Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies

  That night Morris took those shabby note-books home with him. Mary,who according to her custom went to bed early, being by this time fastasleep, he retired to his laboratory in the old chapel, where it was hishabit to sit, especially when, as at the present time, his father wasaway from home. Here, without wasting a moment, he began his study ofthem.

  It was with very strange sensations, such as he had never beforeexperienced, that he opened the first of the volumes, written somethirteen years earlier, that is, about ten years before Stella's death.Their actual acquaintance had been but brief. Now he was about tocomplete his knowledge of her, to learn many things which he had foundno time, or had forgotten to inquire into, to discover the explanationof various phases of her character hitherto but half-revealed; perhapsto trace to its source the energy of that real, but mystic, faith withwhich it was informed. This diary that had come--or perhaps been sentto him--in so unexpected a fashion, was the key whereby he hoped to openthe most hidden chambers of the heart of the woman whom he loved, andwho loved him with all her strength and soul.

  Little wonder, then, that he trembled upon the threshold of such asearch. He was like the neophyte of some veiled religion, who, afterlong years of arduous labour and painful preparation, is at lengthconducted to the doors of its holy of holies, and left to enter therealone. What will he find beyond them? The secret he longed to learn,the seal and confirmation of his hard-won faith, or empty, baulkingnothingness? Would the goddess herself, the unveiled Isis, wait to blessher votary within those doors? Or would that hall be tenanted but by apainted and bedizened idol, a thing fine with ivory and gold, but deadand soulless?

  Might it not be better indeed to turn back while there was yet time,to be content to dwell on in the wide outer courts of the imagination,where faith is always possible, rather than to hazard all? No; it would,Morris felt, be best to learn the whole truth, especially as he was surethat it could not prove other than satisfying and beautiful. Blind musthe have been indeed, and utterly without intuition if with every veilthat was withdrawn from it the soul of Stella did not shine more bright.

  Another question remained. Was it well that he should read thesediaries? Was not his mind already full enough of Stella? If once hebegan to read, might it not be overladen? In short, Mary had dealt wellby him; when those books were open in his hand, would he be dealing wellby Mary? Answers--excellent answers--to these queries sprang up in hismind by dozens.

  Stella was dead. "But you are sworn to her in death," commented thevoice of Conscience. "Would you rob the living of your allegiance beforethe time?"

  There was no possible harm in reading the records of the life andthoughts of a friend, or even of a love departed. "Yet," suggested thevoice of Conscience, "are you so sure that this life _is_ departed? Haveyou not at whiles felt its presence, that mysterious presence of thedead, so sweet, so heavy, and so unmistakable, with which at some timeor other in their lives many have made acquaintance? Will not the studyof this life cause that life to draw near? the absorption of thosethoughts bring about the visits of other and greater thoughts, whereofthey may have been, as it were, the seed?"

  Anyone who knew its author would be interested to read this humandocument, the product of an intelligence singularly bright and clear;of a vision whose point of outlook was one of the highest and mostspiritual peaks in the range of our human imaginings. "Quite so," agreedthe voice of Conscience. "For instance, Mary would be delighted. Why notbegin with her? In fact, why not peruse these pages together--it wouldlead to some interesting arguments? Why pore over them in this selfishmanner all alone and at the dead of night when no one can possiblydisturb you, or, since you have blocked the hagioscope, even see you?And why does the door of that safe stand open? Because of the risk offire if anyone should chance to come in with a candle, I suppose. No,of course it would not be right to leave such books about; especially asthey do not belong to you."

  Then enraged, or at least seriously irritated, by these impertinentcomments of his inner self upon himself, Morris bade Conscience to begone to its own place. Next, after contemplating it for a while as Evemight have contemplated the apple, unmindful of a certain petition inthe Lord's Prayer, he took up the volume marked I, and began to readthe well-remembered hand-writing with its quaint mediaeval-lookingcontractions. Even at the age when its author had opened her diary,he noted that this writing was so tiny and neat that many of thepages might have been taken from a monkish missal. Also there were fewcorrections; what she set down was already determined in her mind.

  From that time forward Morris sat up even later than usual, nor didhe waste those precious solitary hours. But the diary covered ten fullyears of a woman's life, during all of which time certainly never a weekpassed without her making entries in it, some of them of considerablelength. Thus it came about--for he skipped no word--that a full monthhad gone by before Morris closed the last volume and slipped it awayinto its hiding-place in the safe.

