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"I care very much what becomes of you. I should not be here if I did not wish to do what is best for you."
"Then you come as my friend, and not as my enemy?" said Stella.
"Yes, I am here as your friend," answered Christabel, with an effort.
The actress – a creature all impulse and emotion – fell on her knees at Miss Courtenay's feet, and pressed her lips upon the lady's gloved hand.
"How good you are," she exclaimed – "how good – how good. I have read of such women – they swarm in the novels I get from Mudie – they and fiends. There's no middle distance. But I never believed in them. When the man brought me your card I thought you had come to blackguard me."
Christabel shuddered at the coarse word, so out of harmony with that vellum-bound Shelley, and all the graciousness of Miss Mayne's surroundings.
"Forgive me," said Stella, seeing her disgust. "I am horribly vulgar. I never was like that while – while Angus cared for me."
"Why did he leave off caring for you?" asked Christabel, looking gravely down at the lovely up-turned face – so exquisite in its fragile sensitive beauty.
Now Stella Mayne was one of those complex creatures, quite out of the range of a truthful woman's understanding – a creature who could be candour itself – could gush and prattle with the innocent expansiveness of a child, so long as there was nothing she particularly desired to conceal – yet who could lie with the same sweet air of childlike simplicity, when it served her purpose – lie with the calm stolidity, the invincible assurance, of an untruthful child. She did not answer Christabel's question immediately, but looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, wondering how much of her history this young lady knew, and to what extent lying might serve. She had slipped from her knees to a sitting position on the Persian hearthrug, her thin, semi-transparent hands clasped upon her knee, the triple circlet of gems flashing in the low sunlight.
"Why did we part?" she asked, shrugging her shoulders. "I hardly know. Temper, I suppose. He has not too good a temper, and I – well, I am a demon when I am ill – and I am often ill."
"You keep his portrait on your table," said Christabel.
"Keep it? Yes – and round my neck," answered Stella, jerking a gold locket out of her loose gown, and opening it to show the miniature inside. "I have worn his picture against my heart ever since he gave it me – during our first Italian tour. I shall wear it so when I am dead. Yes – when he is married, and happy with you, and I am lying in my grave in Hendon Churchyard. Do you know I have bought and paid for my grave?"
"Why did you do that?"
"Because I wanted to make sure of not being buried in a cemetery – a city of the dead – streets and squares and alleys of gravestones. I have chosen a spot under a great spreading cedar, in a churchyard that might be a hundred miles from London – and yet it is quite near here, and handy for those who will have to take me. I shall not give any one too much trouble. Perhaps, if you will let him, Angus may come to my funeral, and drop a bunch of violets on my coffin."
"Why do you talk like that?"
"Because the end cannot be very far off. Do you think I look as if I should live to be a grandmother?"
The hectic bloom, the unnatural light in those lovely eyes, the transparent hands, and purple-tinted nails, did not, indeed, point to such a conclusion.
"If you are really ill why do you go on acting?" asked Christabel, gently. "Surely the fatigue and excitement must be very bad for you."
"I hardly know. The fatigue may be killing me, but the excitement is the only thing that keeps me alive. Besides, I must live – thirty pounds a week is a consideration."
"But – you are not in want of money?" exclaimed Christabel. "Mr. Hamleigh would never – "
"Leave me to starve," interrupted Stella, hurriedly; "no, I have plenty of money. While – while we were happy Mr. Hamleigh lavished his money upon me – he was always absurdly generous – and if I wanted money now I should have but to hold out my hand. I have never known the want of money since I left my attic – four and sixpence a week, with the use of the kitchen fire, to boil a kettle, or cook a chop – when my resources rose to a chop – it was oftener a bloater. Do you know, the other day, when I was dreadfully ill and they had been worrying me with invalid turtle, jellies, oysters, caviare, all kinds of loathsome daintinesses – and the doctor said I should die if I didn't eat – I thought perhaps I might get back the old appetite for bloater and bread and butter – I used to enjoy a bloater tea so in those old days – but it was no use – the very smell of the thing almost killed me – the whole house was poisoned with it."
She prattled on, looking up at Christabel with a confiding smile. The visit had taken quite a pleasant turn. She had no idea that anything serious was to come of it. Her quondam lover's affianced wife had taken it into her head to come and see what kind of stuff Mr. Hamleigh's former idol was made of – that was all – and the lady's amiability was making the interview altogether agreeable.
Yet, in another moment, the pain and sorrow in Christabel's face showed her and there was something stronger than frivolous curiosity in the lady's mind.
"Pray be serious with me," said Christabel. "Remember that the welfare of three people depends upon my resolution in this matter. It would be easy for me to say – I will shut my eyes to the past: he has told me that he loves me – and I will believe him. But I will not do that. I will not live a life of suspicion and unrest, just for the sweet privilege of bearing him company, and being called by his name – dear as that thought is to me. No, it shall be all or nothing. If I cannot have his whole heart I will have none of it. You confess that you wear his picture next your heart. Do you still love him?"
