon,
to sit at, it is true, things on the walls (terribilia visu) to look upon, such as “The
Hunter’s Return,” and early portraits of Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort, and the floor was covered with a red-and-green
imitation Oriental carpet; but there was no furniture, as Herold
understood the word, nothing to soothe or to please. One of the
chairs was of moth-eaten saddle-bag, another of rusty leather. A
splotch of grease, the trace left by a far-distant storm of gravy
that had occurred on a super-imposed white cloth, and a splotch of
ink gave variety to a faded old table-cover. A litter of books and
papers and unemptied ash-trays and pipes and slippers disfigured
the room. The place suggested chaos coated with mildew.
“ Ugh!” said Herold, on entering, “it ‘s as cold as charity.
Do you mind if I light the fire?”
It was a raw day in March, and the draughts from the
staircase and windows played spitefully about the furniture. Risca
nodded, threw his hat on a leather couch against the wall, and
flung himself into his writing-chair. Hot or cold, what did it
matter to him? What would anything in the world matter to him in
the future? He sat, elbows on table, his hands clutching his
coarse, black hair, his eyes set in a great agony. And there he
stayed for a long time, silent and motionless, while Herold lit the
fire, and, moving noiselessly about the room, gave to its disarray
some semblance of comfort. He was twenty-nine. It was the end of
his career, the end of his life. No mortal man could win through
such devastating shame. It was a bath of vitriol eating through
nerve and fibre to the heart itself. He was a dead man—dead to all
the vital things of life at nine-and-twenty. An added torture was
his powerlessness to feel pity for the woman. For the crime of
which she had been convicted, the satiating of the lust of cruelty,
mankind finds no extenuation. She had taken into her house, as a
slut of all work, a helpless child from an orphanage. Tales had
been told in that court at which men grew physically sick and women
fainted. Her counsel’s plea of insanity had failed. She was as sane
as any creature with such a lust could be. She was condemned to
three years’ penal servitude.
It was his wife, the woman whom he, John Risca, had married
six years before, the woman whom, in his passionate, obstinate,
growling way, he had thought he loved. They had been parted for
over four years, it is true, for she had termagant qualities that
would have driven away any partner of her life who had not a morbid
craving for Phlegethon as a perpetual environment; but she bore his
name, an honoured one (he thanked God she had given him no child to
bear it, too), and now that name was held up to the execration of
all humanity. For the name’s sake, when the unimagined horror had
first broken over him, he had done his utmost to shield her. He had
met her in the prison, for the first time since their parting, and
she had regarded him with implacable hatred, though she accepted
the legal assistance he provided, as she had accepted the home from
which he had been driven and the half of his poor earnings.
Murder, clean and final, would have been more easily borne
than this, the deliberate, systematically planned torture of a
child. There is some sort of tragic dignity in murder. It is
generally preceded by conflict, and the instinct of mankind
recognizing in conflict, no matter how squalid and sordid, the
essence of drama, very often finds sympathy with the protagonist of
the tragedy, the slayer himself. How otherwise to account for the
petitions for the reprieve of a popular murderer, a curious
phenomenon not to be fully explained by the comforting word
hysteria? But in devilish cruelty, unpreceded by conflict; there is
no drama, there is nothing to touch the imagination; it is perhaps
the only wickedness with which men have no lingering sympathy. It
transcends all others in horror.
“ Murder would have been better than this,” he said aloud,
opening and shutting his powerful fists. “My soul has been dragged
through a sewer.”
He rose and flung the window open and breathed the raw air
with full lungs. A news-urchin’s cry caused him to look down into
the street. The boy, expectant, held out a paper, and pointed with
it to the yellow bill which he carried apronwise in front of him.
On the bill was printed in large capitals: “The Risca Torture Case.
Verdict and Sentence.” Risca beckoned Herold to the window, and
clutched him heavily on the shoulder.
“ Look!” said he. “That is to be seen this afternoon in every
street in London. To-night the news will be flashed all round the
world. To-morrow the civilized press will reek with it. Come away!”
He dragged Herold back, and brought down the window with a crash.
“It’s blazing hell!” he said.
“ Every man has to pass through it at least once in his
life,” said Herold, glad that the relief of speech had come to his
friend. “That is, if he ‘s to be any good in the world.”