  As Mr. Fregelius had said, the history was a history of thoughts andtheories, rather than of facts, but notwithstanding this, perhaps onaccount of it, indeed, it was certainly a work which would have struckthe severest and least interested critic as very remarkable. Theprevailing note was that of vividness. What the writer had felt, whatshe had imagined, what she had desired, was all set out, frequently inbut few words, with such crystal clearness, such incisive point, that itcame home to the reader's thought as a flash of sudden light might comehome to his eye. In a pre-eminent degree Stella possessed the gift ofexpression. Even her most abstruse self-communings and speculations wereportrayed so sharply that their meaning could not possibly be mistaken.This it was that gave the book much of its value. Her thoughts were notvague, she could define them in her own consciousness, and, what is morerare, on paper.

  So much for the form of the journal, its matter is not so easy todescribe. At first, as might be expected from her years, it was somewhatchildish in character, but not on that account the less sweet andfragrant of a child's poor heart. Here with stern accuracy were recordedher little faults of omission and commission--how she had answeredcrossly; how she had not done her duty; varied occasionally with shortpoems, some copied, some of her own composition, and prayers also ofher making, one or two of them very touching and beautiful. From timeto time, too--indeed this habit clung to her to the last--she introducedinto her diary descriptions of scenery, generally short and detached,but set there evidently because she wished to preserve a sketch in wordsof some sight that had moved her mind.

  Here is a brief example describing a scene in Norway, where she wasvisiting, as it appeared to her upon some evening in late autumn: "Thisafternoon I went out to gather cranberries on the edge of the fir-beltbelow the Stead. Beneath me stretched the great moss-swamp, so wide thatI could not discern its borders, and grey as the sea in winter. The windblew and in the west the sun was setting, a big, red sun which glowedlike the copper-covered cathedral dome that we saw last week. All aboutin the moss stood pools of black, stagnant water with little stragglingbushes growing round them. Under the clouds they were ink, but in thepath of the red light, there they were blood. A man with a large basketon his back and a long staff in his hand, was walking across the mossfrom west to east. The wind tossed his cloak and bent his grey beard ashe threaded his way among the pools. The red light fell upon him also,and he looked as though he were on fire. Before him, gathering thickeras the sun sank, were shadows and blackness. He seemed to walk into theblackness like a man wading into the sea. It swallowed him up; he musthave felt very lonely with no one near him in that immense grey place.Now he was all gone, except his head that wore a halo of the red light.He looked like a saint struggling across the world into the Black Gates.For a minute he stood still, as though he were frightened. Then a suddengust seemed to sweep him on again, right into the Gates, and I lostsight of that man whom I shall never see any more. I wonder whetherhe was a saint or a sinner, and what he will find beyond the Gates. Acurlew flew past me, borne out of the darkness, a
nd its cry made me feelsad and shiver. It might have been the man's soul which wished to lookupon the light again. Then the sun sank, and there was no light, onlythe wind moaning, and far, far away the sad cry of the curlew."

  This description was simple and unpolished as it was short. Yet itimpressed the mind of Morris, and its curious allegorical note appealedto his imagination. The grey moss broken by stagnant pools, lonesomeand primeval; the dreary pipe of the wildfowl, the red and angrysun fronting the gloom of advancing, oblivious night; the solitarytraveller, wind-buffeted, way-worn, aged, heavy-laden, fulfilling thelast stage of his appointed journey to a realm of sleep and shadow. Allthese sprang into vision as he read, till the landscape, concentrated,and expressing itself in its tiny central point of human interest, grewmore real in memory and meaning than many with which he was himselffamiliar.

  Yet that description was written by an untrained girl not yet seventeenyears of age. But with such from first to last, and this was by no meansthe best of them, he found her pages studded.

  Then, jotted down from day to day, came the account of the illnessand death of her twin sister, Gudrun, a pitiful tale to read. Hopes,prayers, agonies of despair, all were here recorded; the last scene alsowas set out with a plain and noble dignity, written by the bed of deathin the presence of death. Now under the hand of suffering the childhad become a woman, and, as was fitting, her full soul found relief indeeper notes. "Good-bye, Gudrun," she ended, "my heart is broken; but Iwill mourn for you no more. God has called you, and we give you backto God. Wait for me, my sister, for I am coming also, and I will notlinger. I will walk quickly."

