"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--n.o.body 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Ca.n.a.l? 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 pa.s.sengers 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 embarra.s.sment. 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 pa.s.sed. 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."

"'G.o.d 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.

n.o.body 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 n.o.ble feelings; they ruled his life and spoiled his bargains; and grat.i.tude, 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.

Perhaps if you pursued Llewellyn, pushed him, as it were, along the track of what he had to put up with, you would have come upon the further fact that as a woman of business Miss Howe had no parallel for procrastination. Next season was imminent in his arrangements, as Christmas numbers are imminent to publishers at midsummer, and here she was shying at a contract as if they had months for consideration. It wasn't, either, as if she complained of anything in the terms--that would be easy enough fixed--but she said herself that it was a bigger salary than he, Llewellyn, would ever be able to pay unless she went round with the hat. Nor had she any objection to the tour--a fascinating one--including the Pacific Slope and Honolulu. It stumped him, Llewellyn, to know what she did object to and why she couldn't bark it out at once, seeing she must understand perfectly well it was no use his going to Bradley without first settling with her.

Hilda, alone in her own apartment--it was difficult to keep Llewellyn Stanhope away from even that door in his pursuit of her signature--considered the vagary life had become for her, it was so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers.

Alicia knew, of course; but that was much as if she had written it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a drawer. Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of it was tangled now in a speculation. There had been a time filled with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her, like a buoyant sea, and she had been content to float in it, imagining desirable things. Stanhope's waiting contract made a limit to the time--a limit she brought up against without distress or shock, but with a kind of recognising thrill in contact at last with the necessity for action, decision, a climax of high heart-beats. She saw with surprise that she had lived with her pa.s.sion these weeks and months half consciously expecting that a crucial moment would dissolve it, like a person aware that he dreams and will presently awake. She had not faced till now any exigency of her case. But the crucial moment had leapt upon her, pointing out the subjection of her life, and she, undefended, sought only how to accomplish her bonds.

Certainly she saw no solution that did not seem monstrous; yet every pulse in her demanded a solution; there was no questioning the imperious need. She had the fullest, clearest view of the situation, and she looked at it without flinching and without compromise. Above all, she had true vision of Stephen Arnold, glorifying nowhere, extenuating nothing. It was almost cruel to be the victim of such circ.u.mstance and be denied the soft uses of illusion; but if that note of sympathy had been offered to Hilda she would doubtless have retorted that it was precisely because she saw him that she loved him. His figure, in its poverty and austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of her nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompa.s.sing, and her possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and protecting. I think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of content with which, but for Llewellyn and his contract, she would have been willing to go on indefinitely. It made him hers in a primary and essential way, beside which any mere acknowledgment or vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the capital of a pillar firmly rooted. There may be an appearance that she took a good deal for granted; but if there is, I fear that in the baldness of this history it has not been evident how much and how variously Arnold depended on her, in how many places her colour and her vitality patched out the monkish garment of his soul--this with her enthusiasm and her cognisance. It may be remembered, too, that there was in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.

Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.

She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would not find any concessions among its features if she could help it. It was a trick she played upon her own consciousness; she would not look; but she could see without looking. She saw that which explained itself to be best, fittest, most reasonable, and thus she sometimes wandered with Arnold antic.i.p.atively, on afternoons when there was no matinee, through the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.

She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of those steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to possibilities. She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see her then. She had not spoken to him since the night of the Viceroy's party, when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-gharry to wish him good-night, and he walked home alone under the stars, trying to remember a line of Horace, a chaste one, about woman's beauty. She sent the note by post. There was no answer but that was as usual; there never was an answer unless something prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes before the time. Hilda sat under the blue umbrellas when the hour arrived, devising with full heart-beats what she would say, creating fifty different forms of what he would say, while the hands slipped round the clock past the moment that should have brought his step to the door. Hilda noted it and compared her watch. A bowl of roses stood on a little table near a window; she got up and went to it, bending over and rearranging the flowers. The light fell on her and on the roses; it was a beautiful att.i.tude, and when at a footfall she looked up expectantly it was more beautiful. But it was only another boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves, with a highly-varnished complexion, who took off his hat elaborately as he pa.s.sed the open door. Hilda became conscious of her use of the roses and abandoned them. Presently she sat down on a Bentwood rocking-chair and swayed to and fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence. Half an hour later she was still sitting there. Her face had changed, something had faded in it; her gaze at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when she glanced at the empty door it was with timidity. Arnold had not come and did not come.

The evening pa.s.sed without explanation, and next morning the post brought no letter. It was simplest to suppose that her own had not reached him, and Hilda wrote again. The second letter she sent by hand, with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature. The messenger brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials, "J. L. for S.

A.," and there was no reply. There remained the possibility of absence from Calcutta, of illness. That he should have gone away was most unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only too probable. Hilda looked from her bedroom window across the varying expanse of parapeted flat roofs and mosque bubbles that lay between her and College street, and curbed the impulse in her feet that would have resulted in the curious spectacle of Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady calling in person at a monastic gate to express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it was barred. A situation, after all, could be too pictorial, looked at from the point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with grateful humour across her anxiety. Alicia would have known; but both the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon with Duff Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey. They were most anxious, Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them. Could he in the end have gone? There was, of course, the accredited fount and source of all information, the Brother Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda Howe apply for it? Llewellyn might write for her: but it was glaringly impossible that the situation should lay itself so far open to Llewellyn. Looking in vain for resources she came upon an expedient. She found a sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy. On it she wrote with red ink in the cramped hand of the bazaar _Kerani_:[9]

[Footnote 9: Hired writer.]

"Sir:--Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone mofussil or England as I have some small business with him. Yours obedient servant,

"Wun Sing."