Risca uttered a grim sound in the nature of a mirthless
laugh. “ ‘As gold is tried by the fire, so souls are tried by
pain,’ “ he quoted with a sneer. Was ever a man consoled by such
drivelling maxims? And they are lies. No man can be better for
having gone through hell. It blasts everything that is good in one.
Besides, what do you know? You’ve never been through it.”
Herold, standing by the fire, broke a black mass of coal with
the heel of his boot. The flames sprang up, and in the gathering
twilight threw strange gleams over his thin, eager face.
“ I shall, one of these days,” said he—“a very bad
hell.”
“ Good God! Wallie,” cried Risca, “are you in trouble,
too?”
“ Not yet,” Herold replied, with a smile, for he saw that the
instinct of friendship, at any rate, had not been consumed. “I ‘ve
walked on roses all my life. That ‘s why I ‘ve never done anything
great. But my hell is before me. How can I escape it?” The smile
faded from his face, and he looked far away into the gray sky.
“Sometimes my mother’s Celtic nature seems to speak and prophesy
within me. It tells me that my roses shall turn into red-hot
ploughshares and my soul shall be on fire. The curtains of the
future are opened for an elusive fraction of a second—” He broke
off suddenly. “I’m talking rot, John. At least it’s not all rot. I
was only thinking that in my bad time I should have a great, strong
friend to stand by my side.”
“ If you mean me,” said Risca, “you know I shall. But, in the
meanwhile I pray to God to spare you a hell like mine. Sometimes I
wonder,” he continued after a gloomy pause, “whether this would
have happened if I had stuck by her. I could have seen which way
things were tending, and I would have stepped in. After all, I am
strong enough to have borne it.”
“ You were talking about murder just now,” said Herold. “If
you had stayed with her, there would have been murder done or
something precious near it.”
Risca sighed. He was a big, burly man, with a heavy,
intellectual face, prematurely furrowed, and a sigh shook his loose
frame somewhat oddly. “I don’t know,” said he, after a lumbering
turn or so up and down the room. “How can any man know? She was
impossible enough, but I never dreamed of such developments. And
now that I reflect, I remember signs. Once we had a little dog—no,
I have no right to tell you. Damn it! man,” he cried fiercely, “I
have no right to keep you here in this revolting atmosphere.” He
picked up Herold’s hat. “Go away, Wallie, and leave me to myself.
You ‘re good and kind and all that, but I ‘ve no right to make your
life a burden to you.”
Herold rescued his hat and deliberately put it down. “Oh,
yes, you have,” said he, with smiling seriousness. “You have every
right. Have you ever considered the ethics of friendship? Few
people do consider them nowadays. Existence has grown so
complicated that such a simple, primitive thing as friendship is
apt to be neglected in the practical philosophy of life. Our
friendship, John, is something I could no more tear out of me than
I could tear out my heart itself. It’s one of the few vital, real
things—indeed, it’s perhaps the only tremendous thing in my damfool
of a life. I believe in friendship. If a man hath not a friend, let
him quit the stage. Old Bacon had sense: a man has every right over
his friend, every claim upon him, except the right of betrayal. My
purse is yours, your purse is mine. My time is yours, and yours
mine. My joys and sorrows are yours, and yours mine. But a friend
may not supplant a friend either in material ambition or in the
love of a woman. That is the unforgivable sin, high treason against
friendship. Don’t talk folly about having no right.”
He lit with nervous fingers the cigarette he was about to
light when he began his harangue. Risca gripped him by the
arm.
“ God knows I don’t want you to go. I ‘m pretty tough, and I
‘m not going to cave in, but it’s God’s comfort to have you here.
If I’m not a merry companion to you, what the devil do you think I
am to myself?”
He walked up and down the dreary room, on which the dark of
evening had fallen. At last he paused by his writing-table, and
then a sudden thought flashing on him, he smote his temples with
his hands.
“ I must send you away, Wallie. It’s necessary. I have my
column to write for The Herald. It must be in by eleven. I had
forgotten all about it. They won’t want my name,—it would damn the
paper,—but I suppose they ‘re counting on the column, and I don’t
want to leave them in the lurch.”
