Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies

by H. Rider Haggard

Therefore it was not to the true welfare of Morris when through lack of further ambition, or rather of the sting of that spur of necessity which drives most men on, he rested upon his oars, and in practice abandoned his labours, drifting down the tide. No man of high intelligence and acquisitive brain can toil arduously for a period of years and suddenly cease from troubling to find himself, as he expects, at rest. For then into the swept and garnished chambers of that empty mind enter seven or more blue devils. Depression marks him for its own; melancholy forebodings haunt him; remorse for past misdeeds long repented of is his daily companion. With these Erinnyes, more felt perhaps than any of them, comes the devastating sense that he is thwarting the best instinct of his own nature and the divine command to labour while there is still light, because the night draws on apace in which no man can labour.

Mary was fond of society, in which she liked to be accompanied by her husband, so Morris, whose one great anxiety was to please his wife and fall in with her every wish, went to a great many parties which he hated. Mary liked change also, so it came about that three months in the season were spent in London, where they had purchased a house in Green Street that was much frequented by the Colonel, and another two, or sometimes three, months at the villa on the Riviera, which Mary was very fond of on account of its associations with her parents.

Also in the summer and shooting seasons, when they were at home, the old Abbey was kept full of guests; for we may be sure that people so rich and distinguished did not lack for friends, and Mary made the very best of hostesses.

Thus it happened that except at the seasons when his wife retired under the pressure of domestic occurrences, Morris found that he had but little time left in which to be quiet; that his life in short was no longer the life of a worker, but that of a commonplace country gentleman of wealth and fashion.

Now it was Mary who had brought these things about, and by design; for she was not a woman to act without reasons and an object. It is true that she liked a gay and pleasant life, for gaiety and pleasure were agreeable to her easy and somewhat indolent mind, also they gave her opportunities of exercising her faculties of observation, which were considerable.

But Mary was far fonder of her husband than of those and other vanities; indeed, her affection for him shone the guiding star of her existence. From her childhood she had been devoted to this cousin, who, since her earliest days, had been her playmate, and at heart had wished to marry him, and no one else. Then he began his experiments, and drifted quite away from her. Afterwards things changed, and they became engaged. Again the experiments were carried on, with the aid of another woman, and again he drifted away from her; also the drifting in this instance was attended by serious and painful complications.

Now the complications had ceased to exist; they threatened her happiness no more. Indeed, had they been much worse than they were she would have overlooked them, being altogether convinced of the truth of the old adage which points out the folly of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Whatever his failings or shortcomings, Morris was her joy, the human being in whose company she delighted; without whom, indeed, her life would be flat, stale, and unprofitable. The stronger then was her determination that he should not slip back into his former courses; those courses which in the end had always brought about estrangement from herself.

Inventions, the details of which she could not understand, meant, as she knew well, long days and weeks of solitary brooding; therefore inventions, and, indeed, all unnecessary work, were in his case to be discouraged. Such solitary brooding also drew from the mind of Morris a vague mist of thought about matters esoteric which, to Mary’s belief, had the properties of a miasma that crept like poison through his being. She wished for no more star-gazing, no more mysticism, and, above all, no more memories of the interloping woman who, in his company, had studied its doubtful and dangerous delights.

Although since the day of Morris’s confession Mary had never even mentioned the name of Stella to him, she by no means forgot that such a person once existed. Indeed, carelessly and without seeming to be anxious on the subject, she informed herself about her down to the last possible detail; so that within a few months of the death of Miss Fregelius she knew, as she thought, everything that could be known of her life at Monksland. Moreover, she saw three different pictures of her: one a somewhat prim photograph which Mr. Fregelius, her father, possessed, taken when she was about twenty; another, a coloured drawing made by Morris—who was rather clever at catching likenesses—of her as she appeared singing in the chapel on the night when she had drawn the page-boy, Thomas, from his slumbers; and the third, also a photograph, taken by some local amateur, of her and Morris standing together on the beach and engaged evidently in eager discussion.

From these three pictures, and especially from Morris’s sketch, which showed the spiritual light shining in her eyes, and her face rapt, as it were, in a very ecstasy of music, Mary was able to fashion with some certainty the likeness of the living woman. The more she studied this the more she found it formidable, and the more she understood how it came about that her husband had fallen into folly. Also, she learned to understand that there might be greater weight and meaning in his confession than she had been inclined to allow to it at the time; that, at any rate, its extravagances ought not to be set down entirely, as her father-in-law had suggested with such extreme cleverness, to the vagaries of a mind suffering from sudden shock and alarm.