Witness for the Defence

by A. E. W. Mason

"I don't know," answered Stella, still in the quick peremptory tone of one who will not be argued with. "I don't care either. I have nothing to do with wisdom just now. I don't want people at all. I want—oh, how I want—" She stopped and then she added vaguely: "Something else," and her voice trailed away into silence. She sat without a word, all tingling impatience, during the rest of that drive and continued so to sit after the carriage had stopped. When Jane Repton descended, and she woke up with a start and looked at the house, it was as though she brought her eyes down from heaven to earth. Once within the house she went straight up to Repton. He had left his wife behind with Stella at the Law Courts and had come home in advance of them. He had not spoken a word to Stella that day, and he had not the time now, for she began immediately in an eager voice and a look of fever in her eyes:

"You won't try to stop me, will you? I must go away to-morrow."

Repton used more tact now than his wife had done. He took the troubled and excited woman's hand and answered her very gently:

"Of course, Stella. You shall go when you like."

"Oh, thank you," she cried, and was freed to remember the debt which she owed to these good friends of hers. "You must think me a brute, Jane! I haven't said a word to you about all your kindness. But—oh, you'll think me ridiculous, when you know"—and she began to laugh and to sob in one breath. Stella Ballantyne had remained so sunk in apathy through all that long trial that her friends were relieved at her outburst of tears. Jane Repton led her upstairs and put her to bed just as if she had been a child.

"There! You can get up for dinner if you like, Stella, or stay where you are. And if you'll tell us what you want to do we'll make the arrangements for you and not ask you a question."

Jane Repton kissed her and left her alone; and it was while Stella was sleeping upstairs that Henry Thresk called at the house and was told that there was no news for him.

"No doubt she will write to you, Mr. Thresk, if she wishes you to know what she is doing. But I should not count upon it if I were you," said Jane Repton, in a sweet voice and with eyes like pebbles. "She did not mention you, I am sorry to say, when the trial was over."

She could not forgive him because of her own share in what she now called his "treachery" towards Stella. She had no more of the logician in her composition than Thresk had of the hero. He had committed under a great stress of emotion and sympathy what the whole experience and method of his life told him was one of the worst of crimes. And now that its object was achieved, and Stella Ballantyne free, he was in the mood to see only the harm which he had done to the majesty of the law; he was uneasy; he was not troubled by the thought that discovery would absolutely ruin him. That indeed did not enter into his thoughts. But he could not but make a picture of himself in the robe of a King's Counsel, claiming sternly the anger of the Law against some other man who should have done just what he had done, no more and no less. And so when Mrs. Repton's door was finally closed upon him, and no message was given to him from the woman he had saved, he was at once human and unheroic enough to visit a little of his resentment upon her. He had not spoken to her at all since the night at Chitipur; he had no knowledge of the stupor and the prostration into which, after her years of misery, she had fallen; he had no insight into the one compelling passion which now had her, body and soul, in its grip. He turned away from the door and went back to the Taj Mahal. A steamer would be starting for Port Said in two days and by that steamer he would travel. That Stella was in the house on the Khamballa Hill he did not doubt, but since she had no word or thought to spare for him he could not but turn his back and go.

Stella herself got up to dinner, and after it was over she told her friends of the longing which filled her soul.