Stella Fregelius by H. Rider Haggard (no david read aloud .TXT) 📕

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 sure that it could not prove other than satisfying and beautiful. Blind must he have been indeed, and utterly without intuition if with every veil that was withdrawn from it the soul of Stella did not shine more bright.

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

Stella was dead. “But you are sworn to her in death,” commented the voice of Conscience. “Would you rob the living of your allegiance before the time?”

There was no possible harm in reading the records of the life and thoughts of a friend, or even of a love departed. “Yet,” suggested the voice of Conscience, “are you so sure that this life is departed? Have you not at whiles felt its presence, that mysterious presence of the dead, so sweet, so heavy, and so unmistakable, with which at some time or other in their lives many have made acquaintance? Will not the study of this life cause that life to draw near? the absorption of those thoughts bring about the visits of other and greater thoughts, whereof they may have been, as it were, the seed?”

Anyone who knew its author would be interested to read this human document, the product of an intelligence singularly bright and clear; of a vision whose point of outlook was one of the highest and most spiritual peaks in the range of our human imaginings. “Quite so,” agreed the voice of Conscience. “For instance, Mary would be delighted. Why not begin with her? In fact, why not peruse these pages together—it would lead to some interesting arguments? Why pore over them in this selfish manner all alone and at the dead of night when no one can possibly disturb 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 of fire 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 as they do not belong to you.”

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

From that time forward Morris sat up even later than usual, nor did he waste those precious solitary hours. But the diary covered ten full years of a woman’s life, during all of which time certainly never a week passed without her making entries in it, some of them of considerable length. Thus it came about—for he skipped no word—that a full month had gone by before Morris closed the last volume and slipped it away into its hiding-place in the safe.

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

So much for the form of the journal, its matter is not so easy to describe. At first, as might be expected from her years, it was somewhat childish in character, but not on that account the less sweet and fragrant of a child’s poor heart. Here with stern accuracy were recorded her little faults of omission and commission—how she had answered crossly; how she had not done her duty; varied occasionally with short poems, some copied, some of her own composition, and prayers also of her making, one or two of them very touching and beautiful. From time to time, too—indeed this habit clung to her to the last—she introduced into her diary descriptions of scenery, generally short and detached, but set there evidently because she wished to preserve a sketch in words of some sight that had moved her mind.

Here is a brief example describing a scene in Norway, where she was visiting, as it appeared to her upon some evening in late autumn: “This afternoon I went out to gather cranberries on the edge of the fir-belt below the Stead. Beneath me stretched the great moss-swamp, so wide that I could not discern its borders, and grey as the sea in winter. The wind blew and in the west the sun was setting, a big, red sun which glowed like the copper-covered cathedral dome that we saw last week. All about in the moss stood pools of black, stagnant water with little straggling bushes growing round them. Under the clouds they were ink, but in the path of the red light, there they were blood. A man with a large basket on his back and a long staff in his hand, was walking across the moss from west to east. The wind tossed his cloak and bent his grey beard as he 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 thicker as the sun sank, were shadows and blackness. He seemed to walk into the blackness like a man wading into the sea. It swallowed him up; he must have 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 sudden gust seemed to sweep him on again, right into the Gates, and I lost sight of that man whom I shall never see any more. I wonder whether he was a saint or a sinner, and what he will find beyond the Gates. A curlew flew past me, borne out of the darkness, and its cry made me feel sad and shiver. It might have been the man’s soul which wished to look upon the light again. Then the sun sank, and there was no light, only the wind moaning, and far, far away the sad cry of the curlew.”

This description was simple and unpolished as it was short. Yet it impressed the mind of Morris, and its curious allegorical note appealed to his imagination. The grey moss broken by stagnant pools, lonesome and primeval; the dreary pipe of the wildfowl, the red and angry sun fronting the gloom of advancing, oblivious night; the solitary traveller, wind-buffeted, way-worn, aged, heavy-laden, fulfilling the last stage of his appointed journey to a realm of sleep and shadow. All these sprang into vision as he read, till the landscape, concentrated, and expressing itself in its tiny central point of human interest, grew more real in memory and meaning than many with which he was himself familiar.

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

Then, jotted down from day to day, came the account of the illness and death of her twin sister, Gudrun, a pitiful tale to read. Hopes, prayers, agonies of despair, all were here recorded; the last scene also was set out with a plain and noble dignity, written by the bed of death in the presence of death. Now under the hand of suffering the child had become a woman, and, as was fitting, her full soul found relief in deeper notes. “Good-bye, Gudrun,” she ended, “my heart is broken; but I will mourn for you no more. God has called you, and we give you back to God. Wait for me, my sister, for I am coming also, and I will not linger. I will walk quickly.”

It was from this sad day of her only sister’s death that the first real developments of the mystical side of Stella’s character must be dated. The sudden vanishing in Gudrun in the bloom of youth and beauty brought home to her the lesson which all must learn, in such a fashion that henceforth 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 whole shore, as a drop of water to the whole sea, so is what we call our life to the real life. Of course one has always been taught that in church, but I never really comprehended it before. Henceforth this thought shall be a part of me! Every morning when I wake I will remember that I am one night nearer to the great dawn, every night when I lie down to sleep I will 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 the end as did Gudrun; without a single doubt or fear, for if I have nothing to reproach myself with, why should I be reproached? If I have longed for light and lived towards the light, however imperfect I may be, why should I be allotted to the darkness?”

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

The diary showed it to be a little more than a year after this that spiritual doubts began to possess the soul of Stella. After all, was she not mistaken? Was there any world beyond the physical? Were we not mere accidents, born of the will or the chance of the flesh, and shaped by the pressure of centuries of circumstance?