Part 25 (2/2)
Her dress, of some indefinite, slight white material, clasped at the waist with a belt that gave the beam of turquoises and the gleam of silver, ministered as much to the capricious ideal of the moment as to the lines and curves of the person it adorned. The set was the inevitable modern drawing-room, and she sat well out on a sofa with her hands, in long black gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward, on each side of her. It was as if she pushed her body forward in an impulse to rise: her rigid arms thrust her shoulders up a little and accented the swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato att.i.tude. It expressed a temperament, a character, fifty other things, but especially epitomised the restraints and the licenses of a world of drawing-rooms. In that first brief mute instant of disclosure she was all that she presently, by voice and movement, proclaimed herself to be, so dazzling and complete that Stephen literally blinked at the revelation. He made an effort, for a moment or two, to pursue and detect the woman who had been his friend; then the purpose of his coming gradually faded from his mind, and he stood with folded arms and absorbed eyes watching the other, the Mrs. Halliday on the sofa, setting about the fulfilment of a purple destiny.
The play proceeded and Stephen did not move--did not wince. When Mrs.
Halliday, whose mate was exacting, exclaimed, ”The greatest apostle of expediency was St. Paul. He preached 'wives, love your husbands,'” he even permitted himself the ghost of a smile. At one point he wished himself familiar with the plot; it was when Hamilton Bradley came jauntily on as Lord Ingleton, a.s.suring Mrs. Halliday that immorality was really only shortsightedness. Lady Dolly, in front, repeated Lord Ingleton's phrase with ingenuous wonder. ”I know it's clever,” she insisted, ”but what does it mean? Now that other thing--what was it?--'Subtract vice, and virtue is what is left'--that's an easy one.
Write it down on your cuff for me, will you, Colonel c.u.mmins? I _shall_ be so sick if I forget it.”
Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of Lady Dolly. He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play, wholly involved in an effort which the author would doubtless have resented, to keep its current and direction through the floating debris of constrained sayings with which it was enc.u.mbered, to know in advance whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton would accompany. When Lord Ingleton paused, as it were, to beg four people to ”have nothing to do with sentiment--it so often leads to conviction,” and the house murmured its amus.e.m.e.nt, Arnold s.h.i.+fted his shoulders impatiently. ”How inconsistent,” Lord Ingleton reproached Mrs.
Halliday a moment later, ”to wear gloves on your hands and let your thoughts go candid.” Arnold turned to Duff. ”There's no excuse for that,” he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda's rejoinder and did not hear him.
At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday to her husband's divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing his hands with gratification at having made two such clever women ”aware of each other,” Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling to discuss the piece with the rest of the party. As he left the box to walk up and down the corridor outside where it was cooler, he heard the voice of Colonel c.u.mmins lifted in further quotation: ”'To be good _and_ charming--what a sinful superfluity!' I'm sure n.o.body ever called you superfluous, Lady Dolly,” and was vividly aware of the advisability of taking himself and his Order out of the theatre. He had not been gratified, or even from any point appealed to. Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him.
He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the problems of its s.e.x with a curious comfort in the joust. He was too far from the circle of her modern influence to consider her with anything but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection, her reproduction, seemed to him frivolous and meaningless. If he went then, however, he would go as he came, in so far as the play was concerned; the first act, relying altogether upon the jugglery of its dialogue, gave no clue to anything. He owed it to Hilda, after all, to see the piece out. It was only fair to give her a chance to make the best of it. He decided that it was worth a personal sacrifice to give it her and went back.
He was sufficiently indignant with the leading idea of the play, and sufficiently absorbed in its progress, at the end of the second act, to permit Lady Dolly to capture him before it occurred to him that he had the use of his legs. Her enthusiasm was so great that it reduced him to something like equivocation. She wanted to know if anything could be more splendid than Mr. Bradley as Lord Ingleton; she confided to Stephen that that was what she called _real_ wickedness, the kind that did the most harm, and invited him, by inference, to a liberal judgment of stupid sinners. He sat emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes nervously fugitive from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the third act began. Then he gave place with embarra.s.sed alacrity to Colonel c.u.mmins, and folded his arms again at the back of the box.
