The Path of a Star

rprise Party"-he sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the hills-had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9.30. Prices as usual" with reference to this particu

ally minstrel show's about the size of it." Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's art of the large red lips and the twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious. He aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits. His upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance that it would be fruitless and expensive, but the paths of Eastern capitals were strewn with his compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese dollars, Indian rupees, for salaries which no amount of advertising could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came, Llewellyn usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting in their midst mainly upon br

led in to the rupee seats under the gallery: an overflow from Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons even standing room. When this occurred Llewellyn turned and swung indifferently away in the di

im. To speak of unofficials, there must have been quite forty lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial and prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their wives' hair. A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders; much of the hair was shining and abundant, and very black. A turn of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the zenana

people. The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the look-out for offensive personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely. Here, too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedo

ve and beyond them all. It was a caricature

reaking up of this sentiment. It was plain after all that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The relief was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint inclination to be amused. It was to be a play evidently like any other play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals. It is doubtful whether this idea was critically present to anyone but Stephen Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too much of a company that found it worth while to come to Calcutta. The house grew submissive and stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the dress-circle. The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent-it was Mrs. Barberry-replied that it did seem strange. The depths under the gallery were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank into the farthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's b

he hollow-chested slaves and the tin centurion were still on, they had somehow lost significance and colour, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of her fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls, crouching, looked like painted shells. She danced before Pilate in strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed to be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown instrument sobbed out to help her. The women of the people have ever bought in Palestine,

those impenetrable regards which she threw straight in front of her, while Pilate yawped and posed nearer and nearer the desire of the Magdalene to be admitted to his household, was at once aware of him. Presently he sat down again-it was still the profane, the fabulous, the horrible Patullo, but a strain of pure gold had come into the fabric worth holding in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon. Far enough it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction. She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to her lord, the f

nscrutable remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving, the limitations and the depression. Under it one saw the painful inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other presentations, and realised with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda, how he rebelled against the part. Perhaps this was enough in itself to send her dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the adventure was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever may be said about it, while yet the shock of the woman's earthly passion with its divine object was receding from Arnold's mind before the exquisite charm and faithfulness of the worshipping Magdalene, he became aware that in some special way he sat judging and pitying her. She had hardly lifted her eyes to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded as if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew, his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood, and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo's invention, and its insufferable mixture with the fabric of which every thread was precious beyond imagination. He look

or the design of the scene-painter; it does not show in photographs. The audience was dispersing a trifle sedately; the performance had been, as Mrs. Barberry told Mr. Justice Horne, interesting but, depressing. "

mpty darkness of the Maidan, where presently he stumbled upon a wooden bench under a tree. There, after a little, sleep fell upon his amazement, and he lay unconscious for an hour or two, while the breeze stole across the gra