The Path of a Star Part 26

A candle stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the looking-gla.s.s, and there was no other light. On the floor a pair of stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern. The place looked sordid and miserable, and Hilda sitting in the middle of it, still in the yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous. Stephen stood in the doorway grasping the handle, saying nothing, and an instant pa.s.sed before she knew with certainty, in the wretched light, that it was he.

Then she sprang up and made a step toward him as if toward victory and reward, but checked herself in time. "Is it possible!" she exclaimed. "I did not know you were in the theatre."

"Yes," he said, with moderation, "I have seen this--this d.a.m.nable play."

"d.a.m.nable? Oh!--"

"It has caused me," he went on, "to regret the substance of my letter this morning. I failed to realise that this was the kind of work you devote your life to. I now see that you could not escape its malign influence--that no women could. I now think that the alternative that has been revealed to you, of remaining in Calcutta, is a chance of escape offered you by G.o.d Himself. Take it. I withdraw my foolish, ignorant opposition."

"Oh," she cried, "do you really think--"

"Take it," he repeated, and closed the door.

Hilda sat still for some time after the servant had finished unlacing her shoes. A little tender smile played oddly about her carmined lips.

"Dear heart," she said aloud, "I was going to."

CHAPTER XXIII

"I would simply give anything to be there," Miss Livingstone said, with a look of sincere desire.

"I should love to have you, but it isn't possible. You might meet men you knew who had been invited by particular lady friends among the company."

"Oh, well, that of course would be odious."

"Very, I should think," Hilda agreed. "You must be satisfied with a faithful report of it. I promise you that."

"You have asked Mr. Lindsay," Alicia complained.

"That's quite a different thing. And if I hadn't, Llewellyn Stanhope would; Stanhope cherishes Duff as he cherishes the critic of the Chronicle. He refers to him as a pillar of the legitimate. Whenever he begs me to turn the Norwegian crank, he says, 'I'm sure Mr. Lindsay would come.'"

Miss Howe was at the top of the staircase in Middleton Street, on the point of departure. It was to be the night of her last appearance for the season and her benefit, followed by a supper in her honour, at which Mr. Stanhope and his company would take leave of those whose acquaintance, as he expressed it, business and pleasure had given them during the months that were past. It was this function that Alicia, at the top of the staircase, so ardently desired to attend.

"No, I won't kiss you," Hilda said, as the other put her cool cheek forward; "I'm so divinely happy--some of it might escape."

Alicia's voice pursued her as she ran downstairs. "Remember," she said, "I don't approve. I don't at all agree either with my reverend cousin or with you. I think you ought to find some other way, or let it go. Go home instead; go straight to London and insist on your chance. After six weeks you will have forgotten the name of his Order."

Hilda looked back with a smile. Her face was splendid with the dawn and the promise of success. "Don't say that," she cried.

Alicia, leaning down, was visited by a flash of quotation. "Well," she said, "nothing in this life becomes you like the leaving of it," and went back to her room to write to Laura Filbert in Plymouth. She wrote often to Miss Filbert, at Duff's request. It gratified her that she was able, without a pang, to address four pages of pleasantly colourless communication to Mr. Lindsay's fiancee. Her letters stood for a medicine surprisingly easy to take, aimed at the convalescence which she already antic.i.p.ated in the future immediately beyond Duff's miserable marriage.

If that event had promised felicitously she would have faced it, one fancies, with less sanguine antic.i.p.ations for herself: but the black disaster that rode on with it brought her certain aids to the spirit, certain hopes of herself. Laura's prompt replies, with their terrible margins and painstaking solecisms, came to be things Miss Livingstone looked forward to. She read them with a beating heart, however, in the unconscious apprehension of some revelation of improvement. She was quite unaware of it, but she entertained towards the Simpsons an att.i.tude of misgiving in this regard.

Hilda went on about her business. As usual her business was important and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last day. She drove about from place to place in the hot, slatternly city, putting more than her usual vigour and directness into all she did. It seemed to her that the sunlight burning on the tiles, pouring through the crowded streets, had more than ever a vivid note; and so much spoke to her, came to her, from the profuse and ingenuous life which streamed about her, that she leaned a little forward to meet it with happy eyes and tender lips that said, "I know. I see." She was living for the moment which should exhale itself somewhere about midnight after the lights had gone out on her last appearance--living for it as a Carmelite might live for the climax of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that beyond the cell and the grating she saw the movement and the colour and the pa.s.sion of a wider life. All Hilda's splendid vitality went into her intention, of which she was altogether mistress, riding it and reining it in a straight course through the enc.u.mbered hours. It keyed her to a finer and more eager susceptibility; and the things she saw stayed with her, pa.s.sing into a composite day which the years were hardly to dim for her.

