The Path of a Star

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace—those were the pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous half-checked smile. Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands like a reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was absurdly affected; and indeed to an acuter intelligence it might have looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not offered.

That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife, observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she complained afterwards that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance; she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying qualities, which were oddly stimulated when she glanced over the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval, giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry, and drinking water. The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower, living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals closed over her secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the sloping shoulders, thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs. Barberry.

It transpired when the men came up that there was no unanimity about going to Government House. The Livingstones craved the necessity of absence, if anyone would supply it by staying on; it would be a boon they said, and cited the advancement of the season. “One gets to bed so much earlier,” Surgeon-Major Livingstone urged, at which Alicia raised her eyebrows and everybody laughed. Lindsay elected to gratify them, with the proclaimed purpose of seeing how long Livingstone could be kept up, and the civilian pair agreed, apparently from a tendency to remain seated. The A.D.C. had, of course, to go; duty called him; and he declared a sense of slighted hospitality that anybody should remain behind. “Besides,” he cried, with ingenuous privilege, “who's goin' to chaperone Miss Howe?”

Hilda stood in the midst. Tall, in violet velvet, she had a flush that made her magnificent; her eyes were deep and soft. It was patent that she was out of proportion to the other women, body and soul; there was altogether too much of her; and it was only the men, when Captain Corby spoke, who looked silently responsive.

“We're coming away so early,” said Mrs. Barberry, buttoning her glove. Hilda had begun to smile, and, indeed, the situation had its humour, but there was also behind her eyes an appreciation of another sort. “Don't,” she said to Alicia, in the low, quick reach of her prompting tone, as if the other had mistaken her cue, but the moment hardly permitted retreat, and Alicia turned an unflinching graceful front to the lady in the Department of Education. “Then I think I must ask you,” she said.

The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the very dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would be delighted.

“Nobody suggests ME!” exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully. They were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of backward transformation.

“I could chaperone you all!” she cried gaily back at them, as she passed down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to see that she was quite comfortable. The unusual thing, which nobody else heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, “It doesn't matter—it doesn't matter,” and that Hilda, driving away, found herself without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.

Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dogcart, and Hilda, with her purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way. She re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom. They were late; there was hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely, and said she loved the colour of Hilda's dress; also that she would give worlds for an invisible hairpin—oh, thank you!—and that it was simply ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out. She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening—they would meet again later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the ballroom—perfectly lovely. So she vanished; but Hilda went with certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust forward, waiting for her.

They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the pillared spaces of the ballroom. People had not been asked to dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered or not. Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.