The Path of a Star Part 24

"I did not guess--I did not dream!"

"And--now?" she asked.

A heavenly current drifted from her, the words rose and fell on it with the most dazing suggestion in their soft hesitancy. It must have been by an instinct of her art that her hand went up to the cross on Arnold's breast and closed over it, so that he should see only her. The familiar vision of her stood close, looking things intolerably new and different.

Again came out of it that sudden liberty, that unpremeditated rush and shock in him. He paled with indignation, with the startled resentment of a woman wooed and hostile. His face at last expressed something definite, it was anger; he stepped back and caught at his hat. "I am sorry," he said, "I am sorry. I thought you infinitely above and beyond all that."

Hilda smiled and turned away. If he chose it was his opportunity to go, but he stood regarding her, twirling his hat. She sat down, clasping her knees, and looked at the floor. There was a square of sunlight on the carpet, and motes were rising in it.

"Ah well, so did I," she said meditatively, without raising her eyes.

Then she leaned back in the chair and looked at him, in her level simple way.

"It was a foolish theory," she said, "and--now--I can't understand it at all. I am amazed to find that it even holds good with you."

It was so much in the tone of their usual discussions that Arnold was conscious of a lively relief. The instinct of flight died down in him; he looked at her with something like inquiry.

"It will always be to me curious," she went on, "that you could have thought your part in me so limited, so poor. That is enough to say. I find it hard to understand, anybody would, that you could take so much good from me and not--so much more." She opened her lips again, but kept back the words. "Yes," she added, "that is enough to say."

But for the colourless face and the tenseness about her lips it might have been thought that she definitely abandoned what she had learned she could not have. There was a note of acquiescence and regret in her voice, of calm reason above all; and this sense reached him, induced him to listen, as he generally listened, for anything she might find that would explain the situation. His fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain, to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them, wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself.

He looked into her upturned face and saw that her eyes were swimming.

"Never!" he said, "Never!" but he walked to the nearest chair and sat down. He seemed suddenly endowed with the courage to face this problem, and his head, as it rose in the twilight against the window, was grave and calm. Without a word a great tenderness of understanding filled the s.p.a.ce between them; an interpreting compa.s.sion went to and fro. Suddenly a new light dawned in Hilda's eyes, she leaned forward and met his in an absorption which caught them out of themselves into some s.p.a.ce where souls wander, and perhaps embrace. It was a frail adventure upon a gaze, but it carried them infinitely far. The moment died away, neither of them could have measured it, and when it had finally ebbed--they were conscious of every subsiding throb--the silence remained, like a margin for the beauty of it. They sat immovable, while the light faded. After a time the woman spoke. "Once before," she began, but he put up his hand, and she stopped. Then as if she would no longer be restrained. "That is all I want," she whispered. "That is enough."

For a time they said very little, looking back upon their divine moment; the shadows gathered in the corners of the room and made quiet conversation which was almost audible in the pauses. Then Hilda began to speak, steadily, calmly. You, too, would have forgotten her folly in what she found to say, as Arnold did; you too would have drawn faith and courage from her face. One would not be irreverent, but if this woman were convicted of the unforgiveable sin, she could explain it, and obtain justification rather than pardon. Her horizon had narrowed, she sought now only that it should enfold them both. She begged that he would wipe out her insanity, that he would not send her away. He listened and melted to conviction.

"Then I may stay?" she said at the end.

"I am satisfied--if a way can be found."

"I will find a way," she replied.

After which he went back through the city streets to his disciples in new humility and profounder joy, knowing that virtue had gone out of him. She in her room where she lodged also considered the miracle, twice wonderful in that it asked no faith of her.

CHAPTER XXI

It is difficult to be precise about such a thing, but I should think that Hilda gave herself to the marvellous aspect of what had come and gone between them, for several hours after Arnold left her. It was not for some time, at all events, that she arrived at the consideration--the process was naturally downward--that the soul of the marvel lay in the exact moment of its happening. Nothing could have been more heaven-sent than her precious perception, exactly then, that before the s.h.i.+ning gift of Arnold's spiritual sympathy, all her desire for a lesser thing from him must creep away abashed for ever. Even when the lesser thing, by infinitely gradual expansion, again became the greater, it remained permanently leavened and lifted in her by the strange and lovely incident that had taken for the moment such command of her and of him.