She could live like that, for the purposes of a period, wrought up to immense keenness of sense and brilliancy of energy, making steadily for some point of feeling or achievement flashing gloriously on the horizon.

It is already plain, perhaps, that she rejoiced in such strokes, and that life as she found it worth living was marked by a succession of them.

She had kept, even from Lindsay, what she meant to do. When she stepped from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of the evening, with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's--no eight-anna bazar confections edged with silver tinsel--it occurred to her that this reticence was not altogether fair to so constant a friend. He was there, keen and eager as ever in all that concerned her, foremost with his congratulations on the smiling fringe of the party a.s.sembled to do her honour. It was a party of some brilliance in its way, though its way was diverse; there was no steady glow. Fillimore said of the company that it comprised all the talent, and Fillimore, Editor of the Indian Sportsman and Racing Gazelle, was a judge. He said it to Hagge, of the Bank of Hindostan, who could hardly have been an owner on three hundred rupees a month without conspicuous ability disconnected with his ledgers; and Hagge looked gratified. Though so promising, he was young. Lord Bobby was there from Government House. Lord Bobby always accompanied the talent, who were very kind to him. He was talking when Hilda arrived to the Editor of the Indian Empire, who wanted to find out the date of her Excellency's fancy dress party for children, in order that he might make a leaderette of it; but Lord Bobby couldn't remember--had to promise to drop him a line. Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with coldness because the Sportsman had discovered too many virtues in his Musquito, exalted her indeed into a favourite for Sat.u.r.day's hurdle race, a notability for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest. "They say," Fillimore had written, "that Musquito has been seen jumping by moonlight"--the sort of thing to spoil any book. Fillimore was an acute and weary-looking little man, with a peculiarly sweet smile and an air of cynicism which gave to his lightest word a dangerous and suspicious air. It was rumoured in official circles that he had narrowly escaped beheading for pointing out too ironically the disabilities of a Viceroy who insisted on reviewing the troops from a cushioned carriage with the horses taken out. Fillimore seemed to think that if nature had not made such a n.o.bleman a horseman, the Queen-Empress should not have made him Governor-General of India. Fillimore was full of prejudices. Gianacchi, however, found it impossible to treat him coldly. His smoothness of temperament stood in the way. Instead, he imparted the melodious information that Musquito had pecked badly twice at Tollygunge that morning, and smiled with pathetic philosophy. "Always let 'em use their noses," said Fillimore, and there seemed to be satire in it. Fillimore certainly had a flair, and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of him, "What's the dead bird going to be on Sat.u.r.day, Filly?" he put it generously at her service. Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his company were also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect, with the l.u.s.tre they shed upon the Stock Exchange--gentlemen of high finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors' reports, but never in the visitors' book at Government House, who were little more to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so many lakhs, except when they were seen now and then driving, in fleet dogcarts across the Maidan toward comfortable suburban residences where ladies were not entertained. They were extremely, curiously, devoted to business; but if they allowed themselves any amus.e.m.e.nt other than company promoting, it was the theatre, of which their appreciation had sometimes an odd relation to the merits of performance. This supper, on the part of Miss Beryl Stace and one or two others of Mr. Stanhope's artistes, might have been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since the suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.

Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that looked for the sentiment, the pity of things, would have distinguished at once on about half the faces, especially those of the women, the used, underlined look that spoke of the continual play of muscle and forcing of feeling. It gave them a shabbily complicated air, contrasting in a strained and sorry way even, with the countenances of the brokers and bankers, where nature had laid on a smooth wash and experience had not interfered. They were all gay and enthusiastic as Miss Howe entered, they loafed forward, broad shirt-fronts l.u.s.trous, fat hands in financial pockets, with their admiration, and Fillimore put out his cigarette.

Hilda came down among them from the summit of her achievement, clasping their various hands. They were all personally responsible for her success, she made them feel that, and they expanded in the conviction.

She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality, subtly drawing from every human flavour in the room the power to hold and show something akin to it in herself, a fugitive a.s.similation floating in the lamplight with the odour of the flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the occasion. They looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling attraction, they told each other that she was in great form. Mr.

