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Title: The Path of a Star
Author: Mrs. Everard Cotes
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5102]
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[This file was first posted on April 28, 2002]
Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH OF A STAR ***
This eBook was produced by Don Lainson.
THE PATH OF A STAR
by
MRS. EVERARD COTES
(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)
1899
CHAPTER I
She pushed the portiere aside with a curved hand and gracefully
separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed
it after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little
forward, eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew
precisely who was there. You would have been aware at once that
she was an actress. She entered the room with a little stride and
then crossed it quickly, the train of her morning gown--it cried
out of luxury with the cheapest voice--taking folds of great
audacity as she bent her face in its loose mass of hair over Laura
Filbert, sitting on the edge of a bamboo sofa, and said--
"You poor thing! Oh, you POOR thing!"
She took Laura's hand as she spoke, and tried to keep it; but the
hand was neutral, and she let it go. "It is a hand," she said to
herself, in one of those quick reflections that so often visited
her ready-made, "that turns the merely inquiring mind away.
Nothing but feeling could hold it."
Miss Filbert made the conventional effort to rise, but it came to
nothing, or to a mere embarrassed accent of their greeting. Then
her voice showed this feeling to be superficial, made nothing of
it, pushed it to one side.
"I suppose you cannot see the foolishness of your pity," she said.
"Oh Miss Howe, I am happier than you are--much happier." Her bare
feet, as she spoke, nestled into the coarse Mirzapore rug on the
floor, and her eye lingered approvingly upon an Owari vase three
feet high, and thick with the gilded landscape of Japan, which
stood near it, in the cheap magnificence of the room.
Hilda smiled. Her smile acquiesced in the world she had found,
acquiesced, with the gladness of an explorer, in Laura Filbert as a
feature of it.
"Don't be too sure," she cried; "I am very happy. It is such a
pleasure to see you."
Her gaze embraced Miss Filbert as a person, and Miss Filbert as a
pictorial fact, but that was because she could not help it. Her
eyes were really engaged only with the latter Miss Filbert.
"Much happier than you are," Laura repeated, slowly moving her head
from side to side as if to negative contradiction in advance. She
smiled too; it was as if she had remembered a former habit, from
politeness.
"Of course you are--of course!" Miss Howe acknowledged. The words
were mellow and vibrant; her voice seemed to dwell upon them with a
kind of rich affection. Her face covered itself with serious
sweetness. "I can imagine the beatitudes you feel--by your
clothes."
The girl drew her feet under her, and her hand went up to the only
semi-conventional item of her attire. It was a brooch that
exclaimed in silver letters "Glory to His Name!" "It is the dress
of the Army in this country," she said; "I would not change it for
the wardrobe of a queen."
"That's just what I mean." Miss Howe leaned back in her chair with
her head among its cushions, and sent her words fluently across the
room, straight and level with the glance from between her half-
closed eyelids. A fine sensuous appreciation of the indolence it
was possible to enjoy in the East clung about her. "To live on a
plane that lifts you up like that--so that you can defy all
criticism and all convention, and go about the streets like a mark
of exclamation at the selfishness of the world--there must be
something very consummate in it or you couldn't go on. At least I
couldn't."
"I suppose I do look odd to you." Her voice took a curious, soft,
uplifted note. "I wear three garments only--the garments of my
sisters who plant the young shoots in the rice-fields, and carry
bricks for the building of rich men's houses, and gather the dung
of the roadways to burn for fuel. If the Army is to conquer India
it must march bare-footed and bare-headed all the way. All the
way," Laura repeated, with a tremor of musical sadness. Her eyes
were fixed in appeal upon the other woman's. "And if the sun beats
down upon my uncovered head, I think, 'It struck more fiercely upon
Calvary'; and if the way is sharp to my unshod feet, I say, 'At
least I have no cross to bear.'" The last words seemed almost a
chant, and her voice glided from them into singing--
"The blessed Saviour died for me,
On the cross! On the cross!
He bore my sins at Calvary,
On the rugged cross!"
She sang softly, her body thrust a little forward in a tender
swaying--
"Behold His hands and feet and side,
The crown of thorns, the crimson tide,
'Forgive them, Father!' loud He cried,
On the rugged cross!"
"Oh, thank you!" Miss Howe exclaimed. Then she murmured again,
"That's just what I mean."
A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross
the moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it, with penetrant
anxiety. "Did you really enjoy that hymn?" she asked.
"Indeed I did."
"Then, dear Miss Howe, I think you cannot be very far from the
Kingdom."
"I? Oh, I have my part in a kingdom." Her voice caressed the
idea. "And the curious thing is that we are all aristocrats who
belong to it. Not the vulgar kind, you understand--but no, you
don't understand. You'll have to take my word for it." Miss
Howe's eyes sought a red hibiscus flower that looked in at the
window half drowned in sunlight, and the smile in them deepened.
"Is it the Kingdom of God and His righteousness?" Laura Filbert's
clear glance was disturbed by a ray of curiosity, but the
inflexible quality of her tone more than counterbalanced this.
"There's nothing about it in the Bible, if that's what you mean.
And yet I think the men who wrote 'The time of the singing of birds
has come,' and 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,' must have
belonged to it." She paused, with an odd look of discomfiture.
"But one shouldn't talk about things like that--it takes the bloom
off. Don't you feel that way about your privileges now and then?
Don't they look rather dusty and battered to you after a day's
exposure in Bow Bazar?"
There came a light crunch of wheels on the red soorkee drive
outside, and a switch past the bunch of sword-ferns that grew
beside the door. The muffled crescendo of steps on the stair and
the sound of an inquiry penetrated from beyond the portiere, and
without further preliminary Duff Lindsay came into the room.
"Do I interrupt a rehearsal?" he asked; but there was nothing in
the way he walked across the room to Hilda Howe to suggest that the
idea abashed him. For her part she rose and made one short step to
meet him, and then received him as it were with both hands and all
her heart.
"How ridiculous you are!" she cried. "Of course not. And let me
tell you it is very nice of you to come this very first day when
one was dying to be welcomed. Miss Filbert came too, and we have
been talking about our respective walks in life. Let me introduce
you. Miss Filbert--Captain Filbert, of the Salvation Army--Mr.
Duff Lindsay of Calcutta."
She watched with interest the gravity with which they bowed, and
the difference in it: his the simple formality of his class,
Laura's a repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he
looked, although any Bond Street tailor would have impeached his
waistcoat, and one shabby glove had manifestly never been on. Yet
Miss Filbert's first words seemed to show a slight unbending.
"Won't you sit there?" she said, indicating the sofa corner she had
been occupying. "You get the glare from the window where you are."
It was virtually a command, delivered with a complete air of
dignity and authority; and Lindsay, in some confusion, found
himself obeying. "Oh, thank you, thank you," he said. "One
doesn't really mind in the least. Do you--do you object to it?
Shall I close the shutters?"
"If you do," said Miss Howe delightedly, "we shall not be able to
see."
"Neither we should," he assented; "the others are closed already.
Very badly built these Calcutta houses, aren't they? Have you been
long in India, Miss--Captain Filbert?"
"I served a year up-country, and then fell ill and had to go home
on furlough. The native food didn't suit me. I am stationed in
Calcutta now, but I have only just come."
"Pleasant time of the year to arrive," Mr. Lindsay remarked.
"Yes; but we are not particular about that. We love all the times
and the seasons, since every one brings its appointed opportunity.
Last year, in Mugridabad, there were more souls saved in June than
in any other month."
"Really?" asked Mr. Lindsay; but he was not looking at her with
those speculations. The light had come back upon her face.
"I will say good-bye now," said Captain Filbert. "I have a meeting
at half-past five. Shall we have a word of prayer before I go?"
She plainly looked for immediate acquiescence; but Miss Howe said,
"Another time, dear."
"Oh, why not?" exclaimed Duff Lindsay. Hilda put the semblance of
a rebuke into her glance at him, and said, "Certainly not."
"Oh," Captain Filbert cried, "don't think you can escape that way!
I will pray for you long and late to-night, and ask my lieutenant
to do so too. Don't harden your heart, Miss Howe--the Lord is
waiting to be compassionate."
The two were silent, and Laura walked toward the door. Just where
the sun slanted into the room and made leaf-patterns on the floor
she turned and stood for an instant in the full tide of it; and it
set all the loose tendrils of her pale yellow hair in a little
flame, and gave the folds of the flesh-coloured sari that fell over
her shoulder the texture of draperies so often depicted as
celestial. The sun sought into her face, revealing nothing but
great purity of line and a clear pallor except where below the wide
light blue eyes two ethereal shadows brushed themselves. Under the
intentness of their gaze she made as if she would pass out without
speaking; and the tender curves of her limbs, as she wavered, could
not have been matched out of mediaeval stained glass. But her
courage, or her conviction, came back to her at the door, and she
raised her hand and pointed at Hilda.
"She's got a soul worth saving."
Then the portiere fell behind her, and nothing was said in the room
until the pad of her bare feet had ceased upon the stair.
"She came out in the Bengal with us," Hilda told him--this is not a
special instance of it, but she could always gratify Duff Lindsay
in advance--"and she was desperately seedy, poor girl. I looked
after her a little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got
me on her mind. And as the two hundred and eighty million
benighted souls of India are her continual concern, I seem a
superfluity. To think of being the two hundred and eighty
millionth and first oppresses one."
Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.
"You weren't at that end of the ship?" he demanded.
"Of course I was--we all were. And some of us--little Miss Stace,
for instance--thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and
sardines for tea every night for a whole month. And, after Suez,
ices for dinner on Sundays. It was luxury."
Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache. "I don't call it fair
or friendly," he said, "when you know how easily it could have been
arranged. Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told
you that the second-class saloon was no place for you. For YOU!"
Plainly she did not intend to argue the point. She poised her chin
in her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help
seeing, as he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful. But
this had been so long acknowledged between them that she could
hardly have been conscious that she was insisting on it afresh.
Then by the time he might have thought her launched upon a
different meditation, her mind swept back to his protest, like a
whimsical bird.
"I didn't want to extract anything from the mercantile community of
Calcutta in advance," she said. "It would be most unbusinesslike.
Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself,
as leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season.
Then I think," she said with defiance, "that I shall avoid you."
"And pray why?"
"Because you would put too much in. According to your last letters
you are getting beastly rich. You would take all the tragedy out
of the situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque."
"I don't know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the
way of your experiences," Lindsay said. She retorted, "Oh yes, you
do"; and they regarded each other through an instant's silence with
visible good-fellowship.
"A reasonably strong company this time?" Lindsay asked.
"Thank you. 'Company' is gratifying. For a month we have been a
'troupe'--in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling.
Fifteen of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can
please with light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon
done on mirrors with a thousand candlepower. Bradley and I will
have to do most of the serious work. But I have improved--oh, a
lot. You wouldn't know my Lady Whippleton."
It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.
"Then Bradley is here too?" he remarked.
"Oh yes," she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face.
"But it is much better than it was, really. He is hardly ever
troublesome now. He understands. And he teaches me a great deal
more than I can tell you. You know," she asserted, with the effect
of taking an independent view, "as an artist he has my unqualified
respect."
"You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when
they are not women," Duff said. "I don't believe their behaviour
is a bit more affected by their artistry than it would be by a
knowledge of the higher mathematics."
She turned indignant eyes on him. "Fancy YOUR saying that! Fancy
your having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry!
At what Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?" she cried
derisively. "Well, it shows that one can't trust one's best friend
loose among the conventions!"
He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such
matters were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when
she added, with apparent inconsistency and real dejection, "It IS
a hideous bore."
Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it
aside he felt that she was generous. Yet something in him--perhaps
the primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch
impulse to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to
say, "He gives up a good deal, doesn't he, for his present
gratification?"
"He gives up everything! That is the disgusting part of it.
Leander Morris offered him-- But why should I tell you? It's
humiliating enough in the very back of one's mind."
"He is a clever fellow, no doubt."
"Not too clever to act with me! Oh, we go beautifully--we melt, we
run together. He has given me some essential things, and now I can
give them back to him. I begin to think that is what keeps him
now. It must be awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in--
in anybody, and watch it grow."
"Doubtless," said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her
eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing. Although she
knew his very moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with
his eyes on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it
with a cynical clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little
hardness came about her mouth. "Well," he said, visibly detaching
himself from the matter, "it's a satisfaction to have you back. I
have been doing nothing, literally, since you went away, but making
money and playing tennis. Existence, as I look back upon it, is
connoted by a varying margin of profit and a vast sward."
She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely,
considering the advisability of returning. "It's a pity you can't
act," she said; "then you could come away and let it all go."
Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed. "How simple
life is to you!" he said. "But anyway I couldn't act."
"Oh no, you couldn't, you couldn't! You are too intensely
absorbent, you are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would
never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else--
any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called
imaginary. Never!"
It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was: "I wish you
would go on. You can't think how gratifying it is--after the
tennis."
"If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable."
"Oh then, stop. We can't quarrel yet--I've hardly seen you. Are
you comfortable here? Would you like some French novels?"
"Yes, thank you. Yes, please!" She grew before him into a light
and conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of
speech. He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the
spring she had detached herself from, and after failing for a
quarter of an hour he got up to go.
"I shan't bother you again before Saturday," he said; "I know what
a week it will be at the theatre. Remember you are to give the man
his orders about the brougham. I can get on perfectly with the
cart. Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you."
"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with
yawns and much whisky and soda." She gave him a stately inclination
with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his
heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something,
and turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had
stood, but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your
friend of the altruistic army," he said.
"You saw, you heard, you know."
"But--"
"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for
yourself, at the Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street--you man!"
Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way
down the stairs her voice appealed to him over the banisters.
"You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it."
"I know you didn't," he returned. "You woman! But you yourself--
you're not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"
Hilda leaned upon the banisters, her arms dropping over from the
elbows. "I suppose I may look at her," she said; and her smile
glowed down upon him.
"Do you think it really rewards attention?--the type, I mean."
"How you will talk of types! Didn't you see that she was unique?
You may come back if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we
will discuss her."
Lindsay looked at his watch. "I would come back for a quarter of
an hour to discuss anything, or nothing," he replied, "but there
isn't time. I am dining with the Archdeacon. I must go to
church."
"Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to
church? Why not say on arrival: 'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon
and your mutton the same evening--c'est trop! I cannot so impose
upon your generosity. I have come for the mutton!'"
Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often
before, by an orthodox consideration. Duff Lindsay drove away in
his cart; and still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss
Howe stood leaning over the banisters, her eyes fixed full of
speculation on the place where he had stood. She was thinking of
a scene--a dinner with an Archdeacon--and of the permanent
satisfactions to be got from it; and she renounced almost with a
palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's asking her.
CHAPTER II
"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
nobody 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 fortitude,
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
passion 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 Japan, 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 brass 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 glass; 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 assertion 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 butter in the worst possible rendering of
her servants' tongue, without a thought except that the bread and
butter 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 glass 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 passive."
Alicia's eyes were still attracted by the light from the window.
It silhouetted a rare fern from Assam 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 snobbish 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 gratitude 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.
"I don't think she has ever told me," he said. "No, I am sure she
has not." His reflection was: "It is her garment--how could it
fit another woman!"
"But you have divined it--she has let you do that! You can give me
your impression."
He recognised her bright courage in venturing upon impalpabilities,
but not without a shade of embarrassment.
"Perhaps. But having perceived, to pass on--it doesn't follow
that one can. I don't seem able to lay my hand upon the signs and
symbols."
The faintest look of disappointment, the lightest cloud of
submission, appeared upon Miss Livingstone's face.
"Oh, I know!" she said. "You are making me feel dreadfully out of
it, but I know. It surrounds her like a kind of atmosphere, an
intellectual atmosphere. Though I confess that is the part I don't
understand in connection with an actress."
There was a sudden indifference in this last sentence. Alicia lay
back upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among
them, and looked away from the subject at the teacups. Duff picked
up his hat. He had the subtlest intimations with women.
"It's an intoxicating atmosphere," he said. "My continual wonder
is that I'm not in love with her. A fellow in a novel, now, in my
situation, would be embroiled with half his female relations by
this time, and taking his third refusal with a haggard eye."
Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness. She
lifted her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty
suddenly revealed.
"Why aren't you?" she said. "I wonder, too."
"I should like it enormously," he laughed. "I've lain awake at
nights trying to find out why it isn't so. Perhaps you'll be able
to tell me. I think it must be because she's such a confoundedly
good fellow."
Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur
made a shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was
over; she was full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.
"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said. "But why are you going?
Don't go. Stay and have another cup of tea."
CHAPTER III
The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same
terms at New College, and now found themselves again together in
the social poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily
explain their walking in company through the early dusk of a
December evening in Bentinck Street. It seems desirable to supply
a reason why anyone should be walking there, to begin with, anyone,
at all events, not a Chinaman, or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand
furniture, or an able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in
both trouser pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful
temper toward the nearest glass of country spirits. Or, to be
quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a Bulgarian, a
Levantine, or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a carriage,
to whom the able-bodied seaman represented the whole port. The
cramped twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they
overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left,
and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings
and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past
with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as
possible aside. Three parts of the tide of them were neither white
nor black, but many shades of brown, written down in the census as
"of mixed Mood," and wearing still, through the degenerating
centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril of the first Englishmen who came
to conjugal ties of Hindustan. The place sent up to the stars a
vast noise of argument and anger and laughter, of the rattling of
hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered in its exaggeration,
the red turban of a policeman here and there denoted little more
than a unit in the crowd. There were gas-lamps, and they sent a
ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside the
banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.
They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns,
built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history
for Bentinck Street, and explained that whatever might be the
present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones
that loafed together into the fog round the first bend, they were
once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue
capital, that fancy dictated. There where the way narrowed with an
out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights
grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with
an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and
Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch
flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a
squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of
betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little
flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, and
showed his heap of cakes that they were well-browned and full of
butter. From the "Cape of Good Cheer," where many bottles
glistened in rows inside, came a braying upon the conch, and a
flame of burnt brandy danced along the bar to the honour and
propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied seaman might be
thirsty when he came, for the "Cape of Good Cheer" did not owe its
prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of our
theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe
shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the stitching.
There were endless shoe shops, and they all belonged to Powson or
Singson or Samson, while one sign-board bore the broad impertinence
"Macpherson." The proprietors stood in the door, the smell came
out in the street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped in
fried oil and fresh leather that out-fans even the south wind in
Bentinck Street. They were responsible but not anxious, the
proprietors: they buried their fat hands in their wide sleeves and
looked up and down, stolid and smiling. They stood in their alien
petticoat trousers for the commercial stability of the locality,
and the rows of patent leather slippers that glistened behind them
testified to it further. Everything else shifted and drifted, with
a perpetual change of complexion, a perpetual worsening of clothes.
Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of prosperity. It lay round his
thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue cotton smock,
and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking up and
down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise of
the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in his queue.
Lindsay liked Bentinck Street as an occasional relapse from the
scenic standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made
personal business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial
impression thrown into the transaction. Arnold, in his cassock,
waited in the doorway with his arms crossed behind him, and his
thin face thrust as far as it would go into the air outside. It is
possible that some intelligences might have seen in this priest a
caricature of his profession, a figure to be copied for the curate
of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the common signs of
the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish in its
plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only
occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness
which had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had the long
thin nose which looked as if for preference it would be forever
thrust among the pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the
width of his mouth without perhaps detecting the patience and
decision of the upper lip. The indignity of spectacles he did not
yet wear, but it hovered over him; it was indispensable to his
personality in the long-run. In figure he was indifferently tall
and thin and stooping, made to pass unobservedly along a pavement
or with the directness of humble but important business among
crowds. At Oxford he had interested some of his friends and
worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of that
Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her
the responsibility. Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to
exist on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent
animal, under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was
among those who observed his waverings without prejudice or
anything but an affectionate solicitude that, whichever way Arnold
went, he should find the satisfactions he sought. The conviction
that settled the matter was accidental, the work of a moment, a
free instinct and a thing made with hands--the dead Shelley where
the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed him, under his memorial
dome in the gardens of University College. Here one leafy
afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head in
confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by
which he saw deeply concealed in his bosom, and disguised with a
host of spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as
the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery
worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated
prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could
yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis of
the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions. In the end
he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view, as far from
him as his will would carry, and walked away in another direction,
from which, if he turned his head, he could see the Church of Rome
sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in her skirts,
looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the Clarke
Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood in
the door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck Street, while Lindsay
explained to Ahsing his objection to patent leather toe-caps; six
years which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have
cheerfully admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his
personal hopes of achievement--lowered them with a heroism which
took account of himself as no more than a spiritual molecule
rightly inspired and moving to the great future already shining
behind coming aeons of the universal Kingdom. Indeed, his humility
was scientific; he made his deductions from the granular nature of
all change, moral and material. He never talked or thought of the
Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar Oriental brightness as
stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather the ego and the
energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in this world,
thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy to
survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope
to attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held
vastly, on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the
ministry of symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation
which the eye of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon
of Bengal should be hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he
could do to purify and intensify his infinitesimal share of the
force that was to bring it about. Meanwhile he made friends with
the fathers of Bengali schoolboys, who appreciated his manners, and
sent him with urbanity flat baskets of mangoes and nuts and
oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round boxes of white
grapes in sawdust from Kabul. He seldom dwelt upon the converts
that already testified to the success of the mission; it might be
gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.
As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his
hand within Arnold's elbow. It was an impulse, and the analysis of
it would show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value
continually renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common
ground. The physical nearness, the touch, was something, and each
felt it in the remoteness of his other world with satisfaction.
There was absurdly little in what they had to say to each other;
they talked of the Viceroy's attack of measles and the sanitary
improvements in the cloth dealers' quarter. Their bond was hardly
more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness of sentiment,
clearness of eye. Such as it was, it was strong enough to make
both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
Arnold's soutane. It made its universal way for them, however,
this garment. Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and
pressed with one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the
padre sahib. He, with his eyes cast down, took the tribute with
humility, as meet, in a way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at
the persistence of ecclesiastical tradition.
Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a
wave of rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat
sellers, and mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the
continual auction of Kristo Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-
hand. In its vivid familiarity it seemed to make straight for the
two Englishmen, to surround and take possession of them, and they
paused. The source of it was plain--an open door under a vast
white signboard dingily lettered "The Salvation Army." It loomed
through the smoke and the streetlights like a discovery.
"Our peripatetic friends," said Arnold, with his rare smile; and as
if the music seized and held them, they stood listening.
"I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
All day on Sunday and six days a week!
I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
Fifty-two weeks in the year."
It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh
animation. Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they
picked their steps across the street to the door, and there
hesitated, revolted in different ways. Perhaps, I have forgotten
to say that Lindsay came to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse,
and had had a mother before whose name, while she lived, people
wrote "The Hon." Besides, the singing had stopped, and casual
observation from the street was checked by a screen.
"I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are," said
Arnold.
Their methods were just on the other side of the screen. A bullet-
headed youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders,
fingering a cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment,
passing the two men beside the door, and a light, clear voice
seemed to call after him--
"Ah! don't go away!"
Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical
speculation whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe
was still pursuing the broad road to perdition. The desire to
enter sprang up in him: he was reminded of a vista of some interest
which had recently revealed itself by an accident, and which he had
not explored. It had almost passed out of his memory; he grasped
at it again with something like excitement, and fell adroitly upon
the half inclination in Arnold's voice.
"I suppose I can't expect you to go in?" he said.
"Precisely why not?" Stephen retorted. "My dear fellow, we make
broad our sympathies, not our phylacteries."
At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic
was the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with
amusement the pulpit tone of the little epigram. But this moment
found him only aware of the consent in it. His hand on Arnold's
elbow clinched the agreement; he half pushed the priest into the
room, where they dropped into seats. Stephen's hand went to his
breast instinctively, for the words in the air were holy by
association, and stopped there, since even the breadth of his
sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
Booth. Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General
Booth; he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline
and bushy, from a frame on the wall at the end of it. The texts on
the other walls seemed emanations from him; and the man in the
short loose, collarless red coat, with "Salvation Army" in crooked
black letters on it, who stood talking in high, rapid tones with
his hands folded, had the look of a puppet whose strings were
pulled by the personality in the frame above him. It was only by
degrees that they observed the other objects in the room--the big
drum on the floor in the empty space where the exhorters stood, the
dozen wooden benches and the possible score of people sitting on
them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting up the
curtness of the texts. There were half a dozen men of the Duke's
Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and
three or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the
Hooghly, who leaned well forwards their elbows on their knees,
twirling battered straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the
instant off the defensive. One was a Scandinavian, another a
Greek, with earrings. There was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded
negro, very respectable with a plaid tie and a silk hat; and
beside, two East Indian girls of different shades, tittering at the
Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali boy, who spelled out
the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very clean Chinaman,
who appreciated his privilege, since it included a seat, a lamp,
and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no further.
The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like the
girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest,
lying along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.
Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end
of the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung
visibly in mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was
talking. Laura Filbert was one of the women. She might have been
flung upon her chair; her head drooped over the back, buried in the
curve of one arm. A tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest
her face; the other lay, palm outward in its abandonment, among the
folds that covered her limbs. The folds hung from her waist, and
she wore above them a short close bodice like a Bengali woman. Her
head covering had slipped, and clung only to the knot of hair at
the nape of her neck; she lacked, pathetically, the conscious hand
to draw it forward. She was unaware even of the gaze of the Duke's
Own, though it had fixity and absorption.
The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have
caught as a text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung.
"Yes, indeed," he said. "I can tell heveryone 'ere this night,
heveryone, that the Saviour is mighty to keep. I 'ave got it out
of my own personal experience, I 'ave. Jesus don't only look after
you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my friends, six days a week.
Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on you--that's all your
part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an' fall into sin.
There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but oh, my
friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
of Jesus? No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person.
The person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is
prayers; what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is
Jesus a-keeping you? And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it
foolish to put off any longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night;
we may never all meet together again. You and I may never 'ear
each other speaking again or see each other sitting there. Thank
God," the speaker continued, as his eye rested on Arnold and
Lindsay, "the vilest sinner may be saved, the respectable sinner
may be saved. We've got God's word for that. Now just a little
word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls
inside these four walls to-night."
Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters
on her knees on the floor. As she moved she bent upon the audience
a preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers,
chances, from a point remote and emotionally involved. Lindsay's
impression was that she looked at him as from behind a glass door.
