Volume I Part 40 (1/2)
Stella shuddered.
”Michael, what a perfectly horrible idea. Deformed!”
”Well, wouldn't you sooner he were deformed than that you were--than that--than the other idea?” Michael stammered.
”No, I wouldn't,” Stella cried. ”I'd much, much, much rather that mother was never married.”
Michael tried to drag his mind towards the comprehension of this unnatural sentiment, but the longer he regarded it the worse it seemed, and with intense irony he observed to Stella:
”I suppose you'll be telling me next that you're in love.”
”I'm not in love just at the moment,” said Stella blandly.
”Do you mean to say you have been in love?”
”A good deal,” she admitted.
Michael leaped to his feet, and looked down on her rec.u.mbent in the bracken.
”But only in a stupid schoolgirly way?” he gasped.
”Yes, I suppose it was,” Stella paused. ”But it was fearfully thrilling all the same--especially in duets.”
”Duets?”
”I used to read ahead, and watch where our hands would come together, and then the notes used to get quite slippery with excitement.”
”Look here,” Michael demanded, drawing himself up, ”are you trying to be funny?”
”No,” Stella declared, rising to confront Michael. ”He was one of my masters. He was only about thirty, and he was killed in Switzerland by an avalanche.”
Michael was staggered by the confession of this shocking and precocious child, as one after another his chimeras rose up to leer at him triumphantly.
”And did he make love to you? Did he try to kiss you?” Michael choked out.
”Oh, no,” said Stella. ”That would have spoilt it all.”
Michael sighed under a faint lightening of his load, and Stella came up to him engagingly to slip her arm into his.
”Don't be angry with me, Michael, because I have wanted so dreadfully to be great friends with you and tell you all my secrets. I want to tell you what I think about when I'm playing; and, Michael, you oughtn't to be angry with me, because you were simply just made to be told secrets.
That's why I played so well last night. I was telling you a secret all the time.”
”Do you know what it is, Stella?” said Michael, with a certain awe in his voice. ”I believe our father is in an asylum, and I believe you and I are both mad--not raving mad, of course--but slightly mad.”
”All geniuses are,” said Stella earnestly.
”But we aren't geniuses.”
”I am,” murmured Stella in a strangely quiet little voice that sounded in Michael's ears like the song of a furtive melodious bird.