“ They don’t want your column this week, at any rate,” said
Herold. “Oh, don’t begin to bellow. I went to see Ferguson
yesterday. He’s as kind as can be, and of course wants you to go on
as usual. But no one except a raving idiot would expect stuff from
you to-day. And as for your silly old column, I’ve written it
myself. I suggested it to Ferguson, and he jumped at it.”
“ You wrote my column?” said Risca, in a softened
voice.
“ Of course I did, and a devilish good column, too. Do you
think I can only paint my face and grin through a
horse-collar?”
“ What made you think of it? I did n’t.”
“ That’s precisely why I did,” said Herold.
Risca sat down, calmer in mood, and lit a pipe. Herold, the
sensitive, accepted this action as an implication of thanks. Risca
puffed his tobacco for a few moments in silence, apparently
absorbed in enjoyment of the fragrant subtleties of the mixture of
honeydew and birdseye and latakia and the suspicion of soolook that
gives mystery to a blend. At last he spoke.
“ I shall arrange to keep on that house in Smith Street, and
put in a caretaker, so that she shall have a home when she comes
out. What will happen then, God Almighty knows. Perhaps she will
have changed. We need n’t discuss it. But, at any rate, while I ‘m
away, I want you to see to it for me. It’s a ghastly task, but some
one must undertake it. Will you?”
“ Of course,” said Herold. “But what do you mean by being
‘away’?”
“ I am going to Australia,” said Risca.
“ For how long?”
“ For the rest of my life,” said Risca.
Herold leaped from his chair and threw his cigarette into the
fire. It was only John Risca who, without giving warning, would
lower his head and charge at life in that fashion.
“ This is madness.”
“ It’s my only chance of sanity,” said Risca. “Here I am a
dead man. The flames are too much for me. Perhaps in another
country, where I ‘m not known, some kind of a phoenix called John
Smith or Robinson may rise out of the ashes. Here it can’t. Here
the ashes would leave a stench that would asphyxiate any bird,
however fabulous. It’s my one chance—to begin again.”
“ What will you do?”
“ The same as here. If I can make a fair living in London, I
ought n’t to starve in Melbourne.”
“ It’s monstrous!” cried Herold. “It’s not to be thought
of.”
“ Just so,” replied Risca. “It’s got to be done.”
Herold glanced at the gloomy face, and threw up his hands in
despair. When John Risca spoke in that stubborn way there was no
moving him. He had taken it into his head to go to Australia, and
to Australia he would go despite all arguments and beseechings. Yet
Herold argued and besought. It was monstrous that a man of John’s
brilliant attainments and deeply rooted ambitions should surrender
the position in London which he had so hardly won. London was
generous, London was just; in the eyes of London he was pure and
blameless. Not an editor would refuse him work, not an acquaintance
would refuse him the right hand of fellowship. The heart of every
friend was open to him. As for the agony of his soul, he would
carry that about with him wherever he went. He could not escape
from it by going to the antipodes. It was more likely to be
conjured away in England by the love of those about him.
“ I ‘m aware of all that, but I ‘m going to Melbourne,” said
Risca, doggedly. “If I stay here, I’m dead.”
“ When do you propose to start?”
“ I shall take my ticket to-morrow on the first available
boat.”
Herold laid his nervous hand on the other’s burly
shoulder.
“ Is it fair in this reckless way to spring such a tremendous
decision on those who care for you?”
“ Who on God’s earth really cares for me except yourself? It
will be a wrench parting from you, but it has to be.”
“ You’ve forgotten Stellamaris,” said Herold.
“ I have n’t,” replied Risca, morosely; “but she ‘s only a
child. She looks upon me as a creature out of a fairy-tale.
Realities, thank God! have no place in that room of hers. I ‘ll
soon fade out of her mind.”
“ Stella is fifteen, not five,” said Herold.
“ Age makes no difference, I ‘m not going to see her again,”
said he.
“ What explanation is to be given her?”
“ I ‘ll write the necessary fairy-story.”
“ You are not going to see her before you sail?”
“ No,” said Risca.
“ Then you ‘ll be doing a damnably cowardly thing,” cried
Herold, with flashing eyes.
Risca rose and glared at his friend.
“ You fool! Do you suppose I don’t care for her? Do you
suppose I would n’t cut off my hand to save her pain?”