Then her eyes closed as the other woman began, and through their
lids, as it were, he could see that she was again caught up, though
her body remained abased, her hands interlocked between her knees,
swaying in unison with the petition. The Ensign was a little
meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless hair and tight
drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she would have
been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was
plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation
of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
commission. She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained
minor key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened,
her key to hearts. She told the Lord in confidence that however
appearances might be against it every soul before him was really
longing to be gathered within His almighty arms, and when she said
this, Laura Filbert, on the floor, threw back her head and cried
"Hallelujah!" and Duff started. The mothers broke in upon the
Ensign with like exclamations. They had a recurrent, perfunctory
sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again cried "Praise the
Lord!" Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty impulse to
leave the premises. Then she rose, and he watched with the Duke's
Own to see what she would do next. The others looked at her too,
as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign
Sand with humble eyes and disapproving lips. As she began to speak
the silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped
shuffling his feet. "Oh come," she said, "Come and be saved!" Her
voice seemed to travel from her without effort, and to penetrate
every corner and every consciousness. There was a sudden dip in it
like the fall of water, that thrilled along the nerves. "Who am I
that ask you? A poor weak woman, ignorant, unknown. Never mind.
It is not my voice but the voice in your heart that entreats you
'Come and be saved!' You know that voice; it speaks in the watches
of the night; it began to speak when you were a little, little
child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers that you
have forgotten now. Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender voice"--her
own had dropped to the cooing of doves--"it is hard to know why all
the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper it! Strange,
strange! But the world is full of the clamour of its own
foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where
people come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches.
You hear it now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.' Why
must I beg of you? Why do you not come hastening, running? Are
you too wise? But when did the wisdom of this world satisfy you
about the next? Are you too much occupied? But in the day of
judgment what will you do?"--
"When you come to Jordan's flood,
How will you do? How will you do?"
It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
opportunity. Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine,
singing, and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum
thumping out the measure, all the tambourines shaking together.
"You who now contemn your God,
How will you do? How will you do?"
The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made
little of the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract
the sentiment, but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that
the tune was the thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism,
and kept time with their feet. Through the medley of voices--
everybody sang except Arnold and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's
seemed to flow, separate and clear, threading the jangle upon
melody, and turning the doggerel into an appeal, direct, intense.
When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to him, in the unmistakable
intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.
"Death will be a solemn day
When the soul is forced away,
It will be too late to pray;
How will you do?"
It was simple enough. All her supreme desire to convince, to turn,
to make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the
room with whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face
her own could seek with a kind of right to response. But the
sensation Duff Lindsay tried to sit still under was not simple. It
had the novelty, the shock, of a plunge into the sea; behind his
decorous countenance he gasped and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds
in his ears. His soul seemed shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet
the buffets themselves were enthralling. In the strangeness of it
he made a mechanical movement to depart, picked up his stick, but
Arnold was sitting holding his chin, wrapped in quiet interest, and
took no notice. The hymn stopped, and he found a few minutes'
respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the meeting, unveiling
each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over the leaves of
the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware, for airs and
verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his untaken,
sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the
sort of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch
his state with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all
down on their knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not
aware of the meaning of a single word that she said, only that her
voice was threading itself in and out of his consciousness burdened
with a passion that made it exquisite to him. Her appeal lifted
itself in the end into song, low and sweet.
"Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
There to my heart was the blood applied,
Glory to His name!"
They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it
was over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the
preliminary pangs of conversion by the methods of the Salvation
Army. Deliberately, however, he postponed further analysis of them
until after the meeting was over. He would be compelled then to go
away, back to the club to dinner, or something; they would put out
the lights and lock the place up: he thought of that. He glanced
at the lamps with a perception of the finality that would come when
they were extinguished--she would troop away with the others into
the darkness--and then at his watch to see how much time there was
left. More exhortation followed and more prayer; he was only aware
that she did not speak. She sat with her hand over her eyes, and
Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect
whether anyone else was aware of it, this connection that she was
blazoning between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into
a sense of ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of
stuffy smells. When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a
rapt effort to tell her that he perceived her intention. That he
should be grateful, that he should approve, was neither here nor
there; the indispensable thing was that she should know him
conscious, receptive. She read three or four sacred verses,
a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart, "Come unto
Me." . . . The words stole about the room like tears. Then she
would ask "all present," she said, to engage for a moment in silent
prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street
noises surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as
Laura brought it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her
feet as the others raised their heads, breaking forth clear and
jubilant.
"I am so wondrously saved from sin,
Jesus so sweetly abides within;
There at the Cross where He took me in,
Glory to His name!"
She smiled as she sang. It was a happy confident smile, and it was
plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of the last
ten minutes' spiritual experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's
perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested
for an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy
of her calling, he felt a pang of compunction. It was a formless
reproach, too vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest
to defining itself in the idea that he had gone too far--he who had
not left his seat. When the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand
said, "The meeting is now open for testimonies," he knew that all
her hope was upon him, though she looked at the screen above his
head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal sense surging through him
of what he would rejoice to do for her in compensation. In the
little chilly silence that followed he surprised his own eyes moist
with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and so vain--and he
felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum stood up
and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with details
about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.
"Hallelujah!" said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air
of hearing it for the first time. "Any more?" and a Norwegian
sailor lurched shamefacedly upon his feet. He had a couple of
inches of straggling yellow beard all round his face, and fingered
an old felt hat.
"I haf' to say only dis word. I goin' sdop by Jesus. Long time I
subbose I sdop by Jesus. I subbose--"
"Glory be to God!" remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of
the Duke's Own who were inclined to be amused. "That will do,
thank you. Now, is there nobody else? Speak up, friends. It'll
do you no harm, none whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll
be surprised. Now, who'll be the next to say a word for Jesus?"
She was nodding encouragement at the negro cook as if she knew him
for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in his gleaming white collar, was
aware, in silent smiling misery, that the expectations of the
meeting were toward him. Laura had again hidden her eyes in her
hand. The negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and the
prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of
sin was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to
focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and
cleared his voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen
Arnold, picking up his hat, got upon his feet instead.
"I also," he said, "would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
God--with all my heart."
It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance
of his office. Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay, "Shall
we go now?" he whispered, and the two made their way to the door,
leaving a silence behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part
of Ensign Sand at least, to be somewhat resentful. As they passed
out a voice recovered itself, and cried, "Hallelujah!" It was
Laura's; and all the way to the club--Arnold was dining with him
there--Lindsay listened to his friend's analysis of religious
appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that clear music above a
sordid din, "Hallelujah!" "Hallelujah!"
CHAPTER IV
When Alicia Livingstone, almost believing she liked it, drove to
Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and left cards upon Miss Hilda
Howe, she was only partially rewarded. Through the plaster gate-
posts, badly in want of repair, and bearing, sunk in one of them, a
marble slab announcing "Residence with Board," she perceived the
squalid attempt the place made at respectability, the servants in
dirty livery salaaming curiously, the over-fed squirrel in a cage
in the door, the pair of damaged wicker chairs in the porch,
suggesting the easiest intercourse after dinner, the general
discoloration. She observed with irritation that it was a down-at-
heels shrine for such a divinity, in spite of its six dusty crotons
in crumbling plaster urns, but the irritation was rather at her own
repulsion to the place than at any inconsistency it presented.
What she demanded and expected of herself was that Number Three,
Lal Behari's Lane should be pleasing, interesting, acceptable on
its merits as a cheap Calcutta boarding-house. She found herself
so unable to perceive its merits that it was almost a relief to see
nothing of Miss Howe either; Hilda had gone to rehearsal, to the
"dance-house" the servant said, eyeing the unusual landau. Alicia
rolled back into streets with Christian names, distressed by an
uncertainty as to whether her visit had been a disappointment or an
escape. By the next day, however, she was well pulled together in
favour of the former conclusion--she could nearly always persuade
herself of such things in time--and wrote a frank sweet little note
in her picturesque hand--she never joined more than two syllables--
to say how sorry she had been, and would Miss Howe come to lunch on
Friday. "I should love to make it dinner," she, said to herself,
as she sealed the envelope, "but before one knows how she will
behave in connection with the men--I suppose one must think of the
other people."
It was Friday, and Hilda was lunching. The two had met among the
faint-tinted draperies of Alicia's drawing-room--there was something
auroral even about the mantelpiece--a little like diplomatists
using a common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia
drew the conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had
more to cover, but was less particular about it. The only thing she
was bent upon making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of
Miss Livingstone's effort to receive her as if she had been anybody
else. Alicia was hardly aware of what she wanted to conceal,
unless it was her impression that Miss Howe's dress was cut a
trifle too low in the neck, that she was almost too effective in
that cream and yellow to be quite right. Alicia remembered
afterwards to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of intercourse
with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set Celine at
her--with such a foundation to work upon what could Celine not have
done? She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things
Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room
tones of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under
the gallery, and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with
them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown
away upon two women and a little furniture. A consciousness stood
in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the
picturesqueness of the bazar rode on long absorbed regards, one
reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so
conventionally creditable to them both that they might have smiled
past each other under any circumstances next day and acknowledged
no demand for more than the smile.
The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of
her head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her
elbow on the table. They had found a portrait-painter.
"He has such an eye," said Alicia, "for the possibilities of
character."
"Such an eye that he develops them. I know one man he painted.
I suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the
meantime he and everybody else had forgotten about it. All but
Salter. Salter re-created it on the original lines, and brought it
up, and gave it a lodging behind the man's, wrinkles. I saw the
picture. It was fantastic--psychologically."
"Pyschology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know," Alicia
said. "Do let him give you a little more. It's only Moselle."
She felt quite direct and simple too in uttering her postulate.
Her eyes had a friendly, unembarrassed look, there was nothing
behind them but the joy of talking intelligently about Salter.
Hilda did not even glance away. She looked at her hostess instead,
with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily
have mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she
could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the
moment, to swim in Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets,
moreover, were of excellent quality.
"It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially,
thank Heaven, to my trade." Her voice softened the brusqueness of
this; the way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms.
That was the case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.
"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to
make a picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush
to do it, or a pen or a chisel!"
"I know what you mean," said Alicia. She had a little flush, and
an excited hand among the wineglasses. "No, I don't want any;
please don't bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in
aspic. "It's much more direct--your way."
"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh yes! if we are
lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has
dignity enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity,
with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are
Shakespeare's--with being unliterary. You might--good Heavens!--as
well accuse a painter of not being a musician! Our business lies
behind the words--they are our mere medium! Rosalind wasn't
literary--why should I be? But don't indulge me in my shop, if it
bores you," Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that Miss
Livingstone was never further from being bored.
"Oh, please go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows
confessed the tedium of Calcutta small talk. "But why do you say
you are lightly esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone--and
you hold the public in the hollow of your hand!"
Hilda smiled. "Dear old public! It does its best for us, doesn't
it? One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never
believing in its treachery in the end. But I don't know why I say
we are lightly esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all. I've
done nothing--I've no right. In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll
write signed articles for the New Review about modern dramatic
tendencies. Meanwhile you'll have to consider that the value of my
opinions is prospective."
"But already you have succeeded--you have made a place."
"In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg, I think they remember me in
Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila. But that
wasn't legitimate drama," and Hilda smiled again in a way that
coloured her unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and
gold. She waited an instant for these tints to materialise, but
Miss Howe's smile slid discreetly into her wineglass instead.
"There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines," she went on,
her look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way
with her hat. "Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions.
One wonders what America will do with those friars, when she does
go there."
"Do you think she is going?" asked Alicia vaguely. It was the
merest politeness--she did not wait for a reply. With a courageous
air which became her charmingly, she went on, "Don't you long to
submit yourself to London? I should."
"Oh, I must. I know I must. It's in the path of duty and
conscience--it's not to be put off for ever. But one dreads the
chained slavery of London"--she hesitated before the audacity of
adding, "the sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and
caught her breath as if she had watched the other woman make a
hazardous leap.
"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt
curiously buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of
immediate achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two,
but it had become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had
drawn together, and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In
Hilda's there was an instant of consideration before she said--"I
might as well tell you--you won't misunderstand--that I AM sure. I
expect things of myself. I hold a kind of mortgage on my success;
when I foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping
chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only
to accomplish, every moment straddled with calculation, an end to
all the byways where one finds the colour of the sun. The
successful London actress, my dear--what existence has she? A
straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many
nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car,
and the net result in every newspaper--an existence of pure
artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell
of your personality. It's the house for ever on your back; at the
last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open
eye on the floral offerings. There never was reward so qualified
by its conditions."
"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"
"Oh yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish!
But then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing
afterwards but the eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I
don't suppose I could begin to make you see the joys of a strolling
player--they aren't much understood even in the profession--but
there are so many, honestly, that London being at the top of the
hill, I'm not panting up. My way of going has twice wound round
the world already. But I'm talking like an illustrated interview.
You will grant the impertinence of all I've been saying when I tell
you that I've never yet had an illustrated interview."
"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make
you sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"
Hilda threw her head back and laughed, almost, Alicia noted, like a
man. She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her
handkerchief, as women often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed
freely, and as much as she wanted to, and it was as clear as
possible that tights presented themselves quite preposterously to
any discussion of her profession. They were things to be taken for
granted, like the curtain and the wings; they had no relation to
clothing in the world.
Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar
again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews.
"They ARE atrocities," she said. "On their merits they ought to be
cast out of even the suburbs of art and literature. But they help
to make the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do
that, of course--" and the pursed seriousness of her lips gave
Alicia the impression that, though the whole world took offence,
the expediency of the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.
The servant brought them coffee. "Shall we smoke here," said Miss
Livingstone, "or in the drawing-room?"
"Oh, do you want to? Are you quite sure you like it? Please don't
on my account--you really mustn't. Suppose it should mike you
ill?" If Hilda felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her
face. Nothing was there but cheerful concern.
"It won't make me ill." Alicia lifted her chin with delicate
assertiveness. "I suppose you do smoke, don't you?"
"Occasionally--with some people. Honestly, have you ever done it
before?"
"Four times," said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the
apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them. "I
thought it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--"
"Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some
Serene Highness's neck. I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer
to dispense with it. In my bath, for instance, and almost always
in omnibuses."
"How absurd you are! Then we'll stay here."
Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia
sacrifice two matches.
"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor, dear old
Rosy! She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a
kind of look of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and
chokes her, poor dear; but blow her, if she won't be as Bohemian as
anybody. I've seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under
her chin. I got up and went away."
"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting
her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace.
"I'm not old and I'm not grotesque."
"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."
"I BEG your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone
out. Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're
damp."
"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette
between her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it
between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold
letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals
through her nostrils. It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a
horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss Howe wouldn't do it again. But
she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's way of doing it.
"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said contemplatively;
"you're young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred,
imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air.
Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without
wincing. She had less than the common palate for flattery of the
obvious kind, but this was something different--a mere casual and
unprejudiced statement of fact.
"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and
there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace
seemed to be dismissed between them.
"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She
felt delightfully terse and to the point.
"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you
know him well?"
Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side
of them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--
it would have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.
"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the
sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a
hard surface. She looked attentively at the red heart of her
cigarette crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.
"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken.
"As to the rest of the people--bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It
is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's
really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be
idealised--made to serve ennobling ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--
different."
"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of
her, the asking note was in the word.
"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown
me the queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to
Wellesley Square, to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the
middle of it."
"A statue?"
"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new
to me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was, and the
performance. She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of
a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one.
Light seemed to come from her, from her hair or her eyes or
something. I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms
into the sunset when it was ended."
"It sounds most unusual," Alicia said, with a light smile. Her
interest was rather obviously curbed.
"It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one
doesn't go round the corner."
There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss
Livingstone's desire to be informed.
Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and
waited. The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke
it herself.
"And I regret to say it was I who introduced them," she said.
"Introduced whom?"
"Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They
met at Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was
disappointed," Hilda went on tranquilly, "because I would only lend
it to her while she was there."
"Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it.
He is always grateful to be amused."
"Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather
intense about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on
Mr. Lindsay's account. Did I say so?" They were simple, amiable
words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but
Alicia's crude blush--everything else about her was so perfectly
worked out--cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. "Perhaps
though," Hilda hurried on with a pang, "we generalise too much
about the men."
What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no
generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant
brought her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider.
The card saved her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an
instant, and then exclaimed, "My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a
reverend--a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in
here. What shall we do with our cigarettes?"
Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was
developing.
"Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it?
Drown the corpse in here, and I'll pretend it belongs to me." She
pushed the finger-bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant
went into it. "Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and
there was no time for remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting
itself at the door.
"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portiere.
Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition
of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection.
It reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully.
Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and
it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he
would bless it.
"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee." He flavoured
what he said, and made it pretty, like a woman. "Let me confess at
once, that is what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a
hint of formality and self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee-
time, isn't it?" Then he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the
moment, flushed with the luxury of her sensations, a vision as
splendid as she must have been to him unusual. But he only closed
his lips and thrust his chin out a little, with his left hand
behind him in one of his intensely clerical attitudes, and so stood
waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she could hardly have
expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with upraised hands,
but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his self-
possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it,
yet that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life.
It was all as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint
tradition, and she decided not, after all, to begin a trivial
comedy for herself and Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen
Arnold whether he objected to tobacco. She had an instant's
circling choice of the person she would represent to this priest in
the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken
out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really hardly
mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the
shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand
went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An
erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes
that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken
to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse.
She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its
proper note of insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once
afterwards to Arnold, found that he had forgotten it.
"Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said,
and the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought
Hilda a flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.
"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street," she
said, "but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with
Mr. Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't
help knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty
of her well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the
simplicity; it was one of those least of little things which are
enough.
Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again
quickly, and looked at the floor as he said he feared they were
terribly out of it in College Street, for which, however, he had
evidently no apology to offer. He continued to look at the floor
with a careful air, as if it presented points pertinent to the
situation. Hilda felt herself--it was an odd sensation--too sunny
upon the nooked, retiring current that flowed in him. He might
have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that Alicia made, but she
was aware that he did not, that he was struggling through her
strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He
stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled
as if he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked,
making light accusations against the rigours of the Mission House,
complaining of her cousin that he was altogether given over to
bonds and bands, that she personally would soon cease to hold him
in affection at all; she saw so little of him it wasn't really
worth while.
This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other
end of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the
firm, lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.
"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules
should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times
a year." She spoke with a kind of grave brightness; it was
difficult to know whether she was altogether in jest.
"There would be secession all over the place," Arnold responded,
with his repressed smile. "You would get any number of
probationers; I wonder whether you would keep them!"
"During that week," Hilda went on, "they should be compelled to
dine and dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning
before luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to
all the variety entertainments. Think of the austere bliss of the
return to the cloisters! All joy lies in a succession of
sensations, they say. Do you remember how Lord Ormont arranged his
pleasures? Oh yes, my brotherhood would be popular, as soon as it
was understood."
Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember
flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sign
or token of disapproval in Arnold's face. What she might have
observed there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight
disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and
something like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.
Hilda began to put on her gloves. The left one gaped at two
finger-ends; she buttoned it with the palm thrown up and outward,
as if it were the daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opera.
"Not yet!" Alicia cried.
"Thanks, I must. To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have
to dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock. And,
after pulling all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two
in bed."
"You! But it's monstrous. Is there nobody else?"
"I wouldn't let anybody else," Hilda laughed. "Don't forget,
please, that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of
people, mostly from the Antipodes. Don't confound our manners and
customs with anything you've heard about the Lyceum. Good-bye. It
has been charming. Goodbye, Mr. Arnold."
But Alicia held her hand. "The papers say it is to be The Offence
of Galilee, after all," she said.
"Yes. Hamilton Bradley is all right again, and we've found a
pretty fair local Judas--amateur. We couldn't possibly put it on
without Mr. Bradley. He takes the part of"--Hilda glanced at the
hem of the listening priestly robe--"of the chief character, you
know."
"That was the great Nonconformist success at home last year, wasn't
it?" Arnold asked; "Leslie Patullo's play? I knew him at Oxford.
I can't imagine--he's a queer chap to be writing things like that."
"It works out better than you--than one might suppose," Hilda
returned, moving toward the door. "Some of the situations are
really almost novel, in spite of all your centuries of preaching."
She sent a disarming smile with that, looking over her shoulder in
one of her most effective hesitations, one hand holding back the
portiere.
"And next week?" cried Alicia.
"Oh, next week we do L'Amourette de Giselle--Frank Golding's re-
vamp. Good-bye! Good-bye!"
"I wonder very much what Patullo has done with The Offence of
Galilee," Arnold said, after she had gone.
"Come and see, Stephen. We have a box, and there will be heaps of
room. It's--suitable, isn't it?"
"Oh, quite."
"Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on. Why not?"
"Thanks very much indeed. It is sure to reward one. I think I
shall be able to give myself that pleasure."
Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed,
became a cup of tea; and his talk, while he stayed, seemed to
suffer less from the limitations of his Order than it usually did.
He was fluent and direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more
than his prayers; that his glance at the world had still a
speculation in it; and when he went away, he left Alicia with
flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring a vague inward
corollary upon her day--
"It pays! It pays!"
CHAPTER V
Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December
Saturday night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise
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 particular evening
for a fortnight. In the Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof and
nobody could hear the orchestra when it rained--the Midgets were
presenting the earlier collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and
Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine years of age. Colonel
Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full blast on the Maidan
for a week. It became a great Occidental circus when Colonel Pike
married the proprietress. They were both staying at the Grand
Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through
cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say
nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And
certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for
while hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in
the excusably imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural
feature of the cold weather. There was the Mystic Bower, too, in
an octagonal tent under a pipal tree, which gave you by an
arrangement of looking-glasses the most unaccountable sensations
for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know Thyself!" where a
physiological display lurked from the eyes of the police behind a
perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri Chandra's Gully.
Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition, sighed to think
how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the Imperial
Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape, and
pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that
rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought
bitterly, standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims
of legitimate drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of
wheels and the flashing of lamps on the way to accord another
season's welcome to Jimmy Finnigan. "I might've learned this town
well enough by now," he reflected, "to know that a bally 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 brinjals and soda-water.
"I'm in hospital," Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and
I'm d---- glad of it,"--he always insisted on the oath going in,
it appealed so sympathetically to the domiciled Englishman grown
cold to superiority,--"for, upon my soul, I don't know where I'd
turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the talented ladies and
gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary
arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous
hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price. Then
Llewellyn and Rosa Norton--she had a small inalienable income, and
they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable
reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour--would
depart in another direction, full of gratification for the present
and of confidence for the future. Llewellyn usually made a parting
statement to the newspapers that although his aims were unalterably
high he was not above profiting by experience, and that next season
he could be relied upon to hit the taste of the community with
precision. This year, as we know, he had made a serious effort by
insisting that at least a proportion of his ladies and gentlemen
should be high-kickers and equal to an imitation, good enough for
the Orient, of most things done by the illustrious Mr. Chevalier.
But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected The Offence of Galilee
to open with tells its own tale. He was convinced, but not
converted, and he stood there with his little legs apart, chewing
a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the chaste
decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one
more chance to redeem itself.
It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable. A
ticca-gharry deposited a sea-captain; three carriages arrived in
succession; an indefinite number of the Duke's Own, hardly any of
them drunk, filed 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 direction of the dressing-rooms. When
Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors so early there was no further cause
for anxiety. Calcutta was abroad and stirring, and would turn for
amusement even to The Offence of Galilee.
Eventually--that is, five minutes before the curtain rose--the
representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they
were justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable
audience. The Viceroy had taken a box, and sent an Aide-de-Camp to
sit in it, also a pair of M.P.'s from the North of England, whom he
was expected to attend to in Calcutta, and the governess. The
Commander-in-Chief had not been solicited to be present, the
theatrical season demanding an economy in such personalities if
they were to go round; but a Judge of the High Court had a party in
the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal Government sat behind
him. 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 and the origin of the sun. An audience of fluttering fans
and wrinkled shirt collars--the evening was warm under the gas-
lights--sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an old
woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those
who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five--
an audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for
good manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait
for the rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an
atmosphere of affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with
imperious chins, the use of quick orders in a world of personal
superiority.
Thus the stalls--they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs--and the
boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs
supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss
Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other
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 freedom from the
cares of life--at a venture the wives were taking in washing in
Brixton, and the children sent to Board School at the expense of
the nation. And in a climate like this it was a popular opinion
that a man must either enjoy himself or commit suicide.
The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all.
It was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.
Hilda's audience that night knew all about The Offence of Galilee
from the English illustrated papers. The illustrated papers had a
great way of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences;
they contained photographs of almost every striking scene, composed
at the leisure of the cast, but so vividly supplemented with
descriptions of the leading lady's clothes that it hardly required
any effort of the imagination to conjure up the rest. The postures
and the chief garments of Pilate--he was eating pomegranates when
the curtain rose, and listening to scandal from his slave-maidens
about Mary Magdalene--were at once recognised in their resemblance
to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of this satisfaction
any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally unobserved.
A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as if
with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations
to cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and
people listened for familiar sentences with something like the
composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of
the second lesson. But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-
maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and
commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as
distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking
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 box,
and knew all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens,
Pilate's fat wife, and an unspeakable comic centurion, offered as
yet hardly more than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole
performance was already projected upon Arnold's suffering
imagination. This, then, was what Patullo had done with it. But
what other, he asked himself in quiet anger, could Patullo have
been expected to do? the fellow he remembered. Arnold tilted his
chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre brows, at the
opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit of
self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be
made with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred
story, what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine
personalities concerned? He remembered, with the touch of almost
physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two
pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of
surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the
trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source
of Patullo's intolerable inspiration. Certain muscles felt
responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he
possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest, even of
athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required to
be kicked.
Alicia was in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing
plummet into the evening's experience. Arnold, hesitating over the
rudeness of departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she
would hardly mind. The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made
a jest, which reached Stephen over his hostess's shoulder, and
seemed to brand him where he sat. He looked about for his hat and
some excuse that would serve, and while he looked the sound of
applause rose from the house. It was a demonstration without great
energy, hardly more than a flutter from stall to stall, with a
vague, fundamental noise from the gallery; but it had the quality
which acclaimed something new. Arnold glanced at the stage, and
saw that while Pilate and the 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, buy to-day in
the Mousky, the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her
limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver
anklets and armlets. These shone and twinkled with her movements;
but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility
of the bazar. People looked at their playbills to see whether it
was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native
theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot
upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there
was a keenness of desire to see what would happen next which
plainly curtailed the applause, as it does with children at a
pantomime.
"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not
nearly so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene
had begun the well-known passage with Pilate, about which the
newspapers absurdly reported later that if Miss Howe had not been a
Protestant, and so impervious the Pope would have excommunicated
her, and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed to afford
him a better place. He put an undecided hand upon a prop of the
box that rose behind Alicia's shoulder, and so stood leaning and
looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder
cape of the frock of his Order than he knew. Hilda, in one of
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 friend of
Caesar, so that he could not see the design that sat behind the
mask of her sharp indifference. She rested her chin upon her
knees, and let the blankness of her beauty exclaim upon the
subtlety of her replies, plainly measuring the power of her
provocation against the impoverished quality that camp and grove,
court and schools, might leave upon august Roman sensibilities. It
was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its concentration
behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the igniting,
flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage. Alicia, when it
was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, "How the modern woman goes off upon
side issues!" to which that lady nodded a rather suspicious assent.
