The Second Fiddle Part 20

"That," said Julian, "happens to be exactly one of the things you'd better refrain from telling me. Good-by."

CHAPTER XXII

It is always hard to return in the character of a captive to a scene in which you have played the part of victor, and Julian had told the truth to Stella when he said that what stung him most was his new relation to women. Men knew what he had done; many of them were facing the same odds. They had a common experience and a common language to fall back upon. They were his mates, but they did not come near enough to him to hurt him; they had no wish to understand or help his sufferings. It was sufficient for them to say, "Hard luck!" and leave that side of it alone. Women were different: he had pursued women.

Julian had a good average reputation. Very few women attracted him beyond a certain point; but all his experiences had been successes.

He had loved Marian with the best love his heart had known; but it had been the love of Marian as a creature to possess. It had not been an invasion of his personality. He would have given anything to possess Marian; he had not been for a moment possessed by her. It did not seem to Julian that a woman could ever do more than charm a man.

She could charm you, if you let her, to distraction; but if you had any strength, you remained intact. Nothing in you moved to meet her charm.

You simply, not to put too fine a point upon it, took what you could get. Naturally, if you could no longer let a woman charm you, she became, if she wasn't merely a nuisance, a menace.

Julian acquiesced in Stella's remaining as his secretary only because he had a theory that she did not charm him. He could not make head or tail of her. He recognized that she had a mind, but it was a perplexing and unchallenging mind, a private enjoyment of her own. She never attempted to attract Julian by it. If he stirred her, she ran off like a poet or a bird, upon her subject. She did not, as Julian supposed all women did, put Julian himself at the other end of her subject.

She had attractions: sympathy, wit, a charming, fugitive smile. She arranged them no better than she arranged her hair; and it was lamentable how she arranged her hair.

Julian could not have borne her constant presence if she had not effaced herself; his bitter self-consciousness would have been up in arms against an effective personality at his elbow. Nevertheless, he was obscurely annoyed that Stella made no attempt to impress him. She would sit there morning after morning without looking at him, without noticing him, without the lift of an eyelid to make him feel that he was anything to her but the supply of copy for his chapter. She was as inhuman and unpretentious as a piece of moss on a wall.

But her voice haunted him; he would catch s.n.a.t.c.hes of her talk with Lady Verny in the garden. His mother had no scruple against intimacy with Stella, and Stella was not docile with Lady Verny; she was enchanting.

She had a tantalizing voice full of music, with little gusts of mischief and revolt in it.

Julian told himself that he must put up with Stella for his mother's sake. Lady Verny did not make friends easily, and liked bookworms. He dismissed Stella as a bookworm. She had ways that, he told himself, were intensely annoying. She came punctually to her work,--probably the poor town clerk had taught her that much,--but she had no other punctualities. Bells, meals, the pa.s.sage of time, had no landmarks for her. She seemed to drift along the hours like a leaf upon a stream.

She was disorderly: she left things about; books face downward, sc.r.a.ps of paper, flowers. She was always saying that she had lost her fountain-pen. She didn't say this to Julian, but he heard her say it to Ostrog, whom she accused outrageously of having eaten it, to all the servants, and to his mother. None of them seemed to mind, not even Ostrog.

Ostrog's growls had ceased. He slept in Stella's presence, uneasily, with half a red eye upon her; but he slept.

After a few days he chose a position close to her feet and slept solidly, with snores; finally he took her out for walks. Julian approved of this, since she would go all over the place by herself, hatless, and looking like a tramp, it was as well she should be accompanied by Ostrog.

Ostrog had never before been known to go for walks with any one except Julian. He took plenty of exercise independently of human control in the direction of rabbits.

Stella was extremely wasteful with writing-paper. Over and over again Julian saw her throw half a sheet, white and untouched, into the waste-paper basket; and she cut string. It was curious how little Julian felt annoyed by these depredations, considering how much he wished to be annoyed. He was not by nature economical, but he lashed himself into imaginary rages with Stella, and told her that she must once for all turn over a new leaf. She was quite meek about it, and next time she lost her fountain-pen she went into the village and bought a new one which wouldn't write. She paid for it with her own money, and Julian wanted to box her ears. He subsequently found the other one on the rack where he kept his pipes.

For some time he believed that she was not provocative because she was negligible. She was one of those clever neutral women who haven't the wit to be attractive.

Then one day it flashed across him that for all her mild agreement with his wishes, her spirit never for one instant surrendered to him. It did not even think of escaping; it was free.

This startled Julian. He liked evasive women, but he had thought Stella extraordinarily the opposite. She was as frank as a boy. But was this frankness merely because she was dealing with what was non-essential to her? He tried to make her talk; he succeeded perfectly.

