Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

studio with such earnestness that he himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly than before.

“Look here, I say, why don’t you tell me what you’re crying about? You can’t go on crying forever, you know,” Michael pointed out. “And when you’ve stopped crying, you’ll feel such an ass if you haven’t explained what it was all about.”

“I couldn’t possibly tell anybody,” said Stella, looking very fierce. Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather unusually dramatic.

“But I’m damned if I will give up playing,” she proclaimed; and, sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her weakness.

It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella’s calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished, she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily Haden.

“I don’t know⁠—really⁠—they’ve left Trelawny Road,” he said, feeling vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.

“And you never think of her, I suppose?” demanded Stella.

“Well, no, I don’t very much.”

“Yet I can remember,” said Stella, “when you were absolutely miserable because she had been flirting with somebody else.”

“Yes, I was very miserable,” Michael admitted. “And you were rather contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more proud.”

“And don’t you realize,” Stella said, “that just because I did remember what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?”

Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.

Michael made up his mind that Stella’s unhappiness was due to a love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation against the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the fellow’s head. With the easy exaggerations of the nighttime he could picture himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He went so far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale requesting their secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to dance before him. He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily. Time had softened the trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had been guilty. Time with night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal charm. He had been reading this week of the great imaginative loves of the Middle Ages, and of that supple and golden-haired girl he began to weave an abstraction of passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He slept upon the evocation of her beauty just as he was setting forth upon a delicate and intangible pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested to Stella they should revisit Carlington Road.

“My god, to think we once lived here!” exclaimed Stella, as they stood outside Number 64. “To me it seems absolutely impossible, but then of course I was much more away from it than you ever were.”

Stella was so ferocious in her mockery of their childish haunts and habitations that Michael began to perceive her old serene contempt was become tinged with bitterness. This morning she was too straightly in possession of herself. It was illogical after last night.

“Well, thank heaven, everything does change,” she murmured. “And that ugly things become even more ugly.”

“Only for a time,” objected Michael. “In twenty years if we visit Carlington Road we shall think how innocent and intimate and pretty it all is.”

“I wasn’t thinking so much of Carlington Road,” said Stella. “I was really thinking of people.”

“Even they become beautiful again after a time,” argued Michael.

“It would take a very long time for some,” said Stella coldly.

Michael had rather dreaded his mother’s return, with Stella in this mood, and he was pleased when he found that his fears had been unjustifiable. Stella in fact was very gentle with her mother, as if she and not herself had suffered lately.

“I’m so glad you’re back, darling Stella, and so delighted to think you aren’t going to Petersburg tomorrow, because the man at Vienna whose name begins with that extraordinary letter.⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, mother,” Stella laughed, “the letter was quite ordinary. It was only L.”

“But the name was dreadful, dear child. It always reminded one of furs. A most oppressive name. So that really you’ll be in London all this winter?”

“Yes, only I shan’t play much,” said Stella.

“Mrs. Carruthers is so anxious to meet you properly,” Mrs. Fane said. “And Mabel Carruthers is really very nice. Poor girl! I wish you could be friends with her. She’s interested in nothing her mother does.”

Michael was really amazed when Stella, without a shrug, without even a wink at him, promised simply to let Mrs. Carruthers “meet her properly,” and actually betrayed as much interest in Mabel Carruthers as to inquire how old she was.

Maurice arrived at Cheyne Walk, just before Michael went up for term, to say he had taken a most wonderful studio in Grosvenor Road. He was anxious that Michael should bring his sister to see it, but Stella would not go.

“Thanks very much, my dear,” she said to him, “but I’ve seen too much of the real thing. I’m in