Stella watched him ride away, turning at intervals to look at her till he was out of sight, and her eyes became suddenly dim with the thought—'Only eight more days before we must part!'
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Yes, these eight lengthening golden spring days swept on with cruel swiftness. And yet they held so much. The hours in which the heart is most deeply touched have something of the quality of eternity. They stretch backward and forward, allying themselves with all that is deepest and most enduring in human experience. Stella's was one of those complex, yet essentially feminine, natures which can only be gradually kindled with love. But when it comes to full being it is a passion which transforms all life. In place of discord there is harmony that before lay mute and unsuspected, like Hassan's gold covered over by common wood. The friendship which had ripened into the perfect blossom of love had been a very real one. Social intercourse is for the most part a pitifully shabby concern, in which the ashes of mere existence smother aspiration, the quick play of fancy, and the sympathetic flow of thoughts that range beyond merely egotistical aims; an affair in which men and women largely bear themselves as though they were automata moved only by the wheels of custom, taking thought mainly for the things that perish with the using. But fellowship with the kind of vitality which wakens deeper chords of thought and feeling is as the salt of life. There were moments at first in which Stella could have found it in her heart to be sorry that her friend had 'degenerated into a lover.' But if he had not, how unhappy she would have been! And how much she would have lost! Even the old faith she had given up seemed in some way gradually flowing back. When she prayed she no longer lost herself in weary conjectures as to its futility, doubting that her weak pitiful words could reach the great Omniscience, whose thought of order was the fixed law of all the starry hosts, doubting and wondering, till she seemed to be obliterated in a chaotic universe where nothing seemed certain but uncertainty.
And these long beautiful days passed without any of the jar and fuss and congratulation that would have robbed them of their serenity if the sweet notion of mere friendship had been abandoned. 'Please tell us about one of your hospital people,' Stella would say, as she often said before in the presence of her brothers, or their wives. And she would sit sewing and listening, hardly raising her eyes. There were so many people she had learned to know in this way—the old Scotch charwoman who never read fiction because, she said, it was mostly taken up by things that did not signify for this life or that which is to come; the little lame boy who told the sister of charity he did not believe God heard people about legs; the costermonger who had been run over, and whose wife candidly explained that the Lord had made him 'naterally so silly,' one could not tell oftentimes whether he was drunk or sober. And when they were alone after one of these episodes had been talked over, Stella would say with unaltered demureness, 'Dr. Langdale, do not go into partnership with your cousin in the West-End.'
'Why not, Miss Stella?' he would say with responding gravity.
'Because you like the poor so much, and'—dropping her voice with a quick change of manner—'we shall have enough money. And medicine has the trick of turning into a trade when it makes a big income.'
The 'we' had a magical sound to Langdale. Then sometimes they would talk of the work on which he had been engaged. At first he persisted he would tell her nothing about it till his return.
'You have woven so many brilliant fancies about it, St. Charity, and the reality is such homespun stuff.'
Then she found he had been engaged on a dual task—one a treatise on some aspects of hypnotism, the other on the conditions of factory labour. On this she expounded a brilliant plan by which they might be unified, and so produce a novel with a solid realistic background, relieved by incidents of ideal romance, in which 'suggestion' should play the part of the genii.
'Never were so many plots thrown away on a material, semi-Teutonic mind before,' laughed Langdale.