Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




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 an inert tendency to
remain seated. The Aide-de-Camp 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, buttoning 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.

"Nobody suggests _me_!" exclaimed Captain Corby, resentfully. They were
gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the
Barberrys' glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered
vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornity, 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 passed
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 nobody 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 dog-cart, 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 cloak-room. 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 hair-pin--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
ball-room--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
woman, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the
pillared spaces of the ball-room. 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 assent. 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 assured 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 toward 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 backs 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 passed, "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 attitude 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 shores----"

"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 shell, 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 Saturday nights--what can
you expect. If I were famous 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 toward the secretaries' wives
settled upon them, for 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
afterward 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 embarrassment, 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 analysis 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 sex, 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 grass
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 coarse."

"I dare say, my dear. You didn't come out of a cab, and you never are. I
like being coarse, 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."

"Don't 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 damnable--you have always known what I think. Have you
seen him lately--I mean your cousin?"

"He lunched with us yesterday. He was more enthusiastic than ever about
you."

"I wish you could tell me that he hadn't mentioned my name. I don't want
his enthusiasm. The pit gives one that."

"Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of--of what it ought to be? What is
the principal part of it? Not enthusiasm--adoration?"

"Goodness, no! Something quite different and quite simple--too simple to
explain. Besides, it is a thing that requires the completest ignorance
to discuss comfortably. Do you want me to vivisect my soul? You
yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?"

"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at the
same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah, Mr. Lindsay!"

There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's
greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a
difference, and that it would be necessary to find other things to say.
He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish
her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to
abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the
conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and
sugar. Alicia waited; it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the
tapestries until some reviving circumstance should bring her out again,
a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and
comments. She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that. You
know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia
Livingstone behind the tea-pot, the conviction visited her that a sex
three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.

"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible,"
Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent."

"I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm with
him. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll
combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the _Surprise Party_ on between
the acts. The only way it would go, in this capital."

"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed. "I've never seen one of his
plays--doesn't it sound terrible?"

"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should like to,
for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a
scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's no meaning. You
see, he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would be a tame
travesty--nobody could redeem it alone. You must keep to the old
situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia."

"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in _The Reproach of
Galilee_" Duff said; "everyone who knows the least bit about it said you
were marvellous in that."

"Marvellous," said Alicia.

Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking. The
others looked at her absent eyes. "A bazaar trick or two helped me," she
said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that might be
hanging on the wall or visible out of the window.

"And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in
Calcutta?" Duff asked.

"Not in Calcutta, or anywhere. The rest hate it--nobody has a chance but
me," Hilda said, and got up.

"Oh, I don't know," Alicia began, but Miss Howe was already half way out
of the discussion in the direction of the door. There was often a
brusqueness in her comings and goings, but she usually left a flavour of
herself behind. One turned with facility to talk about her, this being
the easiest way of applying the stimulus that came of talking to her. It
was more conspicuous than either of these two realised that they
accepted her retreat without a word, that there was even between them a
consciousness of satisfaction that she had gone.

"This morning's mail," said Alicia, smiling brightly at him, "brought
you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached she was from
her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated to some
background of her nature while she occupied herself with the play of
circumstances or was lost in her observation of him.

"How kind of you to think of it," Lindsay said. "This was the first by
which I could possibly hear from England."

"Ah, well, now you will have no more anxiety. Letters from on board ship
are always difficult to write and unsatisfactory," Alicia said. Miss
Filbert's had been postcards, with a wide unoccupied margin at the
bottom.

"The _Sutlej_ seems to have arrived on the 3rd; that's a day later,
isn't it, than we made out she would be?"

Alicia consulted her memory and found she couldn't be sure. Lindsay was
vexed by a similar uncertainty, but they agreed that the date was early
in the month.

"Did they get comfortably through the Canal? I remember being tied up
there for forty-eight hours once."

"I don't think she says, so I fancy it must have been all right. The
voyage is bound to do her good. I've asked the Simpsons to watch
particularly for any sign of malaria later, though. One can't possibly
know what she may have imported from that slum in Bentinck street."

"And what was it like after Gibraltar?" Alicia asked, with a barely
perceptible glance at the envelope edges showing over his breast pocket.

"I'll look," and he sorted one out. It was pink and glossy, with a
diagonal water-stripe. Lindsay drew out the single sheet it contained,
and she could see that every line was ruled and faintly pencilled. "Let
me see," said he. "To begin at the beginning: 'We arrived home on the
3rd'--you see it was the 3rd--'making very slow progress the last day on
account of a fog in the Channel'--ah, a fog in the Channel!--'which was
a great disappointment to some on board who were impatient to meet their
loved ones. One lady had not seen her family of five for seven years.
She said she would like to get out and swim, and you could not wonder.
She was my s--stable companion.'".

"Quaint!" said Alicia.

"She has picked up the expression on board, 'So--so she told me this.'
Oh, yes. 'Now that it is all over I have written the voyage down among
my mercies in spite of three days' sickness, when you could keep nothing
on'--What are these two words, Miss Livingstone? I can't quite make them
out."

"'Your'--cambric?--stom--'stomach'--'your stomach.'"

"Oh, quite so. Thanks!--'in the Bay of Biscay.' You see, it _was_ rough
after Gib. 'Everybody was'--Yes. 'The captain read Church of England
prayers on Sunday mornings, in which I had no objection to join, and we
had mangoes every day for a week after leaving Ceylon.'"