Fillimore was of the opinion that she couldn't be outcla.s.sed at the Lyceum, and Mr. Hagge responded with vivacity that there were few places where she wouldn't stretch the winner's neck. The feast was not after all one of great bounty, Mr. Stanhope justly holding that the opportunity, the little gathering, was the thing, and it was not long before the moment of celebration arrived for which the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, to judge from their undrained gla.s.ses, seemed to be reserving themselves. There certainly had been one tin of pate, and it circulated at that end; on the other hand the ladies had all the fondants. So that when Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope rose with the sentiment of the evening he found satisfaction, if not repletion, in the regards turned upon him.

Llewellyn got up with modest importance, and ran a hand through his yellow hair, not dramatically, but with the effect of collecting his ideas. He leaned a little forward, he was extremely, happily conspicuous. The attention of the two lines of faces seemed to overcome him, for an instant, with dizzy pleasure; Hilda's beside him was bent a little, waiting.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Stanhope, looking with precision up and down the table to be still more inclusive, "we have met together to-night in honour of a lady who has given this city more pleasure in the exercise of her profession than can be said of any single performer during the last twenty years. Cast your eye back over the theatrical record of Calcutta for that s.p.a.ce of time, and you yourselves will admit that there has been n.o.body that could be said to have come within a mile of her shadow, if I may use the language of metaphor." (Applause, led by Mr. Fillimore.) "I would ask you to remember, at the same time, that this pleasure has been of a superior cla.s.s. I freely admit that this is a great satisfaction to me personally. Far be it from me to put myself forward on this auspicious occasion, but, ladies and gentlemen, if I have one ambition more than another, it is to promote the n.o.ble cause of the unfettered drama. To this I may say I have been vowed from the cradle, by a sire who was well-known in the early days of the metropolis of Sydney as a pioneer of the great movement which has made the dramatic talent of Australia what it is. To-day a magnificent theatre rises on the site forever consecrated to me by those paternal labours, but--but I can never forget it. In Miss Hilda Howe I have found a great coadjutor, and one who is willing to consecrate her royal abilities in the same line as myself, so that we have been able to maintain a high standard of production among you, prices remaining as usual. I have to thank you, as representing the public of the Indian capital, for the kind support which has been so encouraging to Miss Howe, the Company, and myself personally, during the past season. Many a time ladies and gentlemen of my profession have said to me, 'Mr. Stahhope, why do you go to Calcutta?

That city is a death-trap for professionals,' and now the past season proves that I was right and they were wrong; and the magnificent houses, the enthusiasm, and the appreciation that have greeted our efforts, especially on the Sat.u.r.day evening performances, show plainly enough that when a good thing is available the citizens of Calcutta won't be happy till they get it. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to join me in drinking the health, happiness, and prosperity of Miss Hilda Howe!"

"Miss Howe!" "Miss Howe!" "Miss Hilda Howe!" In the midst of a pushing back of chairs and a movement of feet, the response was quick and universal. Hilda accepted their nods and becks and waving gla.s.ses with a slow movement of her beautiful eyes and a quiet smile, in the subsidence of sound Mr. Stanhope's voice was heard again, "We can hardly expect a speech from Miss Howe, but perhaps Mr. Hamilton Bradley, whose international reputation need hardly be referred to, will kindly say a few words on her behalf."

Then with deliberate grace, Hilda rose from her chair, a tall figure among them, looking down with a hint of compa.s.sionateness on the little man at her left. She stood for an instant without speaking, as if the flushed silence, the expectation, the warm magnetism that drew all their eyes to her were enough. Then out of something like reverie she came to the matter, she threw up her beautiful face with one of the supreme gestures which belonged to her. "I think," she said, with a little smiling bow in his direction, "that I will not trouble my friend Mr.

Bradley. He has rendered me so many kind services already that I am sure I might count upon him again, but this is a thing I should like to do for myself. I would not have my thanks chilled by even the pa.s.sage from my heart to his." There was something like bravado in the glance that rested lightly on Bradley with this. One would have said that parley of hearts between them was not a thing that as a rule she courted. "I can only offer you my thanks, poor things to which we can give neither life nor substance, yet I beg that you will somehow take them and remember them. It is to me, and will always be, a kind of crowning satisfaction that you were pleased to come together to-night to tell me I had done well. You know yourselves, and I know, how much too flattering your kindness is, but perhaps it will hurt n.o.body if to-night I take it as it is generously offered, and let it make me as happy as you intend me to be. At all events, no one could disturb me in believing that in obtaining your praise and your good wishes I have done well enough."

