"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone. "It is the lowest, isn"t it--in the scale of human endowment? Mimicry."
Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned her eyes and her delicate chin up to Duff Lindsay with the protest.
Lindsay"s cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.
"Mimicry isn"t a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn"t interpret. He"s a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway."
"You"re mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their energy and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways, and since it left seeming conquerors on her track n.o.body quarrelled with it.
"I"ve met them in London," she said. "Oh, I remember one hot little North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--and they were always disappointing. There seemed to be somehow no basis--nothing to go upon."
She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined. That was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens to find out anything at all.
"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. "But Miss Hilda Howe has one."
"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
"I don"t know. She"s an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on that."
"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone"s lips, but she closed them instead, and turned her head again to listen to Mrs.
Barberry. The turns of Alicia"s head had a way of punctuating the conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and relief.
"I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather," Mrs. Barberry said; "I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the Fort, and I said, "Never again!" Fortunately the girls were just out, and not one of them understood, but those poor boys didn"t know where to look!
And no more did I. So disgustingly real."
Alicia"s eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her lips.
"I was in England last year," she said; "I--I saw A Woman of Honour in London. What could possibly be done with it by an Australian scratch company in a Calcutta theatre! Imagination halts."
"Miss Howe did something with it," observed Mr. Lindsay. "That and one or two other things carried one through last cold weather. One supported even the gaieties of Christmas week with fort.i.tude, conscious that there was something to fall back upon. I remember I went to the State ball, and cheerfully."
"That"s saying a good deal, isn"t it?" commented Dr. Livingstone, vaguely aware of an ironical intention. "By Jove! yes."
"Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn"t he?" Mrs. Barberry said. "Such a magnificent head. I adore him in Shakespeare."
"He knows the conventions, and uses them with security," Lindsay replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air, demanded--
"Is the story true?"
"The story of their relations? I suppose there are fifty. One of them is."
Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a reminiscence of amateur theatricals. "Their relations!" she murmured to Dr. Livingstone. "What awful things to talk about!"
"The story I mean," Alicia explained, "is to the effect that Mr.
Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her pa.s.sion for her art--I mean, of course, her affections--"
"My dear girl, we know what you mean," cried Mrs. Barberry, entering a protest as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.
"And precisely the reverse happened."
"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.
"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.
"That"s as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man," Lindsay contributed again.
"Tables turned, eh? Daresay it served him right," remarked Dr.
Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off?"
"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn"t it dear of him!
Good-bye, you nice thing"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--"Good-bye, Mr. Lindsay. Fancy--a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it better if it came from fascinating j.a.pan, but still--goodbye."
With the lady"s departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the room, and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places, one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in Alicia"s hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd bra.s.s bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a vase of common country gla.s.s; and if one turned to Alicia one could almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a trifle gross and material. Certainly as she sat there in her grace and slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early morning about her that made the full tide of other women"s sunlight vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to present her in. With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness of movement which suggested the a.s.sertion of a primitive sincerity in a personal world of many effects. Into her making of tea, for example, she put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she ordered more bread and b.u.t.ter in the worst possible rendering of her servants" tongue, without a thought except that the bread and b.u.t.ter should be brought.
Lindsay liked to think that with him she was particularly simple and direct, that he was of those who freed her from the pretty consciousness, the elegant restraint that other people fixed upon her.
It must be admitted that this conviction had reason in establishing itself, and it is perhaps not surprising that, in the security of it, he failed to notice occasions when it would not have held, of which this was plainly one. Alicia reflected, with her cheek against the Afghan wolf-skins on the back of the chair. It was characteristic of her eyes that one could usually see things being turned over in them. She would sometimes keep people waiting while she thought. She thought perceptibly about Hilda Howe, slanting her absent gaze between sheltering eyelids to the floor. Presently she rearranged the rose in its green gla.s.s vase, and said, "Then it"s impossible not to be interested."
"I thought you would find it so."
Alicia was further occupied in bestowing small fragments of cress sandwich upon a terrier. "Fancy your being so sure," she said, "that you could present her entertainingly!" She looked past him toward the light that came in at the draped window, and he was not aware that her regard held him fast by the way.
"Anyone could," he said cheerfully. "She presents herself. One is only the humblest possible medium. And the most pa.s.sive."
Alicia"s eyes were still attracted by the light from the window. It silhouetted a rare fern from a.s.sam which certainly rewarded them.
"I like to hear you talk about her. Tell me some more."
"Haven"t I exhausted metaphor in describing her?"
"Yes," said Miss Livingstone, with conviction; "but I"m not a bit satisfied. A few simple facts sometimes--sometimes are better. Wasn"t it a little difficult to make her acquaintance?"
"Not in the very least. I saw her in A Woman of Honour, and was charmed. Charmed in a new way. Next day I discovered her address--it"s obscure--and sent up my card for permission to tell her so. I explained to her that one would have hesitated at home, but here one was protected by the custom. And she received me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was not overwhelmed with tribute of that kind from Calcutta.
The truthful ring of it was pathetic, poor dear."
"That was in--"
"In February."
"In February we were at Nice," Alicia said, musingly. Then she took up her divining-rod again. "One can imagine that she was grateful. People of that kind--how sn.o.bbish I sound, but you know what I mean--are rather stranded in Calcutta, aren"t they? They haven"t any world here;" and, with the quick glance which deprecated her timid clevernesses, she added, "The arts conspire to be absent."
"Ah, don"t misunderstand. If there was any grat.i.tude it was all mine.
But we met as kindred, if I may vaunt myself so much. A mere theory of life will go a long way, you know, toward establishing a claim of that sort. And, at all events, she is good enough to treat me as if she admitted it."
"What is her theory of life?" Alicia demanded quickly. "I should be glad of a new one."
Lindsay"s communicativeness seemed to contract a little, as at the touch of a finger light, but cold.