The Second Fiddle Part 13

"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 At certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from personal contact.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 shillings; 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.

Come, you may as well own up. What was it?"

Stella blinked her eyes, and looked round her like a dazzled stranger.

Usually she was very fond of her room,--it was a small back room, over a yard full of London cats,--but it struck her now that there were too many things with which she was familiar. It was the same with Cicely.

She dearly loved and valued Cicely, but she knew the sight and sound of her extraordinarily well.

"Nothing," said Stella, deprecatingly. "It's no use applying gimlets and tweezers to my moral sense, Cicely. Not even the Inquisition could deal with a hole. Heretics were solid. I have a perfect right to be ill from a cold wind. The world seemed made of it that night, and I swallowed half the world. It must be rather a strain for a thin person to swallow half the world on an empty stomach. I'm quite all right now, thanks to you. I was thinking I ought to get back to the town hall next week.

Only, queerly enough, I had another offer of work. Still, it's so sketchy, that I couldn't honestly fling up my own job for it, though it sounds rather attractive."

"Let's see it," said Cicely, succinctly. "You do conceal things, Stella."

Stella withdrew an envelop from under her pillow. She looked a little anxious after its surrender. Cicely always made her a little anxious over a tentative idea. She had a way of materializing a stray thought, and flinging it back upon Stella as an incontrovertible fact. Stella was very anxious not to think that what was in the letter she gave to Cicely was really a fact. It was like some strange dream that hasn't any right to come true. Cicely read:

Dear Miss Waring: You will think this a most extraordinary request for me to make, and in many ways it is too unformulated to be a request. You will have heard from Marian that six months ago her engagement with my son came to an end. This was the natural and right thing to happen, but it has left him in his invalid condition very much without resources.

You were, I remember your telling me, a secretary to Professor Paulson. I am inclined to think that my son might have his mind directed to some scientific work if he could meet any one who would interest him anew in the subject. Probably you are immersed in other work, but if by any possible chance you should be at liberty and cared to make the experiment, could you come here for a few weeks? You would be conferring a great favor upon us, and if the secretaryship developed out of your little visit, we would arrange any terms that suited you. I may add that I find my son has no remembrance of your a.s.sociation with Marian; indeed, he has forgotten the occasion of your meeting.

He has been so very ill that you will understand and excuse this, I feel sure; and in the circ.u.mstances I think we had better not refer to it. I am very anxious to divert his mind from the past, and I have a feeling that if I could count upon your cooperation, we might succeed.

Yours sincerely,

HELEN VERNY.

"I don't see anything sketchy about it," said Cicely, slowly; "in the circ.u.mstances, I mean. You needn't definitely chuck the town hall.

You'll get a couple of weeks' holiday. They'll give you a fortnight's extension easily, and if the job comes your way, it would be a suitable one. Anyway, you must of course accept it provisionally--"

"I don't see why I must of course accept it," said Stella. "You never see any alternatives, Cicely. Your mind is like one of those sign-posts that have only one name on it, with fields all round and heaps of other places to go to. It must be awfully confusing to be as simple as you are. Why couldn't I go back to the town hall next week?"

"Well, I'll tell you one reason why," said Cicely, grimly. "Simple or not, your heart's as weak as a toy watch; you very nearly died a week ago, and in my opinion if you went back to the town hall, you'd be signing your own death-certificate."

"I couldn't do that," said Stella, gravely; "it's not legal. I'm not the next of kin to myself. I know much more about death-certificates than you do. If I go to Lady Verny at Amberley, what's to become of Eurydice?"

"Eurydice will stay where she is," said Cicely. "If you ever saw to the end of your nose, you'd know that she is as glued to the town hall as she used to be to 'Shocks,' only this time, let us hope, more successfully. Some women have to be married. They contract a fatal desire for it, like the influenza habit every winter. Eurydice is one of them. It takes different forms, of course. This time it's Mr. Travers; the Mr. Bolt attachment was far more dangerous. I have made up my mind that she will marry Mr. Travers, if it's humanly speaking possible."

"Oh," said Stella, "will she? How clever you are, Cicely! You know nearly everything. Why do you say 'humanly speaking possible?'"

"Because you've always made him out as cold as a fish and as hard as iron," said Cicely. "He may be one of the few men who won't yield to vanity or fancy."

"I see," said Stella. "It's not very nice of you to want Eurydice to marry an iron fish. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not quite so certain about Mr. Travers. The iron and the fish are only on the top. I think, humanly speaking, he's quite possible. I'm going to sleep now. When you've made up your mind about Amberley you can wake me up."

CHAPTER XVI

There are two winds in March; one comes in like a tight-lipped school-master set on punishment. It is frequently accompanied by dust, sunshine, and influenza. It has all the cold of winter, and acts as if life could be produced solely by formidable harshness.

But there is another wind, a mild, sensitive wind which carries the secrets of the spring--a wind that wanders and sings on sunless days, penetrating the hard crust of the earth as softly and as inveterately as love, a wind that opens while its forceful brother shuts.