The Path of a Star Part 5

"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor, dear old Rosy!

She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear; but blow her, if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up and went away."

"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace. "I'm not old and I'm not grotesque."

"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."

"I BEG your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out.

Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp."

"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette between her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's way of doing it.

"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said contemplatively; "you're young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be dismissed between them.

"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She felt delightfully terse and to the point.

"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know him well?"

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.

"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.

She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.

"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to the rest of the people--bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised--made to serve enn.o.bling ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different."

"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.

"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square, to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it."

"A statue?"

"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was, and the performance.

She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come from her, from her hair or her eyes or something. I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended."

"It sounds most unusual," Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest was rather obviously curbed.

"It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one doesn't go round the corner."

There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss Livingstone's desire to be informed.

Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and waited.

The pause grew so stiff with embarra.s.sment that she broke it herself.

"And I regret to say it was I who introduced them," she said.

"Introduced whom?"

"Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,"

Hilda went on tranquilly, "because I would only lend it to her while she was there."

"Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is always grateful to be amused."

"Oh, there is no reason to doubt his grat.i.tude. He is rather intense about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's account. Did I say so?" They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia's crude blush--everything else about her was so perfectly worked out--cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. "Perhaps though," Hilda hurried on with a pang, "we generalise too much about the men."

What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant brought her a card at that moment, is embarra.s.sing to consider. The card saved her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then exclaimed, "My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend--a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our cigarettes?"

Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.

"Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it? Drown the corpse in here, and I'll pretend it belongs to me." She pushed the finger-bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant went into it.

"Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and there was no time for remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.

"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portiere.

Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully.

Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless it.

"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee." He flavoured what he said, and made it pretty, like a woman. "Let me confess at once, that is what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality and self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee-time, isn't it?" Then he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been to him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical att.i.tudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she could hardly have expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found that he had forgotten it.

"Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said, and the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought Hilda a flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.

"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street," she said, "but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.

Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty of her well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity; it was one of those least of little things which are enough.

Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again quickly, and looked at the floor as he said he feared they were terribly out of it in College Street, for which, however, he had evidently no apology to offer. He continued to look at the floor with a careful air, as if it presented points pertinent to the situation. Hilda felt herself--it was an odd sensation--too sunny upon the nooked, retiring current that flowed in him. He might have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that Alicia made, but she was aware that he did not, that he was struggling through her strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled as if he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked, making light accusations against the rigours of the Mission House, complaining of her cousin that he was altogether given over to bonds and bands, that she personally would soon cease to hold him in affection at all; she saw so little of him it wasn't really worth while.

This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other end of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the firm, lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.

"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times a year." She spoke with a kind of grave brightness; it was difficult to know whether she was altogether in jest.

"There would be secession all over the place," Arnold responded, with his repressed smile. "You would get any number of probationers; I wonder whether you would keep them!"

"During that week," Hilda went on, "they should be compelled to dine and dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning before luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to all the variety entertainments. Think of the austere bliss of the return to the cloisters! All joy lies in a succession of sensations, they say. Do you remember how Lord Ormont arranged his pleasures? Oh yes, my brotherhood would be popular, as soon as it was understood."

Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sign or token of disapproval in Arnold's face. What she might have observed there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and something like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.

Hilda began to put on her gloves. The left one gaped at two finger-ends; she b.u.t.toned it with the palm thrown up and outward, as if it were the daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opera.

"Not yet!" Alicia cried.

"Thanks, I must. To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have to dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock. And, after pulling all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two in bed."

"You! But it's monstrous. Is there n.o.body else?"

"I wouldn't let anybody else," Hilda laughed. "Don't forget, please, that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of people, mostly from the Antipodes. Don't confound our manners and customs with anything you've heard about the Lyceum. Good-bye. It has been charming. Goodbye, Mr. Arnold."

But Alicia held her hand. "The papers say it is to be The Offence of Galilee, after all," she said.