Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof
followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at
one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared
entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a
rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust.
It gave a soothing wistulness to discontent to think this, which a
discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as
she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south
wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly,
however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things
require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command
over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There
was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or
one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the
days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the
rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas
and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter of
fact, there were not very many days, and they were largely filled with
millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they asserted
themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency,
by billows of spotted muslin, with which Céline, who felt the romance of
the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Céline, indeed, was
worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend"
her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert
contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's
beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the
source, and they stitched together while she, with careful reserves,
watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from
the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her
Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs.
Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had
several times felt, seated beside Céline, how grateful she ought to be
that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such
pleasantness, though Céline herself seemed to stand rather far from
their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came
occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh
remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend as
Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that
there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in
Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would
be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their
bright faces. Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made his
tea for him with precision, and pressed upon him, solicitously,
everything there was to eat. He found her submissive and wishful to be
pleasant. She sat up straight and said it was much hotter than they had
it this time of year up-country but nothing at all to complain of yet.
He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the
muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make
it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to
take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the costumes was
completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the
first time in secular dress. The stays insisted a little cruelly on the
lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested.
Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward
like that of some wading birds, and her arms, in their unaccustomed
sleeves, hung straight at her sides. She had put on a hat that matched:
it was the kind of pretty, disorderly hat with waving flowers that
demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not
thought of that way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the
significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant; its
lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased. She made no demand upon him
for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with
herself; but after a time, when they were sitting together on the sofa,
and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she
recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.
"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.
The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at
six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been
completed over night; indeed, she slept on board, and Duff had only the
duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in
a sequestered corner of the fresh-swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her
Army clothes--she had come on board in one of the muslins--and she was
softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid
tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane,
the overruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come
apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no
more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.
"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you.
We've laboured together, united in heart,
But now we must close, and soon we must part."
They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they
evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside
the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a
consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a
ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between
the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless, as she presently turned a
calmed face to him with her pale apology, he had the sensation of a
rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted
muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of
smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he remembered
that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.
The _Sutlej_ had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
dinner in Middleton street, at which the guests, it was understood, were
to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency
the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an
assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose
almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make, if you like, with the
geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case--he
could almost have demanded an explanation--since it was one of those
parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus
of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society
was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there
were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would
"mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss
Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so
fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She
took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite
comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner party; and it was
seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone
from the feast. If you found this reprehensible, she would have told you
she had observed that they do it in Japan, where manners are the best in
the world.
Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I,
with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do.
To me it is depressing, and a little cruel, to be compelled to betray
the inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia's banquets, especially
in connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking. A poverty
of cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would
have been offered up to the gods that season. The limitations of her
resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she
asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no
better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Shelley under
critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University, and the necessary
item, his wife, who did even less harm by making exquisite lampshades.
There was a civilian who had written a few years before an article in
the _Nineteenth Century_ about the aboriginal tribes of Madras, and the
lady attached to him, who had been at one time the daughter of a
Lieutenant-Governor. The Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry
loved meeting anybody that was clever, admired brains beyond anything;
and an Aide-de-Camp who had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was, and
Captain Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays
when they were produced in Simla, and was invariably considered up there
to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though
he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment
happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay and Stephen Arnold
as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with the contortionist, as it
were, at the apex, on his head. The Livingstones had family connection
with a leading London publishing firm, and Alicia may possibly have
reflected, as she surveyed her completed work, how much better than
capering captains she could have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be
admitted likely that she would harbour, at that particular instant, so
ungracious a thought. And indeed it was a creditable party; it would
almost unanimously call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe
made the most agreeable excitement--you might almost have heard the
heart-beats of the wife of the literary and on one occasion current
civilian, as she just escaped being introduced, and so availed herself
of the dinner's opportunity for intimate observation without letting
herself in a particle--most clever. Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed
upon the spear, as she always did, and made a gushing little speech,
with every eye upon her, in the middle of the room, without a thought of
consequences. The Aide-de-Camp was also _empressé_, one would have
thought that he was acting himself, the way he bowed and picked up
Hilda's fan--a grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the
week before, in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the
Commander-in-Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the
newly-introduced Head of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe
that he never went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too
badly ventilated; and Stephen Arnold, arriving late, shot like an
embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still
engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.
There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were the
pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he
began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous, half-checked smile.
Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she
stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands, like a
reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew
a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The
civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was
absurdly affected; and, indeed, to an acuter intelligence it might have
looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not
offered.
That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife,
observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she
complained afterward that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly
went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to
personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that
night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was
a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the
Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about
punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but
after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have
represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms
instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance;
she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the
jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little
dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's
wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of
the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying
qualities, which were only very slightly dashed when she glanced over
the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval,
giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry and
drinking water. The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower,
living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals
closed over her secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the
sloping shoulders, thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs.
Barberry.
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."