“ Then cut off some of your infernal selfishness and save her
the pain she’s going to feel if you don’t bid her good-bye.”
Risca clenched his fists, and turned to the window, and stood
with his back to the room.
“ Take care what you ‘re saying. It ‘s dangerous to quarrel
with me to-day.”
“ Danger be hanged!” said Herold. “I tell you it will be
selfish and cowardly not to see her.”
There was a long silence. At last Risca wheeled round
abruptly.
“ I’m neither selfish nor cowardly. You don’t seem to realize
what I ‘ve gone through’. I ‘m not fit to enter her presence. I ‘m
polluted. I ‘m a walking pestilence. I told you my soul had been
dragged through a sewer.”
“ Then go and purify it in the sea-wind that blows through
Stella’s window, John,” said Herold, seeing that he had subdued his
anger. “I am not such a fool as to ask you to give up your wretched
idea of exile for the sake of our friendship; but this trivial
point, in the name of our friendship, I ask you to concede to me.
Just grant me this, and I ‘ll let you go to Melbourne or
Trincomalee or any other Hades you choose without worrying
you.”
“ Why do you insist upon it? How can a sick child’s fancies
count to a man in such a position?”
His dark eyes glowered at Herold from beneath lowering brows.
Herold met the gaze steadily, and with his unclouded vision he saw
far deeper into Risca than Risca saw into him He did not answer the
question, for he penetrated, through the fuliginous vapours whence
it proceeded, into the crystal regions of the man’s spirit. It was
he, after a while, who held Risca with his eyes, and it was all
that was beautiful and spiritual in Risca that was held. And then
Herold reached out his hand slowly and touched him.
“ We go down to Southcliff together.”
Risca drew a deep breath.
“ Let us go this evening,” said he.
A few hours afterward when the open cab taking them from the
station to the Channel House came by the sharp turn of the road
abruptly to the foot of the cliff, and the gusty southwest wind
brought the haunting smell of the seaweed into his nostrils, and he
saw the beacon-light in the high west window shining like a star, a
gossamer feather from the wings of Peace fell upon the man’s
tortured soul.
CHAPTER III
IT will be remembered that Stellamaris was a
young person of bountiful fortune. She had stocks and shares and
mortgages and landed property faithfully administered under a deed
of trust. The Channel House and all that therein was, except Sir
Oliver and Lady Blount’s grievances, belonged to her. She knew it;
she had known it almost since infancy. The sense of ownership in
which she had grown up had its effect on her character, giving her
the equipoise of a young reigning princess, calm and serene in her
undisputed position. In her childish days her material kingdom was
limited to the walls of her sea-chamber but as the child expanded
into the young girl, so expanded her conception of the limits of
her kingdom. And with this widening view came gradually and
curiously the consciousness that though her uncle and aunt were
exquisitely honoured and beloved agents who looked to the welfare
of her realm, yet they could not relieve her of certain gracious
responsibilities. Instinctively, and with imperceptible gradations,
she began to make her influence felt in the house itself. But it
was an influence in the spiritual and not material sense of the
word; the hovering presence and not the controlling
hand.When, shortly after the arrival of the two men, Walter Herold
went up to his room, he found a great vase of daffodils on his
dressing-table and a pencilled note from Stella in her unformed
handwriting, for one cannot learn to write copper-plate when one
lies forever on the flat of one’s back.Great High Favourite: Here are some daffodils, because
they laugh and dance like you. Stellamaris.And on his dressing-table John Risca found a mass of
snowdrops and a note:Great High Belovedest: A beautiful white silver cloud
came to my window to-day, and I wished I could tear it in half and
save you a bit for the palace. But snowdrops are the nearest things
I could think of instead. Your telegram was a joy. Love.