"Miss Filbert was so fond of mangoes," Alicia said.

"Was she? 'The passengers got up two dances, and quite a number of
gentlemen invited me, but I declined with thanks, though I would not say
it is wrong in itself.'" Lindsay seemed to waver; her glance went near
enough to him to show her that his face had a red tinge of
embarrassment. He looked at the letter uncertainly, on the point of
folding it up.

"You see she hasn't danced for so long," Alicia put in quickly; "she
would naturally hesitate about beginning again with anybody but you. I
shouldn't wonder," she added gently, "if she never does, with anybody
else."

"I know it's an idea some women have," he replied, gratefully
attributing it to her of whom they spoke. "I think it's rather--nice."

"And her impressions of the Simpsons--and Plymouth?"

"She goes on to that." He re-consulted the letter. "'Mr. and Mrs.
Simpson met me as expected and welcomed me very affably.' She has got
hold of a wrong impression there, I fancy; the Simpsons couldn't be
'affable.' 'They seem very kind and pleasant for such stylish people,
and their house is lovely, with electric light in the parlour and hot
and cold water throughout. They seem very earnest people and have family
prayers regularly, but I have not yet been asked to lead. Four servants
come in to prayers. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson are deeply interested in the
work of the Army, though I think Plymouth, as a whole, is more taken up
with the C. M. S.; but we cannot have all things.' Dear me, yes! I
remember those evangelical teas and the disappointment that I could not
speak more definitely about the work among the Sontalis."

"Fancy her having caught the spirit of the place already!" exclaimed
Alicia. He went on: "'Mr. and Mrs. Simpson have a beautiful garden and
grow most of their own vegetables. We sit in it a great deal and I think
of all that has passed. I hope ever that it has been for the best and
pray for you always. Oh, that your feet may be set in the right path and
that we may walk hand in hand upon the way to Zion!'"

Lindsay lowered his voice and read the last sentences rapidly, as if the
propulsion of the first part of the letter sent him through them. Then
he stopped abruptly, and Alicia looked up.

"That's all, only," he added with an awkward smile, "the usual formula."

"'God bless you'?" she asked, and he nodded.

"It has a more genuine ring than most formulas," she observed.

"Yes, hasn't it? May I have another cup?" He restored the pink sheet to
its pink envelope and both to his breast pocket while she poured out the
other cup, but Miss Filbert was still present with them. They went on
talking about her, and entirely in the tone of congratulation--the
suitability of the Simpsons, the suitability of Plymouth, the
probability that she would entirely recover, in its balmy atmosphere,
her divine singing voice. Plymouth certainly was in no sense a tonic,
but Miss Filbert didn't need a tonic; she was too much inclined to be
strung up as it was. What she wanted was the soothing, quieting
influence of just Plymouth's meetings and just Plymouth's teas. The
charms that so sweetly and definitely characterised her would expand
there; it was a delightful flowery environment for them, and she
couldn't fail to improve in health. Devonshire's visitors got
tremendously well fed, with fish items of especial excellence.




CHAPTER XX.


Nobody could have been more impressed with Hilda's influence upon Mr.
Llewellyn Stanhope's commercial probity than Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope
himself. He was a prey to all noble feelings; they ruled his life and
spoiled his bargains; and gratitude, when it had a chance, which was
certainly seldom in connection with leading ladies, dominated him
entirely. He sat in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel with tears in his
eyes, talking about what Miss Howe had done for him, and gave
unnecessary backsheesh to coolies who brought him small bills--so long,
that is, as they were the small bills of this season. When they had
reference to the liabilities of a former and less prosperous year he
waved them away with a bitter levity which belonged to the same period.
His view of his obligations was strictly chronological, and in taking it
he counted, like the poet, only happy hours. The bad debt and the bad
season went consistently together to oblivion; the sun of to-day's
remarkable receipts could not be expected to penetrate backwards. He had
only one fault to find with Miss Howe--she had no artistic conscience,
none whatever, and he found this with the utmost leniency, basking in
the consciousness that it made his own more conspicuous. She was
altogether in the grand style, if you understood Mr. Stanhope, but
nothing would induce her to do herself justice before Calcutta; she
seemed to have taken the measure of the place and to be as indifferent!
Try to ring in anything worth doing and she was off with the bit between
her teeth, and you simply had to put up with it. The second lead had a
great deal more ambition, and a very good little woman in her way, too,
but of course not half the talent. He was obliged to confess that Miss
Howe wasn't game for risks, especially after doing her Rosalind the
night the circus opened to a twenty-five rupee house. It was monstrous.
She seemed to think that nothing mattered so much as that everybody
should be paid on the first of the month. There was one other grievance,
which Llewellyn mentioned only in confidence with a lowered voice. That
was Bradley. Hilda wasn't lifting a finger to keep Bradley. Result was,
Bradley was crooking his elbow a great deal too often lately and going
off every way. He, Llewellyn, had put it to her if that was the way to
treat a man the _Daily Telegraph_ had spoken about as it had spoken
about Hamilton Bradley. Where was she--where was he--going to find
another? No, he didn't say marry Bradley; there were difficulties, and
after all that might be the very way to lose him. But a woman had an
influence, and that influence could never be more fittingly exercised
than in the cause of dramatic art, based on Mr. Stanhope's combinations.
Mr. Stanhope expressed himself more vaguely, but it came to that.

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