"Yes – always – always – always," answered the actress, fervently. This at least was no bold-faced lie – there was truth's divine accent here. "There is no man like him on this earth." And then in low impassioned tones she quoted those passionate lines of Mrs. Browning's: —
There is no one beside thee, and no one above thee;
Thou standest alone as the nightingale sings;
And my words, that would praise thee, are impotent things.
"And do you believe that he has quite left off loving you?"
"No," answered the actress, looking up at her with flashing eyes, "I don't believe it. I don't believe he could after all we have been to each other. It isn't in human nature to forget such love as ours."
"And you believe – if he were free – if he had not engaged himself to me – perhaps hardly intending it – he would come back to you?"
"Yes, if he knew how ill I am – if he knew what the doctor says about me – I believe he would come back."
"And marry you?" asked Christabel, deadly pale.
"That's as may be," retorted the other, with her Parisian shrug.
Christabel stood up, and laid her clenched hand on the low draperied mantelpiece, almost as if she were laying it on an altar to give emphasis to an oath. "Then he shall come back – then he shall marry you," she said in a grave earnest voice. "I will rob no woman of her husband. I will doom no fellow-creature to lifelong shame!"
"What," cried Stella Mayne, with almost a shriek, "you will give him up – for me!"
"Yes. He has never belonged to me as he has belonged to you – it is no shame for me to renounce him – grief and pain – yes, grief and pain unspeakable – but no disgrace. He has sinned, and he must atone for his sin. I will not be the impediment to your marriage."
"But if you were to give him up he might not marry me: men are so difficult to manage," faltered the actress, aghast at the idea of such a sacrifice, seeing the whole business in the light of circumstances unknown to Miss Courtenay.
"Not men with conscience and honour," answered Christabel, with unshaken firmness. "I feel very sure that if Mr. Hamleigh were free he would do what is right. It is only his engagement to me that hinders his making atonement to you. He has lived among worldly people who have never reminded him of his duty – who have blunted his finer feelings with their hideous wordliness – oh, I know how worldly women talk – as if there were neither hell nor heaven, only Belgravia and Mayfair – and no doubt worldly men are still worse. But he – he whom I have so loved and honoured – cannot be without honour and conscience. He shall do what is just and right."
She looked almost inspired as she stood there with pale cheeks and kindling eyes, thinking far more of that broad principle of justice than of the fragile emotional creature trembling before her. This comes of feeding a girl's mind with Shakespeare and Bacon, Carlyle and Plato, to say nothing of that still broader and safer guide, the Gospel.
Just then there was the sound of footsteps approaching the door – a measured masculine footfall. The emotional creature flew to the door, opened it, murmured a few words to some person without, and closed it, but not before a whiff of Latakia had been wafted into the flower-scented room. The footsteps moved away in another direction, and Christabel was much too absorbed to notice that faint breath of tobacco.
"There's not the least use in your giving him up," said Stella, resolutely: "he would never marry me. You don't know him as well as I do."
"Do I not? I have lived only to study his character for the best part of a year. I know he will do what is just."
Stella Mayne suddenly clasped her hands before her face and sobbed aloud.
"Oh, if I were only good and innocent like you!" she cried, piteously; "how I detest myself as I stand here before you! – how loathsome – how hateful I am!"
"No, no," murmured Christabel, soothingly, "you are not hateful: it is only impenitent sin that is hateful. You were led into wrong-doing because you were ignorant of right – there was no one to teach you – no one to uphold you. And he who tempted you is in duty bound to make amends. Trust me – trust me – it is better for my peace as well as for yours that he should do his duty. And now good-by – I have stayed too long already."
Again Stella Mayne fell on her knees and clasped this divine visitant's hand. It seemed to this weak yet fervid soul almost as if some angel guest had crossed her threshold. Christabel stooped and would have kissed the actress's forehead.
"No," she cried, hysterically, "don't kiss me – don't – you don't know. I should feel like Judas."
"Good-by, then. Trust me." And so they parted.
A tall man, with an iron-grey moustache and a soldier-like bearing, came out of a little study, cigarette in hand, as the outer door closed on Christabel. "Who the deuce is that thoroughbred-looking girl?" asked this gentleman. "Have you got some of the neighbouring swells to call upon you, at last? Why, what's the row, Fishky, you've been crying?"
Fishky was the stage-carpenters', dressers' and supernumeraries' pronunciation of the character which Miss Mayne acted nightly, and had been sportively adopted by her intimates as a pet name for herself.
"That lady is Miss Courtenay."
"The lady Hamleigh is going to marry? What the devil is she doing in this galère? I hope she hasn't been making herself unpleasant?"
"She is an angel."
"With all my heart. Hamleigh is very welcome to her, so long as he leaves me my dear little demon," answered the soldier, smiling down from his altitude of six feet two at the sylph-like form in the Watteau gown.
"Oh, how I wish I had never seen your face," said Stella: "I should be almost a good woman, if there were no such person as you in the world."