S.Beside the bowl of flowers was another note:I heard the wheels of your chariot, but Her Serene
High-and-Mightiness [her trained nurse] says I am tucked up for the
night and can have no receptions, levees, or interviews. I tell her
she will lose her title and become the Kommon Kat; but she does n’t
seem to mind. Oh, it’s just lovely to feel that you ‘re in the
house again. S.Risca looked round the dainty room, his whenever he chose to
occupy it, and knew how much, especially of late, it held of
Stellamaris. It had been redecorated a short while before, and the
colours and the patterns and all had been her choice and
specification.The castle architect, a young and fervent soul called
Wratislaw, a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, and a friend of
Herold’s, who had settled in Southcliff-on-Sea, and was building,
for the sake of a precarious livelihood, hideous bungalows which
made his own heart sick, but his clients’ hearts rejoice, had been
called in to advise. With Stellamaris, sovereign lady of the house,
aged fifteen, he had spent hours of stupefied and aesthetic
delight. He had brought her armfuls of designs, cartloads of
illustrated books; and the result of it all was that, with certain
other redecorations in the house with which for the moment we have
no concern, Risca’s room was transformed from late-Victorian
solidity into early-Georgian elegance. The Adam Brothers reigned in
ceiling and cornice, and the authentic spirit of Sheraton, thanks
to the infatuated enterprise of Wratislaw, pervaded the furniture.
Yet, despite Wratislaw, although through him she had spoken, the
presence of Stellamaris pervaded the room. On the writing-table lay
a leather-covered blotter, with his initials, J. R., stamped in
gold. In desperate answer to a childish question long ago, he had
described the bedspread on his Parian marble bed in the palace as a
thing of rosebuds and crinkly ribbons tied up in true-lovers’
knots. On his bed in Stella’s house lay a spread exquisitely Louis
XV in design.Risca looked about the room. Yes, everything was Stella. And
behold there was one new thing, essentially Stella, which he had
not noticed before. Surely it had been put there since his last
visit.In her own bedroom had hung since her imprisonment a fine
reproduction of Watt’s “Hope,” and, child though she was, she had
divined, in a child’s unformulative way, the simple yet poignant
symbolism of the blindfold figure seated on this orb of land and
sea, with meek head bowed over a broken lyre, and with ear strained
to the vibration of the one remaining string. She loved the
picture, and with unconscious intuition and without consultation
with Wratislaw, who would have been horrified at its domination of
his Adam room, had ordained that a similar copy should be hung on
the wall facing the pillow of her Great High Belovedest’s
bed.The application of the allegory to his present state of being
was startlingly obvious. Risca knitted a puzzled brow. The new
thing was essentially Stella, yet why had she caused it to be put
in his room this day of all disastrous days? Was it not rather his
cousin Julia’s doing? But such delicate conveyance of sympathy was
scarcely Julia’s way. A sudden dread stabbed him. Had Stella
herself heard rumours of the tragedy? He summoned Herold, who had a
prescriptive right to the adjoining room.
“ If any senseless fools have told her, I ‘ll murder them,”
he cried.
“ The creatures of the sunset told her—at least as much as it
was good for her to know,” said Herold.
“ Do you mean that she did it in pure
ignorance?”
“ In the vulgar acceptance of the word, yes,” smiled Herold.
“Do you think that the human brain is always aware of the working
of the divine spirit?”
“ If it’s as you say, it’s uncanny,” said Risca,
unconvinced.Yet when Sir Oliver and Julia both assured him that Stella
never doubted his luxurious happiness, and that the ordering of the
picture was due to no subtle suggestion, he had to believe
them.
“ You always make the mistake, John, of thinking Stellamaris
mortal,” said Herold, at the supper-table, for, on receipt of the
young men’s telegram, the Blounts had deferred their dinner to the
later hour of supper. “You are utterly wrong,” said he. “How can
she be mortal when she talks all day to winds and clouds and the
sea-children in their cups of foam? She’s as elemental as Ariel.
When she sleeps, she’s really away on a sea-gull’s back to the
Isles of Magic. That’s why she laughs at the dull, clumsy old world
from which she is cut off in her mortal guise. What are
railway-trains and omnibuses to her? What would they be to you,
John, if you could have a sea-gull’s back whenever you wanted to go
anywhere? And she goes to places worth going to, by George! What
could she want with Charing Cross or the Boulevard des Italians?
Fancy the nymph Syrinx at a woman writers’ dinner!”
“ I don’t know what you ‘re talking about, Walter,” said Lady
Blount, whose mind was practical.
“ Syrinx,” said Sir Oliver, oracularly (he was a little,
shrivelled man, to whose weak face a white moustache and an
imperial gave a false air of distinction)—“Syrinx,” said he, “was a
nymph beloved of Pan,—it’s a common legend in Greek mythology,—and
Pan turned her into a reed.”
