The Path of a Star Part 17

"Does he think he is insulting me?"

Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was inclined to concede to Stephen's intermediary, he was compelled to recognise without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of her profession, had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of defensive operations. She retired effectively, the quarters in Crooked Lane became her fortified retreat, whence she issued only under escort and upon service strictly obligatory. Succour from Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and Lindsay felt it an anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to a.s.sault her position. Nor could Alicia induce any sortie to Middleton Street. Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in reticence and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal excuse. They loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss Livingstone's shoulders, these notes which bore so much the atmosphere of Crooked Lane, and at the same time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them at arm's length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "G.o.d bless you, yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrification, she was almost disposed to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to enc.u.mber. The new French poet, the American novelist of the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table many days together for this reason. She sometimes remembered what she expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself intellectually jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days. She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside of it. At all events she took a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always measure the strength of one's pinions against these things.

She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this gave hers a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be. The result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the process. We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of Duff's confidences--it has long been evident that he found her persuadable--her unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the a.n.a.lytic turn we may almost suppose it. Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough. She did not even abate the usual number of Duff's invitations to dinner when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver, and a tide of conversation about the season's paper-chasing, except the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in Bentinck Street, desirous and unsatisfied.

It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect, for it was eventually after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual whisky and soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed. Lindsay was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for four or five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbows up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the club.

The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of the hall in Crooked Lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of these exercises. The world shrank, for Laura, to the compa.s.s of the kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against which she must key herself to indifference. When on the second and third evening she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her that either she or Mr.

Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she offered up thanks. On the fourth she reflected recurrently and anxiously that it was not after all a very glorious victory if the devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the opportunities that had been his, should slip back without profit to the level from which she had striven--they had all striven--to lift him. Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations, sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own account and obtained information.

Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the circ.u.mstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which Mrs.

Barberry came for hours to take advantage of. There were the usual two nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the Arab farther afield than ever, and she did. One can imagine her cantering fast and far with a sense of conscious possession in spite of Mrs. Barberry and the two nurses. There may be a certain solace in the definite and continuous knowledge available about a person hovering on the brink of enteric under your own roof-tree. It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major Livingstone could not make up his mind. Alicia knew only of this uncertainty; other satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs. Barberry. She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so uniformly cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from Lindsay's room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the temperature was the same, hadn't budged a point, must manage to get it down somehow in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to envelop himself in the newspapers. Those arbitrary and obstinate figures, which stood for apprehension to the most casual ear, stamped themselves on most things as the day wore on, and at tea-time Mrs. Barberry gave her other details, thinking her rather cold in the reception of them. But she plainly preferred to be out of it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a glance at the boiled milk preparations of the butler. "And you know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these people have to be watched." To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy.

There was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her att.i.tude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has been given in the highest to somebody else. These pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the importance of motives. She rather stood aside with folded hands, and in an infinite terror of prejudicing fate, devoured her heart by way of keeping its beating normal. Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final alternative to Lindsay's marriage, one can imagine her forcing herself to look at it.

Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid pa.s.sing Lindsay's room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o'clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert's face. Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the direction of her skirts. She stood silent, stricken in the dusk with astonishment, but the sense that was strongest in her was plainly that of having made a criminal discovery. Laura stumbled upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant, words held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door.

Then Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on, a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both. It was a s.p.a.cious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony crucifix over the bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet-table.

Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden cut all its fronds sharply against the light.

"Well?" said Alicia, when the door was shut.

Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.

"I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone out.

And the nurse was in the room; I couldn't get to her. There was n.o.body but the servants about."

"Objection to what?"

"To my being there. I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay."

"Did you make any noise?"

Miss Filbert looked professionally touched. "It was silent prayer, of course," she said.

Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet-table, had an air of eagerness, of successful capture. The yellow sky in the window behind her made filmy lights round her hair, and outlined her tall figure, in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit. Laura Filbert thought she looked like a princess.

"I seem to hear of nothing but pet.i.tions," she said. "Isn't somebody praying for you?"

The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such a suggestion. Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the s.p.a.ce between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.

"I hope so, miss," she said, and looked as if for calming over Alicia's shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky. The colour sank back out of her face, and the light from the window rested on it ethereally. The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to seek, and their blue seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old splendour of the uplifted golden gates rewarded them.

"Why do you use that odious word?" Alicia explained. "You are not my maid! Don't do it again--don't dream of doing it again!"

"I--I don't know." The girl was still plainly covered with confusion at being found in the house uninvited. "I suppose I forgot. Well, good-evening," and she turned to the door.

"Don't go," Alicia commanded. "Don't. You never come to see me now. Sit down." She dragged a chair forward and almost pushed Laura into it. "I will sit down too--what am I thinking of?"

