The Second Fiddle Part 23

"You told me once, when you didn't know I cared," agreed Stella. "I understand your feeling that about a woman who didn't care or who only cared a little, but not about a woman who really cares."

"But, my dear child," said Julian, "that's what just makes it utterly impossible. I can't understand how I ever was such a selfish brute as to dream of taking Marian. I was ill at the time, and hadn't sized it up; but if you think I'm going to let _you_ make such a sacrifice, you're mistaken. I'd see you dead before I married you!"

Stella's eyebrows lifted, but she did not seem impressed.

"I think," she said gently, "you talk far too much as if it had only got to do with you. Suppose I don't wish to see myself dead?"

"Well, you must try to see the sense of it," Julian urged. "You're young and strong; you ought to have a life. I'm sure you love children. You like to be with me, and all that; you're the dearest companion a man ever had. It isn't easy, Stella, to say I won't keep you; don't make it any harder for me. I've looked at this thing steadily for months. I don't mind owning that I thought you might get to care if I tried hard enough to make you; but, darling, I honestly didn't try. You can't say I wasn't awfully disagreeable and cross. I knew I was done for long ago, but I thought you were all right. You weren't like a girl in love, you were so quiet and--and sisterly and all that. If I'd once felt you were beginning to care in that way, I'd have made some excuse; I wouldn't have let it come to this. I'd rather die than hurt you."

"Well, but you needn't hurt me," said Stella, "and neither of us need die. It's not your love that wants to get rid of me, Julian; it's your pride. But I haven't any pride in that sense, and I'm not going to let you do it."

"By Jove! you won't!" cried Julian. His eyes shot a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt at her. It struck him that the still little figure by his side was extraordinarily formidable. He had never thought her formidable before.

He had thought her brilliant, intelligent, and enchanting, not formidable; but he had no intention of giving way to her. Formidable or not, he felt quite sure of himself. He couldn't let her down.

"The sacrifice is all the other way," Stella went on. "You would be sacrificing me hopelessly to your pride if you refused to marry me simply because some one of all the things you want to give me you can't give me. Do you suppose I don't mind,--mind for you, I mean, hideously,--mind so much that if I were sure marrying you would make you feel the loss more, I'd go away from you this minute and never come near you again? But I do not think it will make it worse for you. You will have me; you will have my love and companions.h.i.+p, and they are--valuable to you, aren't they, Julian?"

Julian's eyes softened and filled.

"Yes," he muttered, turning his head away from her; "they're valuable."

"Then," she said, "if you are like that to me, if I want you always, and never anybody else, have you a right to rob me of yourself, Julian?"

"If I could believe," he said, his voice shaking, "that you'd never be sorry, never say to yourself, 'Why did I do it?' But, oh, my dear, you know so little about the ordinary kind of love! You don't realize a bit, and I do. It must make it all so confoundedly hard for you, and I'm such an impatient chap. I mightn't be able to help you. And you're right: I'm proud. If I once thought you cared less or regretted marrying me, it would clean put the finish on it. But you're not right about not loving you, Stella, that's worse than pride; loving you makes it impossible. I can't take the risk for you. I'll do any other mortal thing you want, but not that!"

"Julian," asked Stella in a low voice, "do you think I am a human being?"

"Well, no!" said Julian. "Since you ask me, more like a fairy or an elf or something. Why?"

"Because you're not treating me as if I were," said Stella, steadily.

"Human beings have a right to their own risks. They know their own minds, they share the dangers of love."

"Then one of 'em mustn't take them all," said Julian, quickly.

"How could one take them all?" said Stella. "I have to risk your pride, and you have to risk my regret. As a matter of fact, your pride is more of a certainty than a risk, and my regret is a wholly imaginary idea, founded upon your ignorance of my character. Still, I'm willing to put it like that to please you. You have every right to sacrifice yourself to your own theories, but what about sacrificing me? I give you no such right."

For the first time Julian saw what loving Stella would be like; he would never be able to get to the end of it. Marriage would be only the beginning. She had given him her heart without an effort, and he found that she was as inaccessible as ever. His soul leaped toward this new, unconquerable citadel. He held himself in hand with a great effort.

"What you don't realize," he said, "is that our knowledge of life is not equal. If I take you at your word, you will make discoveries which it will be too late for you to act upon. You cannot wish me to do what is not fair to you."

"I want my life to be with you," said Stella. "Whatever discoveries I make, I shall not want them to be anywhere else. You do not understand, but if you send me away, you will take from me the future which we might have used together. You will not be giving me anything in its place but disappointment and utter uselessness. You'll make me--morally--a cripple. Do you still wish me to go away from you?"

Julian winced as if she had struck him.

"No, I'll marry you," he said; "but you've made me furiously angry.

Please go home by yourself. I wonder you dare use such an ill.u.s.tration to me."

Stella slipped over the verge of the hollow. She, too, wondered how she had dared; but she knew quite well that if she hadn't dared, Julian would have sent her away.

