Stella Fregelius

Stella Fregelius

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Title: Stella Fregelius
Author: H. Rider Haggard
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STELLA FREGELIUS By H. Rider Haggard
First Published 1904.

STELLA FREGELIUS
A TALE OF THREE DESTINIES
BY
H. RIDER HAGGARD

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Atque metus omnes, et
inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus; strepitumque Acherontis avari."

DEDICATION
My Dear John Berwick,
When you read her history in MS. you thought well of "Stella
Fregelius" and urged her introduction to the world. Therefore I ask you,
my severe and accomplished critic, to accept the burden of a book for
which you are to some extent responsible. Whatever its fate, at least it
has pleased you and therefore has not been written quite in vain.
H. Rider Haggard.
Ditchingham, 25th August, 1903.

AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author feels that he owes some apology to his readers for his
boldness in offering to them a modest story which is in no sense a
romance of the character that perhaps they expect from him; which has,

moreover, few exciting incidents and no climax of the accustomed
order, since the end of it only indicates its real beginning.
His excuse must be that, in the first instance, he wrote it purely to
please himself and now publishes it in the hope that it may please some
others. The problem of such a conflict, common enough mayhap did
we but know it, between a departed and a present personality, of which
the battle-ground is a bereaved human heart and the prize its complete
possession; between earthly duty and spiritual desire also; was one that
had long attracted him. Finding at length a few months of leisure, he
treated the difficult theme, not indeed as he would have wished to do,
but as best he could.
He may explain further that when he drafted this book, now some five
years ago, instruments of the nature of the "aerophone" were not so
much talked of as they are to-day. In fact this aerophone has little to do
with his characters or their history, and the main motive of its
introduction to his pages was to suggest how powerless are all such
material means to bring within mortal reach the transcendental and
unearthly ends which, with their aid, were attempted by Morris Monk.
These, as that dreamer learned, must be far otherwise obtained, whether
in truth and spirit, or perchance, in visions only.
1903.

STELLA FREGELIUS

CHAPTER I
MORRIS, MARY, AND THE AEROPHONE
Above, the sky seemed one vast arc of solemn blue, set here and there
with points of tremulous fire; below, to the shadowy horizon, stretched
the plain of the soft grey sea, while from the fragrances of night and
earth floated a breath of sleep and flowers.
A man leaned on the low wall that bordered the cliff edge, and looked
at sea beneath and sky above. Then he contemplated the horizon, and
murmured some line heard or learnt in childhood, ending "where earth
and heaven meet."

"But they only seem to meet," he reflected to himself, idly. "If I sailed
to that spot they would be as wide apart as ever. Yes, the stars would be
as silent and as far away, and the sea quite as restless and as salt. Yet
there must be a place where they do meet. No, Morris, my friend, there
is no such place in this world, material or moral; so stick to facts, and
leave fancies alone."
But that night this speculative man felt in the mood for fancies,