Then she forgot about him, because the room was beginning to talk, as a room does when someone settles down within it who it feels belongs there. The small fire whispered beside her, and the seashell murmured. The dress of the shepherdess rustled as she leaned towards the shepherd, who was singing a song to her under his breath. A phrase of music came from the horn hanging on the paneling, and the candle flames leaped and laughed. All the infinitesimal sounds together made up the voice of the room. "Yes," said Stella. "Thank you. I won’t forget." And she sighed with relief, for what she had heard comforted her grief for Sol. Her childhood was slipping away from her and she was not hearing as clearly as she used to do. She could remember when she had been able to hear the feet of a fly on a windowpane and the music of the stars. Tonight she had had to listen very attentively to hear what the room was saying, and perhaps after all, as time went on, she would forget what it had said. But she would remember that it had said something that was full of reassurance, something about coming back to the awareness of childhood again when one had finished being old, hearing again, seeing again, only more clearly than before. And it would be good to be a woman, it would have its compensations. She thought of the bride and groom standing here together after their wedding, and of the baby in its cradle, and she smiled as she sewed.
3
The man who sat wrapped in his cloak under the yew tree, looking out to sea, sighed and got up reluctantly, obeying the promptings of a conscience that suggested that sitting out of doors in a December dusk was not the wisest course of action for a man recently recovered from an illness. The doctor would doubtless have forbidden his walk here, had he been at home. Yet the evening was as balmy as spring, and one seldom took harm from doing what one wanted to do. He had to come back to this place of strength, sit here for a while, and let it toughen his fibers, listening to the silence that wrapped itself about the music he could not hear, and putting his finger in the print on the stone. When he stood up to go, he found that the sheep had gathered close about him. That was odd, he thought. He had borrowed a stick of the doctor’s to help him up the hill, and leaning upon it, he moved among them like a shepherd.
He saw the warm glow of firelight and candlelight shining from the little parlor as he went down the hill. Was Stella there? He crossed the lane, went up the steps, and into the garden. He moved noiselessly among the yew trees until he could see into the small green parlor. She was there, her dark head bent over her sewing, looking like a fairy-tale princess in her bower. The open workbox stood on a stool beside her, the candlelight caught the gleam of silver on a horn that hung upon the wall. He was a lover again, his soul in his eyes as he watched. For perhaps ten minutes he stood motionless, and then, as a lover might have done, he flushed. What right had he to spy on her? This was a hateful thing that he was doing. He turned abruptly away, then with a sudden exclamation drew back again into the shadows.
Who was this mounting the steps and lifting the latch of the gate, the rising moon glinting upon his silver helmet and the red rose stuck jauntily behind his ear? Was it the owner of the fairy horn, come to claim it in his lady’s bower? The young knight strode up the garden path, and the Abbé just noticed that he had a crimson cross upon his breast before his startled attention was captured by the sight of a large green dragon wedged in the gate. His tail was caught in the bottom bar, and he swore loudly as he tugged it free.
Stella heard him, glanced through the window, jumped to her feet, darted from the parlor, and appeared at the front door, clapping her hands delightedly. "St. George!" she cried. "St. George for Merry England! A happy Christmas!"
"A happy Christmas to ee all at Weekaborough," shouted St. George heartily in broad Devon. "How de ye fadge, maid Stella? ’Tis a bowerly woman ee be growin’ then."
The Abbé, enlightened, smiled and drew back into the shadows to watch the happy scene to its conclusion. He would never forget, he thought, the picture of the moon-washed house with its beautiful tall chimneys soaring up against the stars, the door flung wide in welcome with the light streaming out, and the bright figures of the mummers moving up in procession through the dark yews to be welcomed by the little girl in the flowered dress who dropped a curtsey to each of the fairy-tale figures whom she knew so well. St. Andrew, St. Patrick, and St. David, Saladin and the King ofyligypt, the Prince of Paradine with his blackened face, the Fool with his bells and motley, old Father Christmas and the Valiant Slasher, and other strange creatures masked like the spirits in Comus, with a Trumpeter in a scarlet cloak bringing up the rear. This last character halted at the front door, turned and blew his trumpet. "To commemorate the Holy Wars," he cried, "and the happy festival of Christmas." Then he went in with a last swirl of his red cloak, and the door was shut.
