The Path of a Star Part 21

Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I, with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do.

To me it is depressing and a little cruel to be compelled to betray the inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia's banquets, especially in connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking. A poverty of cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would have been offered up to the G.o.ds that season. The limitations of her resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Sh.e.l.ley under critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University. There was also a civilian who had written a few years before an article in the Nineteenth Century about the aboriginal tribes of the Central Provinces, and the lady attached to him, who had been at one time the daughter of a Lieutenant-Governor. The Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry loved meeting anybody that was clever, admired brains beyond anything; and an A.D.C. who had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was; and Captain Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when they were produced in Simla and was invariably considered up there to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay and Stephen Arnold as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with the contortionist as it were at the apex, on his head. The Livingstones had family connection with a leading London publishing firm, and Alicia may possibly have reflected as she surveyed her completed work, how much better than capering captains she could have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be admitted likely that she would harbour, at that particular instant, so ungracious a thought. And indeed it was a creditable party, it would almost unanimously call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe made the most agreeable excitement, you might almost have heard the heart-beats of the wife of the literary civilian, as she just escaped being introduced, and so availed herself of the dinner's opportunity for intimate observation without letting herself in a particle--most clever.

Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed upon the spear, she always did, and made a gushing little speech with every eye upon her in the middle of the room, without a thought of consequences. The A.D.C. was also empresse, one would have thought that he himself was acting, the way he bowed and picked up Hilda's fan--a grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the week before, in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the Commander-in-Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the newly introduced Head of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe that he never went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too badly ventilated; and Stephen Arnold arriving late, shot like an embarra.s.sed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.

There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were the pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous half-checked smile.

Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands like a reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was absurdly affected; and indeed to an acuter intelligence it might have looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not offered.

That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife, observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she complained afterwards that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circ.u.mstance; she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little dinner-party pa.s.sed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying qualities, which were oddly stimulated when she glanced over the brim of her gla.s.s at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval, giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry, and drinking water.

The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower, living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals closed over her secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the sloping shoulders, thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs. Barberry.

It transpired when the men came up that there was no unanimity about going to Government House. The Livingstones craved the necessity of absence, if anyone would supply it by staying on; it would be a boon they said, and cited the advancement of the season. "One gets to bed so much earlier," Surgeon-Major Livingstone urged, at which Alicia raised her eyebrows and everybody laughed. Lindsay elected to gratify them, with the proclaimed purpose of seeing how long Livingstone could be kept up, and the civilian pair agreed, apparently from a tendency to remain seated. The A.D.C. had, of course, to go; duty called him; and he declared a sense of slighted hospitality that anybody should remain behind. "Besides," he cried, with ingenuous privilege, "who's goin' to chaperone Miss Howe?"

Hilda stood in the midst. Tall, in violet velvet, she had a flush that made her magnificent; her eyes were deep and soft. It was patent that she was out of proportion to the other women, body and soul; there was altogether too much of her; and it was only the men, when Captain Corby spoke, who looked silently responsive.

"We're coming away so early," said Mrs. Barberry, b.u.t.toning her glove.

Hilda had begun to smile, and, indeed, the situation had its humour, but there was also behind her eyes an appreciation of another sort. "Don't,"

she said to Alicia, in the low, quick reach of her prompting tone, as if the other had mistaken her cue, but the moment hardly permitted retreat, and Alicia turned an unflinching graceful front to the lady in the Department of Education. "Then I think I must ask you," she said.

The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the very dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would be delighted.

"n.o.body suggests ME!" exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully. They were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of backward transformation.

"I could chaperone you all!" she cried gaily back at them, as she pa.s.sed down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to see that she was quite comfortable. The unusual thing, which n.o.body else heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, "It doesn't matter--it doesn't matter," and that Hilda, driving away, found herself without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.

Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dogcart, and Hilda, with her purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way. She re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom. They were late; there was hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely, and said she loved the colour of Hilda's dress; also that she would give worlds for an invisible hairpin--oh, thank you!--and that it was simply ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out.

She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening--they would meet again later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the ballroom--perfectly lovely. So she vanished; but Hilda went with certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust forward, waiting for her.

They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the pillared s.p.a.ces of the ballroom. People had not been asked to dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered or not. Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.

They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest.

She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious. Their interests were not in any way diffused, they had one straight line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department. The Head of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling eye in search over his shoulder of somebody with whom it would be more advantageous to converse. Yet there were a few people apparently not altogether indifferent to the presence of Miss Howe. She saw them here and there, and when Arnold said, "It must seem odd to you, but I know hardly anybody here. We attempt no social duties," she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow and nods of considerate a.s.sent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a human unit. There was that in her blood which a.s.sured her of a welcome, it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women.