  It was from this sad day of her only sister's death that the first realdevelopments of the mystical side of Stella's character must be dated.The sudden vanishing in Gudrun in the bloom of youth and beauty broughthome to her the lesson which all must learn, in such a fashion thathenceforth her whole soul was tinged to its sad hue.

  "Now I understand it all," she wrote after returning from the funeral."We do not live to die, we die to live. As a grain of sand to the wholeshore, as a drop of water to the whole sea, so is what we call our lifeto the real life. Of course one has always been taught that in church,but I never really comprehended it before. Henceforth this thought shallbe a part of me! Every morning when I wake I will remember that I am onenight nearer to the great dawn, every night when I lie down to sleep Iwill thank God that another day of waiting has ended with the sunset.Yes, and I will try to live so that after my last sunset I may meet theend as did Gudrun; without a single doubt or fear, for if I have nothingto reproach myself with, why should I be reproached? If I have longedfor light and lived towards the light, however imperfect I may be, whyshould I be allotted to the darkness?"

  Almost on the next page appeared a prayer "For the welfare and greaterglory" of her who was dead, and for the mourner who was left alive, withthis quaint note appended: "My father would not approve of this, as itis against the rubric, but all the same I mean to go on praying for thedead. Why should I not? If my poor petitions cannot help them whoare above the need for help, at least they may show that they are notforgotten. Oh! that must be the bitter part; to live on full of love andmemory and watch forgetfulness creeping into the hearts of the loved andthe remembered. The priests never thought of it, but there lies the realpurgatory."

  The diary showed it to be a little more than a year after this thatspiritual doubts began to possess the soul of Stella. After all, was shenot mistaken? Was there any world beyond the physical? Were we not mereaccidents, born of the will or the chance of the flesh, and shapedby the pressure of centuries of circumstance? Were not all religionsdifferent forms of a gigantic fraud played by his own imagination uponblind, believing man? And so on to the end of the long list of thosequestions which are as old as thought.

  "I look," she wrote under the influence of this mood, "but everywhereis blackness; blackness without a single star. I cry aloud, but the onlyanswer is the echo of my own voice beating back upon me from the deafheavens. I pray for faith, yet faith fades and leaves me. I ask forsigns, and there is no sign. The argument? So far as I have read andheard, it seems the other way. And yet I do not believe their proofs. Ido not believe that so many generations of good men would have fedfull upon a husk of lies and have lain down to sleep at last as thoughsatisfied with meat. My heart rises at the thought. I am immortal. Iknow that I am immortal. I am a spirit. In days to come, unchained bymatter, time, or space, I shall stand before the throne of the Fatherof all spirits, receiving of His wisdom and fulfilling His commandments.Yet, O God, help Thou my unbelief. O God, draw and deliver me from thisabyss."

  From this time forward here and there in the diary were to be foundpassages, or rather sentences, that Morris did not understand. Theyalluded to some secret and persistent effort which the writer had beenmaking, and after one of them came these words, "I have failed again,but she was near me; I am sure that she was very near me."

  Then at last came this entry, which, as the writing showed, was writtenwith a shaking hand. "I have seen her beyond the possibility of a doubt.She appeared, and was with me quite a while; and, oh! the rapture! Ithas left me weak and faint after all that long, long preparation. It isof the casting forth of spirits that it is said, 'This kind goeth notout but by prayer and fasting,' but it is also true of the drawing ofthem down. To see a spirit one must grow akin to spirits, which is notgood for us who are still in the flesh. I am satisfied. I have seen, andI _know_. Now I shall call her back no more lest the thing should getthe mastery of me, and I become unfitted for my work on earth. Thismorning I could scarcely hold the bow of the violin, and its sweetestnotes sounded harsh to me; I heard discords among their harmonies. AlsoI had no voice to sing, and after all the money and time that have beenspent upon them, I must keep up my playing and singing, since, perhaps,in the future if my father's health should fail, as it often threatensto do, they may be our only means of livelihood. NO, I shall try nomore; I will stop while there is yet time, while I am still my ownmistress and have the strength to deny me this awful joy. But I haveseen! I have seen, and I am thankful, who shall never doubt again. Yetthe world, and those who tread it, can never more be quite the same tome, and that is not wholesome. This is the price which must be paid forvision of that which we were not meant to touch, to taste, to handle."