The Abbé walked slowly home, wondering what sort of a masque was being performed now in the cave of the Weekaborough kitchen. Some strange confusion of the Crusaders and the three Wise Men, the fairies and the saints, something woven of such diverse strands, reaching back to such distant centuries, that no one knew what it meant any more. But these country folk did not worry about the meaning of things. It was the penalty of too much so-called education, the Abbé thought, that one tended to feel oneself more and more a spectator of the drama of life, rather than an actor in it. Those people, caught up in the pageant of the earth itself, did not analyze. They were better employed playing their full-blooded and richly satisfying parts.
"What you said was true," he said to Dr. Crane that night. “In the deep heart of this country the fairy world is still quite extraordinarily near the surface."
Book III
THE CHAPEL
CHAPTER I
1
The sunshine of a May morning filled Mrs. Loraine’s parlor, where she and Stella sat sewing. Mrs. Loraine was making a scarlet flannel petticoat, and Stella was working on her sampler.
"Just six months ago today, Stella, you came to me," said Mrs. Loraine.
"Yes, Ma’am," said Stella, "and two years and four months since Mon Pere first brought me to see you."
They looked at each other and laughed. It seemed incredible that, just over two years ago, they had not known each other, and now they knew that they would always know each other.
"There are just seven people in the world about whom I feel that," said Stella.
"About whom you feel what, child?" asked Mrs. Loraine. She could not always follow the quick flights of Stella’s mind it was like trying to follow the dartings of a swallow but she found the effort to do so immensely rejuvenating. She had forgotten how stimulating the society of the young can be. Stella launched out into each new day like an explorer into undiscovered country. Her own mind and soul, the world about her, were equally full of marvels to be encountered one by one with astonishment and joy. Mrs. Loraine, making her discoveries with her, found them familiar yet forgotten treasures. She had found these jewels herself once, turned them over, marveled at them, and put them aside uncomprehended. Now, finding them all over again in Stella’s com- pany, she had more understanding. In her old age, she had come back to the place where she had started from, and had discovered that the intuition of youth and the wisdom of age were two keys that unlocked the same door.
"That I shall know them forever and ever," said Stella, and dropping her work she ticked them off on her fingers. "Father and Mother Sprigg, Sol, Dr. Crane, Mon Pere, you, Ma’am, and Zachary."
Mrs. Loraine knew all about Zachary. Stella had not actually told her much about the young sailor, now serving under Hardy on the South American station, but she had told that little in such a way that the old lady was now aware of Zachary as an actual presence in her house. She marveled that the love of a thirteen-year-old girl for a boy whom she had not seen for more than two years could have such evocative power. Yet it was so. When Stella came into the house, Zachary came in, too. It would hardly have astonished Mrs. Loraine had she met him one day upon the stairs or in the garden, and she would have recognized him at once.
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"How does one know that about people?" asked Stella. Mrs. Loraine, remembering that this awareness of an eternal relationship had come like a shaft of light upon her own fourteenth birthday (Stella, as always, was beforehand with hers) laid down her work also and thought about it. They were always dropping their work, these two, while they bent their heads over Stella’s newest discovery.
"I think it’s a case of recognition, Stella," said the old lady slowly. "I think God creates what one might call spiritual families, people who may or may not be physically related to each other, but who will travel together the whole of the way. And it’s a long way."
Stella nodded, for she saw that Mrs. Loraine was right about recognition. Zachary, Mon Pére, and Mrs. Loraine herself, had never seemed strangers to her.
