Bismarck Tribune

STELLA'S LOVER.

"Who is he?" asked Stella; she and Felicia Martin were idly looking out upon the driveway of Mr. Martin's country-seat through the narrow latticed windows.

"That is Colonel Audenreid," answered Felicia, adjusting her eyeglasses. "Papa is bringing him here to dine. He is a widower; he's lived abroad for years. Seems to me I've heard that his course of true love didn't run smooth. He has the most bewitching melancholy eyes, and such a manner! You can't help wishing he was in love with you."

That night, while the girls combed out their braids and curls, in the low wainscoted chamber, Felicia suddenly remarked, "I believe there will be a second Mrs. Audenreid."

Stella gave a start and returned from an excursion into the past.

"Do you know," continued Felicia, "I caught him looking at your reflection in the mirror, with his heart in his eyes. I wonder the first Mrs. Audenreid didn't turn in her grave."

"Felicia don't! you make me shudder," cried Stella. "Your imagination is better than your eyesight; you are always seeing somebody devouring somebody else with their glances. I'm sure I thought Colonel Audenreid was as indifferent as a star in heaven."

Modest creature! He had ears for nobody but yourself, as well as eyes. It is Kismet. Why was not I born under some lucky planet?

From that date Colonel Audenreid became a frequent guest at Mr. Martin's suburban retreat. He rode with Stella and Felicia over the hills; he picnicked with them at the edge of the pine woods; he drifted on the lake at sunset by their side, and filled the boat with water-lilies and spicy branches of the wild azalea; he amused them with glimpses of his Continental life; with stories of war, in which he led a forlorn hope; of camp and hospital regimen. Sometimes they took the train to the city, and laughed together over some comedy, or hung entranced over some famous singer's tones; or they joined a pleasure party to the Isles of Shoals or down the harbor, returning in the dewy evening with the stars leaning out of heaven, and the whip-poor-will making the night melancholy. Once they paused at the gate to listen to its plaintive voice. Felicia had passed out to the piazza: the pines stood out tall and dusky against the heavens; the roses shook out an odorous breath whenever the wind touched them.

"You should hear the nightingales fluting about my home in Surrey, when the night falls; it is like the refrain of some sad poem," said Colonel Audenreid.

"You must have been very happy there in that beautiful country," returned Stella.

Colonel Audenreid opened the gate for her to pass on, without replying, with a distraught air, as if he were already miles away from the subject.

"I think he did not like me to speak of that time," she confessed to Felicia.

"Fiddlesticks," returned that person. "Perhaps it was too sacred."

"Pshaw! are you blind, Stella? None so blind as those who won't see, I've heard. I hastened into the house on purpose to give him a chance to speak to you. I saw it in his eyes."

"I never saw such sights as yours, though I've always understood near-sighted people could see in the dark. He has nothing special to say to me."

"Then he is the greatest humbug extant. He leaves us next month. If he says nothing before then I shall never believe in signs and omens again."

"Nor in your own eyesight? Poor Felicia. I'm afraid you're doomed to disappointment."

"I've set my heart on the match."

The next day Mr. Martin and his family set out for a week's camping out--"A little taste of gypsy life," he said; and so Colonel Audenreid, confessing that a nice camp was quite homelike and irresistible, followed, bearing his part in pitching tents, baking and hewing, and gathering the drift-wood to boil the kettle.

They sat on the beach at night within view of the smouldering drift-wood fire, watching the sails that gleamed in the starlight for an instant like ghosts, and were gone, the revolving lights like big glow-worms, lifting sea-songs, repeating all the lore and romance of the "melancholy main." Col. Audenreid's arctic expedition as well as his Indian voyages furnished material for conversation, even had he not been once shipwrecked, and once in peril from mutiny; but he seemed the merest dilettante while he lounged upon the sands, quoting poetry and carolling snatches of ballads to two very pretty girls.

"The sea hath its pearls,
The heaven hath its stars;
But my heart, my heart,
My heart hath its love"

he repeated one night, as he gave his hand for Stella to rise.

"Did you notice," said Felicia, later "he spoke in the present tense? He ignored the past."

"He was quoting from the German."

"How stupid you are, Stella! If you will not respond, how is a lover to know if you care?"

"And what makes you think that I care?"

"How can you help it? Oh, why doesn't he make love to me that way!"

"Nonsense, Felicia; he makes the same sort of love to every girl he meets, I suppose."

"I don't suppose anything of the kind."

