"That," was the separation which some day or another--after a long and wondrous period--both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not possible!
Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman"s reply. He handed her the first of the two.
"This reached me this morning."
Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the letters would not be still.
"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.
"It offers me service abroad."
Stella"s face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the cablegram.
"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.
"Further south, in the Sudan--Heaven knows where!"
"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."
"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.
Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.
"But you are not going! You can"t go!"
Luttrell handed to her the second paper.
"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.
"Yet it is what I would have written."
Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell"s cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway. If a woman"s glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.
"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"
"Yes."
"To a cable of yours?"
"Sent three days ago."
The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery. The appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen it--so she thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a sinner on his bed.
She stared at the telegrams--not reading them. His arguments and prefaces--the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it--what she had caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the personal reason.
"You are tired of me."
"No," Luttrell answered hotly. "That"s not true--not even a half-truth.
If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy."
"But you are!" Her voice rose shrill in its violence. "You know you are but you are too much of a coward to say so--oh, like all men!" and as Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a remonstrant "Hush!", she continued bitterly, "What do I care if they all hear? I am impossible! You know that, don"t you? I am quite impossible!
I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you hate--one of the Undisciplined."
Stella Croyle hardly knew in her pa.s.sion what she was saying, and Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pa.s.s. It pa.s.sed with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from mood to mood.
He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. "Oh, Wub, what have I done that you should treat me so?"
Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of her lips what she was saying.
"These nicknames are the very devil," he exclaimed, apparently about nothing, to his startled neighbour. "The first thing a woman does when she"s fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn"t belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit, she uses it--publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents her. Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That"s the nickname I am referring to, my dear, when I say it"s the very devil."
The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which was to a.s.sert that she had never been in love. For the practice seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for aeneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter. "Wobbles" had been the first name which Stella Croyle had invented for Harry Luttrell, though by what devious process she had lighted upon it, psychology could not have discovered. "Wub" was the nickname within the nickname, the cherished sign that the two of them lived apart in a little close-hedged garden of their own. Luttrell"s eyes were upon her as she spoke it. And she spoke it with a curious little wistful pursing of soft lips so that it came to him winged with the memory of all her kisses.
"Oh, Wub, must you leave me?" she pleaded in a breaking whisper. "What will be left to me if you do?"
Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands. All the character which he had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal.
But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace. He tried to realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before.
There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever afterwards forgive. But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper at his ear and how could he look forward so far?
"Stella!"
He turned impulsively towards her.
"The game"s up," reflected Sir Charles Hardiman at the end of the table.
"Calypso wins--no, by G.o.d!"
For before Luttrell could speak another word, the music crashed and all that a.s.semblage was on its feet. The orchestra was playing the Swedish National Anthem; and upon that, one after the other, followed the hymns of the peoples who had taken part in the Games. In turn the representatives of each people stood and resumed their seat, the music underlining their individuality and parking them in sections, even as rivalry had parked them in the Stadium. The majestic anthem of Russia, the paean of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, the livelier march of Italy, the song of Germany, the Star-Spangled Banner; and long before the band struck into the solemn rhythm of "G.o.d save the King," Stella Croyle at all events knew that Calypso had lost. For she saw a flame illumine Luttrell"s face and transfigure him. He had slipped out of her reach. The doubts and perplexities which had so troubled him during the last months were now resolved. As he listened to the Hymns, he saw as in a vision the nations advancing abreast over a vast plain like battalions in line with their intervals for manoeuvring s.p.a.ced out between them. In front of each nation rolled a grey vapour, which gradually took shape before Luttrell"s eyes; and there was made visible to him a shadowy legion of men marching in the van, the men who had left ease and women and all the grace of life behind them and had gone out to die in the harness of service--one in this, one in that corner of the untravelled world, and now all reunited in a strong fellowship. The vision remained with him after the last strains of music had died away, and faded slowly. He waked to the lights and clamour of the restaurant and turned to Stella Croyle.
"Stella," he began, and----
"I know," she interrupted in a small voice. She was sitting with her head downcast and her hands clenched upon her lap so tightly that the skin was white about the points where the tips of her fingers pressed.
"Perhaps I shan"t suffer so very much."
She was careful not to lift her head, and when a few moments later their host gave the signal to move, she rose quickly and turned her back on Luttrell.
The party motored back through the Dyurgarden, past the glimmering tents where the Boy-Scouts were encamped to the great hotel by the landing-stage. There a wait of a few minutes took place whilst Hardiman settled for the cars, and during that wait Luttrell disappeared. He rejoined his friends at the harbour steps and when the launch put off towards the _Dragonfly_, he found himself side by side with Stella Croyle. In the darkness she relaxed her guard. Luttrell saw the great tears glisten on her dark eyelashes and fall down her cheeks.
"I am sorry, Stella," he whispered, dropping his hand on hers, and she clutched it and let it go.
"Perhaps I shan"t suffer so very much," she repeated and the next moment the gangway light shone down upon their faces. Stella dropped her head and furtively dried her cheeks.
"I want to go up last," she said, "and just behind you, so that no one shall see what a little fool I am making of myself."
But by some subtle understanding already it was felt amongst that group of people, quick to perceive troubles of the emotions, that something was amiss between the pair. They were left alone upon the deck. Stella by chance looking southwards to the starlit gloom, Luttrell to the north, where still the daylight played in blue and palest green and the delicate changing fires of the opal.
"What will you do, Stella?" Luttrell asked gently.
"I think I will go and live in the country," she replied.