The Path of a Star Part 15

"Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his convictions?

Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the roof after all?"

"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not. Kally Nath is to be baptized to-morrow. We are certain to get our oratory."

"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted. "When one prays for so long a time together it must be better to have fresh air. It will certainly be better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a weak chest."

"It will be better for us all." Arnold seemed to reflect, across his teacup, how much better it would be. Then he added, "I saw Lindsay last night."

"Again? And--"

"I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way."

"Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all--another man--it's naturally of no use!"

"I spoke as a priest!"

"Did he swear at you?"

"Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But I could get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."

"How far did you go?"

"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her."

"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you don't suspect the irony in it" Hilda said. "Pray who is to make it up to him?"

"I suppose there is that point of view."

"I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before him. I succeeded too--he gave me the most uncomfortable looks--but I might as well have let it alone. The great end of nature," Hilda went on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities.

And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.

That's a plat.i.tude, I know," she added, "but it's irresistibly suggested."

Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the room. The plat.i.tude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's subst.i.tutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm--it was really something like that--which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought him.

"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied she was being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him."

"The devil, no doubt," Hilda replied concisely; "and with equal certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."

Arnold gave her a look of surprise. "Surely not my cousin!" he protested. "She can't understand."

"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I think she's only too tortuously intelligent."

Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. "May I ask?--" he began, formally.

"Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?" she went on, at Arnold's blush; "but you asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl--having her there constantly and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away.

People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality."

"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest in his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was not quite a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication between Alicia and Lindsay. He sat for a moment without saying more, covering his eyes with his hand.

"Why should you care so much?" Hilda asked gently. "You are at the very antipodes of her sect. You can't endorse her methods--you don't trust her results."

"Oh, all that! It's of the least consequence." He spoke with a curious, governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes. "It's seeing another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that held, as best it could, a ray from the source. It's another glimpse of the strength of the tide--terrible. It's a cruel hint that one lives above it in the heaven of one's own hopes, by some mere blind accident. To have set one's feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world and to feel the possibility of that--"

"I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed her.

She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to a promiscuous looking-gla.s.s to remove her hat. She was refreshed and vivified--she wanted to talk of the warm world. She let a decent interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his hand from his eyes. Even then, to make the transition easier, she said, "You ought to be lifted up to-day, if you are going to baptize Kally Nath to-morrow."

"The Brother Superior will do it. And I don't know--I don't know. The young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes over to us--"

"The, young woman he is to marry! Oh my dear and reverend friend! Avec ces gens la! I have had a most amusing afternoon," she went on quickly.

"I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your halo." She was safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at any imputation of saints.h.i.+p. He held himself a person of broad indulgences, and would point openly to his consumption of tea-cakes. But this afternoon a miasma hung over him. Hilda saw it, and bent herself, with her graphic recital, to dispel it, perceived it thicken and settle down upon him, and went bravely on to the end. Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and spoke before him. It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a matinee.

"And that is the sort of thing you store up and value," he said, when she had finished. "These persons will add to your knowledge of life?"

"Extremely," she replied to all of it.

"I suppose they will in their measure. But personally I could wish you had not gone. Your work has no right to make such demands."

"Be reasonable," she said, flus.h.i.+ng. "Don't talk as if personal dignity were within the reach of everybody. It's the most expensive of privileges. And nothing to be so very proud of--generally the product of somebody else's humiliations, handed down. But the humiliations must have been successful, handed down in cash. My father drove a cab and died in debt. His name was Ca.s.sidy. I shall be dignified some day--some day! But you see I must make it possible myself, since n.o.body has done it for me."

"Well, then, I'll alter my complaint. Why should you play with your sincerity?"

"I didn't play with it," she flashed; "I abandoned it. I am an actress."

They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance their discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain that Arnold was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves. He fidgeted with the ta.s.sel of his ceinture, and she watched his moving fingers. Presently she spoke quietly, in a different key.

"I sometimes think," she said, "of a child I knew, in the other years.

She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts. Her impulses, within her small limits, were n.o.ble--she was the keenest, loyalest little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the woman she is now I think the uses of life are hard, my friend--they are hard."

He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as an ill.u.s.tration.

"And yet," he replied, "they can be turned to admirable purpose."

"I wonder!" Hilda exclaimed brightly. She had turned down the leaf of that mood. "But we are not cheerful--let us be cheerful. For my part I am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of December. Look at this!"

She opened a small black leather bag, and poured money out of it, in notes and currency, into her lap.

"Is it a legacy?"

"It's pay," she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips. "I have been paid--we have all been paid! It's so unusual--it makes me feel quite generous. Let me see. I'll give you this, and this, and this,"--she counted into her open palm ten silver rupees,--"all those I will give you for your mission. Prends!" and she clinked them together and held them out to him.

He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small. Something in him had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood. He could only draw into his sh.e.l.l; doubtless he thought that a legitimate and inoffensive proceeding.

"Thanks, no," he said, "I think not. We desire people's prayers, rather than their alms."

He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous behaviour, and said farewell to him as she always did, in spite of the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes. She continued to hold the ten rupees carefully and separately, as if she would later examine them in diagnosing her pain. It was keener and profounder than any humiliation, the new voice, crying out, of a trampled tenderness. She stood and looked after him for a moment with startled eyes and her hand, in a familiar gesture of her profession, upon her heart. Then she went to her room, and deliberately loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed, first to sob like that little child she remembered, and afterwards to think, until the world came and knocked at her door and bade her come out of herself and earn money.

CHAPTER XIII