She would not question it or reason about it, perhaps with an instinct to avert its destruction; she simply drew it deeply into her content.

Only its sweet deception did not stay with her, and she let that go with open hands. She wanted, more than ever, the whole of Stephen Arnold, all that was so openly the Mission's and all that was so evidently G.o.d's. It will be seen that she felt in no way compelled to advise him of this her backsliding. I doubt whether such a perversion of her magnificent course of action ever occurred to her. It was magnificent, for it entailed a high disregarding stroke; it implied a sublime confidence of what the end would be, a capacity to wait and endure. She smiled buoyantly, in the intervals of arranging it, at the idea that Stephen Arnold stood beyond her ultimate possession.

There were difficulties, but the moment was favourable to her, more favourable than it would have been the year before, or any year but this. Before ten days had pa.s.sed she was able to write to Arnold describing her plan, and she was put to it to keep the glow of success out of her letter. She kept it out, that, and everything but a calm and humble statement--any Clarke Brother might have dictated it--of what she proposed to do. Perhaps the intention was less obvious than the desire that he should approve it.

The messenger waited long by the entrance to the Mission House for an answer, exchanging, sitting on his feet, the profane talk of the bazar with the gatekeeper of the Christians. Stephen was in chapel. There was no service; he had half an hour to rest in and he rested there. He was speculating, in the grateful dimness, about the dogma--he had never quite accepted it, though Colquhoun had--of the intercessory power of the souls of saints. A converted Brahmin, an old man, had died the day before. Arnold luxuriated in the humility of thinking that he would be glad of any good word dear old Nourendra Lal could say for him. The chapel was deliciously refined. The scent of fresh cut flowers floated upon the continual presence of the incense; a lily outlined its head against the tall carved altarpiece the Brothers had brought from Damascus. The seven bra.s.s lamps that hung from the rafters above the altar rails were also Damascene, carved and pierced so that the light in them was a still thing like a prayer; and the place breathed vague meanings which did not ask understanding. It was a refuge from the riot and squalor of the whitewashed streets with a double value and a treble charm--I.H.S. among plaster G.o.ds, a sanctuary in the bazar. Stephen sat in it motionless, with his lean limbs crossed in front of him, until the half-hour was up; then he bent his knee before the altar and went out to meet a servant at the door with Hilda's letter. The chapel opened upon an upper verandah, he crossed it to get a better light and stood to read with his back half turned upon the comers and goers.

It was her first communication since they parted, and in spite of its colourlessness it seemed to lay strong eager hands upon him, turning his shoulder that way, upon the world, bending his head over the page.

He had not dwelt much upon their strange experience, in the days that followed. It had retreated, for him, behind the veil of tender mystery with which he shrouded, even from his own eyes, the things that lay between his soul and G.o.d. The s.p.a.ce from that day to this had been more than usually full of ministry; its pure uses had fallen like snow, blotting and deadening the sudden wonder that blossomed then. Latterly he had hardly thought of it.

So far was he removed, so deeply drawn again within his familiar activities, that he regarded Hilda's letter for an instant with a lip of censure, as if, for some reason, it should not have been admitted.

It was, in a manner, her physical presence, the words expanded into her, through it she walked back into his life, with an interrogation.

Standing there by the pillar he became gradually aware of the weight of the interrogation.

A pa.s.sing Brother cast at him the sweet smile of the cloister. Arnold stopped him and transferred an immediate duty, which the other accepted with a slightly exaggerated happiness. They might have been girls together, with their apologies and protestations. The other Brother went on in a little glow of pleasure, Arnold turned back into the chapel, carrying, it seemed to him, a woman's life in his hand.