  After this, for some years--until it was decided, indeed, that theyshould move to Monksland--there was little of startling interest in thediary. It recorded descriptions of the wild moorland scenery, of birds,and ferns, and flowers. Also there were sketches of the peasantry andof the gentlefolk with whom the writer came in contact; very shrewdand clever, some of them, but with this peculiarity--that they wereabsolutely free from unkindness of thought or words, though sometimestheir author allowed herself the license of a mitigated satire. Suchthings, with notes of domestic and parish matters, and of the progressmade in her arduous and continual study of vocal and instrumental music,made up the sum of these years of the diary. Then at length, at thebeginning of the last volume, came this entry:

  "The unexpected has happened, somebody has actually been found in whoseeyes this cure of souls is desirable--namely, a certain Mr. Tomley, therector of a village called Monksland, upon the East Coast of England. Iwill sum up the history of the thing. For some years I have been gettingtired of this place, although, in a way, I love it too. It is so lonelyhere, and--I confess my weakness--playing and singing as I do now, Ishould like, occasionally, to have a better audience than a few old,half-deaf clergymen, their preoccupied and commonplace wives, someyeomen farmers, and a curate or two.

  "It was last year, though I find that I didn't put it down at the time,that at the concert in aid of the rebuilding of Pankford church I playedTartini's 'Il Trillo del Diavolo,' to me one of the weirdest and mostwonderful bits of violin music in the world. I know that I was almostcrying when I finished it. But next day I saw in the report in the localpaper, written by 'Our Musical Man,' that 'Miss Fregelius then relievedthe proceed
ings with a comic interlude on the violin, which was muchappreciated by the audience.' It was that, I confess it--yes, theidiotic remark of 'Our Musical Man,' which made me determine if it wasin any way possible that I would shake the dust of this village off myfeet. Then, so far as my father is concerned, the stipend is wretchedand decreasing. Also he has never really got on here; he is too shy,too reserved, perhaps, in a way, too well read and educated, for theserough-and-ready people. Even his foreign name goes against him. Thecurates about here call him 'Frigid Fregelius.' It is the local idea ofa joke.

  "So I persuaded him to advertise for an exchange, although he said itwas a mere waste of money, as nobody in his senses would look atthis parish. Then came the wonderful thing. After the very firstadvertisement--yes, the very first--arrived a letter from Mr. Tomley,rector of Monksland, where the stipend is 100 pounds a year betterthan this, saying that he would wish to inquire into the matter. He hasinquired, he has been, a pompous old gentleman with a slow voice anda single lock of white hair above his forehead; he says that it issatisfactory, and that, subject to the consent of the bishop, etc., hethinks that he will be glad to effect the exchange. Afterwards I foundhim in front of the house staring at the moorland behind, the sea infront, and the church in the middle, and looking very wretched. I askedhim why he wanted to do it--the words popped out of my mouth, I couldn'thelp them; it was all so odd.

  "Then I found out the reason. Mr. Tomley has a wife who is, or thinksshe is--I am not sure which--an invalid, and who, I gather, speaks toMr. Tomley with no uncertain sound. Mr. Tomley's wife was the niece ofa long-departed rector who was inducted in 1815, and reigned here forforty-five years. He was rich, a bachelor, and rebuilt the church. (Isit not all written in the fly-leaf of the last register?) Mrs. Tomleyinherited her uncle's landed property in this neighbourhood, and saysthat she is only well in the air of Northumberland. So Mr. Tomley has tocome up here, which he doesn't at all like, although I gather that he isglad to escape from his present squire, who seems to be a distinguishedbut arbitrary old gentleman, an ex-Colonel of the Guards; ratherquarrelsome, too, with a habit of making fun of Mrs. Tomley. There's theexplanation.

  "So just because of the silly criticism of 'Our Musical Man' we aregoing to move several hundred miles. But is that really the cause? Arethese things done of our own desire, or do we do them because we must,as our forefathers believed? Beneath our shouts and chattering they havealways heard the slow thunder of the waves of Fate. Through the flare ofour straw fires and the dust of our hurrying feet, they could always seethe shadow of his black banners and the sheen of his advancing spears,and for them every wayside sign-post was painted with his finger.

  "I think like that, too, perhaps because I am all, nearly all, Norse,and we do not shake off the strong and ancient shackle of our blood inthe space of a few generations of Christian freedom and enlightenment.Yes, I see the finger of Fate upon this sign-post of an advertisement ina Church paper. His flag is represented to me by Mr. Tomley's whiteand cherished lock. Assuredly our migration is decreed of the Norns,therefore I accept it without question; but I should like to know whatkind of a web of destiny they are weaving for us yonder in the placecalled Monksland."