Stella Maris

That was not her real name. No one could have christened an inoffensive babe so absurdly. Her mother had, indeed, through the agency of godfathers and godmothers, called her Stella after a rich old maiden aunt, thereby showing her wisdom; for the maiden aunt died gratefully a year after the child was born, and bequeathed to her a comfortable fortune. Her father had given her the respectable patronymic of Blount, which, as all the world knows, or ought to know, is not pronounced as it is spelled.

It is not pronounced “Maris,” however, as, in view of the many vagaries of British nomenclature, it might very well be, but “Blunt.” It was Walter Herold, the fantastic, who tacked on the Maris to her Christian name, and ran the two words together so that to all and sundry the poor child became Stellamaris, and to herself a baptismal puzzle, never being quite certain whether Stella was not a pert diminutive, and whether she ought to subscribe herself in formal documents as “Stellamaris Blount.”

The invention of this title must not be regarded as the supreme effort of the imagination of Walter Herold. It would have been obvious to anybody with a bowing acquaintance with the Latin tongue.

Her name was Stella, and she passed her life by the sea—passed it away up on top of a cliff on the South coast; passed it in one big, beautiful room that had big windows south and west; passed it in bed, flat on her back, with never an outlook on the outside world save sea and sky. And the curtains of the room were never drawn, and in the darkness a lamp always shone in the western window; so that Walter Herold, at the foot of the cliff, one night of storm and dashing spray, seeing the light burning steadily like a star, may be excused for a bit of confusion of thought when he gripped his friend John Risca's arm with one hand and, pointing with the other, cried:

“Stella Maris! What a name for her!”

And when he saw her the next morning—she was twelve years old at the time and had worked out only a short term of her long imprisonment—he called her Stellamaris to her face, and she laughed in a sweet, elfin way, and Herold being the Great High Favourite of her little court (a title conferred by herself), she issued an edict that by that style and quality was it her pleasure henceforth to be designated. John Risca, in his capacity of Great High Belovedest, obeyed the ukase without question; and so did His Great High Excellency, her uncle, Sir Oliver Blount, and Her Most Exquisite Auntship, Lady Blount, his wife and first cousin to John Risca.

The events in the life of Stella Blount which this chronicle will attempt to record did not take place when she was a child of twelve. But we meet her thus, at this age, ruling to a certain extent the lives of grown-up men and women by means of a charm, a mystery, a personality essentially gay and frank, yet, owing to the circumstances of her life, invested with a morbid, almost supernatural atmosphere. The trouble in the upper part of her spine, pronounced incurable by the faculty, compelled a position rigidly supine. Her bed, ingeniously castored, could be wheeled about the great room. Sometimes she lay enthroned in the centre; more often it was brought up close to one of the two windows, so that she could look out to sea and feed her fancy on the waves, and the ships passing up and down the Channel, and the white sea-gulls flashing their wings in mid air. But only this unvibrating movement was permitted. For all the splints and ambulance contrivances in the world, she could not be carried into another room, or into the pleasant, sloping garden of the Channel House, for a jar would have been fatal. The one room, full of air and sunlight and sweet odours and exquisite appointments, was the material kingdom in which she ruled with sweet autocracy; the welter of sea and sky was her kingdom, too, the gulls and spring and autumn flights of migratory birds were her subjects, the merchants and princes traversing the deep in ships, her tributaries.