For a few seconds she stopped speaking, but she held them with her eyes from the mistake of supposing she had done. Lindsay, who was watching her closely and hanging with keen pleasure on the sweetness and precision of what she found to say, noted a swift constriction pa.s.s upon her face. There was a half-tone of difference, too, in her voice, when she raised it again, a firmer vibration, as if she pa.s.sed, deliberate and aware, out of one phase into another.

"No," she went on, "I am not shy on this occasion; indeed, I feel that I should like to keep your eyes upon me for a long time to-night, and go on talking far past your patience or my wit. For I cannot think it likely that our ways will cross again." Here her words grew suddenly low and hurried. "If I may trespa.s.s upon your interest so much further, I have to tell you that my connection with the stage closes with this evening's performance. To-morrow I join the Anglican Order of the Sisters of St. Paul--the Baker Inst.i.tution--in Calcutta, as a novice.

They have taken me without much question because--because the plague hospitals of this cheerful country"--she contrived a smile--"have made a great demand upon their body. That is all. I have nothing more to say."

It was, after all, ineffective, the denouement, or perhaps it was too effective. In any case it was received in silence, the applause that was ready falling back on itself, inconsistent and absurd. The incredulity of Llewellyn Stanhope might have been electric had it found words, but that gentleman's protests were made in violent whispers, to which Hilda, who sat playing with a faded rose, seemed to pay no attention whatever.

One might have thought her more overcome than anyone. She seemed to make one or two unsuccessful efforts to raise her head. There was a moment of waiting for someone to reply; eyes were turned towards Mr. Bradley, and when it became plain that no one would, broken murmurs of talk began with a note of deprecation and many shakes of the head. The women, especially, looked tragically at their neighbours with very wide-open eyes. Presently a chair was drawn back, and then another, and people began to filter, in slow embarra.s.sment, towards the door. Lindsay came with Hilda's cloak. "You won't mind my coming with you," he said, "I should like to hear the details." Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her, pouring out abusive disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture almost of irritation. Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two, and went away with lingering backward looks. In a quarter of an hour, Mr. Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicles into the lamp-lit ways of Calcutta, and only the native table-servants remained in somewhat resentful possession of what was left.

CHAPTER XXIV

If Duff Lindsay had apprehended that the reception of Miss Filbert by the Simpsons would involve any strain upon the affection his friends bore him, the event must have relieved him in no small degree. He was soon made aware of its happy character, and constantly kept a.s.sured; indeed, it seemed that whenever Mrs. Simpson had nothing else to do she laid her pen to the task of telling him once again how cherished a satisfaction they found in Laura, and how reluctant they would be to lose it. She wrote in that strain of facile sympathy which seems part of an Englishwoman's education, and often begged him to believe that the more she knew of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly she realised how dreary for him must have been the pang of parting and how arid the months of separation. Mrs. Simpson herself was well acquainted with these trials of the spirit. She and her husband had been divided by those wretched thousands of miles of ocean for three years one week and five days all told during their married life: she knew what it meant. But if Duff could only see how well and blooming his beloved one was--she had gained twelve pounds already--Mrs. Simpson was sure the time of waiting would pa.s.s less heavily. For herself, it was cruel but she smiled upon the deferred reunion of hearts, she would keep Laura till the very last day, and hoped to establish a permanent claim on her.

She was just the daughter Mrs. Simpson would have liked, so unspotted, so pure, so wrapped in high ideals; and then the page would reflect something of the adoring awe in which Mrs. Simpson would have held such a daughter. It will be seen that Mrs. Simpson knew how to express herself, but there was a fine sincerity behind the mask of words; Miss Filbert had entered very completely into possession.

It had its abnormal side, the way she entered into possession.

Everything about Laura Filbert had its abnormal side, none the less obvious because it was inward, and invisible. Nature, of course, worked with her, one might say that nature really did it all, since in the end she was practically unconscious, except for the hope that certain souls had been saved, that anything of the sort had happened. She conquered the Simpsons and their friends chiefly by the simple impossibility that they should conquer her, walking immobile among them even while she admired Mr. Simpson's cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs.

Simpson's house linen. It must be confessed that nothing in her surroundings spoke to her more loudly or more subtly than these things.