“ And then cut the reed up into Pan-pipes,” cried Herold,
eagerly, “and made immortal music out of them—just as he makes
immortal music out of Stellamaris. You see, John, it all comes to
the same thing. Whether you call her Ariel, or Syrinx, or a Sprite
of the Sea, or a Wunderkind whose original trail of glory-cloud has
not faded into the light of common day, she belongs to the Other
People. You must believe in the Other People, Julia; you can’t help
it.”Lady Blount turned to him severely. Despite her affection for
him, she more than suspected him of a pagan pantheism, which she
termed atheistical. His talk about belief in spirits and hobgoblins
irritated her. She kept a limited intelligence together by means of
formulas, as she kept her scanty reddish-gray hair together by
means of a rigid false front.
“ I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost,” she said, with an air of cutting reproof.Sir Oliver pushed his plate from him, but not the fraction of
a millimetre beyond that caused by the impatient push sanctioned by
good manners.
“ Don’t be a fool, Julia!”
“ I don’t see how a Christian woman declaring the elements of
her faith can be a fool,” said Lady Blount, drawing herself
up.
“ There are times and seasons for everything,” said Sir
Oliver. “If you were having a political argument, and any one asked
you whether you believed in tariff reform, and you glared at him
and said, T believe in Pontius Pilate,’ you’d be professing
Christianity, but showing yourself an idiot.”
“ But I don’t believe in Pontius Pilate,” retorted Lady
Blount.
“ Oh, don’t you?” cried Sir Oliver, in sinister exultation.
“Then your whole historical fabric of the Crucifixion must fall to
the ground.”
“ I don’t see why you need be irreverent and blasphemous,”
said Lady Blount.Herold laid his hand on Lady Blount’s and looked at her, with
his head on one side.
“ But do you believe in Stellamaris, Julia.”His smile was so winning, with its touch of mockery, that she
grew mollified.
“ I believe she has bewitched all of us,” she
said.Which shows how any woman may be made to eat her words just
by a little kindness.So the talk went back to Stella and her ways and her
oddities, and the question of faith in Pontius Pilate being
necessary for salvation was forgotten. A maid, Stella’s own maid,
came in with a message. Miss Stella’s compliments, and were Mr.
Risca and Mr. Herold having a good supper? She herself was, about
to drink her egg beaten up in sherry, and would be glad if the
gentlemen would take a glass of wine with her. The young men,
accordingly, raised their glasses toward the ceiling and drank to
Stella, in the presence of the maid, and gave her appropriate
messages to take back to her mistress.It was a customary little ceremony, but in Risca’s eyes it
never lost its grace and charm. To-night it seemed to have a deeper
significance, bringing Stella with her elfin charm into the midst
of them, and thus exorcising the spirits of evil that held him in
their torturing grip. He spoke but little at the meal, content to
listen to the talk about Stella, and curiously impatient when the
conversation drifted into other channels. Of his own tragedy no one
spoke. On his arrival, Lady Blount, with unwonted demonstration of
affection, had thrown her arms round his neck, and Sir Oliver had
wrung his hand and mumbled the stiff Briton’s incoherences of
sympathy. He had not yet told them of his decision to go to
Australia.He broke the news later, in the drawing-room, abruptly and
apropos of nothing, as was his manner, firing his bombshell with
the defiant air of one who says, “There, what do you think of
it?”
“ I’m going to Australia next week, never to come back
again,” said he.There was a discussion. Sir Oliver commended him. The great
dependencies of the empire were the finest field in the world for a
young man, provided he kept himself outside the radius of the
venomous blight of the Colonial Office. To that atrophied branch of
the imperial service the white administrator was merely a
pigeon-holed automaton; the native, black or bronze or yellow, a
lion-hearted human creature. All the murder, riot, rapine, arson,
and other heterogeneous devilry that the latter cared to indulge in
proceeded naturally from the noble indignation of his generous
nature. If the sensible man who was appointed by the Government to
rule over this scum of the planet called out the military and wiped
out a few dozen of them for the greater glory and safety of the
empire, the pusillanimous ineptitudes in second-rate purple and
cheap linen of the Colonial Office, for the sake of currying favour
with Labour members and Socialists and Radicals and Methodists and
Anti-vivisectionists and Vegetarians and other miserable
Little-Englanders, denounced him as a Turk, an assassin, a
seventeenth-century Spanishconquistadorof the bloodiest type, and
held him up to popular execration, and recalled him, and put him on
a beggarly pension years before he had reached his age limit. He
could tell them stories which seemed (and in truth deserved to be)
incredible.