They became engrossed in their work again, and while she stitched, Mrs. Loraine retraced in her mind the steps that had brought Stella to her home. At their first meeting their recognition had been swift and happy, and she had noticed that in Stella’s shy delight in her house, her parlor, and her treasures, there was a good deal more than the curiosity of a child. There had been something of the pleasure of a homecoming. The Abbé had noticed it too. "She felt in her right setting," he had said to Mrs. Loraine later.
“Is not her own home her right settingP" Mrs. Loraine had asked.
"She loves it," he had replied. "If you remember, in the old tales the fairy children of human foster-parents always loved them, though it was not always in their power to stay with them for long."
Their meetings had become more and more frequent, and two years later Stella had had her first real parting with Father and Mother Sprigg. It was not a very severe parting, for she still spent the week ends at Weekaborough, but from Monday morning until Friday evening she lived with Mrs. Loraine, and Mother Sprigg had nearly died of a broken heart when she began to do it.
It had been Stella’s own doing.
“Stella, I wish you need not go home," Mrs. Loraine had cried out one day, after the Abbe had brought her to tea and they were taking their leave. It had been a real cry of distress, for the evening stretched before her empty and lonely, and the rare company of the little girl had become very precious to her.
Stella, tying her bonnet strings, had considered this. Weekaborough would always be to her the dearest place on earth, and there would never be another foster-mother like Mother Sprigg, but there was in Mrs. Loraine and her little house a quality of fastidious beauty that satisfied something in Stella that had not yet been satisfied, and there was no doubt in her mind that Mrs. Loraine needed her. Araminta was so busy looking after the house that she did not have much time to sit with her mistress, and when she did keep her company, she was cross. Stella, as usual, had come directly to the point.
"Would you like me to live with you, Ma’am?" she had asked.
"Yes, Stella."
"Well, I could not live with you always because of Mother Sprigg, but I could live half the time with you and half with Mother Sprigg."
"We’ll think about it," the Abbé had intervened, and no more had been said that night.
Mrs. Loraine had talked it over with the Abbé, and the Abbé with the doctor, and the doctor with great courage had approached Father and Mother Sprigg.
“My Stella a little maidservant?" had ejaculated Mother Sprigg. "It surprises me, doctor, that you could even think of such a thing. Her father and I have brought her up to better things and I should be obliged to you if we could now consider the matter closed."
Father Sprigg had expressed himself much more forcibly, and had taken much longer over it.
The doctor, when he could make himself heard, had explained that, though she would be paid a little for her services, Stella would be with Mrs. Loraine in the capacity not of maidservant but adopted granddaughter. Her duties would be light-dusting, washing china, and arranging flowers. And Mrs. Loraine would teach her accomplishments that could not be learned at Weekaborough. Those would include the playing of the spinet, and the art of genteel conversation both in French and English.
The thought of his Stella chattering French, and playing the spinet like a lady entirely won Father Sprigg. He was too large hearted, and perhaps too unimaginative, to resent, as did Mother Sprigg, benefits to Stellathat would tend to separate her from them. And Mother Sprigg finally yielded, too. She was a born mother, and if her possessiveness was strong, her love was stronger.
And so it had come about, and in these last six months Stella had grown at a most astonishing pace in body, mind, and spirit.
2
Stella finished embroidering a green dolphin with golden fins, and Mrs. Loraine finished the flannel petticoat, and put her feet up on the sofa, while Stella read aloud from a little book of French fables, all written in words of as few syllables as possible for those of tender years. Well grounded by the doctor in Latin, she was learning French with astonishing ease, and with a correctness of pronunciation that astonished the old lady. She could not understand how a farmer’s child could be so swift to learn, so naturally fastidious and sensitive as was this child. She could see now how the Abbé, encountering Stella, had not been able to lose sight of her again. Stella was something that, once found, one held to tightly. She was one of that rare company who are the Almighty’s justification for having made the human race.