In view of what happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's antic.i.p.ation that the Simpsons and their circle would have a radical personal effect upon Laura Filbert became ludicrous. They had no effect at all. She took no tint, no curve. She appeared not to see that these precious things were to be had for the a.s.similation. Her grace remained exclusively that of holiness, and continued to fail to have any relation to the common little things she did and said.

The Simpsons were more plastic. Laura had been with them hardly a week before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to remodel her spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the word is admissible, presented. The dear lady had never before realised, by her own statement, how terribly her religious feelings were mingled with domestic and social considerations, how firmly her spiritual edifice was based upon the things of this world. She felt that her soul was honeycombed--that was her word--with conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace, she made short work of special services and ladies' Bible cla.s.ses. The world was white with harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was a recreation society for shop girls. But it was something, it was everything, to be uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift themselves in prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching supplication in which to represent the matter that the burden of her friend and hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.

Mrs. Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the gentle paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss Filbert's presence.

Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings and goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday evening, for instance, and accompany her to the firemen's halls and skating rinks lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner from which their guest seemed to derive benefit. With all this, the Simpsons were sometimes troubled by the impression that they could not claim to be making their angel in the house completely happy. The air, the garden, the victoria, the turbot and the whitebait, these were all that has been vaunted, and even to the modesty of the Simpsons it was evident that the intimacy they offered their guest should count for something. There were other friends too, young friends who tried to teach her to play tennis, robust and silent young persons who threw shy flushed glances at her in the pauses of the games, and wished supremely, without daring to hint it, that she would let fall some word about her wonderful romance--a hope ever renewed, ever to be disappointed. And physically Laura expanded before their eyes. The colour that came into her cheek gave her the look of a person painted by Bouguereau; that artist would have found in her a model whom he could have represented with sincerity.

Yet something was missing to her, her friends were dimly aware. Her desirable surroundings kindled her to but a perfunctory interest in life--the electric spark was absent. Mrs. Simpson relied strategically upon the wedding preparations and hurried them on, announcing in May that it was quite time to think about various garments of which the fashion is permanent, but the issue was blank. No ripple stirred the placid waters, unless indeed we take that way of describing Laura's calm demand, when the decision lay between Valenciennes and Torchon lace for under-bodies, to hear whether Mrs. Simpson had ever known Duff Lindsay to be anxious about his eternal future. The girl continued to give forth a mere pale reflection of her circ.u.mstances, and Mrs. Simpson was forced into the deprecation that perhaps one would hardly call her a joyous Christian.

But for the Zenana Light Society this impression of Miss Filbert might have deepened. The committee of that body was almost entirely composed of Mrs. Simpson's friends, and naturally came to learn much about her guest. The matter was vastly considered, but finally Miss Filbert was asked to speak at one of the monthly meetings the ladies held among themselves to keep the society "in touch" with the cause. Laura brought them, as one would imagine, surprisingly in touch. She made pictures for them, letting her own eyelashes close deliberately while they stared.

She moved these ladies, inspired them, carried them away, and the fact that none of them found themselves able afterward to quote the most pathetic pa.s.sages seemed rather to add to the enthusiasm with which they described the address. The first result was a shower of invitations to tea, occasions when Laura was easily led into monologue. Miss Filbert became a cult of evangelistic drawing-rooms, and the same kind of forbearance was extended to her little traces of earlier social experiences as is offered, in salons of another sort, to the eccentricities of persons of genius. Very soon other applications had to be met and considered, and Mrs. Simpson freely admitted that Laura would not be justified in refusing to the Methodists and Baptists what she had given elsewhere. She rea.s.serted her platform influence over audiences that grew constantly larger, and her world began to revolve again in that great relation to the infinities which it was her life to perceive and point out. Mrs. Simpson charged her genially with having been miserable in Plymouth until she was allowed to do good in her own way, and saw that she had beef-tea after every occasion of doing it. She became in a way a public character, and a lady journalist sent an account of her, with a photograph, to a well-known London fashion paper.

Perhaps the strongest effect she made was as the voice of the Purity a.s.sociation, when she delivered an address, in the picturesque costume she had abandoned, attacking measures contemplated by Government for the protection of the health of the Army in India. This was reported in full in the local paper, and Mr. Simpson sent a copy to Duff Lindsay, who received it, I regret to say, with an unmistakable imprecation. But Laura rejoiced. Deprived of her tambourine she nevertheless rejoiced exceedingly.

CHAPTER XXV