CHAPTER XXIV

Stella was afraid that when she went down to dinner it would be like slipping into another life--a life to which she was attached by her love for Julian, but to which she did not belong. It did not seem possible to her that Lady Verny would be able to bear her as a daughter-in-law. As a secretary it had not mattered in the least that she was shabby and socially ineffective. And she couldn't be different; they'd have to take her like that if they took her at all. She ranged them together in her fear of their stateliness; she almost wished that they wouldn't take her at all, but let her slink back to Redcliffe Square and bury herself in her own insignificance.

But when she went down-stairs she found herself caught in a swift embrace by Lady Verny, and meeting without any barrier the adoration of Julian's eyes.

"My dear, my dear," said Lady Verny, "I always felt that you belonged to me."

"But are you pleased?" whispered Stella in astonishment.

"Pleased!" cried Lady Verny, with a little shaken laugh. "I'm satisfied; a thing that at my age I hardly had the right to expect."

"Mother thinks it's all her doing," Julian explained. "It's her theory that we've shown no more initiative than a couple of guaranteed Dutch bulbs. Shall I tell you what she was saying before you came down-stairs?"

"Dear Julian," said Lady Verny, blus.h.i.+ng like a girl, "you're so dreadfully modern, you will frighten Stella if you say things to her so quickly before she has got used to the idea of you."

"She's perfectly used to the idea of me," laughed Julian, "and I've tried frightening her already without the slightest success. Besides, there's nothing modern about a madonna lily, which is what we were discussing. My mother said, Stella, that she didn't care very much for madonna lilies in the garden. They're too ecclesiastical for the other flowers, but very suitable in church for weddings. And out in ten days'

time, didn't you say, Mother? I hope they haven't any of Stella's procrastinating habits."

"You mustn't mind his teasing, dear," Lady Verny said, smiling. "We will go in to dinner now. You're a little late, but no wonder. I am delighted to feel that now I have a right to scold you."

"The thing that pleases me most," said Julian, "is that I shall be able to remove Stella's apples and pears forcibly from her plate and peel them myself. I forget how long she has been here, but the anguish I have suffered meal by meal as I saw her plod her unreflecting way over their delicate surfaces, beginning at the stalk and slas.h.i.+ng upward without consideration for any of the laws of nature, nothing but the self-control of a host could have compelled me to endure. I offered to peel them for her once, but she said she liked peeling them; and I was far too polite to say, 'Darling, you've got to hand them over to me.'

I'm going to say it now, though, every time."

"Hush, dear," said Lady Verny, nervously. "Thompson has barely shut the door. I really don't know what has happened to your behavior."

"I haven't any," said Julian. "I'm like the old lady in the earthquake who found herself in the street with no clothes on. She bowed gravely to a gentleman she had met the day before and said, 'I should be happy to give you my card, Mr. Jones, but I have lost the receptacle.' Things like that happen in earthquakes. I have lost my receptacle." He met Stella's eyes and took the consent of her laughter. He was as happy with her as a boy set loose from school.

Lady Verny, watching him, was almost frightened at his lack of self-restraint. "He has never trusted any one like this before," she thought. "He is keeping nothing back." It was like seeing the released waters of a frozen stream.

While they sat in the hall before Julian rejoined them, Lady Verny showed Stella all the photographs of Julian taken since he was a baby.

There was a singularly truculent one of him, at three years old, with a menacingly poised cricket-bat, which Stella liked best of all. Lady Verny had no copy of it, but she pressed Stella to take it.

"Julian will give you so many things," she said; "but I want to give you something that you will value, and which is quite my own." So Stella took the truculent baby, which was Lady Verny's own.

"You look very comfortable sitting there together; I won't disturb you for chess," Julian observed when he came in shortly afterward. "I was wondering if you would like to hear what I did in Germany. It's a year old now and as safe with you as with me, but it mustn't go any further."

Julian told his story very quietly, leaning back against the cus.h.i.+ons of a couch by the open window. Above his head, Stella could see the dark shapes of the black yew hedges and the wheeling of the bats as they scurried to and fro upon their secret errands.

Neither Lady Verny nor Stella moved until Julian had finished speaking.

It was the most thrilling of detective stories; but it is not often that the roots of our being are involved in detective stories.

They could not believe that he lay there before them, tranquilly smoking a cigarette and breathed on by the soft June air. As they watched his face comfort and security vanished. They were in a ruthless world where a false step meant death. Julian had been in danger, but it was never the danger which he had been in that he described; it was the work he had set out to do and the way he had done it. He noticed danger only when it obstructed him. Then he put his wits to meet it. They were, as Stella realized, very exceptional wits for meeting things. Julian combined imagination with strict adherence to fact. He had the courage which never broods over an essential risk and the caution which avoids all unnecessary ones.

"Of course," he broke off for a moment, "you felt all the time rather like a flea under a microscope. Don't underrate the Germans. As a microscope there's nothing to beat them; where the microscope leaves off is where their miscalculations begin. A microscope can tell everything about a flea except where it is going to hop.