Part 13 (1/2)

”The sun has begun to go,” he said; ”I a.s.sure you it is not healthy for you to linger here. Of course I will engage your sister.”

Stella gave a little sigh of relief. She had found a way out for Mr.

Travers.

CHAPTER XV

After the arrival of Eurydice, Mr. Travers saw very little of Stella. At certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from personal contact. She had been impersonal before, but only in a businesslike and friendly way. She was impersonal now as if she was not there.

She could control her attention, but she no longer felt any vitality behind it. She knew where her life had gone, and she was powerless to call it back to her. It hovered restlessly about the spirit of Julian.

Stella had never known what it was to repine at her own fate. If there were many things she wanted that she could not have, she had consoled herself with driving her desires into what was left to her. But she could not do this for Julian.

He had had so much farther to fall. She saw his face as she had seen it first, with its look of human strength; his frosty, blue eyes, his heavy sledge-hammer chin, and all the alertness, the controlled activity, of his young figure. She saw him again like something made of wax, emaciated and helpless, with flickering eyes. He had not believed in knocking under, and he had felt defeat incredible.

But defeat had met him, a blundering defeat that wrecked his body and left his unprotected heart to face disaster.

Would he have courage enough for this restricted battle against adversity? Courage did strange things with pain. It transformed and utilized it; but courage does not spring readily from a mortally wounded pride. Marian, with a complete lack of intention, had robbed Julian of his first weapon. She had dissipated his resources by undermining his confidence, and left him perilously near to the stultification of personal bitterness.

Would it be possible for Julian to escape resentment? Or would he pa.s.s down that long lane which has no turning, and ends in the bottomless bog of self-pity, in which the finest qualities of the human spirit sink like a stone?

Step by step Stella pa.s.sed with him, by all the hidden and vivid obstacles between his soul and victory, between it and defeat.

She could do nothing, but she could not stop her ceaseless watchfulness.

She was like some one who strains his eyes forever down an empty road.

The days began to lengthen into a long cold spring. There were no outward changes in her life: the drafty town hall, the long bus-rides, the bad news from France, and at home the pinch and ugliness of poverty.

She had stopped being afraid that people would notice a difference in her. n.o.body noticed any difference. She behaved in the same way and did the same things. She had gone down under the waters of life without so much as a splash.

”I suppose,” Stella said to herself, ”lots of us see ghosts every day without knowing it.” She had a vague feeling that Mr. Travers knew it, but that he kept it in the back of his mind like an important paper in a case, which it was no use producing unless you could act upon it.

It was an awful day of snow and wind. Everybody but Stella and the porter had gone home. She had been stupid over the munic.i.p.al accounts; over and over again her flagging mind stuck at the same mistake. At last she finished. She was still sixpence out; but she might see the sixpence in a flash the next morning, and there would be no flash in anything she could see to-night.

When she reached the door she found the gale had become formidable and chaotic. She staggered out of the town hall into the grip of a fury. All London shook and quivered; trees were torn down and flung across the road like broken twigs; taxis were blown into lamp-posts; the icy air tore and raged and screamed as if the elements had set out to match and overwhelm the puny internecine struggles of man. ”This,” Stella thought to herself, ”is like a battle--noise, confusion, senselessness. I must hold on to whatever keeps stillest, and get home in rushes.”

But nothing kept very still. She was doubtful about trembling lamp-posts, and area-railings twitched and shook under her hands. Her skirts whipped themselves about her like whom panic was overcoming fury, ”why not send for her? Lizzie, here are two s.h.i.+llings; go out and see if you can find a taxi.”

Stella tried to say what might happen to Lizzie in the search for a taxi, but the effort to speak finished her strength. When she could realize what was happening again, Cicely had arrived. She pounced upon the emergency as a cat upon a mouse.

In a few minutes Stella was tucked up warm and dry, poulticed and eased, capable of a little very short breath, propped up by pillows. The professor had retired to his study with a cup of cocoa hotter than he had known this cheering vegetable to be since Cicely's departure.

Mrs. Waring was breathing very slowly in her bedroom to restore calm to the household, and Eurydice was crying bitterly into the kitchen sink.

She was quite sure that Stella was going to die, and that Cicely would save her.

The second of these two calamities took place. Stella was very ill with pleurisy, and remained very ill for several days. Cicely interfered with death as drastically as she interfered with everything else. She dragged Stella reluctantly back into a shaky convalescence.

”Now you're going to get well,” she announced to her in a tone of abrupt reproach. ”But what I don't understand is the appalling state of weakness you're in. You must have been living under some kind of strain.

I don't mean work. Work alone wouldn't have made such a hash of you.