Part 15 (2/2)

Stella bowed her head. She was aware of an absolute and appalling sense of exhaustion and of an inner failure more terrible than any physical collapse.

It was as if Julian had pushed aside her soul.

”Still, I think you must admit, Julian,” Lady Verny said quietly, ”that 'The Ode to the West Wind' is an admirable poem. I'm afraid, my dear, you have tired yourself in saying it for us. I know the poem very well, but I have never either understood or enjoyed it so much before. Do you not think you had better go to bed? Julian will excuse us. I find I am a little tired myself.”

Stella rose to her feet uncertainly. She was afraid that Julian would get up again and light their candles; but for a moment he did not move.

He was looking at her reconsideringly, as if something in his mind was recognizing something in hers; then he dragged himself up, as she had feared he would, and punctiliously lighted their candles.

”It's rather absurd not having electric light here, isn't it?” he observed, handing Stella her candle. ”But we can't make up our minds to it. We like candle-light with old oak. I'm not prepared to give in about your fellow Sh.e.l.ley; but I confess I like that poem better than the others I have read. You must put me up to some more another time.”

If she had made one of her frightful blunders, he wasn't going to let her see it. His smile was perfectly kind, perfectly impenetrable. She felt as if he were treating her like an intrusive child. Lady Verny said nothing more about the poem; but as she paused outside Stella's door she leaned over her and very lightly kissed her cheek.

It was as if she said: ”Yes, I know you made a mistake; but go on making them. I can't. I'm too like him; so that the only thing for me to do is to leave him alone. But perhaps one day one of your mistakes may reach him; and if they can't, nothing can.”

Stella s.h.i.+vered as she stood alone before the firelight. Everything in the room was beautiful, the chintz covers, the thick, warm carpet, the gleam of the heavy silver candle-sticks. The furniture was not chosen because it had been suitable. It was suitable because it had been chosen long ago. It had grown like its surroundings into a complete harmony, and all this beauty, all this warm, old, s.h.i.+ning polish of inanimate objects and generations of good manners, covered an ache like a hollow tooth. n.o.body could get down to what was wrong because they were too well bred; and was it very likely that they were going to let Stella?

She would annoy Julian, she had probably annoyed him to-night; but would she ever reach him? In her mind she had been able to think of him as near her; but now that she was in the same house, she felt as if she were on the other side of unbridged s.p.a.ce. He was frightening, too; he was so much handsomer than she remembered, and so much more alive. It was inconceivable that he should ever want to work with her.

She sat down before an oval silver mirror and looked at her face. It seemed to her that she was confronted by an empty little slab without light. She gave it a wintry smile before she turned away from it.

”I don't suppose he'll ever want anything of you,” she said to herself, ”except to go away.”

CHAPTER XVIII

Later Stella wrote:

Eurydice dearest:

It's the strangest household, or else, perhaps, everybody else's is. You never see anybody doing anything, and yet everything gets done. It's all ease and velvet and bells; and yet in spite of nothing being a minute late, you never notice the slightest hurry.

It isn't clockwork; it's more like the stars in their courses. I always thought being properly waited on made people helpless; it would me in ten minutes. I can see myself sinking into a cream-fed cus.h.i.+on, but the Vernys sit bolt upright, and no servant they possess can do any given thing as well for them as they can do it for themselves.

I have breakfast in my room, with a robin, and the window open--oh, open on to the sharpest paradise!

While I lie in bed I can see an old, moss-covered barn which always manages to have a piece of pink sky behind it and a black elm bough in front. It's a wonderful barn, as old as any hill, and with all the colors of the rainbow subservient to it. That's one window; the other two look over the garden.

There's a terrace, and a lawn out of which little glens and valleys wander down the hillside into the water-meadows, and there's a lake drowned out by the water, with swans more or less kept in it by a hedge of willows.

The water-meadows are more beautiful than all the little s.h.i.+ny clouds that race across the valley. Sometimes they're like a silver tray, with green islands and wet brown trees on them; and sometimes they are a traveling mist; and then the sun slants out (I haven't seen it full yet), and everything's blue--the frailest, pearliest blue.

Yesterday was quite empty, with only its own light, and when evening came the water-meadows and the little hills were lost in amethyst.

I haven't said anything about the downs. I can't. We walk on them in the afternoon. At least we walk along the lane that goes through the village (it's full of mud; but one gets quite fond of mud), and then when you feel the short turf under you, and the fields drop down, you go up into the sky and float.

One begins so well, too. At breakfast there's such beautiful china, b.u.t.ter in a lordly dish, always honey, and often mushrooms.

Everything tastes as if it came fresh out of the sky.

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