The Path of a Star Part 20

He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for the first time under such an aspect.

"She has been immensely kind," he a.s.serted. "But she wasn't at first. At first, she was hostile, like you, only that her hostility was different, just as she is different. She had to be converted," he went on hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I imagined. I think she takes a kind of pride in conquering her prejudices, and being true to the real breadth of her nature."

"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad. She might very well be content that it is charming. And what is the difference between her hostility and mine?"

"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon her, "is that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a dramatic gesture--"walks between us."

"I know. I tried to stiffen her. I appealed to the worst in her on your behalf. But it wasn't any use. She succ.u.mbed, as you say, to her n.o.bler instincts."

Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent her paradox in twirling it.

"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all proportion,"

Duff said. "And I should be sorry--do you really want me to talk about this?"

"Don't be stupid. Of course."

He took her permission with plain avidity.

"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature like that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily life. That was my chance. I could offer her her place. It's not much to counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking, to equalise matters."

Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an emanation from him. It was his enthusiasm. A cheerfulness had come upon him instead. Also what he said had something categorical in it, something crisp and arranged. He himself received benefit from the consideration of it, and she was aware that if this result followed, her own "conversion" was of very secondary importance.

"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.

"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so plainly right that n.o.body will think twice about it," Duff went on in an encouraged voice. "It's odd how one's ideas materialise. I want her drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk cushions."

"When is it to happen?"

"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."

"Ah! then there will be time. Time to get the white and gold furniture.

It wouldn't be my taste quite. Is it Alicia's?"

"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine. We have talked it over together. And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In matters of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"

"Oh Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss Filbert now?"

"At Number Ten, Middleton Street."

"With the Livingstones?"

"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and Laura is to stay with them until she sails."

"She sails?"

"In the Sutlej, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her outfit together."

"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you?"

"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."

"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"

"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one offer her up at their dinner-tables?"

"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.

The coolie track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf underfoot. The cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man a little way off was a man, and not a horse, but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant gra.s.s. Lindsay dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz points in the level glow.

"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see its proportions more clearly now."

Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good sort, Duff," she said; "I wish you were out of Asia."

"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined himself to see.

"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not endure, you know."

"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim, and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river, and left something chill and empty in the s.p.a.ces about them. Things grew hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace, grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very near. "What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"

Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said, with apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he kept her hand while he said, "you will always represent something in mine. I can depend upon you--I shall know that you are there."

"Yes," she said sincerely. "Yes indeed," and it seemed to her that he looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was only another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to walk back again across the withered gra.s.s, "your fever has taken a good deal out of you."

CHAPTER XVIII

Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust.

It gave a soothing wistfulness to discontent to think this, which a discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter of fact there were not very many days, and they were largely filled with millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they a.s.serted themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency, by billows of spotted muslin, with which Celine, who felt the romance of the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Celine, indeed, was worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend"

her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the source, and they st.i.tched together while she, with careful reserves, watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs.

Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had several times felt, seated beside Celine, how grateful she ought to be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such pleasantness, though Celine herself seemed to stand rather far from their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their bright faces.

Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made tea, and pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat. He found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant. She sat up straight, and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of year up-country, but nothing at all to complain of yet. He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the first time in secular dress. The stays insisted a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested. Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading bird's, and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her sides. She had put on the hat that matched; it was the kind of pretty disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant, its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased.

She made no demand for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time when they were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.

"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.

The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her Army clothes--she had come on board in one of the muslins--and she was softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the over-ruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.

"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you, We've laboured together, united in heart, But now we must close and soon we must part."

They had said good-bye to her and G.o.d bless you, all of them, but they evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless as she presently turned a calmed face to him with her pale apology he had the sensation of a rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he reflected that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.

The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood, were to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an a.s.surance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make if you like, with the geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case--he could almost have demanded an explanation--since it was one of those parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would "mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner-party; and it was seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone from the feast. If you found this reprehensible she would have told you she had observed they do it in j.a.pan, where manners are the best in the world.