The following day the wind turned east, a drizzling, lazy rain set in, blotting out everything, and obliging them to fold their tents and take refuge in the Sea-shell-House at hand; and by midnight all the powers of the air were abroad; the sea seemed to beat and bellow under their very windows, the wind whipped it into fine feathers of spray, and the darkness was like a garment. There was a gray sickly dawn creeping upon the sky, when Stella, looking from her window, saw in the distance the outlines of a ragged wreck painted boldly against the horizon, and the shore swarming with people moving about uncertainly.

"Oh, Stella," cried Felicia, "here's a real shipwreck! Let us put on our wraps and creep down to the shore, and hear all about it. I wouldn't miss it for worlds!"

Felicia's teeth were chattering mightily as they took their way to the shore, and mingled among the groups of men and women.

"She'll go to pieces in no time at all," some one was prophesying. "Jim saw folks a-clinging to the masts and things, with his glass."

"That's a master glass of his'n," said another. "But ain't they going for to do nothing."

"They've sent for a life-line; but it ain't any pleasant places that line's fallen into, let me tell you. Jim he was a-going with it but for me and the children. I'm powerful glad he didn't."

"Girls! girls!" cried Mr. Martin, bustling up, "this is no place for you. Better go back to your beds. Trying scene. None of these clod-hoppers would carry out the line to save a soul. Audenreid has gone out with it himself--a terrible risk. So much brilliancy and cultivation, so much wit and experience, as good as thrown away. They'll have to pull the line in presently, no doubt, and it would be painful for you to be here, my dears, after so much pleasant companionship. Oh, Stella! Stella! my dear girl"

Stella had fainted away.

It was a stirring morning that followed at the little Sea-shell House, providing for the rescued, listening to their story, and talking over the event. When Stella left her room, about noon, she was met by a fisherman's wife bringing her a sealed note. "I found it in the pocket of Jim's pea-jacket, and I found out how it was for Miss Stella Ames, and they told me you were the lady as fainted on the beach," she explained. "You see, Jim has gone for the doctor up to town, and he changed his coat first to look 'ship-shape like.'"

"Thank you," said Stella. "Who can have written to me here?" as she tore open and read:

"I am going to carry the life line to a ship-wrecked crew. I shall probably never return alive, but it is their only chance. While you are dreaming on your pillow, I shall, perhaps, be tasting the bitterness of death and parting. 'Verily, death is this'--to see you no more till the sea gives up its dead. My darling, my darling, let me have the happiness of repeating I love you, I love you. Stella. Good-by, sweetheart, good-by.

JOHN AUDENREID."

Then she turned to the torn envelope addressed to Miss Stella Ames, Sea-shell House. "To be delivered to her in case I never return." The revelation was premature. Colonel Audenreid had returned, but so spent that the doctor had been summoned from town. Mr. Martin took his family back to Martinvale, but Colonel Audenreid remained at the sea-side a week longer under treatment. In the meantime Stella went home--home for Stella meaning attendance on the whims of a wealthy hypochondriac, with a small stipend, without relaxation. One morning the post brought her a letter from Felicia. Perhaps it contained news of Colonel Audenreid. It did with a vengeance.

"DEAREST STELLA" (it began),--How odd that the very thing I wished should come to pass! I'm almost daft. To think that, after all my nonsense, it should be me--myself--little insignificant, near-sighted Felicia Martin, whom Colonel Audenreid asks to marry him! I can hardly believe my ears; and all the while I believed he was smitten by your charms. How glad I am that you didn't care for him! You must be my bridesmaid. Mamma says it shall be white satin and pearls.

"Yours in the seventh heaven.

FELICIA."

"P. S.--After all, he doesn't make quite the ideal lover I fancied--he is so respectful, and not at all gushing, you know. By-the-way, you never told me how you came to faint that night of the wreck."

It was no wonder that Mrs. Davis found Stella distraught that day, talking at random, absent-eyed, and fantastic in her moods. What did it all mean? Why had Colonel Audenreid written her that note if he loved Felicia, and why was he going to marry her if he loved somebody else? Didn't he know that she had received his message of love? Or did he mean simply to ignore it, having seen fit to change? From living in a state of happy excitement, when every footstep in the street below might be Colonel Audenreid's, who was hastening to repeat the burden of his note, Stella was suddenly brought down to earth, to the dull certainty that nothing more was ever likely to happen to her,--that there had been some dreadful mistake somewhere, which had lent her days a rose-color for a little while, to be sure, only to leave them grayer and more forlorn than before. All at once she remembered with a shudder that Colonel Audenreid's fatal note was at Martinvale; for that one morning she had been reading it and getting it by heart in her own room, when Felicia knocked at the door, and she had slipped the precious document between the leaves of her Golden Treasury, lying on the toilet table; and just then Felicia had entered with Mrs. Davis's summons for Stella to return to duty, and in her hasty packing and departure she had left Martinvale without the book. Some day she promised herself to beg leave of Mrs. Davis to run down to Martinvale and secure her treasure; not that its possession would signify to her any longer, only in order to keep it from Felicia's eyes; but Mrs. Davis would not hear to being left alone for an hour, and sometimes Stella cherished the insane idea of writing to Mrs. Martin and request that lady to send the Golden Treasury of Song, which she would find in the gable room, without opening it.

