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

congratulation; the week's _Gazette_ had transformed Surgeon-Major Livingstone into Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel. The officer thus promoted, in a particularly lustrous shirt bosom--he had them laundried in England and sent out with the mails--made a serious social effort to correspond, and succeeded in producing more than one story of the Principal Medical Officer with her Majesty's forces in India which none of them heard before. They were all delighted at Herbert's step, he was just the kind of person to get a step, and to get it rather early; a sense of the propriety of it mingled with the general gratification. There was a feeling of ease among them, too, of the indefeasibly won, which the event is apt to bring even when the surgeon-lieutenant-colonelcy is most strikingly deserved. With no strain imaginable one could see the relaxation.

"We can't do much in celebration," Lindsay was saying, "but I've got a box at the theatre, if you'll come. Our people had some pomfret and oysters over on ice from Bombay this morning, and I've sent my share to Bonsard to see what he can do with it for supper. Jack Cummins and Lady Dolly are coming. By the way, what do you think the totalizator paid Lady Dolly on Saturday--six thousand!"

"Rippin'," Herbert agreed. "We'll all come--at least--I don't know. What do you say, Arnold?"

"Of course Stephen will come," Alicia urged. "Why not?" It was putting him and his gown at once beyond the operation of vulgar prejudice, intimating that they quite knew him for what he was.

"What's the piece?" Herbert inquired.

"Oh, the piece isn't up to much, I'm afraid, only that Hilda Howe is worth seeing in almost anything."

"Thanks," Stephen put in, "but I think, thanks very much, I would rather not."

"I remember," Alicia said, "you were with us the night she played in _The Reproach of Galilee_. I don't wonder that you do not wish to disturb that impression."

Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallized cherries immediately in front of him and appeared to consider, austerely, what form his reply should take. There was an instant's perceptible pause, and then he merely bowed toward Alicia as if vaguely to acknowledge the kindness of her recollection. "I think," he said again, "that I will not accompany you to-night, if you will be good enough to excuse me."

"You must excuse us both," Alicia said, definitely, "I should much rather stay at home and talk to Stephen."

At this they all cried out, but Miss Livingstone would not change her mind. "I haven't seen him for three weeks," she said, with gentle effrontery, making nothing of his presence, "and he's much more improving than either of you. I also shall choose the better part."

"How you can call it that, with Hilda in the balance----" Duff protested.

"But then you've invited Lady Dolly. After winning six thousand there will be no holding Lady Dolly. She'll be capable of cat-calls! How I should love," Alicia went on, "to have Hilda meet her. She would be a mine to Hilda."

"For pity's sake," cried her brother, "stop asking Hilda and people who are a mine to Hilda! It's too perceptible, the way she digs in them."

"You dear old thing, you're quite clever to-night! What difference does it make? They never know--they never dream! I wish I could dig." Alicia looked pensively at the olive between her finger and thumb.

"Thank heaven you can't," Duff said warmly. It was a little odd, the personal note. Alicia's eyes remained upon the olive.

"It's all she lives for."

"Well," Duff declared, "I can imagine higher ends."

"You're not abusing Hilda!" Alicia said, addressing the olive.

"Not at all. Only vindicating you."

It did single them out, this fencing. Herbert and Arnold sat as spectators, pushed, in a manner, aside.

"I suppose she will be off soon," Livingstone said.

"Oh, dreadfully soon. On the 15th. I had a note from her to-day."

"Did she say she was going?" Stephen asked quickly.

"She mentioned the company--she is the company, surely."

"Oh, undoubtedly. May I--might I ask for a little more soda-water, Alicia?" He made the request so formally that she glanced at him with surprise.

"Please do--but isn't it very odious, by itself, that way? I suppose we shouldn't leave out Hamilton Bradley--he certainly counts."

"For how much?" inquired her brother. "He's going to pieces."

"Hilda can pull him together again," Lindsay said incautiously.

"Has she an influence for good--over him?" Stephen inquired and cleared his throat. He caught a glance exchanged and frowned.

"Oh, yes," Duff said, "I fancy it is for good. For good, certainly. The odd part of it is that he began by having an influence over her which she declares improved her acting. So that was for good, too, as it turned out. I think she makes too much of him. To my mind, he speaks like a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like a bit of consecrated stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and his thin lips, and his thin eyebrows. Personally, I'm sick of his eyebrows."