He took his seat and folded his arms almost eagerly; there was a light of concentration in his eye and a line of compression about his lips which had not marked his meditation upon Nourendra Lal. The vigour in his face suggested that he found a kind of athletic luxury in what he had to think about. Brother Colquhoun, with his flat hat clasped before his breast, pa.s.sed down the aisle. Stephen looked up with a trace of impatience. Presently he rose hurriedly as if he remembered something, and went and knelt before one of several paintings that hung upon the chapel walls. They were old copies of great works, discoloured and damaged. They had sailed round the Cape to India when the century was young, and a lady friend of the Mission had bought them at the sale of the effects of a ruined Begum. Arnold was one of those who could separate them from their incongruous history and consecrate them over again. He often found them helpful when he sought to lift his spirit, and in any special matter a special comfort. He bent for ten minutes before a Crucifixion, and then hastened back to his place. Only one reflection corrected the vigorous satisfaction with which he thought out Hilda's proposition. That disturbed him in the middle of it, and took the somewhat irrelevant form of a speculation as to whether the events of their last meeting should have had any place in his Thursday confession. He was able to find almost at once a conscientious negative for it, and it did not recur again.

He got up reluctantly when the Mission bell sounded, and indeed he had come to the end of a very absorbing interest. His decision was final against Hilda's scheme. His worn experience cried out at the sacrifice in it without the illumination--which it would certainly lack--of religious faith. She confessed to the lack, and that was all she had to say about her motive, which, of course, placed him at an immense disadvantage in considering it. But the question then descended to another plane, became merely a doubt as to the most useful employment of energy, and that doubt n.o.body could entertain long, n.o.body of reasonable breadth of view, who had ever seen her expressing the ideals of the stage. Arnold did his best to ward off all consideration which he could suspect of a personal origin, but his inveterate self-sacrifice slipped in and counted, naturally enough, under another guise, against her staying.

He went to his room and wrote to Hilda at once, the kindest, simplest of letters, but conveying a definitely negative note. He would have been perhaps more guarded, but it was so plainly his last word to her; Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure of his people in ten days' time upon every blank wall. So he gave himself a little lat.i.tude, he let in an undercurrent of gentle reminiscence, of serious a.s.surance as to the difference she had made. And when he had finally bade her begone to the light and fulness of her own life, and fastened up his letter, he deliberately lifted it to his lips and placed a trembling, awkward kiss upon it, like the kiss of an old man, perfunctory yet bearing a tender intention.

The Livingstones and Duff Lindsay had come back, the people from Surrey having been sped upon their way to the Far East. Stephen remembered with more than his usual relish an engagement to dine that evening in Middleton Street. He involuntarily glanced at his watch. It was half-past one. The afternoon looked arid, stretching between. Consulting his tablets he found that he had nothing that was really of any consequence to do. There were items, but they were unimportant, transferable. He had dismissed Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she helped to illumine showed seductively at the end of his day. He made an errand involving a long walk, and came back at an hour which left nothing but evensong between him and eight o'clock.

He was suddenly aware as he talked to her later, of a keener edge to his appreciation of the charm of Alicia Livingstone. Her voyage, he a.s.sured her, had done her all the good in the world. Her delicate bloom had certainly been enhanced by it, and the graceful spring of her neck and her waist seemed to have its counterpart in a freshened poise of the agreeable things she found to say. It was delightful the way she declared herself quite a different being, and the pleasure with which she moved, dragging fascinating skirts behind her, about the room. She made more of an impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had ever done before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had greater relief, and her charm more freedom. Lindsay was there, and Arnold glanced from one to the other of them, first with a start then with a smile, at the recollection of Hilda's conception of their relations. If this were a type and instance of hopeless love he had certainly misread all the songs and sayings. He kept the idea in his mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in his curious ac.u.men in such an unwonted direction. It was a very flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St. Barnabas. It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned across him toward Lindsay with occasional references to Laura Filbert, apparently full of light-heartedness, references which Duff received in the square-shouldered matter-of-course fas.h.i.+on of his countrymen approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe.

It was gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the indrawing of his under-lip, a plaintive twist of expression which spoke upon the faces of quite half the Order, of patience under privation.

The atmosphere was one of congratulation, the week's Gazette had transformed Surgeon-Major Livingstone into Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel.

The officer thus promoted, in a particularly l.u.s.trous s.h.i.+rt bosom, made a serious social effort to correspond, and succeeded in producing more than one story of the Princ.i.p.al Medical Officer with her Majesty's forces in India, which none of them had 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 c.u.mmins and Lady Dolly are coming. By the way, what do you think the totalizator paid Lady Dolly on Sat.u.r.day--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 Offence of Galilee. I don't wonder that you do not wish to disturb that impression."

Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallised 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."