"Dear Mrs. Davis," she begged one day, when a couple of months had gone by, and she had heard no more of pearls and satins and bridesmaids from Felicia. "do let me run down to Martinvale, only to stay over a train; it is very important."

"A matter of life and death?"

"It concerns the life-long happiness of two people."

"Can't you tell me about it?"

"Yes, I will, and then you will surely let me go. When I was at Martinvale in the summer, I met Col.--a certain gentleman. He was very kind. He carried the life-line out to a distressed crew when we were all at the beach together, and he left a little foolish, hasty note for me, in case he never returned; by some mistake the note was brought to me, though he did return. It was a hasty little affair, you know, written, no doubt, under strong excitement, when he misunderstood his own feelings, I suppose--for I have never seen him since, and the note is in my Golden Treasury, which I left behind me, and my friend Felicia Martin may find it, and it will break her heart, for she is going to marry Colonel Audenreid.--O! I did not mean to tell his name; but you will forget it, dear Mrs. Davis, and let me go at once?"

"I am not likely to forget it, child," laughed Mrs. Davis, "It is my own name before I married. Colonel Audenreid is a sort of a cousin of mine. it is a very pretty story. Yes, you shall go. So the note would break Felicia's heart, would it? It must have been very tender."

"But you see there must have been some mistake about it."

"Well, there are as good fish in the sea as ever yet was caught, child. Go and look after Felicia's happiness if you will."

And for the first time Mrs. Davis kissed Stella's white cheek.

"You might have been my cousin, you know," she explained.

But Stella never reached Martinvale. Stepping into the station, she ran against Colonel Audenreid stepping out, with her Golden Treasury in his hand. They looked at each other for a breathing space.

"I was going to you," said the colonel.

"Where is Felicia?" demanded Stella.

"At home--and happy still. Where were you going?"

"To Martinvale, for my Golden Treasury."

"I have made the journey unnecessary. Let me call a carriage and take you home. I have a great deal to confess."

"It happened oddly enough," he explained, later, when he had given orders to be driven "home." "I had left the note to be given you in case I never returned. Afterward when I asked Jim to surrender it, he confessed that he couldn't lay hands upon it; must have lost it through the hole in the pocket of his pea-jacket. That was of no consequence: if he had dropped it on the beach, the tide had hidden it. Returning alive, I prepared to do my courting by word of mouth. I did not know you had left Mr. Martin's. When I was able to walk, I went there to find you. It was dusk when I approached through the garden. Somebody was dreaming on the piazza. 'It is Stella,' I thought. Inside the house Mrs. Martin was speaking to Felicia. I heard her say distinctly, 'Shall you go to town to-morrow, Felicia?' and Felicia reply, 'Certainly, if the weather allows.' I did not know that there was an aunt Felicia with the same tricks of voice. Of course if Felicia was in-doors with her mother it was Stella star-gazing on the piazza, and perhaps thinking of me. Would ever things be more in my favor? I drew near; some tender words, some hasty avowal, escaped me; she was in my arms, when a voice from the window dispelled my dream. 'Felicia child,' it said, 'you will take cold mooning out there so late.' Do you know, Stella, at that instant I was almost sorry the sea had not finished me on the night of the wreck. Stupid of me, wasn't it? But all's well that ends well. I had no thought of retreat. Felicia had accepted me. I had heard at the beach that she fainted when I carried out the line. You had not received my note, and had no knowledge of my feelings. I must make the best of my mistake. The arrangement was announced. I made a sorry lover, I fear. One day when I went down to visit at Martinvale, they gave me the room you had used, as there were other guests. In a fit of megrims, I happened upon your Golden Treasury, and your name stared me from the fly-leaf, and my own letter fell to my feet. Felicia released me without a sigh. There is another star in her heaven, before which my light grows pale. Stella, do you love?"