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. In loco 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, characters
Never harm nor spell nor charm
Come 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.
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.
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.