The Summons Part 53

Joan was to leave Harry Luttrell alone.

"You are quite young," said Stella, "only twenty. What does he matter to you? You have everything in front of you. With your looks and your twenty years you can choose where you will. You have lovers already----"

"I?" Joan interrupted.

"Mario Escobar."

Joan repeated the name with such a violence of scorn that for a moment Stella Croyle was silenced.

"Mario Escobar!"

"He was here with you a moment ago."

Joan answered quietly and quite distinctly:

"I wish he were dead!"

Stella Croyle fell back upon her first declaration.

"You must leave my Wub alone."

Joan laughed aloud, harshly and without any merriment. She checked herself with an effort lest she should go on laughing, and her laughter turn uncontrollably into hysteria and tears. Here was Mrs. Croyle, a grown woman, standing in front of her like a mutinous obstinate child, looking like one too, talking like one and bidding Joan leave her Wub alone. Whence did she get that ridiculous name? It was all degrading and grotesque.

"Your Wub! Your Wub!" she cried in a heat. "Yes, I am only twenty, and probably I am quite wrong and stupid. But it seems to me horrible that we two women should be wrangling over a man neither of us had met a week ago. I'll have no more of it."

She flung towards the window, but Stella Croyle cried out, "A week ago!"

and the cry brought her to a stop. Joan turned and looked doubtfully at Mrs. Croyle. After all, that ridiculous label had not been pasted on to Harry Luttrell as a result of a week's acquaintance. Harry Luttrell had certainly talked to Stella through the greater part of an evening, his first evening in the house, but they had hardly been together at all since then. Joan came back slowly into the room.

"So you knew Colonel Luttrell before this week?"

"We were great friends a few years ago."

It was disturbing to Joan that Harry Luttrell had never spoken to her of this friends.h.i.+p. Was it possible that Stella had a claim upon him of which she herself knew nothing? She sat down at a table in front of Mrs.

Croyle.

"Tell me," she said.

Once, long ago, upon the deck of the _Dragonfly_ at Stockholm, Stella had cried out to Harry Luttrell, "Oh, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to be kind!" Joan was now to hear how that cry had come to be uttered by a woman in the nethermost distress. She knew, of course, that Stella was married at the age of seventeen and had been divorced, but little more than that.

"There was a little girl," said Stella, "my baby. I lost her."

She spoke very simply. She had come to the end of efforts and schemes, and was very tired. Joan's anger died away altogether in her heart.

"Oh, I am very sorry," she replied. "I didn't know that you had a little girl."

"Yes. Look, here is her portrait." Stella Croyle drew out from her bosom a locket which hung night and day against her heart, and showed it to Joan across the table. "But I don't know whether she is little any more.

She is thirteen now."

Joan gazed at the painted miniature of a lovely child with the eyes and the hair of Stella Croyle.

"And you lost her altogether?" she asked with a rising pity.

"Not at first," answered Stella. "I was allowed by the Court to have her with me for one month in every year. And I lived the other eleven months for the one, the wonderful one."

Stella's face softened indescribably. The memory of her child did for her what all her pa.s.sion for Harry Luttrell could not do. It restored her youth. Her eyes grew tender, her mouth quivered, the look of conflict vanished altogether.

"We had good times together, my baby and I. I took her to the sea. It sounds foolish, but we were more like a couple of children together than mother and daughter"; and Joan, looking at the delicate, porcelain-like figure in front of her, smiled in response.

"Yes, I can understand that."

"She was with me every minute," Stella Croyle resumed. "I watched her so, I gave her so much of me that when I had seen her off at the station with her nurse at the end of the month, I was left behind, as weak and limp as an invalid. I lived for her, Joan, believe that at all events in my favour! There was no one else."

"I do believe it."

"Then one year in the winter she did not come to me."

"They kept her back!" cried Joan. "But you had the right to her."

"Yes. And I went down to Exeter to her father's house, to fetch her away."

It was curious that Stella Croyle, who was speaking of her own distressful life, told her story with a quiet simplicity of tone, as if she had bent her neck in submission to the hammer strokes of her destiny; whereas Joan, who was but listening to griefs of another, was stirred to a compa.s.sion which kindled her face and made her voice shake.

"Oh, they hadn't sent her away! She was waiting for you," she cried eagerly.

"She was waiting for me. Yes! But it was no longer my baby who was waiting. They had worked on her, Robert, my husband--and his sisters.

They had told her--oh, more than they need! That I was bad."

"Oh!" breathed Joan.

"Yes, they were a little cruel. They had changed baby altogether. She was just eight at that time." Stella stopped for a moment or two. Her voice did not falter but her eyes suddenly swam with tears. "She used to adore me--she really and truly did. Now her little face and her eyes were like flint. And what do you think she said to me? Just this!

'Mummy, I don't want to go with you. If you take me with you, you'll spoil my holidays!'"

Joan shot back in her chair.

"But they had taught her to say that?"

Stella Croyle shook her head.

"They had taught her to dislike me. My little girl has character. She wouldn't have repeated the words, because she had been taught them. No, she meant them."

"But a day or two with you and she would have forgotten them. Oh, she _did_ forget them!"

In her great longing to comfort the woman, whose deep anguish she divined beneath the quiet desolation of her voice, Joan overleapt her own knowledge. She was still young enough to will that past events had not occurred, and that things true were false.

"I didn't take her," replied Stella Croyle. "I wouldn't take her. I knew baby--besides she had struck me too hard."

"You came away alone!" whispered Joan.

"In the cab which I had kept waiting at the door to take us both away."