Stella would talk about anything he liked. She enjoyed talking. She made Julian enjoy it; and then he found that he had arrived nowhere. She gave him her talk, as she gave him her attention, exactly as she would have got up and handed him a book if he had asked for it. There was no more of herself in it than in the simplest of her services.

Julian was not sure when it was that he discovered that he had a new feeling about her, which was even more disconcerting than her independence; it was anxiety.

Perhaps it was during the extremely slow and tiresome week-end on which Stella paid a visit to her family. She went without her umbrella,--not that it would have done much good if she had taken it, for Julian found, to his extreme vexation, that it was full of holes,--the weather was atrocious, and she came back with a cold.

It might have been gathered that no one at Amberley had ever had a cold before. As far as Julian was concerned n.o.body ever had.

Julian possessed a sane imagination, and generally treated the subject of health with a mixture of common sense and indifference. But this cold of Stella's!

It was no good Stella's saying it was a slight cold; he forced her to take a list of remedies suitable for severe bronchitis. He quarreled with his mother for saying that people had been known to recover from colds, and finally he sent for the doctor.

The doctor, being a wise man with a poor country practice, agreed with Julian that you could not be too careful about colds, and thought that priceless old port taken with her meals would not do Miss Waring any harm.

Stella disliked port very much, but she drank it submissively for a week.

"n.o.body can call me fussy," Julian announced sternly, "but I will not have a neglected cold in the house."

He was not contradicted, though everybody knew that for weeks the cook and two housemaids had been sneezing about the pa.s.sages.

It was a strange feeling, this sharp compulsion of fear. It taught Julian something. It taught him that what happened to Stella happened to himself. He no longer thought of pursuit in connection with her. He had found her in his heart.

It was an extremely awkward fact, but he accepted it. After all, he had crushed pa.s.sions before which had gone against his code. He had iron self-control, and he thought it would be quite possible to stamp out this fancy before it got dangerous, even while he retained her presence.

He couldn't remain friendly to her, but he could be civil enough. He tried this process. For nine days it worked splendidly. Of course Stella didn't like it, but it worked. She had too much sense to ask him what was the matter, but she looked wistful. On the tenth she cut her finger sharpening a pencil, and Julian called her "Darling." Fortunately she didn't hear him, and he managed to bandage her finger up without losing his head; but he knew that it had been an uncommonly near shave, and if she hurt herself again, he wasn't at all sure how he would stand it.

Love flooded him like a rising tide; all his landmarks became submerged.

He could not tell how far the tide would spread. He clung to Stella's faults with positive vindictiveness despite the fact that he had surprised himself smiling over them. He dared not let himself think about her qualities. The one support left to him was her own unconsciousness. He needn't tell her, and she wouldn't guess; and as long as she didn't know, he could keep her. If she did know, she would have to go away; even if she didn't want to go, as she most probably would, he would have to send her away. He became as watchful of himself as he had been when his life depended on every word he said; but he could not help his eyes. When other people were there he did not look at Stella at all.

It was the first day Stella had been late for her work, and Julian had prepared to be extremely angry until he saw her face. She came slowly toward the open window out of the garden, looking oddly drawn and white.

The pain in her eyes hurt Julian intolerably.

"Hullo!" he said quickly, "what's wrong?"

She did not answer at once; her hands trembled. She was holding a letter, face downward, as if she hated holding it.

"Your mother asked me to tell you myself," she began. "I am afraid to tell you; but she seemed to think you would rather--"

"Yes," said Julian, quickly. "Are you going away?"

"Oh, no," whispered Stella. "If it was only that!"

Julian said, "Ah!" It was an exclamation that sounded like relief. He leaned back in his chair, and did nothing further to help her.

Stella moved restlessly about the room. She had curious graceful movements like a wild creature; she became awkward only when she knew she was expected to behave properly. Finally she paused, facing a bookcase, with her back to Julian.

"Well?" asked Julian, encouragingly. "Better get it over, hadn't we?

World come to pieces worse than usual this morning?"

"I don't know how to tell you," she said wretchedly. "For you perhaps it has--I have heard from Marian."

Julian picked up his pipe, which he had allowed to go out when Stella came in, relit it, and smiled at the back of her head. He looked extraordinarily amused and cheerful.

"She hadn't written to me," Stella went on without turning round, "for ages and ages,--you remember I told you?--and now she has."

"She was always an uncertain correspondent," said Julian, smoothly. "Am I to see this letter? Message for me, perhaps? Or doesn't she know you're here?"