Long before Hilda had begun to act for Arnold, to play to his
special consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so
to speak, by a whirlpool of conflicting impulses. She did so much
more than "lift" the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in
the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that whenever
she appeared people irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made
private acknowledgments to the effect that something was to be said
even for an impious fantasy which gave her so unique an opportunity.
To Arnold her vivid embodiment of an incident in that which was his
morning and evening meditation made special appeal, and though it
was in a way as if she had thrust her heathen torch into his Holy
of Holies, he saw it lighted with fascination, and could not close
the door upon her. The moment of her discovery of this came early,
and it is only she, perhaps, who could tell how the strange bond
wove itself that drew her being--the Magdalene's--to the priest
who sat behind a lady in swansdown and chiffon in the upper box
nearest to the stage on the right. The beginnings of such things
are untraceable, but the fact may be considered in connection with
this one that Hamilton Bradley, who represented, as we have been
told he would, the Chief Character, did it upon lines very
recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred books, very
correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of the
Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable
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 looked down with
tender patience and compassion upon the development of the woman's
intrigue in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts and
guiles, to save Him who had transfigured her from the hands of the
rabble and the high priests; he did not even shrink from the
inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene's final
passionate tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured
Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept
at His feet where He lay bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in
the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's
lips almost moved in words other than those of the playwright--
words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her
sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee . . ." In his
exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins.
The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a white heat; the
woman on the stage warmed her hands at it in two consciousnesses.
She was stirred through all her artistic sense in a new and
delicious way, and wakened in some dormant part of her to a
knowledge beautiful and surprising. She felt in every nerve the
exquisite quality of that which lay between them, and it thrilled
her through all her own perception of what she did, and all the
applause at how she did it. It was as if he, the priest, was borne
out upon a deep broad current that made toward solar spaces, toward
infinite bounds, and as if she, the actress, piloted him. . . .
The Sphinx on the curtain--it had gone down in the old crooked
lines--again looked above and beyond them all. I have sometimes
fancied a trace of malignancy about her steady eyeballs, but
perhaps that is the accident 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. "I hope," said Alicia
to Stephen, fastening the fluffy-white collar of the wrap he put
round her, "that I needn't be sorry I asked you to come. I don't
quite know. But she did redeem it, didn't she? That last scene--"
"Can you not be silent?" Arnold said, almost in a whisper; and her
look of astonishment showed her that there were tears in his eyes.
He left the theatre and walked light-headedly across Chowringhee
and out into the starlit empty 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
grass from the river and the mast-head lights watched beside the
city. He woke chilled and normal, and when he reached the Mission
House in College Street his servant was surprised at the unusual
irritation of a necessary rebuke.
CHAPTER VI
While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting
for Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a
notable presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees
crossed on the bench farthest back and the corner obscurest of the
Salvation Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street. It had become his
accustomed place; sitting there he had begun to feel like the
adventurer under Niagara, it was the only spot from which he could
observe, try to understand and cope with the torrential nature of
his passion. Nearer to the fair charm of his kneeling Laura, in
the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and the sound of the big
drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away. His persistent
refusal of a better place also profited him in that it brought to
Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he was one
of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of
not noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were
not there, a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when
the plate came round. After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand
regarded his spiritual interests with almost superstitious
reverence, according them the fullest privacy of which she was
capable. The gravity which the gentleman attached to his situation
was sufficiently testified by the "amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted
better evidence than the amount. Even Laura, acting doubtless
under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away from him in her
prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional allusion passed
her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they fell, he
gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to
visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four
hours he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them
and her face; they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least
of all in the manner of their intention. After the first quarter
of an hour, it is to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more
apprehensions on the score of emotional hypnotism. He recognised
his situation plainly enough, and there was no appeal in it of
which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for example, could properly
suspect the genuineness or the permanence.
On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat
through other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which
he meditated mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was
one quite adapted to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied
with the burden of his transgressions it was one he might very well
have fallen into. When Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at
her, at other times he looked at the situation in the brightness of
her presence at the other end of the room. She gave forth there,
for Lindsay, an illumination by which he almost immediately began
to read his life; and it was because he thought he had done this
with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind her that
evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest, with
her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
Street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see
you. When may I? Any time that suits you. Have you half an hour
to spare to-morrow?"
It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which
she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory. Not
the frankness though, or the touch of "Now we are getting to
business," that stood in her expression. She looked alert and
pleased.
"You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?" she said.
Her manner took Lindsay a trifle aback; it suggested that she
conferred this privilege so freely. "To-morrow--let me see, we
march in the morning, and I have an open-air at four in the
afternoon--the Ensign takes the evening meeting. Yes, I could see
you to-morrow about two or about seven, after I get back from the
Square." It was not unlike a professional appointment.
Lindsay considered. "Thanks," he said, "I'll come at about seven--
if you are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a
day."
He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly
reddened at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's
road dust, and a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which
she said matter-of-factly, "We are never too exhausted to attend to
our Master's business."
Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation; he looked gravely
the other way. "And the address?" he said.
"Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is
in Crooked Lane. Anybody will tell you."
At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Lindsay said
"Thanks" again, and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for
him--and picked his way over the gutters to the shop of his
Chinaman opposite. From there he watched the little company issue
forth and turn into Crooked Lane, where the entrance was. It gave
him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not
altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm,
living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and
attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and found there a
note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance,
to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he said
as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
already there was one who guessed, who knew.
One gropes in Crooked Lane after the lights of Bentinck Street have
done all that can be expected of them. There are various things to
avoid, washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-
gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay,
when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a
quadrangle which was positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper
slinking out, and the man showed him where an open staircase ran
down against the wall in one corner. It was up there, he said,
that the "tamasho-mems"* lived. There were three tamasho-mems, he
continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and one sahib, but
this was not the time for the tamasho--it was finished. Lindsay
mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to
avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss
Filbert's whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted
a cigar, disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers
and a dirty shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At
all events he had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on,
it was the third storey. Duff kept straight on in a spirit of
caution, and just missed treading upon the fattest rat in the
heathen parish of St. John's. At the top he saw a light and
hastened; it shone from an open door at the side of a passage.
The partition in which the door was came considerably short of the
ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite stretched a
line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile pattern.
Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian way
to summon a servant, "Qui hai?"# he called, "Qui hai?"
* Festival-making women.
# "Whoever is there?"
He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a
door farther down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura
Filbert with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful
picture. "Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced.
"Won't you come in?" She clung to the handle until he had passed
into the room, then she closed the door after him. "I was
expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris, let me make you acquainted
with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."
Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little
chairs. He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's
garb of the Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been
reading a newspaper; he had a displeasing air of possession. At
Laura's formula he looked up and nodded without amiability, folded
his journal the other side out and returned to it.
"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a
demon of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt
dumb. Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed
his legs in greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible,
looking at Laura, who sat down like a third stranger, curiously
detached from any sense of hospitality.
"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said
pleasantly. "I guess you can tell him what to do as well as I
can."
"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. "Is he?" said
Mr. Harris, without looking up from his paper. "Well, what I've
got to say on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a
proper an' a public place. He can hear it there any day of the
week."
"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to
say."
"Then that's all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon
his newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to
the other of them and fell upon an expedient.
"If you'll excuse me," she said, "I'll just get you that bicycle
story you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take
it with you. The Ensign's got it," and she left the room. Lindsay
glanced round, and promptly announced to himself that he could not
come there again. It was taking too violent an advantage. The
pursuit of an angel does not imply that you may trap her in her
corner under the Throne. The place was divided by a calico
curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a mosquito curtain--
she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts about
loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed with
photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic
eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras,
Ceylon, China. A little wooden table stood against the wall
holding an album, a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an
irrelevant Japanese doll which seemed to stretch its absurd arms
straight out in a gay little ineffectual heathen protest. There
was another more embarrassing table: it had a coarse cloth; and was
garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a plate of plantains and a
tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal evidently
impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its core in
Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked
up. "If you're here on private business," he said to Lindsay,
fixing his eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him,
"maybe you ain't aware that the Ensign"--he threw his head back in
the direction of the next room--"is the person to apply to. She's
in command here. Captain Filbert's only under her."
"Indeed?" said Lindsay. "Thanks."
"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered,
still searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eyes
could permanently rest, "where, if you remember, Ensigns are the
smallest officer we have."
"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, governing
a deep and irritated frown.
"Maybe so. This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the
other--not in discipline anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity.
"But you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can
for you. She's a hard-working officer."
A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and
canvas partition, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and
steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe
that Mrs. Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at
which Mr. Harris shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed
into silence, looking sternly at an advertisement. The air was
full of their mutual annoyance, although Duff tried to feel amused.
They were raging as primitively, under the red flannel shirt and
the tan-coloured waistcoat with white silk spots, as two cave-men
on an Early British coast; their only sophistication lay in
Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he ought to find this
person humorous. Then Laura came back and resolved the situation.
"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have
all enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest
mixture of the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris,
as he took the book, had no alternative.
"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went, stumbling at the
door.
"Mr. Harris," said Laura equably, "found salvation about a month
ago. He is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage
works here. He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he
often drops in in the evening."
"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.
"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find
himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But
he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the
Ensign doesn't think there's any objection."
Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs,
her sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The
native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her
consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had
nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or
its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him.
Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of
contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she
counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that
he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire. This
brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he
had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her
to a wider view of him.
"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly
it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her
profile. "Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"
"There are some things I should certainly like you to know,"
replied Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult--" he glanced
at the lath and plaster partition, but she to whom publicity was a
condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience,
naturally had no interpretation for that.
"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our
tongues."
The misunderstanding was absurd, but he saw only its difficulties,
knitting his brows.
"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said.
"I cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."
"Oh," Laura said simply, "do not be afraid! I have heard
confessions! I work at home, you see, a good deal among the
hospitals, and--we do not shrink, you know, in the Army, from
things like that."
"Good God!" he exclaimed, staring, "you don't think--you don't
suppose--"
"Ah! don't say that! It's so like swearing."
As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something
intelligible, the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl
of eighteen, also in the dress of the Army, came through from the
bedroom part. She smiled in a conscious, meaningless way, as she
sidled past them. At the door her smile broadened, and as she
closed it after her she gave them a little nod.
"That's my lieutenant," said Laura.
"The place is like a warren," Lindsay groaned. "How can we talk
here?"
Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis. "Do you
think," she said, "a word of prayer would help you?"
"No," said Lindsay. "No, thank you. What is making me miserable,"
he added quietly, "is the knowledge that we are being overheard.
If you go into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs.
Sand listening by the wall."
"She's gone out! She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take
the evening meeting. Nobody is in there except the two children,
and they are asleep." Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of
her. "Indeed, we are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now. So
please don't be afraid, Mr. Lindsay! Say whatever is in your
heart, and the mere saying--"
"Oh," Lindsay cried, "stop! Don't, for Heaven's sake, look at me
in that light any longer. I'm not penitent. I'm not--what do you
call it?--a soul under conviction. Nothing of the sort." He
waited with considerateness for this to have its effect upon her;
he could not go on until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the
inundation of it. But she was not even staggered by it. She only
looked down at her folded hands with an added seriousness and a
touch of sorrow.
"Aren't you?" she said. "But at least you feel that you ought to
be. I thought it had been accomplished. But I will go on
praying."
"Shall you be very angry if I tell you that I'd rather you didn't?
I want to come into your life differently--sincerely."
She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution
was swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.
"I won't tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-
night except this--I find that you are influencing all my thoughts
and all my days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way.
You hear as much as that often, and from many people, don't you?
So there is nothing in it that need startle you or make you
uncomfortable." He paused, and she nodded in a visible effort to
follow him.
"So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you
just for my own pleasure--there must be some way of helping you,
and being your friend--"
"As Mr. Harris is," she interrupted. "I do influence Mr. Harris
for good, I know. He says so."
"Influence me," he begged, "in any way you like."
"I will pray for you," she said. "I promise that."
"And you will let me see you sometimes?" he asked, conceding the
point.
"If I thought it would do you any good"--she looked at him
doubtfully, clasping and unclasping her hands; "I will see; I will
ask for guidance. Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways. If
you have no objection, I will give you this little book, Almost
Persuaded. I am sure you are almost persuaded. Above all, I hope
you will go on coming to the meetings."
And in the course of the next two or three moments Lindsay found
himself, somewhat to his astonishment, again in the night of the
staircase, dismissed exactly as Mr. Harris had been, by the agency
of a printed volume. Only in his case a figure of much angelic
beauty stood at the top, holding a patent kerosene lamp high, to
illumine his way. He refrained from looking back lest she should
see something too human in his face, and vanish, leaving him in
darkness which would be indeed impenetrable.
CHAPTER VII
There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a "ticca-gharry"--the shabby
oblong box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a
hackney carriage--was running away. Coolie mothers dragged naked
children up on the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts
dug their lean beasts in the side, and turned out of the way almost
at a trot; only the tram-car held on its course in conscious
invincibility. A pariah tore along beside the vehicle barking;
crows flew up from the rubbish heaps in the road by half-dozens,
protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead necklaces just escaped
being knocked down. Little groups of native clerks and money-
lenders stood looking after, laughing and speculating; a native
policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse, and
they said to him, "Peace, brother." To each other they said,
"Behold, the driver is a 'mut-wallah'" (or drunken person); and
presently, as the thing whirled farther up the emptied perspective,
"Lo! the syce has fallen." The driver was certainly very drunk;
his whip circled perpetually above his head; the syce clinging
behind was stiff with terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags.
Inside, Hilda Howe, with a hand in the strap at each side and her
feet against the opposite seat, swayed violently and waited for
what might happen, breathing short. Whenever the gharry thrashed
over the tram-lines, she closed her eyes. There was a point near
Cornwallis Street where she saw the off front wheel make
sickeningly queer revolutions; and another, electrically close,
when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared in a gate to
the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely right
angles to her own derelict equipage. That was the juncture of the
Reverend Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with
Amiruddin Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and
Mohammedan fasting. It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did
in that interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to
Amiruddin. The ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any
resolute hand could have impelled them away from the carriage-pole
with which the roans threatened to impale their wretched sides.
The front wheel, however, made him heroic, going off at a tangent
into a cloth merchant's shop, and precipitating a crash while he
still clung to the reins. The door flew open on the under side,
and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust of the road; while the
driver, discovering that his seat was no longer horizontal, entered
suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with tears that the cloth-
merchant should restore his wheel--was he not a poor man? Hilda,
struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by various
lean hands of the bazar, and observed herself the central figure in
yet another situation. When she was in a condition to see, she saw
Arnold soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the vague possibility
of police complication having slipped away. Stephen had believed
the gharry empty. The sight of her, in her disordered draperies,
was a revelation and a reproach.
"Is it possible!" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not
hurt?"
"Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this." She held
up her right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand
had struck the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin
fingers to examine it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch.
He looked at it with anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that
Hilda silently smiled. She who had been battered, as she said,
twice round the world, found it disproportionate.
"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his
glance.
"Indeed, I fear not." The priest made a solicitous bandage with
his handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. "It is
quite unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the
nearest chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may
give you a vast amount of trouble--but I am walking."
"I will walk too," Hilda said readily. "I should prefer it,
truly." With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her
pocket, where a few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and
groped for another. "I really can't afford any more," she said.
"He can get his wheel mended with that, can't he?"
"It is three times his fare," Arnold said austerely, "and he
deserved nothing--but a fine, perhaps." The man was suppliant
before them, cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda
lifted her head and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble,
where the sun stood golden upon the roadside and two naked children
played with a torn pink kite. Something seemed to gather into her
eyes as she looked, and when she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to
speak, as it had spoken before.
"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."
It was the merest echo, and she had done it on purpose, but he
could not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving
hands, and turned and walked away with him, he was held in a
frightened silence. There was nothing perhaps that he wanted to
talk of more than of his experience at the theatre; he longed to
have it simplified and explained; yet in that space of her two
words the impossibility of mentioning it had sprung at him and
overcome him. He hoped, with instant fervour, that she would
refrain from any allusion to The Offence of Galilee. And for the
time being she did refrain. She said, instead, that her hand was
smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would
use a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look, said very
possibly not, but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-
off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to
disagreeable necessities; covered a preposterous impulse to cry
with another smile.
A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his
arms full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery.
"Oh, the good man!" Hilda exclaimed. "My parcels!" and looked on
equably, while Arnold took them by their puckered ends. "I have
been buying gold lace and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume,"
she explained. The bags dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers;
he looked very much aware of them. "Let me carry at least one,"
she begged. "I can perfectly with my parasol hand;" but he refused
her even one. "If I may be permitted to take the responsibility,"
he said happily, and she rejoined, "Oh, I would trust you with
things more fragile." At which, such is the discipline of these
Orders, he looked steadily in front of him, and seemed deaf with
modesty.
"But are you sure," said Hilda, suddenly considerate, "that it
looks well?"
"Is the gold lace then so very meretricious?"
"It goes doubtfully with your cloth," she laughed, and instantly
looked stricken with the conviction that she might better have said
something else. But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see
no gibe in it, only a pleasant commonplace.
"It might look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a
censorious public." Then, as if to palliate the word, he added,
"They will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry
myself, when it is plain that I might ride--and they see me doing
that every day."
All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt
did impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since
humour goes so far to destroy the picturesque. Hilda without the
paper bags would have been vastly enough for contrast. She walked--
one is inclined to dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being
unintelligible--in a wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk,
rather frayed at the seams; a trifle spent in vulnerable places,
surmounted by an extravagant collar and a Paris hat. The dress was
of artistic intention inexpensively carried out, the hat had an
accomplished chic; it had fallen to her in the wreck and ruin of a
too ambitious draper of Coolgardie. As a matter of fact it was the
only one she had. The wide sleeves ended a little below the elbow,
and she carried in compensation a pair of long suede gloves, a
compromise which only occasionally discovered itself buttonless,
and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in that
line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced
beside her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into
something less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he
looked, in a quaint uniform, with his long lip drawn down and
pursed a little in this accomplishment of duty, and his eyes
steadily in front of him. Hilda's lambent observation was
everywhere, but most of all on him; a fleck of the dust from the
road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a perpetual happy
curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets of the
thronging people, where yards of new-dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called
the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, golden-tongued Kali,
half visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers
in brass dishes and glass armlets and silver-gilt stands for the
comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds
and accepted them with indifference. So they passed, worthy of a
glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.
They talked of the accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?"
Hilda said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the
extent to which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate,
under sacerdotal robes worn every day.
"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly
to be persuaded."
"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she
adventured like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her.
She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life
saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion--I shouldn't
know how to cope with it."
"I will claim to have saved your other hand," he smiled. "You will
be quite grateful enough for that."
She noted that he did not hasten, behind blushes, into the shelter
of a general disavowal. The cassock seemed to cover an obligation
to acknowledge things.
"I see," she said, veering round. "You are quite right to
circumscribe me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that
will out. It is only the absence of it, too plainly expressed,
that is unpleasant. But you won't find that in me either." She
gave him a smile as she lowered her parasol to turn into the shop
of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell European drugs, that promised
infinite possibilities of friendship; and, he, following, took
pleased and careful possession of it.
An hour later, as they approached Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane,
Miss Howe looked pale, which is not surprising since they had
walked and talked all the way. Their talk was a little strenuous
too; it was as if they had fallen upon an opportunity, and,
mutually, consciously made the most of it.
"You must have some tea immediately," Arnold said, before the
battered urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.
"A little whisky and soda, I think. And you will come up, please,
and have some too. You must."
"Thanks," he said, looking at his watch. "If I do--"
"You'll have the soda without the whisky! All right!" she laughed,
and led the way.
"This is vicious indulgence," Arnold said of his beverage, sitting
under the inverted Japanese umbrellas. "I haven't been pitched out
of a ticca-gharry."
It is doubtful whether the indulgence was altogether in the soda,
which is, after all, ascetic in its quality, and only suitably
effervescent, like ecclesiastical humour. It may very probably be
that there was no indulgence; indeed, one is convinced that the
word, like so many words, says too much. The springs of Arnold's
chair were bursting through the bottom, and there were stains on
its faded chintz-arms, but it was comfortable, and he leaned back
in it, looking up at the paper umbrellas. You know the room; I
took you into it with Duff Lindsay, who did not come there from
rigidities and rituals, and who had a qualified pleasure in it.
But there were lines in the folds of the flowered window-curtains
dragging half a yard upon the floor, which seemed to disband
Arnold's spirit, and a twinkle in the blue bead of a bamboo screen
where the light came through that released it altogether. The
shabby violent-coloured place encompassed him like an easy garment,
and the lady with her feet tucked up on a sofa and a cushion under
her tumbled head, was an unembarrassing invitation to the kind of
happy things he had not said for years. They sat in the coolness
of the room for half an hour, and then, after a little pause, Hilda
said suddenly--
"I am glad you saw me in The Offence of Galilee on Saturday night.
We shall not play it again."
"It has been withdrawn?"
"Yes. The rights, you know, really belong to Mr. Bradley; and he
can't endure his part."
"Is there no one else to--"
"He objects to anyone else. We generally play together." This was
inadvertent, but Stephen had no reason to imagine that she
contracted her eyebrows in any special irritation. "It is an
atrocious piece," she added.
"Is it?" he said absently, and then, "Yes, it is an atrocious
piece. But I am glad, too, that I saw you."
He looked away from her, reddening deeply, and stood up. He bade
her a measured and precise farewell. It seemed as if he hurried.
She only half rose to give him her unwounded hand, and when he was
gone she sank back again thoughtfully.
CHAPTER VIII
"I have outstayed all the rest," Lindsay said, with his hat and
stick in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, "because
I want particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious
little time," he added, glancing at his watch.
She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour
for men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered
more when he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the
situation, while Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and
went. There was a mist in her brain as she talked to the Major-
Generals and Deputy-Secretaries--it did not in the least obscure
what she found to say--and in the midst of it the formless idea
that he must wish to attach a special importance to his visit.
This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke of out-
sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and open
it. "You might stay to lunch," she said, addressing a pair of
crows in altercation on the verandah.
"There is nearly half an hour before lunch," he said. "Can I
convince you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute
fool?"
Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a
prevision of the need of support. "I hardly think," she said,
drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest
within, "that it would take so long." She looked with careful
criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.
"I've had a supreme experience," he said, "very strange and very
lovely. I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it," he added
quickly, watching her face; "so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it
roughly."
She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. "Why
should you suppose I would touch it roughly?" There was that in
her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at
all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose
it, did not hear it. He knew her so well.
"A great many people will," he said. "I can't bear the thought of
their fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you."
She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked
straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation,
even in the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived
a smile.
"I believe you know already," Lindsay cried.
"I have heard something. Don't be alarmed--not from people, from
Miss Howe."
"Wonderful woman! I haven't told her."
"Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case,"
Alicia went on, with immense courage, "I didn't believe them."
"Why?" he asked enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight--he
would even submit it to analysis.
She hesitated--her business was in great waters, the next instant
might engulf her. "It's so curiously unlike you," she faltered.
"If she had been a duchess--a very exquisite person, or somebody
very clever--remember I haven't seen her."
"You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons."
Lindsay visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated
hardness.
Alicia raised her eyebrows.
"What do you expect one to imagine?" she asked, with quietness.
"A miracle," he said sombrely.
"Ah, that's difficult!"
There was silence for a moment between them, then she added
perversely--
"And, you know, faith is not what it was."
Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was
accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming
enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were
ever reflected. Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own
consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon
the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.
"Don't make a mistake," she said. "Don't." She thrust her hand
for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew
it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. "That's what
everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand." He
tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the
strokes. She looked down and counted them too.
"Then you won't help me to marry her?" he said, definitely, at
last.
"What could I do?" She twisted her sapphire ring. "Ask somebody
else."
"Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to
her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell
her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me
in all the lurid colours of the lost."
The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles,
and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly,
suggesting Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her
elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect,
but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her
negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to
expect.
"No," she said. "It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I
should become involved--I might do harm." She had surmounted her
emotion; she was able to look at the matter with surprising
clearness and decision. "I should do harm," she repeated.
"You don't count with her effect on you."
"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man."
"But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm
really not a fool--not even very impressionable?"
"Oh no!" she said impatiently. "No--of course not."
"Pray why?"
"There are other things to reckon with." She looked coldly beyond
him out of the window. "A man's intelligence when he is in love--
how far can one count on it?"
There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured,
"Oh, I don't agree," with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her
logic with a simple appeal. "Then after all," he said, "you're not
my friend."
It goaded her into something like an impertinence. "After you have
married her," she said, "you'll see."
"You will be hers then," he declared.
"I will be yours." Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested
on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
"And I thought you broad in these views," Lindsay said, glancing at
her curiously. Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a
heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon
Major Livingstone, looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul
of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against
Lindsay's going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a
bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it. Not that her added protest
would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbation away with
him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he
shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to
reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all
effulgence on the other side of the door.
CHAPTER IX
That same Sunday, Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about
Hilda Howe, "We have not stood still--we know each other well now,"
and when he commented with some reserve upon this to follow it up.
"But these things have so little to do with mere length of time or
number of opportunities," she declared. "One springs at some
people."
A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance;
and they talked about something else. But perhaps this is enough
to explain a note which went by messenger from the Livingstones'
pillared palace in Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal Behari's
Lane, on Monday morning. It was a short note, making a definite
demand with an absence of colour and softness and emotion which was
almost elaborate. Hilda, at breakfast, tore off the blank half
sheet, and wrote in pencil--
"I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon.
No rehearsal--they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the
theatre, so you will find me, anyway. And I'll be delighted to see
you."
She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the
scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-
office stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went
back to an extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the
reflection--"Can she possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?"
Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in
order apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing.
Hilda was agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about
anything, tipped on the edge of her bed--Alicia had surmounted that
degree of intimacy at a bound by the declaration that she could no
longer endure the blue umbrellas--and clasping one knee, with an
uncertain tenure of a chipped bronze slipper deprived of its heel.
Wonderful silk draperies fell about her, with ink-spots on the
sleeves; her hair was magnificent.
"It's so curious to me," she was saying of the novel, "that anyone
should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book.
It's like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass."
"I fancy that the most desirable way," said Alicia, glancing at the
door.
"Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow
out of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the
value of contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You,
poor dear, were born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But
you couldn't help it."
"Everybody doesn't grow out of it." The concentration in Alicia's
eyes returned again with vacillating wings.
"She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet." The slipper
dropped at this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She
kept her foot in her hands, and regarded it pensively.
"Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter,"
she continued; "at all events, ready-made."
"You have an audacity--" Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.
"Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?"
"I know it."
"From him?"
"From him."
"Oh!"--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--"Really?
Well, we can't let that happen."
"Why not?"
"You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don't you see
anything?"
Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips.