“ John,” said Lady Blount, “has heard all this a thousand
times,”—as indeed he had,—“and must be sick to death of it. He is
not going out to Australia as governor-general.”
“ Who said he was, my dear?” said Sir Oliver.
“ If you did n’t imply it, you were talking nonsense,
Oliver,” Lady Blount retorted.
“ Anyhow, Oliver, do you think John is taking a wise step?”
Herold hastily interposed.
“ I do,” said he; “a very wise step.”
“ I don’t agree with you at all,” said Lady Blount, with a
snap of finality.
“ Your remark, my dear,” replied Sir Oliver, “does not
impress me in the least. When did you ever agree with
me?”
“ Never, my dear Oliver,” said Lady Blount, with the facial
smile of the secretly hostile fencer. “And I thank Heaven for it. I
may not be a brilliant woman, but I am endowed with common
sense.”Sir Oliver looked at her for a moment, with lips parted, as
if to speak; but finding nothing epigrammatic enough to say—and an
epigram alone would have saved the situation—he planted a carefully
cut cigar between the parted lips aforesaid, and deliberately
struck a match.
“ Your idea, John,” said Lady Blount, aware of victory, “is
preposterous. What would Stella do without you?”
“ Yes,” said Sir Oliver, after lighting his cigar; “Stella
has to be considered before everything.”Risca frowned on the unblushing turncoat. Stella! Stella!
Everything was Stella. Here were three ordinary, sane, grown-up
people seriously putting forward the proposition that he had no
right to go and mend his own broken life in his own fashion because
he happened to be the favored playmate of a little invalid
girl!On the one side was the driving force of Furies of a myriad
hell-power, and on the other the disappointment of Stella Blount.
It was ludicrous. Even Walter Herold, who had a sense of humour,
did not see the grotesque incongruity. Risca frowned upon each in
turn—upon three serene faces smilingly aware of the absurd. Was it
worth while trying to convince them?
“ Our dear friends are quite right, John,” said Herold. “What
would become of Stella if you went away?”
“ None of you seems to consider what would happen to me if I
stayed,” said John, in the quiet tone of a man who is talking to
charming but unreasonable children. “It will go to my heart to
leave Stella, more than any of you can realize; but to Australia I
go, and there’s an end of it.”Lady Blount sighed. What with imperial governments that
wrecked the career of men for shooting a few murderous and
fire-raising blacks, and with lowborn vixens of women who ruined
men’s careers in other ways, life was a desperate puzzle. She was
fond of her cousin John Risca. She, too, before she married Sir
Oliver, had borne the name, and the disgrace that had fallen upon
it affected her deeply. It was horrible to think of John’s wife,
locked up that night in the stone cell of a gaol. She leaned back
in her chair in silence while the men talked—Sir Oliver, by way of
giving Risca hints on the conduct of life in Melbourne, was
narrating his experiences of forty years ago in the West Indies—and
stared into the fire. Her face, beneath the front of red hair that
accused so pitifully the reddish gray that was her own, looked very
old and faded. What was a prison like? She shuddered. As governor’s
wife, she had once or twice had occasion to visit a colonial
prison. But the captives were black, and they grinned cheerily;
their raiment, save for the unæsthetic decoration of the black
arrow, was not so very different from that which they wore in a
state of freedom; neither were food, bedding, and surroundings so
very different; and the place was flooded with air and blazing
sunshine. She could never realize that it was a real prison. It
might have been a prison of musical comedy. But an English prison
was the real, unimaginable abode of grim, gray horror. She had
heard of the prison taint. She conceived it as a smell—that of
mingled quicklime and the corruption it was to destroy—which
lingered physically forever after about the persons of those who
had been confined within prison-walls. A gaol was a place of
eternal twilight, eternal chill, eternal degradation for the white
man or woman; and a white woman, the wife of one of her own race,
was there. It was almost as if the taint hung about her own
lavender-scented self. She shivered, and drew her chair a few
inches nearer the fire.Was it so preposterous, after all, on John Risca’s part to
fly from the shame into a wider, purer air? Her cry had been
unthinking, instinctive, almost a cry for help. She was growing old
and soured and worn by perpetual conjugal wranglings. John, her
kinsman, counted for a great deal in a life none too rich. John and
Stella were nearest to her in the world—first Stella, naturally,
then John. To the woman of over fifty the man of under thirty is
still a boy. For many, years she had nursed the two together in her
heart. And now he was going from her. What would she, what would
Stella, do without him? Her husband’s direct interpellation aroused
her from her reverie.
