Hilda, Sara Jeannette Duncan [ebook reader 7 inch TXT] 📗

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.