"I see only one thing that matters--he wants it," she said.
"And won't be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an
intolerably self-sacrificing sex." Hilda felt about for pillows,
and stretched her length along the bed. "They've taught us well,
the men; it's a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female
line. You may be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated
between the lady and the tiger. A civilised one would have
introduced the lady and given her a dot, and retired to the nearest
convent. Bah! It's a deformity, like the dachshund's legs."
Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not
quite worth while, to follow.
"The happiness of his whole life is involved," she said simply.
"Oh dear yes--the old story! And what about the happiness of
yours? Do you imagine it's laudable, admirable, this attitude? Do
you see yourself in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred
satisfaction of self-praise?"
Contempt accumulated in Miss Howe's voice, and sat in her eyes. To
mark her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.
"It is idiotic--it's disgusting," she said.
Alicia caught a flash from her. "My attitude!" she cried. "What
in the world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no
attitude. I care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he
shall have what he wants--so far as I can help him to it. You have
never cared for anybody--what do you know about it?"
Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling. "I assure you
I'm not an angel," she cried. "Haven't I cared! Several times."
"Not really--not lastingly."
"I don't know about really; certainly not lastingly. I've never
thought the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities.
They entail the prettiest experiences."
"Of course, in your profession--"
"Don't be nasty, sweet lady. My affections have never taken the
opportunities of our profession. They haven't even carried me into
matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to
the brink! We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay."
"You assume too much--a great deal too much. She must be
beautiful--and good."
"Give me a figure. She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty
that lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious
enthusiasm. Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage
would touch and bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of
stale vegetation. You want him to clasp that to his bosom for the
rest of his life?"
"I won't believe you. You're coarse and you're cruel."
Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this. Hilda, still
regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient
shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
"I'm sorry, dear," she said. "I forgot. You are usually so
intelligent, one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to
you. Go into the bathroom and get my salts--they're on the
washhand-stand--will you? I'm quite faint with all I'm about to
undergo."
Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring
the third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside
and laid her hand on Hilda's head.
"Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry," she said. It
was a cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a
necessity.
"I am not very bad," Hilda improvised. "Hardly more than a
headache."
"She makes light of everything," Miss Filbert said, smiling toward
Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression. Discovering
the blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from
her hands.
"And what," said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss
Livingstone, "might your name be?"
There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a
conventionality of the other world, and before its assurance Alicia
stood helpless.
"Her name is Livingstone," called Hilda from the bed, "and she is
as good as she is beautiful. You needn't be troubled about HER
soul--she takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral."
"Hallelujah!" said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious
congratulation.
"Much better," said Hilda cheerfully, "to take it at the Cathedral,
you know, than nowhere."
Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of
the bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda's hair.
"You don't seem to have much fever," she said. "There was a poor
fellow in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of
one hundred and seven. I could hardly bear to touch him."
"What was the matter?" asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses
about the third person in the room.
"Oh, I don't know exactly. Some complication, I suppose, of
Satan's tribute--"
"Divinest Laura!" Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back.
"Do take a chair. It will be even more soothing to see you
comfortable."
Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed. "Miss Howe
is more thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones," she
said, with vast kindness. "I have often told her so. I have had a
long day."
"It may improve me in that character," Hilda said, "to suggest that
if you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is
a good thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your
bath. Do you use those things?"
Laura shook her head. "Faith is better than disinfectants. I
never get any harm. My Master protects me."
"My goodness!" Hilda said. And in the silence that occurred,
Captain Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid
for was a decayed tooth. Presently Alicia made a great effort.
She laid hands on Hilda's previous reference as a tangibility that
remained with her.
"Do you ever go to the Cathedral?" she said.
The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert's features,
as when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant
from a flower. Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries
of dogma it may have been some other obscurity, but that was the
effect.
"No. I never go there. We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a
tabernacle to ourselves."
"Isn't it exquisite--her way of speaking!" cried Hilda from the
bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful
smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she
went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus.
"Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary
enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied
fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army,
He is Lord of our hosts."
"A kind of chant," murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became
aware that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of
magnetism. Then that impression was carried away as it were on a
puff of air, and it is hardly likely that she thought of it again.
"I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?" Laura said. The
sanctity of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested
upon it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue
of some other thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant
feminine, and narrowed her eyes.
"Dear me, yes," she said for Alicia. "His Excellency the Viceroy
and all his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their
ladies, Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully
choral, Under-Secretaries so thick they're kept in the vestibule
till the bells stop. 'And make Thy chosen people joyful'!" she
intoned. "Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia
Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the main
aisle, advantageously near the pulpit."
"You know already what a humbug she is," Alicia said, but Captain
Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.
"Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me," she said, rising to
go through the little accustomed function of her departure. "I'll
be going now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to
take her place at the Believers' Meeting." She took Hilda's hand
in hers and held it for an instant. "Good-bye, and God bless you--
in the way you most need," she said, and turned to Alicia, "Good-
bye. I am glad to know that we will be one in the glad hereafter
though our paths may diverge"--her eye rested with acknowledgment
upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves--"in this world. To look at you
I should have thought you were of the bowed down ones, not yet
fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little more oxygen in
the blood of your religion. Remember the word of the Lord--
'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!' Goodbye."
She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door.
It sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes
clung about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way.
Miss Howe looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as
uncontrollable as it was unreasonable. "A saved soul, perhaps.
A woman--oh, assuredly," she said in the depths of her hair.
The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made
something like a dash at an object about to elude her. "Oh," she
exclaimed, "wait a minute. Will you come and see me? I think--I
think you might do me good. I live at Number Ten, Middleton
Street. Will you come?"
Laura came back into the room. There was a little stiffness in her
air, as if she repressed something.
"I have no objection," she said.
"To-morrow afternoon--at five? Or--my brother is dining at the
club--would you rather come to dinner?"
"Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me." She spoke carefully,
after an instant's hesitation.
"Then do come and dine--at eight," Alicia said; and it was agreed.
She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and
only turned when Hilda spoke.
"You are going to have him to meet her," she said. "May I come
too?"
"Certainly not." Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door
handle.
"Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!" Hilda cried.
"I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home," said
Alicia, and went out swiftly.
"My goodness!" Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her
slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend
Stephen Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street. "Thanks
immensely," it ran, "for your delightful offer to introduce me to
Father Jordan and persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders
he keeps in his tower at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an
hour of milk and honey, and belonging to that charming Order, he
won't mind my coming on a Sunday evening--the first clear one."
Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her
pen. Then she added: "If you have any influence with Duff
Lindsay, it may be news to you that you can exert it with advantage
to keep him from marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the
Salvation Army named Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you
should expostulate with her, but I don't advise that."
CHAPTER X
The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful
air when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in
any case it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand
walked the floor, carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with
blotches, which had inherited from its maternal parent a
conspicuous lack of buttons. Mrs. Sand's room was also ornamented
with texts, but they had apparently been selected at random, and
they certainly hung that way. The piety of the place seemed at the
control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with
his father's regimental cap. On the other side of the curtain
Captain Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.
"What kind of meetin' did you have?" asked Mrs. Sand. "There--
there now; he shall have his bottle, so he shall!"
"A beautiful meeting. Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro,
you know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss
Rozario from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's. We had such a happy time."
"What sort of collection?"
Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper
coins.
"Only seven annas three pice! And you call that a good meeting!
I don't believe you exhorted them to give!"
"Oh, I think I did!" Laura returned mechanically.
"Seven annas and three pice! And you know what the Commissioner
wrote out about our last quarter's earnings! What did you say?"
"I said--I said the collection would now be taken up," Laura
faltered.
"Oh dear! oh dear! Leopold, stop clawing me! Couldn't you think
of anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that? Fever or no
fever, it does not do for me to stay away from the regular
meetin's. One thing is plain--HE wasn't there!"
"Who?"
"Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your
reasons." Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful.
"I mean the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind,
under the window. A society man, I should say, to look at him,
though the officers of this Army are no respecters of persons, and
I don't suppose the Lord takes any notice of his clothes."
"His name is Mr. Lindsay. No, he wasn't there."
The girl's tone was distant and cold. The rebuke about the
collection had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.
"I hope you haven't been discouraging him?"
Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.
"I have entreated him to come to the meetings. But he never
attends a Believers' Rally. Why should he?"
"What's his state of mind? He came to see you, didn't he, the
other night?"
"Yes, he did. I don't think he's altogether careless."
"Ain't he seeking?"
"He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself. The Lord has
different ways of working. What else should bring him, night after
night?"
Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with lifted
eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly-disciplined
smile behind her baby's head. When she looked back again Laura had
flushed all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which
she felt was absurd.
"My!" she said,--scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have
been expected of her,--"you do look nice when you've got a little
colour. But if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the
meetin's, you must be blind, that's all."
Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a
wand.
"Then I hope I may go on bringing him," she said. "He couldn't
come to a better place."
"Well, you'll have to be careful," said Mrs. Sand, as if with
severe intent. "But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say
that. You may be an influence for good. It may be His will that
you should be pleasant to the young man. But don't make free with
him. Don't, on any account, have him put his arm round your
waist."
"Nobody has done that to me," Laura replied austerely, "since I
left Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will. Not that
Mr. Lindsay" (she blushed again) "would ever want to. The class he
belongs to look down on it."
"The class he belongs to do worse things. The Army doesn't look
down on it. It's only nature, and the Army believes in working
with nature. If it was Mr. Harris I wouldn't say a word--he
marches under the Lord's banner."
Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even
slightly complacent.
"Well," she said, "I told Mr. Harris last evening that the
Lieutenant and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and
he seemed to think he'd been keeping company with me. I had to
tell him I hadn't any such idea."
"Did he seem much disappointed?"
"He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging
to the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have
to learn to walk alone."
Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lips.
"I don't know but what you did right," she said. "By the grace of
God you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you.
But I have a kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay 'll be harder to
convince."
"I daresay."
"It would be splendid, though, to garner him in. He might be
willing to march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor
Captain Corby, of the Queen's army, did in Rangoon."
"He might be proud to."
"We must all try and bring sin home to him," Mrs. Sand remarked
with rising energy; "and don't you go saying anything to him
hastily. If he's gone on you--"
"Oh Ensign! let us hope he is thinking of higher things! Let us
both pray for him. Let Captain Sand pray for him too, and I'll ask
the Lieutenant. Now that she's got Miss Rozario safe into the
kingdom, I don't think she has any special object."
"Oh yes, we'll pray for him," Ensign Sand returned, as if that
might have gone without saying, "but you--"
"And give me that precious baby. You must be completely worn out.
I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should."
"It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin'
child out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her
husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned
the infant without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her
own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more
nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have
believed she remembered.
The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of
some selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the
vagueness of his perception of the privileges he claimed; and his
ignorance of all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him
out. Qualms of conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young
lady friends away, and these also doubtless operated to detain Duff
Lindsay. One does not attend a Believers' Rally unless one's
personal faith extends beyond the lady in command of it, and one
specially refrains if one's spiritual condition is a delicate and
debatable matter with her. In Wellesley Square, later in the
evening, the conditions were different. It would not be easy to
imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment.
The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted
shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps
shone, and tram-drivers whistled bullock-carts off the lines, and
street pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the
group of exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made
glorious the buttons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to
the people in their own language; the "open air" was designed for
the people. "Kiko! Kiko!" (Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry,
where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd. He looked
down at a coolie-woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her
haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil of half a century, and
back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not delay until to-morrow!"
Laura besought them. "Kul ka dari mut karo!" A sensation of
disgust assailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse of
atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back and
dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap. But he grew more
miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden
bench at a distance where he could not hear her voice. Only the
hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn. In the chorus the
words were distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain
Sand--
"Us ki ho tarif,
Us ki ho tarif!"
The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous
jangle, a discordance of a specially intolerable sort.
"Glory to His name!
Glory to His name!"
Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-
woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the
questionable reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee,
she ought to be.
His "Good-evening!" when the meeting was over, was a cheerful,
general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was
plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful.
Lieutenant Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had
thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the
manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed
everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the
way.
"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
appeal, as they moved off.
"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called out,
and they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer the East Indian
paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not
afford a coffin, and slipped away.
"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said.
Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and
seemed perturbed.
"What she said was quite true," he ventured.
"But--anybody would think--"
"What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road?
It's quieter. What would anybody think?"
"Oh, silly things." Laura threw up her head with a half laugh.
"Things I needn't mention."
Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then "Between us?" he asked,
and she nodded.
Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He
found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so
very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke
as if to a child. His passion was never more clearly a single
object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential
impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he
told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.
"I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay."
Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed
to be a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one
behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no
serious entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one
thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something
like invitation. Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing
point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.
"Dear," he said, "you can't know--there is no way of telling you--
what I mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the
woman he loves; but it seems to me that my life had never known the
sun until I saw you. I can't explain to you how poor it was, and I
won't try; but I fancy God sends every one of us, if we know it,
some one blessed chance, and He did more for me--He lifted the veil
of my stupidity and let me see it, passing by in its halo, trailing
clouds of glory. I don't want to make you understand, though--I
want to make you promise. I want to be absolutely sure from to-
night that you'll marry me. Say that you'll marry me--say it
before we get to the crossing. Say it, Laura." She listened to
his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then made as
if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and
she heard him through, walking beside him formally on her bare
feet, and looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in
Putney.
"I don't object to your calling me by my given name," she said when
he had done, "but it can't go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay,
and you ought not to bring God into it--indeed you ought not. You
are no son or servant of His--you are among those whose very light
is darkness, and how great is your darkness!"
"Don't," he said shortly. "Never mind about that--now. You
needn't be afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know,
outside your particular Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants
you to marry him, that's how it is. Will you?"
"I don't wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I'm very much obliged,
but I couldn't dream of it."
"Don't dream of it; consider it, accept it. Why, dear creature,
you are mine already--don't you feel that?"
Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of
his eyes in her. Her tired body even clung to him. "Are you quite
sure you haven't begun to think of loving me?" he demanded.
"It isn't a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it's a question of the
Army. You don't seem to think the Army counts for anything."
One is convinced that it wasn't a question of love, the least in
the world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and
the flame in him leaped up.
"Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question."
"Is that a quotation?" she asked. She spoke coldly, and this time
she succeeded in withdrawing her hand. "I daresay you think the
Army very common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great
and holy crusade, and I march with it. You would not ask me to
give up my life-work?"
"Only to take it into another sphere," Duff said unreflectingly.
He was checked, but not discouraged; impatient, but in no wise cast
down. She had not flown, she walked beside him placidly. She had
no intention of flight. He tried to resign himself to the task of
beating down her trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse
to leap over them.
"Another sphere,"--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation.
"I suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same."
"Not quite the same. You would have to drive to see your sinners
in a carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them
in--what do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or
pearls. I think I would rather see you in pearls." He was aware
of the inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped
to laugh inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn
of her head.
"We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most
of them would be on Government House list, just as most of your
present ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the
police magistrates. But you would find just as much to do for
them."
"I should not even know how to act in such company."
"You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some
people I know; delightful people, who will understand. A year!
You will learn in three months--what odds and ends there are to
know. I couldn't spare you for a year."
Lindsay stopped. He had to. Captain Filbert was murmuring the
cadences of a hymn. She went through two stanzas, and covered her
eyes for a moment with her hand. When she spoke it was in a quiet,
level, almost mechanical way. "Yes," she said. "The Cross and the
Crown, the Crown and the Cross. Father in heaven, I do not forget
Thy will and Thy purpose, that I should bring the word of Thy love
to the poor and the lowly, the outcast and those despised. And
what I say to this man, who offers me the gifts and the gladness of
a world that had none for Thee, is the answer Thou hast put in my
heart--that the work is Thine and that I am Thine, and he has no
part or lot in me, nor can ever have. Here is Crooked Lane. Good-
night, Mr. Lindsay." She had slipped into the devious darkness of
the place before he could find any reply, before he quite realised,
indeed, that they had reached her lodging. He could only utter a
vague "Goodnight," after her, formulating more definite statements
to himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.
CHAPTER XI
Miss Howe was walking in the business quarter of Calcutta. It was
the business quarter, yet the air was gay with the dimpling of
piano notes, and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on
yellow stuccoed flats above the shops and the offices. There the
pleasant north wind blew banners of muslin curtains out of wide
windows, and little gardens of palms in pots showed behind the
balustrades of the flat roofs whenever a storey ran short.
Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary well-being, a sense
of lifted burden. The stucco streets were too slovenly to be
purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them, the pariahs
blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in the
cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices
or circled against the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be
abroad, in the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with
brown humility half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility
seemed well affected toward the world, alert and content. The air
was full of the comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced
luxuries, and the incense of wayside trees; it was as if the sun
laid a bland compelling hand upon the city, bidding strange flowers
bloom and strange fruits increase. Brokers' gharries rattled past,
each holding a pale young man preoccupied with a notebook; where
the bullock-carts gathered themselves together and blocked the road
the pale young men put excited heads out of the gharry windows and
used remarkable imprecations. One of them, as Hilda turned into
the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out to take off his
hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the pleasant
reflection of his infinite interest in life. "Upon my word," she
said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of
a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, "he's
so lighthearted, so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous
effect even of a failure like the one he contemplates."
She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman,
and followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who
hardly lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to
look at her--so many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle
gave prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and they were so
much alike. At all events they carried a passport to indifference
in the fact that they all wanted something, and it was clear to the
meanest intelligence that they appeared to be more magnificent than
they were, visions in dazzling complexions and long kid gloves,
rattling up in third-class ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder
clinging to their skirts. It was less interesting still when they
belonged to the other class, the shabby ladies, nearly always in
black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court, or sons before the
police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible, "kept out of
the paper." Successful or not these always wept on their way out,
and nothing could be more depressing. The only gleam of
entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib
occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of
a boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in
leading Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local
columns of the Chronicle--a lady who had never known what a bailiff
looked like in the lifetime of her first husband, or her second
either. Then at the sound of a pudgy blow upon a table, or high
abusive accents in the rapid elaborate cadences of the domiciled
East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would glance at Gobind Babu with a
careful smile, for the manager-sahib who dispensed so much galli*
was now receiving the same, and defenceless.
* Abuse.
The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in. He did not rise--
he was one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee
exports in such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and
she had come on business. He gave her a nod, however, and an
affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on
the other side of the table. He had once made three hundred rupees
in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and
speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table with his blue pencil
he asked Miss Howe how the world was using HER.
"Let me see," said Hilda, a trifle absent-mindedly, "were you here
last cold weather--I rather imagine you were, weren't you?"
"I was; I had the pleasure of--"
"To be sure. You got the place in December, when that poor fellow
Baker died. Baker was a country-bred I know, but he always kept
his contracts, while you got your po-lish in Glesca, and your name
is Macphairson--isn't it?"
"I was never in Glasgow in my life, and my name is Macandrew," said
the manager, putting with some aggressiveness a paper-weight on a
pile of bills.
"Never mind," said Hilda, again wrapped in thought, "don't
apologise--it's near enough. Well, Mr. Macandrew,"--her tone came
to a point,--"what is the Stanhope Company's advertisement worth a
month to the Chronicle?"
"A hundred rupees maybe--there or thereabouts;" and Mr. Macandrew,
with a vast show of indifference, picked up a letter and began to
tear at the end of it.
"One hundred and fifty-five I think, to be precise. That
communication will wait, won't it? What is it--Kally Nath Mitter's
paper and stores bill? You won't be able to pay it any quicker if
we withdraw our advertisement."
"Why should ye withdraw it?"
"It was given to you on the understanding that notices should
appear of every Wednesday and Saturday's performance. For two
Wednesdays there has been no notice, and last Saturday night you
sent a fool."
"So Muster Stanhope thinks o' withdrawin' his advertisement?"
"He is very much of that mind."
The manager put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned
back in his chair, and demonstrated the principle that had given
him a gold watch chain--"never be bluffed."
"Ye can withdraw it," he said, with a warily experimental eye upon
her.
"How reasonable of you not to make a fuss! We'll have the order to
discontinue in writing, please. If you'll give me a pen and paper--
thanks--and I'll keep a copy."
"Stanhope has wanted to transfer it to the Market Gazette for some
time," she went on as she wrote.
"That's not a newspaper. You'll get no notices there."
"Cheaper on that account, probably."
"They charge like the very deevil. D'ye know the rates of them?"
"I can't say I do."
"There's a man on our staff that doesn't like your show. We'll be
able to send him every night now."
"When we withdraw our advertisement?"
"Just then."
"All right," said Hilda. "It will be interesting to point out in
the Indian Empire the remarkable growth of independent criticism in
the Chronicle since Mr. Stanhope no longer uses the space at his
disposal. I hope your man will be very nasty indeed. You might as
well hand over the permanent passes--the gentleman will expect, I
suppose, to pay."
"They'll be in the yeditorial department," said Mr. Macandrew, but
he did not summon a messenger to go for them. Instead he raised
his eyebrows in a manner that expressed the necessity of making the
best of it, and humorously scratched his head.
"We have four hundred pounds of new type coming out in the Almora--
she's due on Thursday," he said. "Entirely for the advertisements.
We'll have a fine display next week. It's grand type--none of your
Calcutta-made stuff."
"Pays to bring it out, does it?" asked Hilda inattentively, copying
her letter.
"Pays the advertisers." There were ingratiating qualities in the
managerial smile. Hilda inspected them coldly.
"There's your notice of withdrawal," she said. "Good-morning."
"Think of that new type, and how lovely Jimmy Finnigan's ad will
look in it."
"That's all right. Good-morning." Miss Howe approached the door,
the blue glance of Macandrew pursuant.
"No notices for two Wednesdays, eh? We'll have to see about that.
I was thinkin' of transferrin' your space to the third page; it's a
more advantageous position--and no extra charge--but ye'll not
mention it to Jimmy."
Miss Howe lifted an arrogant chin. "Do I understand you'll do
that, and guarantee regular notices, if we leave the advertisement
with you?"
Mr. Macandrew looked at her expressively, and tore, with a gesture
of moderated recklessness, the notice of withdrawal in two.
"Rest easy," he said, "I'll see about it. I'd go the len'th of
attendin' myself to-night, if ye could spare two three extra
places."
"Moderate Macandrew!"
"Moderate enough. I've got some frien's stayin' in the same place
with me from Behar--indigo people. I was thinkin' I'd give them a
treat, if three places c'd be spared next to the Chronicle seats."
"We do Lady Whippleton to-night and the booking's been heavy. Five
is too many, Mr. Macandrew, even if you promised not to write the
notice yourself."
"I might pay for one;" Macandrew drew red cartwheels on his
blotting-pad.
"Those seats are sure to be gone. I'll send you a box. Stanhope's
as bad as he can be with dysentery--you might make a local out of
that. Be sure to mention he can't see anybody--it's absurd the way
Calcutta people want to be paid."
"A box'll be Grand," said Mr. Macandrew. "I'll see ye get plenty
of ancores. Can ye manage the door? Good-day, then."
Hilda stepped out on the landing. The heavy, regular thud of the
presses came up from below. They were printing the edition that
took the world's news to planters' bungalows in the jungle of Assam
and the lonely policeman on the edge of Manipore. The smell of the
newspaper of to-day and of yesterday, and of a year ago, stood in
the air; through an open door she saw the dusty, uneven edges of
files of them, piled on the floor. Three or four messengers
squatted beside the wall, with slumbrous heads between their knees.
Occasionally a shout came from the room inside, and one of them,
crying "Hazur!" with instant alacrity, stretched himself mightily,
loafed upon his feet and went in, emerging a moment later carrying
written sheets, with which he disappeared into the regions below.
The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it, through an
open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and green
leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his
grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation. A Government
peon in scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace,
bearing a packet with an official seal. The place, with its ink-
smeared walls and high ceilings, spoke between dusty yawns of the
languor and the leisure which might attend the manipulation of the
business of life, and Hilda paused for an instant to perceive what
it said. Then she walked behind her card into the next room, where
a young gentleman, reading proofs in his shirt sleeves, flung
himself upon his coat and struggled into it at her approach. He
seemed to have the blackest hair and the softest eyes and the
neatest moustache available, all set in a complexion frankly olive,
amiable English cut, in amiable Oriental colour, and the whole
illumined, when once the coat was on and the collar perfectly
turned down, by the liveliest, most engaging smile. Standing with
his head slightly on one side and one hand resting on the table,
while the other saw that nothing was disarranged between collar and
top waistcoat button, he was an interjection point of invitation
and attention.
"The Editor of the Chronicle?" Hilda asked with diffident dignity,
and very well informed to the contrary.
"NOT the editor--I am sorry to say." The confession was
delightfully vivid--in the plenitude of his candour it was plain
that he didn't care who knew that he was sorry he was not the
editor. "In journalistic parlance, the sub editor," he added.
"Will you be seated, Miss Howe?" and with a tasteful silk pocket
handkerchief he whisked the bottom of a chair for her.
"Then you are Mr. Molyneux Sinclair," Hilda declared. "You have
been pointed out to me on several first nights. Oh, I know very
well where the Chronicle seats are!"
Mr. Sinclair bowed with infinite gratification, and tucked the silk
handkerchief back so that only a fold was visible. "We members of
the Fourth Estate are fairly well known, I'm afraid, in Calcutta,"
he said. "Personally, I could sometimes wish it were otherwise.
But certainly not in this instance."
Hilda gave him a gay little smile. "I suppose the editor," she
said, with a casual glance about the room, "is hammering out his
leader for to-morrow's paper. Does he write half and do you write
half, or how do you manage?"
A seriousness overspread Mr. Sinclair's countenance, which
nevertheless irradiated, as if he could not help it, with beaming
eyes. "Ah, those are the secrets of the prison-house, Miss Howe.
Unfortunately it is not etiquette for me to say in what proportion
I contribute the leading articles of the Chronicle. But I can tell
you in confidence that if it were not for the editor's prejudices--
rank prejudices--it would be a good deal larger."
"Ah, his prejudices! Why not be quite frank, Mr. Sinclair, and say
that he is just a little tiny bit jealous of his staff. All
editors are, you know." Miss Howe shook her head in philosophical
deprecation of the peccadillo, and Mr. Sinclair cast a smiling,
embarrassed glance at his smart brown leather boot. The glance was
radiant with what he couldn't tell her as a sub-editor of honour
about those cruel prejudices, but he gave it no other medium.
"I'm afraid you know the world, Miss Howe," he said, with a noble
reserve, and that was all.
"A corner of it here and there. But you are responsible for the
whole of the dramatic criticism,"--Hilda charged him roundly,--"the
editor can't claim any of THAT."
An inquiring brown face under an embroidered cap appeared at the
door; a brown hand thrust in a bunch of printed slips. Mr.
Sinclair motioned both away, and they vanished in silence.
"That I can't deny," he said. "It would be useless if I wished to
do so--my style betrays me--I must plead guilty. It is not one of
my legitimate duties--if I held this position on the Times, or say
the Daily Telegraph, our London contemporaries, it would not be
required of me. But in this country everything is piled upon the
sub-editor. Many a night, Miss Howe, I send down the last slips of
a theatre notice at midnight and am here in this chair"--Mr.
