Part 5 (1/2)
”You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know him well?”
Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.
”He is an old friend of my brother's,” she said. Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.
She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette, crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.
”Most impressionable,” she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. ”As to the rest of the people--bah, you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way pancreatic influences can be idealised--made to serve enn.o.bling ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different.”
”Yes?” Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.
”We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it.”
”A statue?”
”No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was and the performance.
She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come from her hair or eyes or something. I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended.”
”It sounds most unusual,” Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest was rather obviously curbed.
”It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one doesn't go round the corner.”
There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss Livingstone's desire to be informed.
Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger bowl and waited.
The pause grew so stiff with embarra.s.sment that she broke it herself.
”And I regret to say it was I who introduced them,” she said.
”Introduced whom?”
”Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,”
Hilda went on tranquilly, ”because I would only lend it to her while she was there.”
”Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is always grateful to be amused.”
”Oh, there is no reason to doubt his grat.i.tude. He is rather intense about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's account. Did I say so?” They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was far from insistent: but Alicia's crude blush--everything else about her was perfectly worked out--cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. ”Perhaps, though,” Hilda hurried on with a pang, ”we generalise too much about the men.”
What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant brought her a card at that moment, is embarra.s.sing to consider. The card saved her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then exclaimed, ”My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend--a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our cigarettes?”
Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.
”Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it? Drown the corpse in here, and he won't guess it belongs to you.” She pushed the finger bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant went into it.
”Don't ask me to sacrifice mine,” she added, and there was no time for remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.
”Pray may I come in?” he called from behind the portiere.
Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It reminded her of a man she knew who ”did” curates beautifully. Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless it.
”You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee.” He flavoured what he said, and made it pretty, like a woman. ”Let me confess at once, that is what brought me.” He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality and self-sacrifice even in that. ”It is coffee time, isn't it?” Then he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been to him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical att.i.tudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she could hardly have expected him to exclaim, ”Whom have we here?” with upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found that he had forgotten it.