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, I 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.
0046
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 Spanish conquistador of 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 a je m'en fich'isme about 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?
“Don't look so grave, Great High Belovedest,” she said, squeezing a finger. “I only spoke in fun. It must really be horrid to be wicked. When I was little I had a book about Cruel Frederick—I think it belonged to grandmama. It had awful pictures, and there were rhymes—
He tore the wings off little flies,
And then poked out their little eyes.
And there was a picture of his doing so. I used to think him a detestable boy. It made me unhappy and kept me awake when I was quite small, but now I know it's all nonsense. People don't do such things, do they?”
Risca twisted his glum face into a smile, remembering the Unwritten Law. “Of course not, Stellamaris,” said he. “Cruel Frederick is just as much of a mythical personage as the Giant Fee-fo-fum, who said:
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
And be he alive or be he dead,
I 'll grind his bones to make my bread.”
“Why do people frighten children with stories of ogres and wicked fairies and all the rest of it, when the real world they live in is so beautiful?”
“Pure cussedness,” answered John, unable otherwise to give a satisfactory explanation.
“Cussedness is silly,” said Stellamaris.
There was a little pause. Then she put both her hands on his and pressed it.
“Oh, it's lovely to have you here again, Great High Belovedest; and I have n't thanked you for your letter. It's the most heavenly one you've ever written to me.”
It might well have been. He had taken two hours to write it.