Sinclair brought his open palm down upon the arm of it--"by eleven
the following day!" Mr. Sinclair's chin was thrust passionately
forward, moisture dimmed the velvety brightness of those eyes
which, in more dramatic moments, he confessed to have inherited
from a Nawab great-grandfather. "But I don't complain," he said,
and drew in his chin. It seemed to bring his argument to a climax,
over which he looked at Hilda in warm, frank expansion.
"Overworked, too, I daresay," she said, and then went on a trifle
hurriedly. "Well, I must tell you, Mr. Sinclair, how kind your
criticism always is, and how much I personally appreciate it. None
of the little points and effects one tries to make seem to escape
you, and you are always generous in the matter of space too."
Molyneux impartially threw out his hand. "I believe in it!" he
exclaimed. "Honour where honour is due, Miss Howe, and the
Stanhope Company has given me some very enjoyable evenings. And
you'll hardly believe me, but it is a fact, I assure you, I seldom
get a free hand with those notices. Suicidal to the interests of
the paper as it is, the editor insists as often as not on cutting
down my theatre copy!"
"Cuts it down, does he? The brute!" said Miss Howe.
"I've known him sacrifice a third of it for an indigo market
report. Now, I ask you, who reads an indigo market report?
Nobody. Who wants to know how Jimmy Finnigan's--how the Stanhope
Company's latest novelties went off? Everybody. Of course, when
he does that sort of thing, I make it warm for him next morning?"
The door again opened and admitted a harassed little Babu in
spectacles, bearing a sheaf of proof slips, who advanced timidly
into the middle of the room and paused.
"In a few minutes, Babu," said Mr. Sinclair; "I am engaged."
"It iss the Council isspeech of the Legal Member, sir, and it iss
to go at five p.m. to his house for last correction."
"Presently, Babu. Don't interrupt. As I was saying, Miss Howe, I
make it warm for him till he apologises. I must say he always
apologises, and I don't often ask more than that. But I was
obliged to tell him the last time that if it happened again one of
us would have to go."
"What did he say to that?"
"I don't exactly remember. But it had a tremendous effect--
tremendous. We became good friends almost immediately."
"Quite so. We miss you when you don't come, Mr. Sinclair--last
Saturday night, for example."
"I HAD to go to the Surprise Party. Jimmy came here with tears in
his eyes that morning. 'My show is tumbling to pieces,' he said.
'Sinclair, you've got to come to-night.' Made me dine with him--
wouldn't let me out of his sight. We had to send a reporter to you
and Llewellyn that night."
"Mr. Sinclair, the notice made me weep."
"I know. All that about the costumes. But what can you expect?
The man is as black as your hat."
"We have to buy our own costumes," said Hilda, with a glance at the
floor, "and we haven't any too much, you know, to do it on."
"The toilets in Her Second Son were simply magnificent. Not to be
surpassed on the boards of the Lyceum in tasteful design or
richness of material. They were ne plus ultra!" cried Mr.
Sinclair. "You will remember I said so in my critique."
"I remember. If I were you I wouldn't go so far another time.
There's a lot of cotton velvet and satin about it, you know,
between ourselves, and Finnigan's people will be getting the laugh
on us. That's one of the things I wanted to mention. Don't be
quite so good to us. See? Otherwise--well, you know how Calcutta
talks, and what a pretty girl Beryl Stace is, for example. Mrs.
Sinclair mightn't like it, and I don't blame her."
"As I said before, Miss Howe, you know the world," Mr. Sinclair
replied, with infinite mellow humour, and as Miss Howe had risen he
rose too, pulling down his waistcoat.
"There was just one other thing," Hilda said, holding out her hand.
"Next Wednesday, you know, Rosa Norton takes her benefit. Rosy's
as well known here as the Ochterlony monument; she's been coming
every cold weather for ten years, poor old Rosy. Don't you think
you could do her a bit of an interview for Wednesday's paper?
She'll write up very well--get her on variety entertainments in the
Australian bush."
Mr. Molyneux Sinclair looked pained to hesitate. "Personally," he
said confidentially, "I should like it immensely, and I daresay I
could get it past the editor. But we're so short-handed."
Miss Howe held up a forefinger which seemed luminous with solution.
"Don't you bother," she said, "I'll do it for you; I'll write it
myself. My 'prentice hand I'll try on Rosy, and you shall have the
result ready to print on Tuesday morning. Will that do?"
That would do supremely. Mr. Sinclair could not conceal the
admiration he felt for such a combination of talents. He did not
try; he accompanied it to the door, expanding and expanding until
it seemed more than ever obvious that he found the sub-editorial
sphere unreasonably contracted. Hilda received his final bow from
the threshold of what he called his "sanctum," and had hardly left
the landing in descent when a square-headed, collarless, red-faced
male in shirt sleeves came down, descending, as it seemed, in
bounds from parts above. "Damn it, Sinclair!" she heard, as he
shot into the apartment she had left, "here's the whole council
meeting report set up and waiting three-quarters of an hour--press
blocked; and the printer Babu says he can get nothing out of you.
What the devil . . . If the dak's* missed again, by thunder! . . .
paid to converse with itinerant females . . . seven columns . . .
infernal idiocy" . . .
* Country post.
Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with amusement
as she made her way down that Mr. Sinclair was doubtless waiting
until his lady visitor was well out of earshot to make it warm for
the editor.
CHAPTER XII
I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything
very exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged
themselves between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the
Reverend Stephen Arnold, had it been aware of them; and I conclude
reluctantly that it would not. Reluctantly, because such
imperviousness argues a lack of perception, of flair in directions
which any Continental centre would recognise as vastly tickling,
regrettable in a capital of such vaunted sophistication as that
which sits beside the Hooghly. It may as well be shortly admitted,
however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you must, for
example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty technical
equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from
England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of
your dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the sex
that does not hunt jackals it is easier--you have only to be a
little frivolous and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-
shaking nickname, as in the case of three ladies known in a
viceroyalty of happy legend as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
I should be sorry to give the impression that Calcutta is therefore
a place of gloom. The source of these things is perennial, and the
noise of laughter is ever in the air of the Indian capital.
Between the explosions, however, it is natural enough that the
affairs of a priest of College Street and an actress of no address
at all should slip unnoticed, especially as they did not advertise
it. Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was no
rehearsal, to tea. He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts
which answered fairly well the purposes of a sense of humour, and
nobody could question hers; it operated obscurely to keep them in
the house.
She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her
to take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of
beauty; although she mentioned to herself that he took it with a
difference, a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of
not having yet quite sounded. The depths of his faith of course--
there she could only scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon
which she did not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he
sometimes gently guided her. The atmospheres of their talk were
the more bracing ones of this world, and it was here that Hilda
looked when she would make him a parallel for Lindsay, and here
that she found her measure of disappointment. He warmed himself
and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and she was not
on the whole the poorer by any exchange they made, but she was
sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between
them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the
flavour of adventure. She found herself inclined--and the
experience was new--to make an effort for a reward which was
problematical and had to be considered in averages, a reward put
out in a thin and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a
curious concentrated quality, and a strange flavour of incense and
the air of cold churches. There was also the impression--was it
too fantastic?--of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire
which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff
Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with
open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to
one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after a time
she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to
declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration
of Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be--one
hardly paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection
which would certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear
Duff. With regard to Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course,
another way of saying that she was less oppressed, in his company,
by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it is already evident
that this was her grievance with life, when the joy of it left her
time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her personal lines,
the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of her and
found her willing to perform, the fact that it meant more to her,
for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she
got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view
except the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these
conditions--her experience had not been upon that plane--but she
bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading;
one came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains.
It was absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman
kind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially
subjected. So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour,
and so interfering--so horribly interfering! Personally she did
not see herself one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her
defences; but the necessity of using them was matter for complaint
when existence might have been so delightful a boon without it,
full of affinities and communities in every direction. She had
not, I am convinced, any of the notions of a crusader upon this
popular subject, nor may I portray her either shocked or revolted,
only rather bored, being a creature whom it was unkind to hamper;
and she would have explained quite in these simple terms the reason
why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament was to her a
pervasive charm of his society.
She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not
classify him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and
there was in this no doubt a vague perception that the confession
showed a limitation of experience on her part for which he might be
inclined to call her to account; since cultured young Oxonians with
an altruistic bias, if they do not exactly abound, are still often
enough to be discovered if one happens to belong to the sphere
which they haunt, they and their ideals. Not that any such
consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the disabilities of
her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching her lips,
and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance
following her into its queer byways--her sphere's--full of spangles
and limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival
artistry. There was a fascination in bringing him out of his
remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to
what he might do. This remained ungratified, for he never did
anything. He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs
possible, that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and
she in the picturesque tangle outside found it enough.
He was there when she came back from the Chronicle office, patient
under the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had
told him she would not be long in returning. He had gone so far as
to order tea for her, and it was waiting with him. "Make it," she
commanded; "why haven't you had some already?" and while he bent
over the battered Britannia metal spout she sank into the nearest
seat and let her hat make a frame for her face against the back of
it. She was too tired, she said, to move, and her hands lay
extended, one upon each arm of her chair, with the air of being
left there to be picked up at her convenience. Arnold, over the
teapot, agreed that walking in Calcutta was an insidious pleasure--
one gathered a lassitude--and brought her cup. She looked at him
for an instant as she took it.
"But I am not too tired to hear what you have on your mind," she
said. "Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his
convictions? Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the
roof after all?"
"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I
don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not.
Kally Nath is to be baptized to-morrow. We are certain to get our
oratory."
"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted. "When one prays for so long a
time together it must be better to have fresh air. It will
certainly be better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a
weak chest."
"It will be better for us all." Arnold seemed to reflect, across
his teacup, how much better it would be. Then he added, "I saw
Lindsay last night."
"Again? And--"
"I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way."
"Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all--
another man--it's naturally of no use!"
"I spoke as a priest!"
"Did he swear at you?"
"Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But
I could get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."
"How far did you go?"
"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit
sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her."
"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you
don't suspect the irony in it" Hilda said. "Pray who is to make it
up to him?"
"I suppose there is that point of view."
"I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you.
I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of
her appear before him. I succeeded too--he gave me the most
uncomfortable looks--but I might as well have let it alone.
The great end of nature," Hilda went on, putting down her cup,
"reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend
themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities. And
therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.
That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's irresistibly
suggested."
Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of
the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion,
the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his
mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's
substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and
he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a
statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to
characterise it at all. He looked at the wall as if, being a solid
and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm--it was really
something like that--which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought
him.
"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He
seemed determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied
she was being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through.
Indeed, I wasn't sure that there was any great temptation.
Somebody must be helping him."
"The devil, no doubt," Hilda replied concisely; "and with equal
certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."
Arnold gave her a look of surprise. "Surely not my cousin!" he
protested. "She can't understand."
"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I
think she's only too tortuously intelligent."
Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. "May I ask?--" he
began, formally.
"Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so
exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love
with Mr. Lindsay herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it,
to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?" she went
on, at Arnold's blush; "but you asked me, you know. And she is
making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about. I
think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl--having her
there constantly and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of
what she is so possessed to throw away. People in Alicia's
condition have no sense of immorality."
"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest
in his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was
not quite a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication
between Alicia and Lindsay. He sat for a moment without saying
more, covering his eyes with his hand.
"Why should you care so much?" Hilda asked gently. "You are at the
very antipodes of her sect. You can't endorse her methods--you
don't trust her results."
"Oh, all that! It's of the least consequence." He spoke with a
curious, governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes.
"It's seeing another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that
held, as best it could, a ray from the source. It's another
glimpse of the strength of the tide--terrible. It's a cruel hint
that one lives above it in the heaven of one's own hopes, by some
mere blind accident. To have set one's feeble hand to the
spiritualising of the world and to feel the possibility of that--"
"I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed
her. She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and
went to a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat. She was
refreshed and vivified--she wanted to talk of the warm world. She
let a decent interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his
hand from his eyes. Even then, to make the transition easier, she
said, "You ought to be lifted up to-day, if you are going to
baptize Kally Nath to-morrow."
"The Brother Superior will do it. And I don't know--I don't know.
The young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes
over to us--"
"The, young woman he is to marry! Oh my dear and reverend friend!
Avec ces gens la! I have had a most amusing afternoon," she went
on quickly. "I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your
halo." She was safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at
any imputation of saintship. He held himself a person of broad
indulgences, and would point openly to his consumption of tea-
cakes. But this afternoon a miasma hung over him. Hilda saw it,
and bent herself, with her graphic recital, to dispel it, perceived
it thicken and settle down upon him, and went bravely on to the
end. Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and spoke
before him. It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a
matinee.
"And that is the sort of thing you store up and value," he said,
when she had finished. "These persons will add to your knowledge
of life?"
"Extremely," she replied to all of it.
"I suppose they will in their measure. But personally I could wish
you had not gone. Your work has no right to make such demands."
"Be reasonable," she said, flushing. "Don't talk as if personal
dignity were within the reach of everybody. It's the most
expensive of privileges. And nothing to be so very proud of--
generally the product of somebody else's humiliations, handed down.
But the humiliations must have been successful, handed down in
cash. My father drove a cab and died in debt. His name was
Cassidy. I shall be dignified some day--some day! But you see I
must make it possible myself, since nobody has done it for me."
"Well, then, I'll alter my complaint. Why should you play with
your sincerity?"
"I didn't play with it," she flashed; "I abandoned it. I am an
actress."
They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance
their discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain
that Arnold was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves. He
fidgeted with the tassel of his ceinture, and she watched his
moving fingers. Presently she spoke quietly, in a different key.
"I sometimes think," she said, "of a child I knew, in the other
years. She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts. Her
impulses, within her small limits, were noble--she was the keenest,
loyalest little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her.
When I look at the woman she is now I think the uses of life are
hard, my friend--they are hard."
He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as
an illustration.
"And yet," he replied, "they can be turned to admirable purpose."
"I wonder!" Hilda exclaimed brightly. She had turned down the leaf
of that mood. "But we are not cheerful--let us be cheerful. For
my part I am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of
December. Look at this!"
She opened a small black leather bag, and poured money out of it,
in notes and currency, into her lap.
"Is it a legacy?"
"It's pay," she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips. "I
have been paid--we have all been paid! It's so unusual--it makes
me feel quite generous. Let me see. I'll give you this, and this,
and this,"--she counted into her open palm ten silver rupees,--"all
those I will give you for your mission. Prends!" and she clinked
them together and held them out to him.
He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small. Something
in him had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood.
He could only draw into his shell; doubtless he thought that a
legitimate and inoffensive proceeding.
"Thanks, no," he said, "I think not. We desire people's prayers,
rather than their alms."
He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous
behaviour, and said farewell to him as she always did, in spite of
the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes. She continued to
hold the ten rupees carefully and separately, as if she would later
examine them in diagnosing her pain. It was keener and profounder
than any humiliation, the new voice, crying out, of a trampled
tenderness. She stood and looked after him for a moment with
startled eyes and her hand, in a familiar gesture of her
profession, upon her heart. Then she went to her room, and
deliberately loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed, first
to sob like that little child she remembered, and afterwards to
think, until the world came and knocked at her door and bade her
come out of herself and earn money.
CHAPTER XIII
The compulsion which took Stephen Arnold to Crooked Lane is hardly
ours to examine. It must have been strong, since going up to Mrs.
Sand involved certain concessions, doubtless intrinsically
trifling, but of exaggerated discomfort to the mind spiritually
cloistered, whatever its other latitude. Among them was a
distinctly necessary apology, difficult enough to make to a lady of
rank so superior and authority so voyant in the Church militant, by
a mere fighting soul without such straps and buttons as might
compel recognition upon equal terms. It is impossible to know how
far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty--the priestly horizon is
perhaps not wholly free from mirage--or to what extent he confessed
it an indulgence. He was certainly aware of a stronger desire than
he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not
desert her post. The idea had an element of irritation oddly
personal; he could not bear to reflect upon it. It may be wondered
whether in any flight of venial imagination Arnold saw himself in a
parallel situation with a lady. I am sure he did not. It may be
considered, however, that among mirages there are unaccountable
resemblances--resemblances without shape or form. He might fix his
gaze, at all events, upon the supreme argument that those who were
given to holy work, under any condition, in any degree, should make
no rededication of themselves. This had to support him as best it
could against the conviction that had Captain Filbert been Sister
Anastasia, for example, of the Baker Institution, and Ensign Sand
the Mother Superior of its Calcutta branch, it was improbable that
he would have ventured to announce his interest in the matter by
his card, or in any other way.
It was a hesitating step, therefore, that carried him up to the
quarters, and a glance of some nervous distress that made him
aware, as he stood bowing upon her threshold, clasping with both
hands his soft felt hat to his breast, that Mrs. Sand was not
displeased to see him. She hastened, indeed, to give him a chair;
she said she was very glad he'd dropped in, if he didn't mind the
room being so untidy--where there were children you could spend the
whole day picking up. They were out at present, with Captain Sand,
in the perambulator, not having more servants than they could help.
A sweeper and a cook they did with; it would surprise the people in
this country, who couldn't get along with less than twenty, she
often said.
Mrs. Sand's tone was casual; her manner had a quality somewhat
aggressively democratic. It said that under her welcome lay the
right to criticise, which she would have exercised with equal
freedom had her visitor been the Lord Bishop John Calcutta himself;
and it made short work of the idea that she might be over-gratified
to receive Holy Orders in any form. She was not unwilling, however,
to show, as between Ensign and man, reasonable satisfaction;
presently, in fact, she went so far as to say, still vaguely
remarking upon his appearance there, that she often thought there
ought to be more sociability between the different religious
bodies; it would be better for the cause. There was nothing
narrow, she said, about her, nor yet about Captain Sand. And then,
with the distinct intimation that that would do, that she had gone
far enough, she crossed her hands in her lap and waited. It became
her to have it understood that this visit need have no further
object than an exchange of amiabilities; but there might be
another, and Mrs. Sand's folded hands seemed to indicate that she
would not necessarily meet it with opposition.
Stephen made successive statements of assent. He sat grasping his
hat between his knees, his eyes fixed upon an infant's sock which
lay upon the floor immediately in front of him, looking at Mrs.
Sand as seldom and as briefly as possible, as if his glance took
rather an unfair advantage, which he would spare her.
"Yes, yes," he said. "Yes, certainly," revolving his hat in his
hands. And when she spoke of the fraternity that might be fostered
by such visits, he looked for an instant as if he had found an
opening, which seemed, however, to converge and vanish in Mrs.
Sand's folded hands. He flushed to think afterwards, that it was
she who was obliged to bring his resolution to a head, her scent of
his embarrassment sharpening her curiosity.
"And is there anything we Army officers can do for you, Mr.
Arnold?" she inquired.
There was a hint in her voice that, whatever it was, they would
have done it more willingly if she had not been obliged to ask.
"I am afraid," he said, "my mission is not quite so simple. I
could wish it were. It is so easy to show our poor needs to one
another; and I should have confidence--" He paused, amazed at the
duplicity that grinned at him in his words. At what point more
remote within the poles was he likely to show himself with a
personal request?
"I have nothing to ask for myself," he went on, with concentration
almost harsh. "I am here to see if you will consent to speak with
me about a matter which threatens your--your community--about your
possible loss of Miss Filbert."
Mrs. Sand looked blank. "The Captain isn't leavin' us, as far as I
know," she said.
"Oh--is it possible that you are not aware that--that very strong
efforts are being made to induce her to do so?"
Mrs. Sand looked about her as if she expected to find an
explanation lying somewhere near her chair. Light came to her
suddenly, and brought her a conscious smile; it only lacked force
to be a giggle. She glanced at her lap as she smiled; her air was
deprecating and off-putting, as if she had detected in what Arnold
said some suggestion of a gallant nature aimed at herself.
Happily, he was not looking.
"You mean Mr. Lindsay!" she exclaimed, twisting her wedding-ring
and its coral guard.
"I hope--I beg--that you will not think me meddlesome or
impertinent. I have the matter very much at heart. It seems to
lie in my path. I must see it. Surely you perceive some way of
averting the disaster in it!"
"I'm sure I don't know what you refer to." Mrs. Sand's tone was
prudish and offended. "She hasn't said a word to me--she's a great
one for keeping things to herself--but if Mr. Lindsay don't mean
marriage with her--"
"Why, of course!" Arnold, startled, turned furiously red, but Mrs.
Sand in her indignation did not reflect the tint. "Of course! Is
not that," he went on after an instant's pause, "precisely what is
to be lamented--and prevented?"
Mrs. Sand looked at her visitor with dry suspicion. "I suppose you
are a friend of his," she said.
"I have known him for years. Pray don't misunderstand me. There
is nothing against him--nothing whatever."
"Oh, I don't suppose there is, except that he is not on the Lord's
side. But I don't expect any of his friends are anxious for him to
marry an officer in the Salvation Army. Society people ain't fond
of the Army, and never will be."
"His people--he has only distant relatives living--are all at
home," Stephen said vaguely. The situation had become slightly
confused.
"Then you speak for them, I suppose?"
"Indeed not. I am in no communication with them whatever. I fancy
they know nothing about it. I am here entirely--ENTIRELY of my own
accord. I have come to place myself at your disposition if there
is anything I can do, any word I can say, to the end of preventing
this catastrophe in a spiritual life so pure and devoted; to ask
you at all events to let me join my prayers to yours that it shall
not come about."
The squalor of the room seemed to lift before his eyes and be
suffused with light. At last he had made himself plain. But Mrs.
Sand was not transfigured. She seemed to sit, with her hands
folded, in the midst of a calculation.
"Then he HAS put the question. I told her he would," she said.
"I believe he has asked her to marry him and she has refused, more
than once. But he is importunate, and I hear she needs help."
"Mr. Lindsay," said Mrs. Sand, "is a very takin' young man."
"I suppose we must consider that. There is position too, and
wealth. These things count--we are all so human--even against the
Divine realities into possession of which Miss Filbert must have so
perfectly entered."
"I thought he must be pretty well off. Would he be one of them
Government officials?"
"He is a broker."
"Oh, is he indeed?" Mrs. Sand's enlightenment was evidently
doubtful. "Well, if they get married Captain Filbert 'll have to
resign. It's against the regulations for her to marry outside of
the Army."
"But is she not vowed to her work; isn't her life turned for ever
into that channel? Would it not be horrible to you to see the
world interfere?"
"I won't say but what I'd be sorry to see her leave us. But I
wouldn't stand in her way either, and neither would Captain Sand."
"Stand in her way! In her way to material luxury, poverty of
spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral
mediocrity of the world. I would to God I could be that stumbling
block! I have heard her--I have seen the light in her that may so
possibly be extinguished."
"I don't deny she has a kind of platform gift, but she's losin' her
voice. And she doesn't understand briskin' people up, if you know
what I mean."
"She will be pulled down--she will go under!" Arnold repeated in
the depths of his spirit. He stood up, fumbling with his hat.
Mrs. Sand and her apartment, her children out of doors in the
perambulator, and the whole organisation to which she appertained
had grown oppressive and unnecessary. He was aware of a desire to
put his foot again in his own world, where things were seen, were
understood. He thought there might be solace in relating the
affair to Brother Colquhoun.
"It's a case," said Mrs. Sand judicially, "where I wouldn't think
myself called on to say one word. Such things everyone has a right
to decide for themselves. But you oughtn't to forget that a
married woman"--she looked at Arnold's celibate habit as if to hold
it accountable for much--"can have a great influence for good over
him that she chooses. I am pretty sure Captain Filbert's already
got Mr. Lindsay almost persuaded. I shouldn't be at all surprised
if he joined the Army himself when she's had a good chance at him."
Arnold put on his hat with a groan, and began the descent of the
stairs. "Good-afternoon then," Mrs. Sand called out to him from
the top. He turned mechanically and bared his head. "I beg your
pardon," he said. "Good-afternoon."
CHAPTER XIV
Mrs. Sand found it difficult to make up her mind upon several
points touching the visit of the Reverend Stephen Arnold. Its
purport, of which she could not deny her vague appreciation, drew a
cloud across a rosy prospect, and in this light his conduct showed
unpardonable; on the other hand it implied a compliment to the
corps, it made the spiritual position of an officer of the Army, a
junior too, a matter of moment in a wider world than might be
suspected; and before this consideration Mrs. Sand expanded. She
reflected liberally that salvation was not necessarily frustrated
by the laying-on of hands; she had serene fancies of a republic of
the redeemed. She was a prey to further hesitations regarding the
expediency of mentioning the interview to Laura, and as private and
confidential it ministered for two days to her satisfactions of
superior officer. In the end, however, she had to sacrifice it to
the girl's imperturbable silence. She chose an intimate and a
private hour, and shut the door carefully upon herself and her
captain, but she had not at all decided, when she sat down on the
edge of the bed, what complexion to give to the matter, nor had she
a very definite idea, when she got up again, of what complexion she
had given it. Laura, from the first word, had upset her by an
intense eagerness, a determination not to lose a syllable. Captain
Filbert insisted upon hearing all before she would acknowledge
anything; she hung upon the sentences Mrs. Sand repeated, and
joined them together as if they were parts of a puzzle; she finally
had possession of the conversation much as I have already written
it down. As Mrs. Sand afterward told her husband, Miss Filbert sat
there growing whiter and whiter, more and more worked up, and it
was impossible to take any comfort in talking to her. It seemed as
if she, the Ensign, might save herself the trouble of giving an
opinion one way or the other, and not a thing could she get the
girl to say except that it was true enough that the gentleman
wanted to marry her, and she was ashamed of having let it go so
far. But she would never do it--never! She declared she would
write to this Mr. Arnold and thank him, and ask him to pray for
her, "and she as much as ordered me to go and do the same,"
concluded Mrs. Sand, with an inflection which made its own comment
upon such a subversion of discipline.
Stephen, under uncomfortable compulsion, sent Laura's letter--she
did write--to Lindsay. "I cannot allow you to be in the dark about
what I am doing in the matter," he explained; "though if I had not
this necessity for writing you might reasonably complain of an
intrusive and impertinent letter. But I must let you know that she
has appealed to me, and that as far as I can I will help her."