Before it was finished he had the gratification of recognising at least one Hilda that he knew. The newspapers found in her interpretation the development of a soul, and one remembered, reading them, that a _cliche_ is a valuable thing in a hurry. A phrase which spoke of a soul bruised out of life and rus.h.i.+ng to annihilation would have been more precise.
The demand upon her increased steadily as the act went on, and as she met it, there slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities of motive and of pa.s.sion. She offered to the shaping circ.u.mstance rich material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away, she did it with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movements that was essentially of herself.
The moment of it had a bold gruesomeness that caught the breath--a disinterment on the stage in search of letters that would prove the charge against the second year of Mrs. Halliday's married life, her letters buried with the poet. It was an advantage which only the husband of Mrs. Halliday would have claimed to bring so helpless a respondent before even the informal court at the graveyard; but it gave Hilda a magnificent opportunity of wild, mad apostrophe to the skull, holding it tenderly with both hands, while Lord Ingleton smiled appreciatively in advance of the practical benevolence which was to sustain the lady through the divorce court and in the final scene offer to her and to the prejudices of the British public the respectability of his name.
It was over with a rush at the end, leaving the audience uncertain whether, after all, enough attention had been paid to that tradition of the footlights which insists on so nice a sense of opprobrium and compensation, but convinced of its desire to applaud. Duff Lindsay turned, as the wave of clapping spent itself, to say to Stephen that he had never respected Hamilton Bradley's acting so much. He said it to Herbert Livingstone instead; the priest had disappeared.
The outgoers looked at Arnold curiously as he made his way among them in a direction which was not that of the exit. He went with hurried purpose, in the face of them all, toward the region, badly lighted and imperfectly closed, which led to the rear of the stage. He opened doors into dark closets, and one which gave upon the road, retraced his unfamiliar steps and asked a question, to which--it was so unusual from one in his habit--he received a hesitating but correct reply. A moment later he pa.s.sed Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope, who stood in his path with a hostile stare and got out of it with a deferential bow, and knocked at a door upon which was pasted the name, in large red letters cut from a poster, of Miss Hilda Howe. It was a little ajar, so he entered, when she cried, ”Come in!” with the less hesitation. Hilda sat on the single chair the place contained in the dress and make-up of the last scene. A Mohammedan servant, who looked up incuriously, was unlacing her shoes.
Various garments hung about on nails driven into the unpainted walls, others overflowed from a packing-box in one corner. A common teak-wood dressing-table held make-up saucers and powder-puffs and some remnants of cold fowl which had not been partaken of, apparently, with the a.s.sistance of a knife, and fork. A candle stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the looking-gla.s.s, and there was no other light.
On the floor a pair of stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern.
The place looked sordid and miserable, and Hilda, sitting in the middle of it, still in the yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous. Stephen stood in the doorway grasping the handle, saying nothing, and an instant pa.s.sed before she knew with certainty, in the wretched light, that it was he. Then she sprang up and made a step toward him as if toward victory and reward, but checked herself in time.
”Is it possible?” she exclaimed. ”I did not know you were in the theatre.”
”Yes,” he said, with moderation, ”I have seen this--this d.a.m.nable play.”
”d.a.m.nable? Oh!----”
”It has caused me,” he went on, ”to regret the substance of my letter this morning. I failed to realise that this was the kind of work you devote your life to. I now see that you could not escape its malign influence--that no woman could. I now think that the alternative that has been revealed to you, of remaining in Calcutta, is a chance of escape offered you by G.o.d himself. Take it. I withdraw my foolish, ignorant opposition.”
”Oh,” she cried, ”do you really think----”
”Take it,” he repeated and closed the door.
Hilda sat still for some time after the servant had finished unlacing her shoes. A little tender smile played oddly about her carmined lips.
”Dear heart,” she said aloud, ”I was going to.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
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