Araminta came in with a glass of wine for Mrs. Loraine, a mug of milk for Stella, two queen cakes, and the announcement that the hired chaise was waiting. Mrs. Loraine now, very occasionally, took a morning drive, and she intended this morning to visit the Cockington almshouses with a basket of comforts for the inmates.
They took their refreshment, and went upstairs to put on their bonnets, while Araminta added the completed petticoat to the packets. of tea, peppermint, and sugar in the basket in the hall. To Mrs. Loraine’s surprise, Araminta had not resented the addition of Stella to the household. She liked the child, she liked to hear the spinet being played again, and above all she liked to see the cedarwood workbox once more resting on its appointed table, even though it was Stella who used it now, and not Mrs. Loraine.
The chaise was hired from the Crown and Anchor, and it would have been difficult to say which was the oldest, the chaise itself with its moth-eaten cushions, the half-blind white horse who pulled it, or the deaf coachman, in his mustard-colored livery with tarnished brass buttons, who sat upon the box. The whole equipage moved so slowly that it would have been quicker to walk, but on a fine May morning it was no penance to move slowly, and have time to gloat over each flower and tree beside the way. They had the hood down today, it was so fine and warm, and only a light rug across their knees, and Mrs. Loraine carried her summer parasol of gray silk with a silver fringe.
"You look beautiful, Ma’am," said Stella simply, and indeed in her gray mantle and gray velvet bonnet, and sitting very upright on her seat, Mrs. Loraine was a most regal figure. Stella herself, wearing a new green cloak and a green bonnet trimmed with daisies, and holding herself with the stately grace that she had quite unconsciously copied from her benefactress, was also a pleasing sight.
As they drove slowly away, Stella looked back at the small white house with its blue front door and brass knocker, and at the garden filled with a tangle of sweet-scented wall flowers. She looked, too, at Torre Church, and at the holy well of St. Elfride with its stone archway. The meadows between Torre village and the beach were bright with buttercups, and bordered with meadowsweet. The wind from the sea, blowing over them, brought wafts of sweet scent that made her wrinkle her nose with pleasure. This hamlet of
Torre was a part of her now, and she loved it. Home was no longer just Gentian Hill, Weekaborough, and Bowerly Hill, it had widened to take in Torre Village, the Abbey, St. Michael’s Chapel, Torquay, and the church under the sea that she had visited only in her dream.
"And Cockington," she said to Mrs. Loraine.
"What, dear?"
"After today I shall belong to Cockington, too."
"You’ve been there before, dear."
"Only driving past. Not going right inside the park like we’ll do today.
They bumped slowly along over the ruts of Robber’s Lane. Oak trees, on fire with their spring leaves, arched over their heads, and the steep banks on either side were covered with bluebells and pink campion. When they stopped to admire the view through a gateway, they could hear the torrent of birdsong that flowed up from the earth with such passion that the sound of the waves breaking on the beach was drowned in it.
They drove on through Cockington village with its whitewashed thatched cottages and its fourteenth century forge with a large pond in front of it. A stream ran down one side of the village street and the sound of running water seemed a part of Cockington. Its very name meant a settlement near the springs. Then they turned in through the gates of Cockington park. The church and almshouses, as well as the manor, were within the park, and visitors to them might drive through it when they pleased. Most of the famous Cockington deer had been sold by the present lord of the manor, but there were still a few of them left grazing under the great trees, their dappled bodies lovely in the sunlight. The trees parted, the manor came in sight, and Stella sighed with delight.
The manor was a beautiful three-storied house with a courtyard in front of it. To the left, a gateway in the wall led into the pleasance, and beyond was the church. To the right were the kennels, stables, and almshouses.
"Have you been inside the church, Ma’am?" asked Stella eagerly, her imagination caught by the beautiful Norman tower rising above the trees.
"My dear, I am a Catholic," said Mrs. Loraine severely.
"Have you been inside the manor, Ma’am?"