Laura reflected for a moment, looking at her folded hands. "I might as well tell you," she said, "that I have not been praying that Mr. Lindsay should get better. Only that he should be given time to find salvation and die in Jesus."

"Don't--don't say those things to me. How light you are--it's wicked!"

Alicia returned with vehemence, and then as Captain Filbert stared, half comprehending, "Don't you care?" she added curiously.

It was so casual that it was cruel. The girl's eyes grew wider still during the instant she fixed them upon Alicia in the effort of complete understanding. Then her lip trembled.

"How can I care?" she cried; "how can I?" and burst into weeping. She drew her sari over her face and rocked to and fro. Her dusty bare foot protruded from her cotton skirt. She sat huddled together, her head in its coverings sunk between weak shaking shoulders. Alicia considered her for an instant as a pitiable and degraded spectacle. Then she went over and touched her.

"You are completely worn out," she said, "and it is almost dinner-time.

The ayah will bring you a hot bath and then you will come down and have some food quietly with me. My brother is dining out somewhere. I will go away for a little while and then I know you will feel better. And after dinner," she added gently, "you may come up if you like and pray again for Mr. Lindsay. I am sure he would--"

The faintest break in her own voice warned her, and she hurried out of the room.

It was a foolish thing, and the Livingstones' old Karim Bux much deplored it, but the miss-sahib had forgotten to give information that the dinner of eight commanded a fortnight ago would not take place--hence everything was ready in its sequence for this event, with a new fas.h.i.+on of stuffing quails and the first strawberries of the season from Dinapore. The feelings of Karim Bux in presenting these things to a woman in the dress of a coolie are not important; but Alicia, for some reason, seemed to find the trivial incident gratifying.

CHAPTER XV

Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a flagrant ticca-gharry. The driver lay extended on the top of it, asleep, the syce squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it perfunctorily with hay from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind. A fringe of palms and ferns in pots ran between the pillars, and orchids hung from above, shutting out the garden where heavy scents stood in the sun, and mynas chattered on the drive. The air was full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to the lavish energy of growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the compound rose the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue.

A long time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse, uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.

Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped handkerchief agreeably scented. The night nurse had realised herself equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of practical views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept from day to day to see her patient fed, and hand him books and writing materials. She had not even the duty of debarring visitors, but sat most of the time in the dressing-room where echoes fell about her of the stories with which riotous young men, in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's convalescence. There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in vain, to express her views upon such waste of scientific training. She had Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his sister's.

There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two women in the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated these things to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was already half disengaged from the subject, her eye wandered as if in search for the avenue to another. By a sudden inclination Alicia began the story of Laura Filbert on her knees at Lindsay's door. She told it in a quiet, steady, colourless way, pursuing it to the end--it came with the ease of frequent private rehearsals--and then with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms she stopped and gazed meditatively in front of her. There was something in the gaze to which Hilda yielded an attention unexpectedly serious, something of the absolute in character and life impervious to her inquiry. Yet to a.n.a.lysis it was only the grey look of eyes habituated to regard the future with penetration and to find nothing there.

"Have you told him?" Hilda asked after an instant's pause, during which she conceded something, she hardly knew what; she meant to find out later.

"I haven't seen him. But I will tell him, I promise you."

"I have no doubt you will! But don't promise ME. I won't even witness the vow!" Hilda cried.

"What does it matter? I shall certainly tell him." The words fell definitely like pebbles. Hilda thoughtfully picked them up.

"On the whole," she said, "perhaps it would be as well. Yes, it is my advice. It is quite likely that he will be revolted. It may be curative."

Alicia turned away her head to hide the faint frown that nevertheless crept into her voice. "I don't think so," she said. "How you do juggle with things! I don't know why I talk to you about this--this matter. I am sure I ought not."

"I was going to say," pursued Hilda, indifferent to her scruple, "that I shouldn't be at all surprised if his illness leaves him quite emotionally sane. The poison has worked itself out of his blood--perhaps the pa.s.sion and the poison were the same."

"I wonder!" Alicia said. She said it mechanically, as the easiest comment.

"When I knew you first your speculation would have been more active, my dear. You would have looked into the possibility and disputed it. What has become of your modernity?"

It was the tenderest malice, but it obtained no concessive sign. Alicia seemed to weigh it. "I think I like theories better than ill.u.s.trations,"

she said in defence.

"One can look at theories as one looks at the sky, but an ill.u.s.tration wants a careful point of view. For this one perhaps you are a little near."

"Perhaps," Alicia a.s.sented, "I am a little near." She glanced quickly down as she spoke, but when she raised her eyes they were dry and clear.