“ Julia, what was the name of the chap we met in St. Kitts
who had been sheep-farming in Queensland?”They had sailed away from St. Kitts in 1878. Lady Blount
reminded him tartly of the fact while professing her oblivion of
the man from Queensland. They sparred for a few moments. Then she
rose wearily and said she was going to bed. Sir Oliver looked at
his watch.
“ Nearly twelve. Time for us all to go.”
“ As soon as I’ ve written my morning letter to Stellamaris,”
said Herold.
“ I must write, too,” said Risca.For it was a rule of the house that every visitor should
write Stellamaris a note overnight, to be delivered into her hands
the first thing in the morning. The origin of the rule was wrapped
in the mists of history.So John Risca sat down at Sir Oliver’s study-table in order
to indite his letter to Stellamaris. But for a long time he stared
at the white paper. He, the practised journalist, who could dash
off his thousand words on any subject as fast as pen could travel,
no matter what torture burned his brain, could not find a foolish
message for a sick child. At last he wrote like a
school-boy:Darling: The flowers were beautiful, and so is the new
picture, and I want to see you early in the morning. I hope you are
well. John Risca.And he had to tear the letter out of its envelope and put it
into a fresh one because he had omitted to add the magic initials
“G. H. B.” to his name. Compared with his usual imaginative feats
of correspondence, this was a poverty-stricken epistle. She would
wonder at the change. Perhaps his demand for an immediate interview
would startle her, and shocks were dangerous. He tore up the letter
and envelope, and went to his own room. It was past two o’clock
when he crept downstairs again to lay his letter on the hall
table.At the sight of him the next morning the color deepened in
the delicate cheeks of Stellamaris, and her dark eyes grew bright.
She held out a welcoming hand.
“ Ah, Belovedest, I ‘ve been longing to see you ever since
dawn. I woke up then and could n’t go to sleep again because I was
so excited.”He took the chair by her bedside, and her fingers tapped
affectionately on the back of the great hand that lay on the
coverlid.
“ I suppose I was excited, too,” said he, “for I was awake at
dawn.”
“ Did you look out of window?”
“ Yes,” said John.
“ Then we both saw the light creeping over the sea like a
monstrous ghost. And it all lay so pallid and still,—did n’t it?—as
if it were a sea in a land of death. And then a cheeky little
thrush began to twitter.”
“ I heard the thrush,” replied John. “He said, ‘Any old
thing! Any old thing!’ ”He mimicked the bird’s note. Stella laughed. “That’s just
what he said—as though a sea in a land of death or the English
Channel was all the same to him. I suppose it was.”
“ It must be good to be a thrush,” said Risca. “There ‘s
aje m’en fich’ismeabout his
philosophy which must be very consoling.”
“ I know what that is in English,” cried Stellamaris. “It is
‘don’t-care-a-damativeness.’ “ Her lips rounded roguishly over the
naughty syllable.
“ Where did you learn that?”
“ Walter told me.”
“ Walter must be clapped into irons, and fed on bread and
water, and seriously spoken to.”Unconsciously he had drifted into his usual manner of speech
with her. She laughed with a child’s easy gaiety.
“ It’s delightful to be wicked, is n’t it?”
“ Why?” he asked.
“ It must be such an adventure. It must make you hold your
breath and your heart beat.”John wondered grimly whether a certain doer of wickedness had
felt this ecstatic rapture. She, too, must have seen the gray dawn,
but creeping through prison-bars into her cell. God of
Inscrutability! Was it possible that these two co-watchers of the
dawn, both so dominant in his life, were of the same race of
beings? If the one was a woman born of woman, what in the name of
mystery was Stellamaris?
“
