“It has a more genuine ring than most formulas,” she observed.
“Yes, hasn't it? May I have another cup?” He restored the pink sheet to its pink envelope, and both to his breast-pocket, while she poured out the other cup, but Miss Filbert was still present with them. They went on talking about her, and entirely in the tone of congratulation—the suitability of the Simpsons, the suitability of Plymouth, the probability that she would entirely recover, in its balmy atmosphere, her divine singing voice. Plymouth certainly was in no sense a tonic, but Miss Filbert didn't need a tonic; she was too much inclined to be strung up as it was. What she wanted was the soothing, quieting influence of just Plymouth's meetings and just Plymouth's teas. The charms that so sweetly and definitely characterised her would expand there; it was a delightful flowery environment for them, and she couldn't fail to improve in health. Devonshire's visitors got tremendously well fed, with fish items of especial excellence.
CHAPTER XX
Nobody could have been more impressed with Hilda's influence upon Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's commercial probity than Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope himself. He was a prey to all noble feelings; they ruled his life and spoiled his bargains; and gratitude, when it had a chance, which was certainly seldom in connection with leading ladies, dominated him entirely. He sat in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel with tears in his eyes, talking about what Miss Howe had done for him, and gave unnecessary backsheesh to coolies who brought him small bills—so long, that is, as they were the small bills of this season. When they had reference to the liabilities of a former and less prosperous year he waved them away with a bitter levity which belonged to the same period. His view of his obligations was strictly chronological, and in taking it he counted, like the poet, only happy hours. The bad debt and the bad season went consistently together to oblivion; the sun of to-day's remarkable receipts could not be expected to penetrate backwards.
He had only one fault to find with Miss Howe—she had no artistic conscience—none, and he found this with the utmost leniency, basking in the consciousness that it made his own more conspicuous. She was altogether in the grand style, if you understood Mr. Stanhope, but nothing would induce her to do herself justice before Calcutta; she seemed to have taken the measure of the place and to be as indifferent! Try to ring in anything worth doing and she was off with the bit between her teeth, and you simply had to put up with it. The second lead had a great deal more ambition, and a very good little woman in her way, too, but of course not half the talent. He was obliged to confess that Miss Howe wasn't game for risks, especially after doing her Rosalind the night the circus opened to a twenty-five rupee house. It WAS monstrous. She seemed to think that nothing mattered so much as that everybody should be paid on the first of the month. There was one other grievance, which Llewellyn mentioned only in confidence with a lowered voice. That was Bradley. Hilda wasn't lifting a finger to keep Bradley. Result was, Bradley was crooking his elbow a great deal too often lately and going off every way. He, Llewellyn, had put it to her if that was the way to treat a man the Daily Telegraph had spoken about as it had spoken about Hamilton Bradley. Where was she—where was he—going to find another? No, he didn't say marry Bradley; there were difficulties, and after all that might be the very way to lose him. But a woman had an influence, and that influence could never be more fittingly exercised than in the cause of dramatic art based on Mr. Stanhope's combinations. Mr. Stanhope expressed himself with a difference, but it came to that.
Perhaps if you pursued Llewellyn, pushed him, as it were, along the track of what he had to put up with, you would have come upon the further fact that as a woman of business Miss Howe had no parallel for procrastination. Next season was imminent in his arrangements, as Christmas numbers are imminent to publishers at midsummer, and here she was shying at a contract as if they had months for consideration. It wasn't either as if she complained of anything in the terms—that would be easy enough fixed—but she said herself that it was a bigger salary than he, Llewellyn, would ever be able to pay unless she went round with the hat. Nor had she any objection to the tour—a fascinating one—including the Pacific Slope and Honolulu. It stumped him, Llewellyn, to know what she did object to, and why she couldn't bark it out at once, seeing she must understand perfectly well it was no use his going to Bradley without first settling with her.
Hilda, alone in her own apartment—it was difficult to keep Llewellyn Stanhope away from even that door in his pursuit of her signature—considered the vagary life had become for her that was so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers. Alicia knew, of course; but that was as if she had written it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a drawer. Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of it was tangled now in a speculation. There had been a time filled with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her like a buoyant sea, and she had been content to float in it, imagining desirable things. Stanhope's waiting contract made a limit to the time—a limit she brought up against without distress or shock, but with a kind of recognising thrill in contact at last with the necessity for action, decision, a climax of high heart-beats. She saw with surprise that she had lived with her passion these weeks and months half consciously expecting that a crucial moment would dissolve it, like a person aware that he dreams and will presently awake. She had not faced till now any exigency of her case. But the crucial moment had leapt upon her, pointing out the subjection of her life, and she, undefended, sought only how to accomplish her bonds.
Certainly she saw no solution that did not seem monstrous; yet every pulse in her demanded a solution; there was no questioning the imperious need. She had the fullest, clearest view of the situation, and she looked at it without flinching and without compromise. Above all she had true vision of Stephen Arnold, glorifying nowhere, extenuating nothing. It was almost cruel to be the victim of such circumstance, and be denied the soft uses of illusion; but if that note of sympathy had been offered to Hilda she would doubtless have retorted that it was precisely because she saw him that she loved him. His figure, in its poverty and austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of her nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompassing; and her possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and protecting. I think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of content with which, but for Llewellyn and his contract, she would have been willing to go on indefinitely. It made him hers in a primary and essential way, beside which any mere acknowledgment or vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the capital of a pillar firmly rooted. There may be an appearance that she took a good deal for granted; if there is, I fear that in the baldness of this history it has not been evident how much and how variously Arnold depended on her, in how many places her colour and her vitality patched out the monkish garment of his soul. This with her enthusiasm and her cognisance. It may be remembered, too, that there was in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there. Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.
She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would not find any concessions of her own among its features if she could help it. It was a trick she played upon her consciousness; she would not look, but she could see without looking. She saw that which explained itself to be best, fittest, most reasonable; and thus she sometimes wandered with Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when there was no matinee, through the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.