Duff read both communications--Laura's to the priest was brief and
very technical--between the business quarters of Ralli Brothers and
the Delhi and London Bank, with his feet in the opposite seat of
his office-gharry and his forehead puckered by an immediate
calculation forward in rupee paper. His irritation spoiled his
transaction--there was a distinct edge in the manager's manner when
they parted, and it was perhaps a pardonable weakness that led him
to dash in blue pencil across the page covered with Arnold's minute
handwriting, "Then you have done with pasty compromises--you have
gone over to the Jesuits. I congratulate you," and readdressed the
envelope to College Street. The brown tide of the crowd brought
him an instant messenger, and he stood in the doorway for a moment
afterwards frowning upon the yellow turbans that swung along in the
sunlight against the white wall opposite, across the narrow
commercial road. The flame of his indignation set forth his
features with definiteness and relief, consuming altogether the
soft amused well-being which was nearly always there. His lips set
themselves together, and Mrs. Sand would have been encouraged in
any scheme of practical utility by the lines that came about his
mouth. A brother in finance of some astuteness, who saw him
scramble into his gharry, divined that with regard to a weighty
matter in jute mill shares pending, Lindsay had decided upon a
coup, and made his arrangements accordingly. He also went upon his
way with a fresh impression of Lindsay's undeniable good looks, as
sometimes in a coin new from the mint one is struck with the beauty
of a die dulled by use and familiarity.
Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel
distress, but when he had read it, that emotion was lightened in
him by another sentiment.
"A community admirable in many ways," he murmured, refolding the
page. "Does he think he is insulting me?"
Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was
inclined to concede to Stephen's intermediary, he was compelled to
recognise without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of
her profession, had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of
defensive operations. She retired effectively, the quarters in
Crooked Lane became her fortified retreat, whence she issued only
under escort and upon service strictly obligatory. Succour from
Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and Lindsay felt it an
anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back
upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to
assault her position. Nor could Alicia induce any sortie to
Middleton Street. Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and
luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in
reticence and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal
excuse. They loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss
Livingstone's shoulders, these notes which bore so much the
atmosphere of Crooked Lane, and at the same time they formed the
indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh
upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them at arm's length, in
enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful,
taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God bless you, yours
truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the
limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind
himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through
which tiniest hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other
side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten
years hence attached to the body of this petrification, she was
almost disposed to abandon the pair, to let them take their
wretched chance. But this was a climax which did not occur often;
she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by
which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to
encumber. The new French poet, the American novelist of the year,
and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table many days
together for this reason. She sometimes remembered what she
expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what
profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to
whether her expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself
intellectually jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to
daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and
gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days.
She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside
of it. At all events she took a line; the new Arab was typical,
and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with
the idea that she was making a physical fight. Life might weigh
one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always
measure the strength of one's pinions against these things. She
made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her
impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the
foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped
her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept
from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this
gave hers a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there
was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be. The
result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate
hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the
process. We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was
derivable from her continued reception of Duff's confidences--
it has long been evident that he found her persuadable--her
unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the analytic
turn we may almost suppose it. Starvation is so monotonous a
misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend
attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be
permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept
conventional enough. She did not even abate the usual number of
Duff's invitations to dinner when there was certainly nothing to
repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver,
and a tide of conversation about the season's paper-chasing, except
the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in
Bentinck Street, desirous and unsatisfied.
It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this
respect, for it was eventually after one of these parties that
Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the
hall the usual whisky and soda, found it necessary instead to give
him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and
authoritatively to bed. Lindsay was very well content to submit;
he confessed to fever off and on for four or five days past, and
while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone
gave him an elbows up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house
of a friend was better than a shelf at the club.
The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of
the hall in Crooked Lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of
these exercises. The world shrank, for Laura, to the compass of
the kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against
which she must key herself to indifference. When on the second and
third evening she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her
that either she or Mr. Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she
offered up thanks. On the fourth she reflected recurrently and
anxiously that it was not after all a very glorious victory if the
devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the
opportunities that had been his, should slip back without profit to
the level from which she had striven--they had all striven--to lift
him. Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations,
sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own
account and obtained information.
Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the
circumstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which
Mrs. Barberry came for hours to take advantage of. There were the
usual two nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the
Arab farther afield than ever, and she did. One can imagine her
cantering fast and far with a sense of conscious possession in
spite of Mrs. Barberry and the two nurses. There may be a certain
solace in the definite and continuous knowledge available about a
person hovering on the brink of enteric under your own roof-tree.
It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major Livingstone could not make
up his mind. Alicia knew only of this uncertainty; other
satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs. Barberry.
She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so uniformly
cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from
Lindsay's room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the
temperature was the same, hadn't budged a point, must manage to get
it down somehow in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to
envelop himself in the newspapers. Those arbitrary and obstinate
figures, which stood for apprehension to the most casual ear,
stamped themselves on most things as the day wore on, and at tea-
time Mrs. Barberry gave her other details, thinking her rather cold
in the reception of them. But she plainly preferred to be out of
it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a
glance at the boiled milk preparations of the butler. "And you
know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these people have to be
watched." To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be
solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy. There
was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct
as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either
by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her
right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously
when it has been given in the highest to somebody else. These
pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but
they did not take the importance of motives. She rather stood
aside with folded hands, and in an infinite terror of prejudicing
fate, devoured her heart by way of keeping its beating normal.
Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final alternative to Lindsay's
marriage, one can imagine her forcing herself to look at it.
Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing
Lindsay's room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o'clock
half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she
went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a
veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly
asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly
up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert's face.
Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the
direction of her skirts. She stood silent, stricken in the dusk
with astonishment, but the sense that was strongest in her was
plainly that of having made a criminal discovery. Laura stumbled
upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant, words
held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door. Then
Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the
servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on,
a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both.
It was a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of
flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony
crucifix over the bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix
afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed
brushes on the toilet-table. Across the open window a couple of
bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden
cut all its fronds sharply against the light.
"Well?" said Alicia, when the door was shut.
Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.
"I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone
out. And the nurse was in the room; I couldn't get to her. There
was nobody but the servants about."
"Objection to what?"
"To my being there. I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay."
"Did you make any noise?"
Miss Filbert looked professionally touched. "It was silent prayer,
of course," she said.
Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet-table, had an air of
eagerness, of successful capture. The yellow sky in the window
behind her made filmy lights round her hair, and outlined her tall
figure, in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped
effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit. Laura
Filbert thought she looked like a princess.
"I seem to hear of nothing but petitions," she said. "Isn't
somebody praying for you?"
The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such
a suggestion. Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the
space between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.
"I hope so, miss," she said, and looked as if for calming over
Alicia's shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky.
The colour sank back out of her face, and the light from the window
rested on it ethereally. The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to
seek, and their blue seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old
splendour of the uplifted golden gates rewarded them.
"Why do you use that odious word?" Alicia explained. "You are not
my maid! Don't do it again--don't dream of doing it again!"
"I--I don't know." The girl was still plainly covered with
confusion at being found in the house uninvited. "I suppose I
forgot. Well, good-evening," and she turned to the door.
"Don't go," Alicia commanded. "Don't. You never come to see me
now. Sit down." She dragged a chair forward and almost pushed
Laura into it. "I will sit down too--what am I thinking of?"
Laura reflected for a moment, looking at her folded hands. "I
might as well tell you," she said, "that I have not been praying
that Mr. Lindsay should get better. Only that he should be given
time to find salvation and die in Jesus."
"Don't--don't say those things to me. How light you are--it's
wicked!" Alicia returned with vehemence, and then as Captain
Filbert stared, half comprehending, "Don't you care?" she added
curiously.
It was so casual that it was cruel. The girl's eyes grew wider
still during the instant she fixed them upon Alicia in the effort
of complete understanding. Then her lip trembled.
"How can I care?" she cried; "how can I?" and burst into weeping.
She drew her sari over her face and rocked to and fro. Her dusty
bare foot protruded from her cotton skirt. She sat huddled
together, her head in its coverings sunk between weak shaking
shoulders. Alicia considered her for an instant as a pitiable and
degraded spectacle. Then she went over and touched her.
"You are completely worn out," she said, "and it is almost dinner-
time. The ayah will bring you a hot bath and then you will come
down and have some food quietly with me. My brother is dining out
somewhere. I will go away for a little while and then I know you
will feel better. And after dinner," she added gently, "you may
come up if you like and pray again for Mr. Lindsay. I am sure he
would--"
The faintest break in her own voice warned her, and she hurried out
of the room.
It was a foolish thing, and the Livingstones' old Karim Bux much
deplored it, but the miss-sahib had forgotten to give information
that the dinner of eight commanded a fortnight ago would not take
place--hence everything was ready in its sequence for this event,
with a new fashion of stuffing quails and the first strawberries of
the season from Dinapore. The feelings of Karim Bux in presenting
these things to a woman in the dress of a coolie are not important;
but Alicia, for some reason, seemed to find the trivial incident
gratifying.
CHAPTER XV
Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white
sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a
flagrant ticca-gharry. The driver lay extended on the top of it,
asleep, the syce squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it
perfunctorily with hay from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind.
A fringe of palms and ferns in pots ran between the pillars, and
orchids hung from above, shutting out the garden where heavy scents
stood in the sun, and mynas chattered on the drive. The air was
full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to the lavish energy of
growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the compound rose
the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue. A long
time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse,
uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.
Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped
handkerchief agreeably scented. The night nurse had realised
herself equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of
practical views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept
from day to day to see her patient fed, and hand him books and
writing materials. She had not even the duty of debarring
visitors, but sat most of the time in the dressing-room where
echoes fell about her of the stories with which riotous young men,
in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's convalescence.
There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in vain, to
express her views upon such waste of scientific training. She had
Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his
sister's.
There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two
women in the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated
these things to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was
already half disengaged from the subject, her eye wandered as if in
search for the avenue to another. By a sudden inclination Alicia
began the story of Laura Filbert on her knees at Lindsay's door.
She told it in a quiet, steady, colourless way, pursuing it to the
end--it came with the ease of frequent private rehearsals--and then
with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms she stopped
and gazed meditatively in front of her. There was something in the
gaze to which Hilda yielded an attention unexpectedly serious,
something of the absolute in character and life impervious to her
inquiry. Yet to analysis it was only the grey look of eyes
habituated to regard the future with penetration and to find
nothing there.
"Have you told him?" Hilda asked after an instant's pause, during
which she conceded something, she hardly knew what; she meant to
find out later.
"I haven't seen him. But I will tell him, I promise you."
"I have no doubt you will! But don't promise ME. I won't even
witness the vow!" Hilda cried.
"What does it matter? I shall certainly tell him." The words fell
definitely like pebbles. Hilda thoughtfully picked them up.
"On the whole," she said, "perhaps it would be as well. Yes, it is
my advice. It is quite likely that he will be revolted. It may be
curative."
Alicia turned away her head to hide the faint frown that
nevertheless crept into her voice. "I don't think so," she said.
"How you do juggle with things! I don't know why I talk to you
about this--this matter. I am sure I ought not."
"I was going to say," pursued Hilda, indifferent to her scruple,
"that I shouldn't be at all surprised if his illness leaves him
quite emotionally sane. The poison has worked itself out of his
blood--perhaps the passion and the poison were the same."
"I wonder!" Alicia said. She said it mechanically, as the easiest
comment.
"When I knew you first your speculation would have been more
active, my dear. You would have looked into the possibility and
disputed it. What has become of your modernity?"
It was the tenderest malice, but it obtained no concessive sign.
Alicia seemed to weigh it. "I think I like theories better than
illustrations," she said in defence.
"One can look at theories as one looks at the sky, but an
illustration wants a careful point of view. For this one perhaps
you are a little near."
"Perhaps," Alicia assented, "I am a little near." She glanced
quickly down as she spoke, but when she raised her eyes they were
dry and clear.
"I can see it better," Hilda went on, with immense audacity, "much
better."
"Isn't it safer to feel?"
"Jamais de la vie! The nerves lie always."
They were on the edge of the vortex of the old dispute. Alicia
leaned back among the cushions and regarded the other with an
undecided eye.
"You are not sure," said Hilda, "that you won't ask me, at this
point, to look at the pictures in that old copy of the Persian
classic--I forget its lovely name--or inquire what sort of house we
had last night. Well, don't be afraid of hurting my feelings.
Only, you know, between us as between more doubtful people, the
door must be either open or shut. I fancy you take cold easily;
perhaps you had better shut the door."
"Not for worlds," Alicia said, with promptitude. Then she added,
rather cleverly, "That would be spoiling my one view of life."
Hilda smiled. "Isn't there any life where you live?" She glanced
round her, at the tapestried elegance of the room, with sudden
indifference. "After all," she said, "I don't know what I am
doing here, in your affairs. As the world swings no one could be
more remote from them or you. I belong to its winds and its
highways--how have you brought me here, a tramp-actress, to your
drawing-room?"
Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. "Don't go
away," she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was
hardly a foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.
"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure
impulse, you don't know. One only asks the things that minister--
one goes and finds and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's
head under any roof. What difference does it make? The only thing
that counts, that rules, is the chance of seeing something else,
feeling something more, doing something better."
Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on
the actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary
movement. It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action
of flight. Then she glanced about her again with a kind of
appraisement, which ended with Alicia and embraced her. What she
realised seemed to urge her, I think, in some weak place of her
sex, to go on intensely, almost fiercely.
"Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia
Livingstone. We leave it all over the world for people of taste,
like you, in the glow of their illusions. I couldn't make you
understand our harvest; it is of the broad sun and the sincerity of
things."
"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said,
wearing, as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of
trouble.
But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find
the atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."
Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the
window before she understood. There was some timidity in her
glance at Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I
see what you mean; and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so
little imagination."
"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you
could add up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have
none!"
As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands.
"At least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I
felt you, too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me
to--to respond properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be
the one valuable thing that I can have--the only permanent fact
that is left."
Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. "Who said anything
about giving up?" she interrupted.
"Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean
it, if you say so." She turned the appeal of her face and saw a
sudden pitiful consideration in Hilda's, and as if it called them
forth two tears sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her
delicate head upon her lap.
"Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm
overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately." She possessed
herself of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her
head bent for a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment,
upon the other woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly
that Hilda felt guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat
together for a moment or two in silence with only that supervening
sense of successful aggression between them, and the humiliation
was Hilda's. Presently it grew heavy, embarrassing. Alicia got up
and began a slow, restless pacing up and down before the alcove
they sat in. Hilda watched her--it was a rhythmic progress--and
when she came near with a sound of brushing silk and a faint
fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a long breath as
if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner obtained,
assimilated.
"Oh yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a
smile, "I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself
more--worth while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take
up modelling. There's rather a good man here just now."
"Yes," Hilda assented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling.
It is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like
those things sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far
as I count--oh, my dear, do nothing more. You are already an
achieved effect--a consummation of the exquisite in every way.
Generations have been chosen among for you; your person holds the
inheritance of all that is gracious and tender and discriminating
in a hundred years. You are as rare as I am, and if there is
anything you would take from me, I would make more than one
exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you have
for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
my dear."
"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light
of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the
room overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do
me?" she cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"
"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now?
What simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in
your own house?"
Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side.
"Oh, hush!" she cried. "Go on!"
"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room
should be full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your
profile should come between him and the twilight with a scent of
violets."
"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.
"It IS a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a
plot. If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme,
deeper than you perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We
wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we
had been consulted; we're naturally too scrupulous, but nobody
asked us. 'Without our aid He did us make,' you know."
"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if
I could."
Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the
back and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour,
her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple
lines. In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair
and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might
have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he
sometimes thought of wine and death and roses.
"I would go farther," she said, and looked as if some other thing
charged with sweetness had come before her.
"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success,"
Alicia faltered.
"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she
smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her
eyes and came upon her lips. Her thought turned inward absently;
it embraced with sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity,
obedience. As if she knew her betrayal already complete, "I wish I
had such a chance," she said.
"You wish you had such a chance!"
"I didn't mean to tell you--you have enough to do to work out your
own problem; but--"
She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a
miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her
eyes instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia
looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a
mirage of the Promised Land.
"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.
"Who?"
"Hamilton Bradley."
Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if
all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to
make it beautiful.
"How you will hold me to my metier," she said. "Hamilton Bradley
has given up trying."
"Then--"
"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."
Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A
turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than
usual. Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers
and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused
confirmation for their astonishment.
"Well?" said Hilda.
"I can think of no one--there IS no one--except--oh, it's too
absurd! Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"
The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an
instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came
back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.
"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it
seems," she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--
like a thing born. But it is that--a thing born."
"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.
"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature
with its feet in a trap. The insane, insane improbability of it!"
She laughed again. It was delicious to hear her.
"But--he is a priest!"
"Much more difficult. He is a saint."
Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment
twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.
"Are you quite certain?" she said. "You told me once that--that
there had been other times."
"They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the
difference." The tone of this was very even, very usual, but
Alicia was aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of
aggression, that almost ranged her hostile. She hurried out of
that position.
"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarrassment. "I
see nothing--nothing REALLY against it."
"I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"
"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of
curiosity.
"I don't think I can let you ask me that."
"There are such strange things to consider! Would he withdraw from
the Church? Would you retire from the stage? I don't know which
seems the more impossible!"
Hilda got up.
"It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?" she said. "I haven't
made it out. And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls
for redemption, never of me at all."
A servant of the house with the air of a messenger brought Alicia a
scrap of paper. She glanced at it, and then, with hands that
trembled, began folding it together.
"He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair," she murmured,
"and he wants me to come and talk to him."
"Well," said Hilda. "Come."
She put her arm about Alicia, and drew her out of the room to the
foot of the stairs. They went in silence, saying nothing even when
they parted, and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend.
Halfway up she paused and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her
glance, and something of primitive puissance passed, conscious,
comprehended, between the eyes of the two women.
CHAPTER XVI
For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign
of anything but convalescence. An appetite to cry out upon, a
chartered tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands;
such indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for
other betrayals. There had been opportunities--even the day nurse
had gone, and Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he
seemed to prefer to talk about the pattern in the carpet, or the
corpulence of the khansamah, or things in the newspapers. Alicia,
once, at a suggestive point, put almost a visible question into a
silent glance, and Lindsay asked her for some more sugar. Surgeon-
Major Livingstone, coming into his office, unexpectedly one
morning, found his sister in the act of replacing a volume upon its
professional shelf. It was somebody on the pathology of Indian
fevers. Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve it--only
technical corroboration. It might also be considered that,
although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for
intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again. They
may have heard in Crooked Lane that Duff was better. We may freely
imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to
disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken
advantage of. Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified
repentance; they might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought,
smiling, to the Archdeacon.
As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay
still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make,
was perhaps lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of
some intricacy, it might very probably work out in shades. So much
would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much
reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope
budding underneath; the key to Hilda's theory might very well be
lost in contingencies. Nevertheless, Alicia postponed her story,
from day to day and from hour to hour. If her ideas about it--she
kept them carefully in solution--could have been precipitated, they
might have appeared in a formula favourite with her brother the
Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.
She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went
together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the
carriage at a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven
o'clock, and the morning wind swept soft and warm from over the
river. There was a white light on all the stucco parapets, and
their shadows slanted clear and delicately purple to the west. The
dust slept on the broad roads of the Maidan, only a curling trace
lifted itself here and there at the heel of a cart-bullock, and
nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the streets that
knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving past the
statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country people
with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation,
in the profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the
completest freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the
city gathered her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to
disburden any heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of
words to any joy that might rebel in prison. The advantage of the
intimacy of the landau for purposes of observation was so obvious
that one imagines Alicia must have been aware of it, though as a
matter of fact when she finally told Lindsay she did not look at
him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden Gardens, where the
yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the morning sky; and
so lost it.
He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterwards?
The yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as
the road trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There
was an endless going round of wheels, and trees passed them in
mechanical succession; a tree, and another tree; some of them had
flowers on them. When he broke the silence afterwards she started
as if in apprehension, but it was only to say something that
anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing energy of the
organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged. Her assent was little
and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it. The Salvation
Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton, without a suggestive
bone.
Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared." There was
in it that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man
finds under pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned
himself to his invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay
extended beside her among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look
at him, and got as far as the hand nearest her, ungloved and
sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.
"She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only
that if you died you might be saved first." Her eyes were still on
his hand, and she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an
impulse. Then they relaxed again, and he said, "Oh, well," and
smiled at the balancings of a crow drinking at a city conduit.
That was all. Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to
postpone her impressions, even her emotions. In the meantime it
was something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to
talk about the commonplaces of the roadside. In her escape from
this oppression, she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent
pleasure in what they saw; everything had in some way the likeness
of the leafing teak-trees, tender and curative. In the broad early
light that lay over the tanks there was a vague allurement, almost
a presage, and the wide spaces of the Maidan made room for hope.
She asked Lindsay presently if he would mind driving to the market;
she wanted some flowers for that night. I think she wanted some
flowers for that hour. Her thought broke so easily into the symbol
of a rose.
They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink
and crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared
houses servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches
in the sun and were shaved. Where the street ran into shops there
was still a shuttered blankness, but here and there a doorkeeper
yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper
made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first
hoarding in a side street announced the appearance of Miss Hilda
Howe for one night only as Lady Macbeth, under the kind patronage
of His Excellency the Viceroy; with Jimmy Finnigan in the close
proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete
novelties for the same evening. It made a cheerful note which
appealed to them both; it was a pictorial combination, Hilda and
Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was something of gay
burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the crumbling plaster
of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their shoes.
Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a
testimony to the difference of her. In Alicia's smile there was a
satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of
things.
The life of the market, the bazar, was all awake and moving. They
rolled up through a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the
moment and abandoned, where the leisurely crowd with calculation
under its turbans, swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a
palm-dealer ran out of bounds and made a little grove before the
stall of the man who sold pith helmets. The warm air held the
smell of all sorts of commodities; there was a great hum of small
transactions, clink of small profits. "It makes one feel immensely
practical and acquisitive," Duff said, looking at the loaded
baskets on the coolies' heads; and he insisted on getting out. "I
am dying to buy an enormous number of desirable things very cheap.
But not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you, nor any ribbons or lace--
is that good lace, Miss Livingstone? Nor even a live duck--really
I am difficult. We might inquire the price of the duck though."
The sense of being contributive to his holiday satisfaction reigned
in her. She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that
played steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him without her
sanction, how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being.
They made their way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so
many things he wanted to stop before as they went, leaning on his
stick to examine them and delighting in opportunities for making
himself quite ridiculous. The country tobacco-dealer laughed too,
squatting behind his basket--it was a mad sahib, but not madder
than the rest; and there was no hurry. Alicia saw the pink glow of
the roses beyond, where the sun struck across them over the
shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach them by degrees.
They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of climax to the
hour's experience, and after that she was not entirely sure that
the day would be as grey as other days.
This was the flood-time of roses, and it was exquisite in the
flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and
squares of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones. Some of
the stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was
room only for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the
velvety Jacks, the rest over-ran the tables and the floor in
anything that would hold them. The place rioted with the joy and
the passion of roses, for buying and selling. There were other
flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette, but they had a
diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches beside the
triumph of the roses. Farther on, beyond the cage of the money-
changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their
vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling
crowd divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates. In
this part there were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table-
servants, and fat Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses,
Armenian women with embroidered shawls drawn over their heads,
sailors of the port. They came to pass that way, through the
sweetness of it, and this made a coign of vantage for the men with
trays who were very persecuting there. Lindsay and Alicia stood
together beside the roses, her hands were deep in them, he
perceived with pleasure that their glow was reflected in her face.
"No," she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man who sat cross-
legged in muslin draperies on the table. "These are certainly of
yesterday. There is no scent left in them--and look!" she held up
the bunch and shook it, a shower of pink petals and drops of water
fell upon the round of her arm above the wrist where the laces of
her sleeve slipped back. Lindsay had something like a poetic
appreciation of her, observing her put the bunch down tenderly as
if she would not, if she could help it, find fault with any rose.
The dealer drew out another, and handed it to her; a long-stemmed,
wide-open, perfect thing, and it was then that her glance of
delight, wandering, fell upon Laura Filbert. Lindsay looked
instantly, curiously in the same direction, and Alicia was aware
that he also saw. There ensued a terse moment with a burden of
silence and the strangest misgivings, in which he may have imagined
that he had his part alone but which was the heavier for her
because of him. These two had seen the girl before only under
circumstances that suggested protection, that made excuse, on a
platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her
fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone,
slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the
sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress
was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement
of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away
as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a
sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she offered them
right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a sailor,
who refused the paper. When he rejoined his companions there was a
hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads to look after her.
The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the
"mem" passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good.
He, too, looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to
Alladiah Khan, a man impatient in his religion, who refused it,
mumbling in his beard. With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on
him, saying something. Then Alladiah's green turban shook, his
beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he raised his arm, and Laura in
white astonishment darted from under it. They seldom did that.
Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made
his stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of
Mecca and fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague
thankfulness that it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed.
More plainly she saw the manner of Duff's coming back to the girl
and the way in which, with a look of half-frightened satisfaction,
Laura gave herself up to him. He was hurrying her away without a
word. Her surrender was as absolute and final as if she had been
one of those desirable things he said he wanted to buy. Alicia
intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being forgotten, stepping
up to them. "Take her home in the carriage," she said to Duff,
"and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time still--quite
a long time." She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke, but made
no answer to the "Good-morning! God bless you!" with which the
girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked
down at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn
of it deep into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt
themselves more to suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic
of her, for she was not aware that she still held it, but that was
the only rose she brought away.
CHAPTER XVII
Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her, green
where the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and
yellow in the distance, where the light lay on the top of the
withered grass. It was like a great English park, with something
of the village common, only the trees, for the most part, made
avenues over it, running an arbitrary half-mile this way or that,
with here and there a group dotted about in the open; and the
brimming tank-pots were of India, and of nowhere else in the world.
The sun was dipping behind the masts that showed where the straight
border of the river ran, and the shadows of the pipals and the
banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light struck on the
stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee which made
behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push them
back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta,
the teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that
chaste frontage, and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here
cattle grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles
of the trees. Calcutta the capital indeed was superimposed; one
felt that always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the
air among the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but
luminous space and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and
winging of crows. What persisted then under the span of the sky,
was the old India of rich tradition, and a bullock beneath the
yoke, jogging through the evening to his own place where the blue
haze hid the little huts on the rim of the city, the real India,
and the rest was fiction and fabrication.
The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its
solace for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long
the sun had been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and
now the air had a sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of
harvests. The crickets had been at it since five o'clock, and
though the city rose not half a mile across the grass, it was the
crickets she heard and listened to. In making private statements
of things, the crickets offered a chorus of agreement, and they
never interrupted. Not that she had much to consider, poor girl,
which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One might have
thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not
badly equipped. She had all the argument--which is like saying all
the arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only
practical outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in
the small value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with
cynicism and made it more piquant. She did not altogether scorn
her own intelligence as the result, because it had always admitted
the existence of dominating facts that belonged to life and not to
reason; it was only the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one
herself. One might think round such a fact and talk round it--
there were less exquisite satisfactions--but it was not to be cowed
or abated, and in the end the things one said were only words.
Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through
her veins with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she
saw helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her
profound sweet presciences. A coolie-woman, carrying a basket on
her head, stopped and looked at her with full glistening eyes; they
smiled at each other, and passed on. She found herself upon a
narrow path, worn smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made
in its devious way toward the rich mists where the sun had gone
down; and Hilda followed, breasting the glow and the colour and the
wide, flat expanse, as if in the India of it there breathed
something exquisitely sensuous and satisfying. It struck sharp on
her senses; she almost consciously thanked Heaven for such a
responsive set of nerves. Always and everywhere she was intensely
conscious of what she saw and of how she saw it; and it was
characteristic of her that she found in that saffron February
evening, spreading to a purple rim, with wandering points of colour
in a soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a
mise en scene for her own complication. She could take a tenderly
artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result
that came of examining it in other lights. And she did, aware,
with smiling eyes, of how full of colour, how dramatic it was.
Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome
seemed a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time
for that. For the present, there on the Maidan with the south
wind, she took it with her head thrown up, in her glad, free
fashion, as something that came in the way of life--the delightful
way of life--with which it was absurd to quarrel because of a
slight inconvenience or incongruity, things which helped, after
all, to make existence fascinating.
A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken
stem, dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up, and
drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes
and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her
feet. All India and all her passion was in that violent,
penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as she gave her senses up to
it, a kind of dual perception of being near the core, the throbbing
centre of the world's meaning.
Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay. He hastened to meet
her, in his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that
lay between them and gave transit to her senses from that other
plane. They encountered each other in full recognition of the
happiness of the accident, and he turned back with her as a matter
of course. It was a kind of fruition of all that light and colour
and passive delight that they should meet and take a path together;
she at least was aware. Hilda asked him if he was quite all right
now, and he said "Absolutely" with a shade of emphasis. She
charged him with having been a remarkable case, and he piled up
illustrations of what he felt able to do in his convalescence.
There was something in the way he insisted upon his restoration
which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.
"And I hear I may congratulate you," she said. "You have got what
you wanted."
"Someone has told you," he retorted, "who is not friendly to it."
"On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial
support--Alicia Livingstone."
He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for
the first time under such an aspect.
"She has been immensely kind," he asserted. "But she wasn't at
first. At first, she was hostile, like you, only that her
hostility was different, just as she is different. She had to be
converted," he went on hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I
imagined. I think she takes a kind of pride in conquering her
prejudices, and being true to the real breadth of her nature."
"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad. She might very
well be content that it is charming. And what is the difference
between her hostility and mine?"
"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon
her, "is that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a
dramatic gesture--"walks between us."
"I know. I tried to stiffen her. I appealed to the worst in her
on your behalf. But it wasn't any use. She succumbed, as you say,
to her nobler instincts."
Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and
spent her paradox in twirling it.
"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all
proportion," Duff said. "And I should be sorry--do you really want
me to talk about this?"
"Don't be stupid. Of course."
He took her permission with plain avidity.
"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody
else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's
tremendous desirability. Her beauty would go for something
anywhere, but I don't want to insist on that. What marks her even
more is the wonderful purity and transparency of her mind; one
doesn't find it often now, women's souls are so clouded with
knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals especially to me
because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm only a man.
Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature like
that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily
life. That was my chance. I could offer her her place. It's not
much to counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking,
to equalise matters."
Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an
emanation from him. It was his enthusiasm. A cheerfulness had
come upon him instead. Also what he said had something categorical
in it, something crisp and arranged. He himself received benefit
from the consideration of it, and she was aware that if this result
followed, her own "conversion" was of very secondary importance.
"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.
"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so
plainly right that nobody will think twice about it," Duff went on
in an encouraged voice. "It's odd how one's ideas materialise. I
want her drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk
cushions."
"When is it to happen?"
"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."
"Ah! then there will be time. Time to get the white and gold
furniture. It wouldn't be my taste quite. Is it Alicia's?"
"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine. We have talked it over
together. And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In
matters of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"
"Oh Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss
Filbert now?"
"At Number Ten, Middleton Street."
"With the Livingstones?"
"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in
her kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the
club, and Laura is to stay with them until she sails."
"She sails?"
"In the Sutlej, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave.
She really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an
accommodating old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her
to some dear old friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people
of her own. She's got a notion of taking lessons of some kind--
perfectly unnecessary, but if it amuses her--during the summer.
And of course she will have to get her outfit together."
"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you?"
"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up
together."
"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I
fancy I would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why
should one offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda
absently.
The coolie track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan,
where it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There
was nothing about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked
turf underfoot. The cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man a
little way off was a man, and not a horse, but did hardly more.
"I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let us sit down," and sank
comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay dropped beside her and
they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket chirped noisily a few
inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it
ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening
sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz
points in the level glow.
"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to
see its proportions more clearly now."
Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully
good sort, Duff," she said; "I wish you were out of Asia."
"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he
examined himself to see.
"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not
endure, you know."
"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a
maxim, and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they
sat without speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across
the river, and left something chill and empty in the spaces about
them. Things grew hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited
expanse of commonplace, grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps
on the roads came very near. "What a difference it makes!" Lindsay
exclaimed, looking after the vanished light, "and how suddenly it
goes!"
Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen
sadness far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she
said, with apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with
both hands." She made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his
feet, helped her. As if the moment had some special significance,
something to be underlined, he kept her hand while he said, "you
will always represent something in mine. I can depend upon you--I
shall know that you are there."
"Yes," she said sincerely. "Yes indeed," and it seemed to her that
he looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was
only another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they
turned to walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever
has taken a good deal out of you."
CHAPTER XVIII
Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones'
roof followed each other into the past that is not much pondered.
Alicia at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta
disappeared entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory
there was a rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to
stir up the dust. It gave a soothing wistfulness to discontent to
think this, which a discerning glance might often have seen about
her lips and eyebrows as she lay back among her carriage cushions
under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening
drive. She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that
or any impression. Such things require range and atmosphere, and
she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was
blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There was certainly no room
for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste. Also
it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her
hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from
the rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with
dilemmas and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget.
As a matter of fact there were not very many days, and they were
largely filled with millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses,
when they asserted themselves, were more or less overswept, as if
for the sake of decency, by billows of spotted muslin, with which
Celine, who felt the romance of the situation, made herself
marvellously clever. Celine, indeed, was worth in this exigency
many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend" her to the fullest
extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert contriving and
arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's beneficence. It
became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the source, and
they stitched together while she, with careful reserves, watched
for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from the
lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her
Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of
Mrs. Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations.
She had several times felt, seated beside Celine, how grateful she
ought to be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths
of such pleasantness, though Celine herself seemed to stand rather
far from their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs.
Sand came occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had
always a fresh remembrance of how much she had done in giving so
generous a friend as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was
reasonable enough that there should be a falling off in Mr.
Lindsay's attendance just now in Laura's absence, but when they
were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would be very few evening
services when she, the Ensign, would miss their bright faces.
Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made tea, and
pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat. He
found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant. She sat up
straight, and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of
year up-country, but nothing at all to complain of yet. He also
discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the
muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to
make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very
expensive to take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the
costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing
before him for the first time in secular dress. The stays insisted
a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice
betrayed her narrow-chested. Above its frills her throat protruded
unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading bird's,
and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her
sides. She had put on the hat that matched; it was the kind of
pretty disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow
of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that
way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the
significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant,
its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased.
She made no demand for admiration on this occasion, she seemed
sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time when they
were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines
of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the
conventionalities of the situation.
"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.
The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the
river at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort
had been completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff
had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the
morning. He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed
quarter-deck. She wore her Army clothes--she had come on board in
one of the muslins--and she was softly crying. From the jetty on
the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted
orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the over-ruling sound
of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay
the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on
earth, bearing her heavenly commission.
"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you,
We've laboured together, united in heart,
But now we must close and soon we must part."
They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but
they evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat
down beside the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her
hand. There was a consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort,
which he owed perhaps to a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up
and down before him, between the ranks of the steamer-chairs.
Nevertheless as she presently turned a calmed face to him with her
pale apology he had the sensation of a rebound toward the ideal
that had finally perished in the spotted muslin, and when a little
later he watched the long backward trail of smoke as the steamer
moved down the clear morning river, he reflected that it was a
satisfaction to have prevailed.
The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood,
were to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his
Excellency the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her
invitations, felt an assurance that the steamer must by that time
have reached Aden, and rose almost with buoyancy to the illusion
you can make if you like, with the geographical mile. She could
hardly have left him out in any case--he could almost have demanded
an explanation--since it was one of those parties which she gave
every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus of Hilda Howe.
It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society was so
little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there were
so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would
"mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss
Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so
fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced.
She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level,
it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner-
party; and it was seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking,
to carry away a bone from the feast. If you found this
reprehensible she would have told you she had observed they do it
in Japan, where manners are the best in the world.
Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party
than I, with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself
inclined to do. To me it is depressing and a little cruel to be
compelled to betray the inadequacy of the personal element at
Alicia's banquets, especially in connection with the conspicuous
excellence of the cooking. A poverty of cuisine would have
provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would have been
offered up to the gods that season. The limitations of her
resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact
that she asked such a person as the Head of the Department of
Education, with no better reason than that he had laid almost the
whole of Shelley under critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta
University. There was also a civilian who had written a few years
before an article in the Nineteenth Century about the aboriginal
tribes of the Central Provinces, and the lady attached to him, who
had been at one time the daughter of a Lieutenant-Governor. The
Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry loved meeting anybody
that was clever, admired brains beyond anything; and an A.D.C. who
had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was; and Captain Salter
Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when they
were produced in Simla and was invariably considered up there to
have done them better than any professional they have at home,
though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the
entertainment happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay
and Stephen Arnold as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with
the contortionist as it were at the apex, on his head. The
Livingstones had family connection with a leading London publishing
firm, and Alicia may possibly have reflected as she surveyed her
completed work, how much better than capering captains she could
have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be admitted likely that she
would harbour, at that particular instant, so ungracious a thought.
And indeed it was a creditable party, it would almost unanimously
call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe made the most
agreeable excitement, you might almost have heard the heart-beats
of the wife of the literary civilian, as she just escaped being
introduced, and so availed herself of the dinner's opportunity for
intimate observation without letting herself in a particle--most
clever. Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed upon the spear, she
always did, and made a gushing little speech with every eye upon
her in the middle of the room, without a thought of consequences.
The A.D.C. was also empresse, one would have thought that he
himself was acting, the way he bowed and picked up Hilda's fan--a
grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the week before,
in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the Commander-in-
Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the newly introduced Head
of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe that he never
went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too badly
ventilated; and Stephen Arnold arriving late, shot like an
embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was
still engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was
announced.
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.
They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried
priest. She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their
ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious.
Their interests were not in any way diffused, they had one straight
line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above
them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department. The Head
of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a
travelling eye in search over his shoulder of somebody with whom it
would be more advantageous to converse. Yet there were a few
people apparently not altogether indifferent to the presence of
Miss Howe. She saw them here and there, and when Arnold said, "It
must seem odd to you, but I know hardly anybody here. We attempt
no social duties," she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia
had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm
pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the
world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and
their dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed
eyebrow and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along,
as it were, in their direction. She was full that night of a
triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a
human unit. There was that in her blood which assured her of a
welcome, it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her
force, her distinction among other women. She pressed forward to
human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter
of course, going towards the people who were not indifferent to the
fact that she was there, who could not be entirely, since they had
some sort of knowledge of her.
In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged
in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her. She
encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then
turning she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places--
were no longer in her path. One lady put herself at a safe
distance and then bowed, with much cordiality. It was extraordinary
in a group of five how many glistening shoulders would be presented,
quite without offence, to her approach. Mrs. Winstick had hidden
behind the Superintendent of Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was
explaining, between spoonfuls of strawberry ice, her terrible
situation. And from the lips of another lady whose face she knew,
she heard after she had passed, "Don't you think it's rather an
omnium gatherum?"
It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment with serious
interest, how the little world about them had the same negative
attitude for the missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a
hardly perceptible difference. Within its limits there was plainly
no room for him either. His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed
with the kind of respect which implies distance, and in the
wandering eyes of the others it was plain that he did not exist.
She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that he carried
himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious. Expecting
nothing he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd, and
in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their
mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the
unconscious one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too
deep to let these things hurt her, she looked down and saw the
soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom,
gliding smoothly over. They brought no stereotype to her smile, no
dissonance to what she found to say. When at last she and Arnold
sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she
herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it
without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social
manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering up her egotism
that way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one
could hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her
pause. She anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was
relieved to find in her light comment that she took the typical
Mrs. Winstick less seriously than he had supposed when they drove
away from the Livingstones'. It could not occur to him to correct
the impression he had then by the sound of his own voice uttering
sympathy.
"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff,"
she said. "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the
wave's reflection."
"It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there," said the
priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of
high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,--"and there, I
think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience
of the tides and a full beating upon many shores--"
"Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even," she said half-
reflectively, "when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I
am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always
with the calling in my ears--" She seemed to have dropped
altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing,
because he could not understand.
"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it?
One doesn't blame these people. They are stupid--that's all. They
want the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope--
without the smallest diamond--who does song and dance on Saturday
nights--what can you expect! If I had a great name they would be
pleased enough to see me. It is one of the rewards of the fame."
She was silent for a moment, and then she added, "They are very
poor."
"Those rewards! I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you
were not devoured by thirst for them."
"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never
am."
He took it at its face value. They had had some delightful
conversations. If her words awakened anything in him it was the
remembrance of these. The solace of her companionship presented
itself to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence
another seal; that was all. They sat where they were for half an
hour, and something like antagonism and displeasure towards the
secretaries' wives settled upon them, from which Hilda, interrupting
a glance or two from the ladies purring past, drew suspicion. "I
am going now," she said. "It--it isn't quite suitable here," and
there was just enough suggestion in the point of her fan to make
him think of his frock. "It is an unpardonable truth that if we
stay any longer I shall make people talk about you."
He turned astonished eyes upon her, eyes in which she remembered
afterwards there was absolutely nothing but a literal and pained
apprehension of what she said. "You are a good woman," he
exclaimed. "How could such a thing be possible!"
The faintest embarrassment, the merest suggestion of distress, came
into her face and concentrated in her eyes, which she fixed upon
him as if she would bring his words to the last analysis, and
answer him as she would answer a tribunal.
"A good woman?" she repeated, "I don't know--isn't that a
refinement of virtue? No; standing on my sex I make no claim,
but as PEOPLE go I am good. Yes, I am good."
"In my eyes you are splendid," he replied, content, and gave her
his arm. They went together through the reception-rooms, and the
appreciation of her grew in him. If in the bright and silken
distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a
cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it.
But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he
uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the
sensibility of swine.
"Yes," she laughed into her good-night to him, "but I'm not sure
that it isn't better to be the pig than the pearl."
CHAPTER XIX
"Not long ago," said Hilda, "I had a chat with him. We sat on the
grass in the middle of the Maidan, and there was nothing to
interfere with my impressions."
"What were your impressions? No!" Alicia cried. "No! Don't tell
me. It is all so peaceful now, and simple, and straightforward.
You think such extraordinary things. He comes here quite often, to
talk about her. He is coming this afternoon. So I have impressions
too--and they are just as good."
"All right." Hilda crossed her knees more comfortably. "WHAT did
you say the Surgeon-Major paid for those Teheran tiles?"
"Something absurd--I've forgotten. He writes to her regularly,
diary letters, by every mail."
"Do you tell him what to put into them?"
"Hilda, sometimes--you're positively gross."
"I daresay, my dear. You didn't come out of a cab, and you never
are. I like being gross, I feel nearer to nature then, but I don't
say that as an excuse. I like the smell of warm kitchens and the
talk of bus-drivers, and bread and herrings for my tea--all the low
satisfactions appeal to me. Beer, too, and hand-organs."
"I don't know when to believe you. He talks about her quite
freely, and--and so do I. She is really interesting in her way."
"And in perspective."
"Why should you be odiously smart. He and Stephen"--her glance was
tentative--"have made it up."
"Oh?"
"He admits now that Stephen was justified, from his point of view.
But of course that is easy enough when you have come off best."
"Of course."
"Hilda, what do you THINK?"
"Oh, I think it's deplorable--you have always known what I think.
Have you seen him lately--I mean your cousin?"
"He lunched with us yesterday. He was more enthusiastic than ever
about you."
"I wish you could tell me that he hadn't mentioned my name. I
don't want his enthusiasm. The pit gives one that."
"Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of--of what it ought to be?
What is the principal part of it? Not enthusiasm--adoration?"
"Goodness, no! Something quite different and quite simple--too
simple to explain. Besides, it is a thing that requires the
completest ignorance to discuss comfortably. Do you want me to
vivisect my soul? You yourself, can you talk about what most
possesses you?"
"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at
the same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah! Mr. Lindsay."
There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss
Howe's greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this
made a difference, and that he must find other things to say. He
found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish
her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed
satisfied to abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place
in the conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about
cream and sugar. Alicia waited, it was her way; she sank almost
palpably into the tapestries until some reviving circumstance
should bring her out again, a process which was quite compatible
with her little laughs and comments. She waited, offering repose,
and unconscious even of that. You know Hilda Howe as a creature of
bold reflections. Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the teapot,
the conviction visited her that a sex three-quarters of this fibre
explained the monastic clergy.
"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the
impossible," Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home
solvent."
"I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm.
He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll
combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between
the acts. The only way it would go, in this capital."
"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed; "I've never seen one of
his plays--doesn't it sound terrible!"
"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should
like to, for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to
deliver to a scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's
no meaning. You see he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would
be a tame travesty--nobody could redeem it alone. You must keep to
the old situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any
part of Asia."
"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in The Offence
of Galilee?" Duff said. "Everyone who knows the least bit about it
said you were marvellous in that."
"Marvellous," said Alicia
Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking.
The others looked at her absent eyes. "A bazar trick or two helped
me," she said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that
might be hanging on the wall, or visible out of the window.
"And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in
Calcutta?" Duff asked.
"Not in Calcutta, or anywhere. The rest hate it--nobody has a
chance but me," Hilda said, and got up.
"Oh, I don't know," Alicia began, but Miss Howe was already half-
way out of the discussion, in the direction of the door. There was
often a brusqueness in her comings and goings, but she usually left
a flavour of herself behind. One turned with facility to talk
about her, this being the easiest way of applying the stimulus that
came of talking to her. It was more conspicuous than either of
these two realised that they accepted her retreat without a word,
that there was even between them a consciousness of satisfaction
that she had gone.
"This morning's mail," said Alicia, smiling brightly at Lindsay,
"brought you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached
she could be from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed
relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied
herself with the immediate play of circumstance or was lost in her
observation of him.
"How kind of you to think of it," Lindsay said. "This was the
first by which I could possibly hear from England."
"Ah, well, now you will have no more anxiety. Letters from on
board ship are always difficult to write and unsatisfactory,"
Alicia said. Miss Filbert's had been postcards, with a wide
unoccupied margin at the bottom.
"The Sutlej seems to have arrived on the third; that's a day later,
isn't it, than we made out she would be?"
Alicia consulted her memory, and found she couldn't be sure.
Lindsay was vexed by a similar uncertainty, but they agreed that
the date was early in the month.
"Did they get comfortably through the Canal? I remember being tied
up there for forty-eight hours once."
"I don't think she says, so I fancy it must have been all right.
The voyage is bound to do her good. I've asked the Simpsons to
watch particularly for any sign of malaria later, though. One
can't possibly know what she may have imported from that slum in
Bentinck Street."
"And what was it like after Gibraltar?" Alicia asked, with a barely
perceptible glance at the envelope edges showing over his breast-
pocket.
"I'll look," and he sorted one out. It was pink and glossy, with a
diagonal water-stripe. Lindsay drew out the single sheet it
contained, and she could see that every line was ruled and faintly
pencilled. "Let me see," said he. "To begin at the beginning.
'We arrived home on the third,'--you see it was the third,--'making
very slow progress the last day on account of a fog in the
Channel'--ah, a fog in the Channel!--'which was a great
disappointment to some on board who were impatient to meet their
loved ones. One lady had not seen her family of five for seven
years. She said she would like to get out and swim, and you could
not wonder. She was my s--stable companion."
"Quaint!" said Alicia.
"She has picked up the expression on board. 'So--so she told me
this.' Oh yes. 'Now that it is all over I have written the voyage
down among my mercies in spite of three days' sickness, when you
could keep nothing on--' What are those two words, Miss
Livingstone? I can't quite make them out."
"'Your'--cambric?--stom--'stomach'--'your stomach.'"
"Oh, quite so. Thanks!--'in the Bay of Biscay.' You see it WAS
rough after Gib. 'Everybody was'--yes. 'The captain read Church
of England prayers on Sunday mornings, in which I had no objection
to join, and we had mangoes every day for a week after leaving
Ceylon.'"
"Miss Filbert was so fond of mangoes," Alicia said.
"Was she? 'The passengers got up two dances, and quite a number of
gentlemen invited me, but I declined with thanks, though I would
not say it is wrong in itself.'" Lindsay seemed to waver; her
glance went near enough to him to show her that his face had a red
tinge of embarrassment. He looked at the letter uncertainly, on
the point of folding it up.
"You see she hasn't danced for so long," Alicia put in quickly;
"she would naturally hesitate about beginning again with anybody
but you. I shouldn't wonder," she added gently, "if she never
does, with anybody else."
"I know it's an idea some women have," he replied. "I think it's
rather--nice."
"And her impressions of the Simpsons--and Plymouth?"
"She goes on to that." He reconsulted the letter. "'Mr. and Mrs.
Simpson met me as expected and welcomed me very affably.' She has
got hold of a wrong impression there, I fancy; the Simpsons
couldn't be 'affable.' 'They seem very kind and pleasant for such
stylish people, and their house is lovely, with electric light in
the parlour and hot and cold water throughout. They seem very
earnest people and have family prayers regularly, but I have not
yet been asked to lead. Four servants come in to prayers. Mr. and
Mrs. Simpson are deeply interested in the work of the Army, though
I think Plymouth as a whole is more taken up with the C.M.S.; but
we cannot have all things.' Dear me, yes! I remember those
evangelical teas and the disappointment that I could not speak more
definitely about the work among the Sontalis."
"Fancy her having caught the spirit of the place already!"
exclaimed Alicia. "He went on: 'Mr. and Mrs. Simpson have a
beautiful garden and grow most of their own vegetables. We sit in
it a great deal and I think of all that has passed. I hope ever
that it has been for the best and pray for you always. Oh that
your feet may be set in the right path and that we may walk hand in
hand upon the way to Zion!'" Lindsay lowered his voice and read
the last sentences rapidly, as if the propulsion of the first part
of the letter sent him through them. Then he stopped abruptly, and
Alicia looked up.
"That's all, only," he added, with an awkward smile, "the usual
formula."
"'God bless you'?" she asked, and he nodded.
"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.
She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of those
steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to
possibilities. She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see
her then. She had not spoken to him since the night of the
Viceroy's party, when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-
gharry to wish him good-night, and he walked home alone under the
stars, trying to remember a line of Horace, a chaste one, about
woman's beauty. She sent the note by post. There was no answer;
but that was as usual; there never was an answer unless something
prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes before the time.
When the time arrived she sat under the blue umbrellas devising
what she would say, creating fifty different forms of what he would
say, while the hands slipped round the clock past the moment that
should have brought his step to the door. Hilda noted it, and
compared her watch. A bowl of roses stood on a little table near a
window; she got up and went to it, bending over and rearranging the
flowers. The light fell on her and on the roses; it was a
beautiful attitude, and when at a footfall she looked up
expectantly it was more beautiful. But it was only another
boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves, with a highly varnished complexion, who
took off his hat elaborately as he passed the open door. She
became conscious of her use of the roses, and abandoned them.
Presently she sat down on a bentwood rocking-chair, and swayed to
and fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence. Half an hour later she
was still sitting there. Her face had changed, something had faded
in it; her gaze at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when
she glanced at the empty door it was with timidity. Arnold had not
come and did not come.
The evening passed without explanation, and next morning the post
brought no letter. It was simplest to suppose that her own had not
reached him, and Hilda wrote again. The second letter she sent by
hand, with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature. The
messenger brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials,
"J. L. for S. A.," and there was no reply. There remained the
possibility of absence from Calcutta, of illness. That he should
have gone away was most unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only
too probable. Hilda looked from her bedroom window across the
varying expanse of parapeted flat roofs and mosque bubbles that lay
between her and College Street, and curbed the impulse in her feet
that would have resulted in the curious spectacle of Llewellyn
Stanhope's leading lady calling in person at a monastic gate to
express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it was barred.
A situation after all could be too pictorial, looked at from the
point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with
grateful humour across her anxiety. Alicia would have known; but
both the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon,
with Duff Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey. They were
most anxious, Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them.
Could he in the end have gone? There was, of course, the
accredited fount and source of all information, the Father
Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda Howe apply for it!
Llewellyn might write for her; but it was glaringly impossible that
the situation should lay itself so far open to Llewellyn. Looking
in vain for resources she came upon an expedient. She found a
sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy. On it she
wrote with red ink, in the cramped hand of the hired scribe of the
bazar:--
"SIR--Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone
mofussil or England as I have some small business with him. Yours
obedient servant,--WUN SING."
"It can't be forgery," she reflected, "since there isn't a Wun
Sing," and added an artistic postscript, "Boots and shoes verry
much cheap for cash." She made up the envelope to match, and
addressed it with consistent illiteracy to the head of the Mission.
The son of the Chinese basketmaker, who dwelt almost next door,
spoke neither English nor Hindustani, but showed an easy
comprehension of her promise of backsheesh when he should return
with an answer. She had a joyful anticipation, while she waited,
of the terms in which she should tell Arnold how she passed
disguised as a Chinese shoemaker, before the receptive and
courteous consciousness of his spiritual senior; of how she
penetrated, in the suggestion of a pigtail and an unpaid bill,
within the last portals that might be expected to receive her in
the form under which, for example, certain black and yellow posters
were presenting her to the public at that moment. She saw his
scruples go swiftly down before her laughter and the argument of
her tender anxiety, which she was quite prepared to learn foolish
and unnecessary. There was even an adventurous instant in which
she reaped at actual personation of the Chinaman, and she looked in
rapture at the vivid risk of the thing before she abandoned it as
involving too much. She sent no receipt form this time--that was
not the practice of the bazar--and when, hours after, her messenger
returned with weariness and dejection written upon him, in the
characters of a perfunctory Chinese smile, she could only gather
from his negative head and hands that no answer had been given him,
and that her expedient had failed.
Hilda stared at her dilemma. Its properties were curiously simple.
His world and hers, with the same orbit, had no point of contact.
Once swinging round their eastern centre they had come close enough
for these two, leaning very far out, to join hands. When they
loosed it seemed they lost.
