Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies

by H. Rider Haggard

“Yes,” he answered, “I am fond of her, though of that the less said the better, and because our case is the same I hope that we shall always be friends.”

“You are very kind; I shall need a friend now. I am alone now, quite alone, and my heart is broken.”

Here it may be added that Morris was even better than his word. Out of the wealth that came to him in such plenty, for instance, he was careful to augment the old man’s resources without offending his feelings, by adding permanently and largely to the endowment of the living. Also, he attended to his wants in many other ways which need not be enumerated, and not least by constantly visiting him. Many were the odd hours and the evenings that shall be told of later, which they spent together smoking their pipes in the Rectory study, and talking of her who had gone, and whose lost life was the strongest link between them. Otherwise and elsewhere, except upon a few extraordinary occasions, her name rarely passed the lips of Morris.

Yet within himself he mourned and mourned, although even in the first bitterness not as one without hope. He knew that she had spoken truth; that she was not dead, but only for a while out of his sight and hearing.

Ten days had passed, and for Morris ten weary, almost sleepless, nights. The tragedy of the destruction of the new rector’s daughter in the ruins of the Dead Church no longer occupied the tongues of men and paragraphs in papers. One day the sea gave up the hood of her brown ulster, the same that Morris had been seen arranging by Stephen and Eliza Layard; it was found upon the beach. After this even the local police admitted that the conjectures as to her end must be true, and, since for the lack of anything to hold it on there could be no inquest, the excitement dwindled and died. Nor indeed, as her father announced that he was quite satisfied as to the circumstances of his daughter’s death, was any formal inquiry held concerning them. A few people, however, still believed that she was not really drowned but had gone away secretly for unknown private reasons. The world remembers few people, even if they be distinguished, for ten whole days. It has not time for such long-continued recollection of the dead, this world of the living who hurry on to join them.

If this is the case with the illustrious, the wealthy and the powerful, how much more must it be so in the instance of an almost unknown girl, a stranger in the land? Morris and her father remembered her, for she was part of their lives and lived on with their lives. Stephen Layard mourned for the woman whom he had wished to marry—fiercely at first, with the sharp pain of disappointed passion; then intermittently; and at last, after he was comfortably wedded to somebody else, with a mild and sentimental regret three or four times a year. Eliza, too, when once convinced that she was “really dead,” was “much shocked,” and talked vaguely of the judgments and dispensations of Providence, as though this victim were pre-eminently deserving of its most stern decrees. It was rumoured, however, among the observant that her Christian sorrow was, perhaps, tempered by a secret relief at the absence of a rival, who, as she now admitted, sang extremely well and had beautiful eyes.

The Colonel also thought of the guest whom the sea had given and taken away, and with a real regret, for this girl’s force, talents, and loveliness had touched and impressed him who had sufficient intellect and experience to know that she was a person cast in a rare and noble mould. But to Morris he never mentioned her name. No further confidence had passed between them on the matter. Yet he knew that to his son this name was holy. Therefore, being in some ways a wise man, he thought it well to keep his lips shut and to let the dead bury their dead.

By all the rest Stella Fregelius was soon as much forgotten as though she had never walked the world or breathed its air. That gale had done much damage and taken away many lives—all down the coast was heard the voice of mourning; hers chanced to be one of them, and there was nothing to be said.

On the morning of the eleventh day came a telegram from Mary addressed to Morris, and dated from London. It was brief and to the point. “Come to dinner with me at Seaview, and bring your father.—Mary.”

When Morris drove to Seaview that evening he was as a man is in a dream. Sorrow had done its work on him, agonising his nerves, till at length they seemed to be blunted as with a very excess of pain, much as the nerves of the victims of the Inquisition were sometimes blunted, till at length they could scarcely feel the pincers bite or the irons burn. Always abstemious, also, for this last twelve days he had scarcely swallowed enough food to support him, with the result that his body weakened and suffered with his mind.