"They'll end by marrying," said Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel Livingstone.

"_Herbert!_ How little you know her!"

"It's possible enough," Duff said, "especially if she finds him in any way necessary to her production of herself. Hilda has knocked about too much to have many illusions. One is pretty sure she would place that first."

"You are saying a thing which is monstrous!" cried Alicia.

Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction. "She'll have to marry him to get rid of him," he said. "Fancy the opportunities of worrying her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!"

"Oh, if you think Hilda could be _worried_ into anything!" Miss Livingstone exclaimed derisively. "If the man were irritating, do you suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means--?"

"She would have him put in irons, no doubt," Herbert retorted, "or locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the ship's butcher."

The three laughed immoderately, and Stephen, looking up, came in at the end with a smile. Alicia pronounced her brother too absurd, and unfitted by nature to know anything about creatures like Hilda Howe. "A mere man to begin with," she said. "You haven't the ghost of a temperament, Herbert, you know you haven't."

"He's got a lovely bedside manner," Lindsay remarked, "and that's the next thing to it."

"Rubbish! I don't want to hurry you," Alicia glanced at the watch on her wrist, "but unless you and Herbert want to miss half the first act you had better be off. Stephen and I will have our coffee comfortably in the drawing-room and find what excuses we can for you."

But Stephen put out his hand with a movement of slightly rigid deprecation.

"If it is not too vacillating of me," he said, "and I may be forgiven, I think I will change my mind and go. I have no business to break up your party, and besides, I shall probably not have another opportunity--I should rather like to go. To the theatre, of course, that is. Not to Bonsard's, thanks very much."

"Oh, do come on to Bonsard's," Lindsay said, and Alicia protested that he would miss the best of Lady Dolly, but Stephen was firm. Bonsard's was beyond the limit of his indulgence.


CHAPTER XXII.

Only the Sphinx confronted them, after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box. Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were assisting her a good deal with the house in exploring and being explored, enabling Colonel John Cummins, who sat by her side, to observe how very perfect and adorable the cut of her bodice was. Since Colonel Cummins was accustomed to say in moments when his humour escaped his discretion, that there was more in a good fit than meets the eye, the _role_ of Lady Dolly's elbows could hardly be dismissed as unimportant. Moreover, the husband attached to the elbows belonged to the Department of which Colonel John was the head, so that they rested, one may say, upon a very special plane.

Alicia disturbed it with the necessity of taking Colonel Cummins' place, which Lady Dolly accepted with admirable spirit, assuring the usurper, with the most engaging candour, that she simply ought never to be seen without turquoises. "Believe it or not as you like, but I like you better every time I see you in that necklace." Lady Dolly clasped her hands, with her fan in them, in the abandonment of her affection, and "love you better" floated back and dispersed itself among the men. Alicia smiled the necessary acknowledgment. All the women she knew made compliments to her; it was a kind of cult among them. The men had sometimes an air of envying their freedom of tongue. "Don't say that," she returned lightly, "or Herbert will never give me any diamonds." She, too, looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice but said nothing. It was doubtless precisely because she distained certain forms of feminine barter that she got so much for nothing.

"And where," demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, "did you find that dear, sweet little priest? Do introduce him to me--at least, bye and bye, when I've thought of something to say. Let me see, wasn't it Good Friday last week? I'll ask him if he had hot-cross buns--or do people eat those on Boxing Day? Pancakes come in somewhere, if one could only be sure!"

Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box. His senses were filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to spring from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front, a kind of lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to enjoy. They were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed to proceed partly from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was but dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical inferiority to the other men assailed him; his appreciation of their muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to which he held failed to offer him a refuge. His eye wandered restlessly as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing most present with him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck of his cassock. He fixed his attention presently in a climax of passive discomfort on the curtain, where, unconsciously, his gaze crept with a subtle interrogation in it to the wide eyeballs of the Sphinx.

The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production in the middle of the week, and although the gallery and rupee seats under it were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both. When Duff Lindsay said at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he spoke, I fancy, from the nearest point of view he could take to that of the Order of St. Barnabas. As a matter of fact, _The Victim of Virtue_ was up to a very great deal, but its points were so delicate that one must have been educated