She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter of course, going towards the people who were not indifferent to the fact that she was there, who could not be entirely, since they had some sort of knowledge of her.

In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her. She encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then turning she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places--were no longer in her path. One lady put herself at a safe distance and then bowed, with much cordiality. It was extraordinary in a group of five how many glistening shoulders would be presented, quite without offence, to her approach. Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls of strawberry ice, her terrible situation. And from the lips of another lady whose face she knew, she heard after she had pa.s.sed, "Don't you think it's rather an omnium gatherum?"

It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment with serious interest, how the little world about them had the same negative att.i.tude for the missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible difference. Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either.

His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed with the kind of respect which implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain that he did not exist. She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.

Expecting nothing he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd, and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these things hurt her, she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering up her egotism that way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one could hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her pause. She anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was relieved to find in her light comment that she took the typical Mrs. Winstick less seriously than he had supposed when they drove away from the Livingstones'. It could not occur to him to correct the impression he had then by the sound of his own voice uttering sympathy.

"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff," she said. "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the wave's reflection."

"It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there," said the priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,--"and there, I think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and a full beating upon many sh.o.r.es--"

"Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even," she said half-reflectively, "when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I am not a wave at all, only a sh.e.l.l, to be stranded and left, always with the calling in my ears--" She seemed to have dropped altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not understand.

"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it? One doesn't blame these people. They are stupid--that's all. They want the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope--without the smallest diamond--who does song and dance on Sat.u.r.day nights--what can you expect! If I had a great name they would be pleased enough to see me. It is one of the rewards of the fame." She was silent for a moment, and then she added, "They are very poor."

"Those rewards! I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you were not devoured by thirst for them."

"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never am."

He took it at its face value. They had had some delightful conversations. If her words awakened anything in him it was the remembrance of these. The solace of her companionship presented itself to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence another seal; that was all. They sat where they were for half an hour, and something like antagonism and displeasure towards the secretaries' wives settled upon them, from which Hilda, interrupting a glance or two from the ladies purring past, drew suspicion. "I am going now," she said.

"It--it isn't quite suitable here," and there was just enough suggestion in the point of her fan to make him think of his frock. "It is an unpardonable truth that if we stay any longer I shall make people talk about you."

He turned astonished eyes upon her, eyes in which she remembered afterwards there was absolutely nothing but a literal and pained apprehension of what she said. "You are a good woman," he exclaimed.

"How could such a thing be possible!"

The faintest embarra.s.sment, the merest suggestion of distress, came into her face and concentrated in her eyes, which she fixed upon him as if she would bring his words to the last a.n.a.lysis, and answer him as she would answer a tribunal.

"A good woman?" she repeated, "I don't know--isn't that a refinement of virtue? No; standing on my s.e.x I make no claim, but as PEOPLE go I am good. Yes, I am good."

"In my eyes you are splendid," he replied, content, and gave her his arm. They went together through the reception-rooms, and the appreciation of her grew in him. If in the bright and silken distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it. But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the sensibility of swine.

"Yes," she laughed into her good-night to him, "but I'm not sure that it isn't better to be the pig than the pearl."

CHAPTER XIX

"Not long ago," said Hilda, "I had a chat with him. We sat on the gra.s.s in the middle of the Maidan, and there was nothing to interfere with my impressions."

"What were your impressions? No!" Alicia cried. "No! Don't tell me. It is all so peaceful now, and simple, and straightforward. You think such extraordinary things. He comes here quite often, to talk about her. He is coming this afternoon. So I have impressions too--and they are just as good."

"All right." Hilda crossed her knees more comfortably. "WHAT did you say the Surgeon-Major paid for those Teheran tiles?"

"Something absurd--I've forgotten. He writes to her regularly, diary letters, by every mail."

"Do you tell him what to put into them?"

"Hilda, sometimes--you're positively gross."

"I daresay, my dear. You didn't come out of a cab, and you never are. I like being gross, I feel nearer to nature then, but I don't say that as an excuse. I like the smell of warm kitchens and the talk of bus-drivers, and bread and herrings for my tea--all the low satisfactions appeal to me. Beer, too, and hand-organs."

"I don't know when to believe you. He talks about her quite freely, and--and so do I. She is really interesting in her way."

"And in perspective."

"Why should you be odiously smart. He and Stephen"--her glance was tentative--"have made it up."

"Oh?"

"He admits now that Stephen was justified, from his point of view. But of course that is easy enough when you have come off best."

"Of course."

"Hilda, what do you THINK?"

"Oh, I think it's deplorable--you have always known what I think. Have you seen him lately--I mean your cousin?"