The more she gazed at it the more it looked a preposterous thing
that in a city vibrant with human communication by all the methods
which make it easy, it should be possible for one individual thus
to drop suddenly and completely from the knowledge of another--a
mediaeval thing. Their isolation as Europeans of course accounted
for it; there was no medium in the brown population that hummed in
the city streets. Hilda could not even bribe a servant without
knowing how to speak to him. She ravaged the newspapers; they
never were more bare of reference to consecrated labours. The
nearest approach to one was a paragraph chronicling a social
evening given by the Wesleyans in Sudder Street, with an exhibition
of the cinematograph. In a moment of defiance and determination
she sent a telegram studiously colourless, "Unable find you wish
communicate please inform. A. Cassidy." Arnold had never ignored
the name she was born to, in occasional scrupulous moments he
addressed her by it; he would recognise and understand. There was
no reply.
The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it,
waiting. His silence adding itself up, brought her a kind of shame
for the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the
further schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her
unsuccessful efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them
increased it. His behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting
against it twenty explanations, but not the futility of what she
had done. Her resentment of that undermined all the fairness of
her logic and even triumphed over the sword of her suspense. She
never quite gave up the struggle, but in effect she passed the week
that intervened pinioned in her unreason--bands that vanished as
she looked at them, only to tie her thrice in another place.
Life became a permanent interrogation point. Waiting under it,
with a perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy. The
sun of March had been increasing, and the air of one particular
Saturday afternoon had begun to melt and glow and hang in the
streets with a kind of inertia, like a curtain that had to be
parted to be penetrated. Hilda came into the house and faced the
stairs with an inclination to leave her body on the ground-floor
and mount in spirit only. When she glanced in at the drawing-room
door and saw Arnold sitting under the blue umbrellas, a little
paler, a thought more serene than usual, she swept into the room as
if a tide carried her, and sank down upon a footstool close to him,
as if it had dropped her there. He had risen at her appearance, he
was all himself but rather more the priest, his face of greeting
had exactly its usual asking intelligence but to her the fact that
he was normal was lost in the fact that he was near. He held out
his hand but she only sought his face, speechless, hugging her
knees.
"You are overcome by the sun," he said. "Lie down for a moment,"
and again he offered her a hand to help her to rise. She shook her
head but took his hand, enclosing it in both of hers with a sort of
happy deliberation, and drew herself up by it, while her eyes,
shining like dark surfaces of some glorious consciousness within,
never left his face. So she stood beside him with her head bowed,
still dumb. It was her supreme moment; life never again brought
her anything like it. It was not that she confessed so much as
that she asserted, she made a glowing thing plain, cried out to
him, still standing silent, the deep-lying meaning of the tangle of
their lives. She was shaken by a pure delight, as if she unclosed
her hand to show him a strange jewel in her palm, hers and his for
the looking. The intensity of her consciousness swept round him
and enclosed him, she knew this profoundly, and had no thought of
the insulation he had in his robe. The instant passed; he stood
unmoved definitely enough, yet some vibration in it reached him,
for there was surprise in his involuntary backward step.
"You must have thought me curiously rude," he said, as if he felt
about for an explanation, "but your letters were only given to me
an hour ago. We have all been in retreat, you know."
"In RETREAT!" Hilda exclaimed. "Ah, yes. How foolish I have been!
In retreat," she repeated softly, flicking a trace of dust from his
sleeve. "Of course."
"It was held in St. Paul's College," Stephen went on, "by Father
Neede. Shall we sit down? And of course at such times no
communications reach us, no letters or papers."
"No letters or papers," Hilda said, looking at him softly, as it
were, through the film of the words. They sat down, he on the
sofa, she on a chair very near it. There was another placed at a
more usual distance, but she seemed incapable of taking the step or
two toward it, away from him.
Stephen gave himself to the grateful sense of her proximity. He
had come to sun himself again in the warmth of her fellowship; he
was stirred by her emphasis of their separation and reunion. "And
what, please," he asked, "have you been doing? Account to me for
the time."
"While you have been praying and fasting? Wondering what you were
at, and waiting for you to finish. Waiting," she said, and clasped
her knees with her intent look again, swaying a little to and fro
in her content, as if that which she waited for had already come,
full, and very desirable.
"Have you been reading?--"
"Oh, I have been reading nothing! You shall never go into retreat
again," she went on, with a sudden change of expression. "It is
well enough for you, but I am not good at fasting. And I have an
indulgence," she added, unaware of her soft, bright audacity, "that
will cover both our cases."
His face uttered aloud his reflection that she was extravagant.
That it was a pity, but that what was not due to her profession
might be ascribed to the simple, clear impulse of her temperament--
that temperament which he had found to be a well of rare sincerity.
"I am not to go any more into retreat?" he said, in grave
interrogation; but the hint of rebuke in his voice was not in his
heart, and she knew it.
"No!" she cried. "You shall not be hidden away like that. You
shall not go alive into the tomb and leave me at the door. Because
I cannot bear it."
She leaned toward him, and her hand fell lightly on his knee. It
was a claiming touch, and there was something in the unfolded
sweetness of her face that was not ambiguous. Arnold received the
intelligence. It came in a vague grey monitory form, a cloud, a
portent, a chill menace; but it came, and he paled under it. He
seemed to lean upon his hands, pressed one on each side of him to
the seat of the sofa for support, and he looked in fixed silence at
hers, upon his knee. His face seemed to wither, new lines came
upon it as the impression grew in him; and the glamour faded out of
hers as she was sharply reminded, looking at him, that he had not
traversed the waste with her, that she had kept her vigils alone.
Yet it was all said and done, and there was no repentance in her.
She only gathered herself together, and fell back, as it were, upon
her magnificent position. As she drew her hand away, he dropped
his face into the cover of his own, leaning his elbow on his knee,
and there was a pulsing silence. The instant prolonged itself.
"Are you praying?" Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a
childlike note; and he shook his head. There was another,
instant's pause, and she spoke again.
"Are you so grieved, then," she said, "that this has come upon us?"
Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands, and
looking at the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the
heart of the natural man in him came up and stained his face, his
forehead under the thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above
the white band that was his badge of difference from other men.
"I--fear--I hardly understand," he said. The words fell cramped
and singly, and his lip twitched. "It--it is impossible to think--"
He looked as if he dared not lift his head.
One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in
the wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave
silence. Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on
the brink of her words just long enough to ask whether they would
hurt him. Seeing that they would, she nevertheless plunged, but
with infinite compassion and consideration. She spoke like an
agent of Fate, conscious and grieved.
"_I_ understand," she said simply. "Sometimes, you know, we are
quicker. And you in your cell, how should you find out? That is
why I must tell you, because, though I am a woman, you are a
priest. Partly for that reason I may speak, partly because I love
you, Stephen Arnold, better and more ardently than you can ever
love me, or anybody, I think, except perhaps your God. And I am
tired of keeping silence."
She was so direct, so unimpassioned, that half his distress turned
to astonishment, and he faced her as if a calm and reasoned hand
had been laid upon the confusion in him. Meeting his gaze, she
unbarred a floodgate of happy tenderness in her eyes.
"Love!" he gasped in it, "I have nothing to do with that."
"Oh," she said, "you have everything to do with it."
Something thrilled him without asking his permission, assuring him
that he was a man--until then a placid theory with an unconscious
basis. It was therefore a blow to his saintship, or it would have
been, but he warded it off, flushed and trembling. It was as if he
had been ambuscaded. He had to hold himself from the ignominy of
flight; he rose to cut his way out, making an effort to strike with
precision.
"Some perversity has seized you," he said. The muscles about his
mouth quivered, giving him a curious aspect. "You mean nothing of
what you say."
"Do you believe that?"
"I--I cannot think anything else. It is the only way I can--I can--
make excuse."
"Ah, don't excuse me!" she murmured, with an astonishing little gay
petulance.
"You cannot have thought--" in spite of himself he made a step
towards the door.
"Oh, I did think--I do think. And you must not go." She too stood
up, and stayed him. "Let us at least see clearly." There was a
persuading note in her voice, one would have thought that she was
dealing with a patient or a child. "Tell me," she clasped her
hands behind her back and looked at him in marvellous simple
candour, "do I really announce this to you? Was there not in
yourself anywhere--deep down--any knowledge of it?"
"I did not guess--I did not dream!"
"And--now?" she asked.
A heavenly current drifted from her, the words rose and fell on it
with the most dazing suggestion in their soft hesitancy. It must
have been by an instinct of her art that her hand went up to the
cross on Arnold's breast and closed over it, so that he should see
only her. The familiar vision of her stood close, looking things
intolerably new and different. Again came out of it that sudden
liberty, that unpremeditated rush and shock in him. He paled with
indignation, with the startled resentment of a woman wooed and
hostile. His face at last expressed something definite, it was
anger; he stepped back and caught at his hat. "I am sorry," he
said, "I am sorry. I thought you infinitely above and beyond all
that."
Hilda smiled and turned away. If he chose it was his opportunity
to go, but he stood regarding her, twirling his hat. She sat down,
clasping her knees, and looked at the floor. There was a square of
sunlight on the carpet, and motes were rising in it.
"Ah well, so did I," she said meditatively, without raising her
eyes. Then she leaned back in the chair and looked at him, in her
level simple way.
"It was a foolish theory," she said, "and--now--I can't understand
it at all. I am amazed to find that it even holds good with you."
It was so much in the tone of their usual discussions that Arnold
was conscious of a lively relief. The instinct of flight died down
in him; he looked at her with something like inquiry.
"It will always be to me curious," she went on, "that you could
have thought your part in me so limited, so poor. That is enough
to say. I find it hard to understand, anybody would, that you
could take so much good from me and not--so much more." She opened
her lips again, but kept back the words. "Yes," she added, "that
is enough to say."
But for the colourless face and the tenseness about her lips it
might have been thought that she definitely abandoned what she had
learned she could not have. There was a note of acquiescence and
regret in her voice, of calm reason above all; and this sense
reached him, induced him to listen, as he generally listened, for
anything she might find that would explain the situation. His
fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain,
to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested
mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them,
wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget
that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself. He
looked into her upturned face and saw that her eyes were swimming.
"Never!" he said, "Never!" but he walked to the nearest chair and
sat down. He seemed suddenly endowed with the courage to face this
problem, and his head, as it rose in the twilight against the
window, was grave and calm. Without a word a great tenderness of
understanding filled the space between them; an interpreting
compassion went to and fro. Suddenly a new light dawned in Hilda's
eyes, she leaned forward and met his in an absorption which caught
them out of themselves into some space where souls wander, and
perhaps embrace. It was a frail adventure upon a gaze, but it
carried them infinitely far. The moment died away, neither of them
could have measured it, and when it had finally ebbed--they were
conscious of every subsiding throb--the silence remained, like a
margin for the beauty of it. They sat immovable, while the light
faded. After a time the woman spoke. "Once before," she began,
but he put up his hand, and she stopped. Then as if she would no
longer be restrained. "That is all I want," she whispered. "That
is enough."
For a time they said very little, looking back upon their divine
moment; the shadows gathered in the corners of the room and made
quiet conversation which was almost audible in the pauses. Then
Hilda began to speak, steadily, calmly. You, too, would have
forgotten her folly in what she found to say, as Arnold did; you
too would have drawn faith and courage from her face. One would
not be irreverent, but if this woman were convicted of the
unforgiveable sin, she could explain it, and obtain justification
rather than pardon. Her horizon had narrowed, she sought now only
that it should enfold them both. She begged that he would wipe out
her insanity, that he would not send her away. He listened and
melted to conviction.
"Then I may stay?" she said at the end.
"I am satisfied--if a way can be found."
"I will find a way," she replied.
After which he went back through the city streets to his disciples
in new humility and profounder joy, knowing that virtue had gone
out of him. She in her room where she lodged also considered the
miracle, twice wonderful in that it asked no faith of her.
CHAPTER XXI
It is difficult to be precise about such a thing, but I should
think that Hilda gave herself to the marvellous aspect of what had
come and gone between them, for several hours after Arnold left
her. It was not for some time, at all events, that she arrived at
the consideration--the process was naturally downward--that the
soul of the marvel lay in the exact moment of its happening.
Nothing could have been more heaven-sent than her precious
perception, exactly then, that before the shining gift of Arnold's
spiritual sympathy, all her desire for a lesser thing from him must
creep away abashed for ever. Even when the lesser thing, by
infinitely gradual expansion, again became the greater, it remained
permanently leavened and lifted in her by the strange and lovely
incident that had taken for the moment such command of her and of
him. She would not question it or reason about it, perhaps with an
instinct to avert its destruction; she simply drew it deeply into
her content. Only its sweet deception did not stay with her, and
she let that go with open hands. She wanted, more than ever, the
whole of Stephen Arnold, all that was so openly the Mission's and
all that was so evidently God's. It will be seen that she felt in
no way compelled to advise him of this her backsliding. I doubt
whether such a perversion of her magnificent course of action ever
occurred to her. It was magnificent, for it entailed a high
disregarding stroke; it implied a sublime confidence of what the
end would be, a capacity to wait and endure. She smiled buoyantly,
in the intervals of arranging it, at the idea that Stephen Arnold
stood beyond her ultimate possession.
There were difficulties, but the moment was favourable to her, more
favourable than it would have been the year before, or any year but
this. Before ten days had passed she was able to write to Arnold
describing her plan, and she was put to it to keep the glow of
success out of her letter. She kept it out, that, and everything
but a calm and humble statement--any Clarke Brother might have
dictated it--of what she proposed to do. Perhaps the intention was
less obvious than the desire that he should approve it.
The messenger waited long by the entrance to the Mission House for
an answer, exchanging, sitting on his feet, the profane talk of the
bazar with the gatekeeper of the Christians. Stephen was in
chapel. There was no service; he had half an hour to rest in and
he rested there. He was speculating, in the grateful dimness,
about the dogma--he had never quite accepted it, though Colquhoun
had--of the intercessory power of the souls of saints. A converted
Brahmin, an old man, had died the day before. Arnold luxuriated in
the humility of thinking that he would be glad of any good word
dear old Nourendra Lal could say for him. The chapel was
deliciously refined. The scent of fresh cut flowers floated upon
the continual presence of the incense; a lily outlined its head
against the tall carved altarpiece the Brothers had brought from
Damascus. The seven brass lamps that hung from the rafters above
the altar rails were also Damascene, carved and pierced so that the
light in them was a still thing like a prayer; and the place
breathed vague meanings which did not ask understanding. It was a
refuge from the riot and squalor of the whitewashed streets with a
double value and a treble charm--I.H.S. among plaster gods, a
sanctuary in the bazar. Stephen sat in it motionless, with his
lean limbs crossed in front of him, until the half-hour was up;
then he bent his knee before the altar and went out to meet a
servant at the door with Hilda's letter. The chapel opened upon an
upper verandah, he crossed it to get a better light and stood to
read with his back half turned upon the comers and goers.
It was her first communication since they parted, and in spite of
its colourlessness it seemed to lay strong eager hands upon him,
turning his shoulder that way, upon the world, bending his head
over the page. He had not dwelt much upon their strange
experience, in the days that followed. It had retreated, for him,
behind the veil of tender mystery with which he shrouded, even from
his own eyes, the things that lay between his soul and God. The
space from that day to this had been more than usually full of
ministry; its pure uses had fallen like snow, blotting and
deadening the sudden wonder that blossomed then. Latterly he had
hardly thought of it.
So far was he removed, so deeply drawn again within his familiar
activities, that he regarded Hilda's letter for an instant with a
lip of censure, as if, for some reason, it should not have been
admitted. It was, in a manner, her physical presence, the words
expanded into her, through it she walked back into his life, with
an interrogation. Standing there by the pillar he became gradually
aware of the weight of the interrogation.
A passing Brother cast at him the sweet smile of the cloister.
Arnold stopped him and transferred an immediate duty, which the
other accepted with a slightly exaggerated happiness. They might
have been girls together, with their apologies and protestations.
The other Brother went on in a little glow of pleasure, Arnold
turned back into the chapel, carrying, it seemed to him, a woman's
life in his hand.
He took his seat and folded his arms almost eagerly; there was a
light of concentration in his eye and a line of compression about
his lips which had not marked his meditation upon Nourendra Lal.
The vigour in his face suggested that he found a kind of athletic
luxury in what he had to think about. Brother Colquhoun, with his
flat hat clasped before his breast, passed down the aisle. Stephen
looked up with a trace of impatience. Presently he rose hurriedly
as if he remembered something, and went and knelt before one of
several paintings that hung upon the chapel walls. They were old
copies of great works, discoloured and damaged. They had sailed
round the Cape to India when the century was young, and a lady
friend of the Mission had bought them at the sale of the effects of
a ruined Begum. Arnold was one of those who could separate them
from their incongruous history and consecrate them over again. He
often found them helpful when he sought to lift his spirit, and in
any special matter a special comfort. He bent for ten minutes
before a Crucifixion, and then hastened back to his place. Only
one reflection corrected the vigorous satisfaction with which he
thought out Hilda's proposition. That disturbed him in the middle
of it, and took the somewhat irrelevant form of a speculation as to
whether the events of their last meeting should have had any place
in his Thursday confession. He was able to find almost at once a
conscientious negative for it, and it did not recur again.
He got up reluctantly when the Mission bell sounded, and indeed he
had come to the end of a very absorbing interest. His decision was
final against Hilda's scheme. His worn experience cried out at the
sacrifice in it without the illumination--which it would certainly
lack--of religious faith. She confessed to the lack, and that was
all she had to say about her motive, which, of course, placed him
at an immense disadvantage in considering it. But the question
then descended to another plane, became merely a doubt as to the
most useful employment of energy, and that doubt nobody could
entertain long, nobody of reasonable breadth of view, who had ever
seen her expressing the ideals of the stage. Arnold did his best
to ward off all consideration which he could suspect of a personal
origin, but his inveterate self-sacrifice slipped in and counted,
naturally enough, under another guise, against her staying.
He went to his room and wrote to Hilda at once, the kindest,
simplest of letters, but conveying a definitely negative note. He
would have been perhaps more guarded, but it was so plainly his
last word to her; Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure
of his people in ten days' time upon every blank wall. So he gave
himself a little latitude, he let in an undercurrent of gentle
reminiscence, of serious assurance as to the difference she had
made. And when he had finally bade her begone to the light and
fulness of her own life, and fastened up his letter, he
deliberately lifted it to his lips and placed a trembling, awkward
kiss upon it, like the kiss of an old man, perfunctory yet bearing
a tender intention.
The Livingstones and Duff Lindsay had come back, the people from
Surrey having been sped upon their way to the Far East. Stephen
remembered with more than his usual relish an engagement to dine
that evening in Middleton Street. He involuntarily glanced at his
watch. It was half-past one. The afternoon looked arid,
stretching between. Consulting his tablets he found that he had
nothing that was really of any consequence to do. There were
items, but they were unimportant, transferable. He had dismissed
Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she helped to illumine showed
seductively at the end of his day. He made an errand involving a
long walk, and came back at an hour which left nothing but evensong
between him and eight o'clock.
He was suddenly aware as he talked to her later, of a keener edge
to his appreciation of the charm of Alicia Livingstone. Her
voyage, he assured her, had done her all the good in the world.
Her delicate bloom had certainly been enhanced by it, and the
graceful spring of her neck and her waist seemed to have its
counterpart in a freshened poise of the agreeable things she found
to say. It was delightful the way she declared herself quite a
different being, and the pleasure with which she moved, dragging
fascinating skirts behind her, about the room. She made more of an
impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had ever done
before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had greater
relief, and her charm more freedom. Lindsay was there, and Arnold
glanced from one to the other of them, first with a start then with
a smile, at the recollection of Hilda's conception of their
relations. If this were a type and instance of hopeless love he
had certainly misread all the songs and sayings. He kept the idea
in his mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a
pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in
his curious acumen in such an unwonted direction. It was a very
flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from
him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed
him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St.
Barnabas. It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation
confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned across him toward
Lindsay with occasional references to Laura Filbert, apparently
full of light-heartedness, references which Duff received in the
square-shouldered matter-of-course fashion of his countrymen
approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe. It was
gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the
indrawing of his under-lip, a plaintive twist of expression which
spoke upon the faces of quite half the Order, of patience under
privation.
The atmosphere was one of congratulation, the week's Gazette had
transformed Surgeon-Major Livingstone into Surgeon-Lieutenant-
Colonel. The officer thus promoted, in a particularly lustrous
shirt bosom, made a serious social effort to correspond, and
succeeded in producing more than one story of the Principal Medical
Officer with her Majesty's forces in India, which none of them had
heard before. They were all delighted at Herbert's step, he was
just the kind of person to get a step, and to get it rather
early; a sense of the propriety of it mingled with the general
gratification. There was a feeling of ease among them, too, of the
indefeasibly won, which the event is apt to bring even when the
surgeon-lieutenant-colonelcy is most strikingly deserved. With no
strain imaginable one could see the relaxation.
"We can't do much in celebration," Lindsay was saying, "but I've
got a box at the theatre, if you'll come. Our people had some
pomfret and oysters over on ice from Bombay this morning, and I've
sent my share to Bonsard to see what he can do with it for supper.
Jack Cummins and Lady Dolly are coming. By the way, what do you
think the totalizator paid Lady Dolly on Saturday--six thousand!"
"Rippin'," Herbert agreed. "We'll all come--at least--I don't
know. What do you say, Arnold?"
"Of course Stephen will come," Alicia urged. "Why not?" It was
putting him and his gown at once beyond the operation of vulgar
prejudice, intimating that they quite knew him for what he was.
"What's the piece?" Herbert inquired.
"Oh, the piece isn't up to much, I'm afraid, only that Hilda Howe
is worth seeing in almost anything."
"Thanks," Stephen put in, "but I think, thanks very much, I would
rather not."
"I remember," Alicia said, "you were with us the night she played
in The Offence of Galilee. I don't wonder that you do not wish to
disturb that impression."
Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallised
cherries immediately in front of him, and appeared to consider,
austerely, what form his reply should take. There was an instant's
perceptible pause, and then he merely bowed toward Alicia as if
vaguely to acknowledge the kindness of her recollection. "I
think," he said again, "that I will not accompany you to-night, if
you will be good enough to excuse me."
"You must excuse us both," Alicia said definitely, "I should much
rather stay at home and talk to Stephen."
At this they all cried out, but Miss Livingstone would not change
her mind. "I haven't seen him for three weeks," she said, with
gentle effrontery, making nothing of his presence, "and he's much
more improving than either of you. I also shall choose the better
part."
"How you can call it that, with Hilda in the balance--" Duff
protested.
"But then you've invited Lady Dolly. After winning six thousand
there will be no holding Lady Dolly. She'll be capable of cat-
calls! How I should love," Alicia went on, "to have Hilda meet
her. She would be a mine to Hilda."
"For pity's sake," cried her brother, "stop asking Hilda and people
who are a mine to Hilda! It's too perceptible, the way she digs in
them."
"You dear old thing, you're quite clever to-night! What difference
does it make? They never know--they never dream! I wish I could
dig." Alicia looked pensively at the olive between her finger and
thumb.
"Thank Heaven you can't," Duff said warmly. It was a little odd,
the personal note. Alicia's eyes remained upon the olive.
"It's all she lives for."
"Well," Duff declared, "I can imagine higher ends."
"You're not abusing Hilda!" Alicia said, addressing the olive.
"Not at all. Only vindicating you."
It did single them out, this fencing. Herbert and Arnold sat as
spectators, pushed, in a manner, aside.
"I suppose she will be off soon," Livingstone said.
"Oh, dreadfully soon. On the fifteenth. I had a note from her to-
day."
"Did she say she was going?" Stephen asked quickly.
"She mentioned the Company--she is the Company surely."
"Oh, undoubtedly. May I--might I ask for a little more soda-water,
Alicia?" He made the request so formally that she glanced at him
with surprise.
"Please do--but isn't it very odious, by itself, that way? I
suppose we shouldn't leave out Hamilton Bradley--he certainly
counts."
"For how much?" inquired her brother. "He's going to pieces."
"Hilda can pull him together again," Lindsay said incautiously.
"Has she an influence for good--over him?" Stephen inquired, and
cleared his throat. He caught a glance exchanged, and frowned.
"Oh yes," Duff said, "I fancy it is for good. For good, certainly.
The odd part of it is that he began by having an influence over her
which she declares improved her acting. So that was for good, too,
as it turned out. I think she makes too much of him. To my mind
he speaks like a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like
a bit of consecrated stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and
his thin lips, and his thin eyebrows. Personally, I'm sick of his
eyebrows."
"They'll end by marrying," said Surgeon-Lieut.-Colonel Livingstone.
"HERBERT! How little you know her!"
"It's possible enough," Duff said, "especially if she finds him in
any way necessary to her production of herself. Hilda has knocked
about too much to have many illusions. One is pretty sure she
would place that first."
"You are saying a thing which is monstrous!" cried Alicia.
Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction. "She'll have to
marry him to get rid of him," he said. "Fancy the opportunities of
worrying her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!"
"Oh, if you think Hilda could be WORRIED into anything!" Miss
Livingstone exclaimed derisively. "If the man were irritating, do
you suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means?--"
"She would have him put in irons, no doubt," Herbert retorted, "or
locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the ship's
butcher."
The three laughed immoderately, and Stephen, looking up, came in at
the end with a smile. Alicia pronounced her brother too absurd,
and unfitted by nature to know anything about creatures like Hilda
Howe. "A mere man to begin with," she said. "You haven't the
ghost of a temperament, Herbert; you know you haven't."
"He got's a lovely bedside manner," Lindsay remarked, "and that's
the next thing to it."
"Rubbish! I don't want to hurry you," Alicia glanced at the watch
on her wrist, "but unless you and Herbert want to miss half the
first act you had better be off. Stephen and I will have our
coffee comfortably in the drawing-room and find what excuses we can
for you."
But Stephen put out his hand with a movement of slightly rigid
deprecation.
"If it is not too vacillating of me," he said, "and I may be
forgiven, I think I will change my mind, and go. I have no
business to break up your party, and besides, I shall probably not
have another opportunity--I should rather like to go. To the
theatre, of course, that is. Not to Bonsard's, thanks very much."
"Oh, do come on to Bonsard's," Lindsay said, and Alicia protested
that he would miss the best of Lady Dolly, but Stephen was firm.
Bonsard's was beyond the limit of his indulgence.
CHAPTER XXII
Only the Sphinx confronted them after all when they arrived at the
theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment
sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the
curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the
front of the box. Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows,
which were assisting her a good deal with the house in exploring
and being explored, enabling Colonel John Cummins, who sat by her
side, to observe how very perfect and adorable the cut of her
bodice was. Since Colonel Cummins was accustomed to say in moments
when his humour escaped his discretion, things highly appreciative
of bodices, the role of Lady Dolly's elbows could hardly be
dismissed as unimportant. Moreover, the husband attached to the
elbows belonged to the Department of which Colonel John was the
head, so that they rested, one may say, upon a very special plane.
Alicia disturbed it with the necessity of taking Colonel Cummins
place, which Lady Dolly accepted with admirable spirit; assuring
the usurper, with the most engaging candour, that she simply ought
never to be seen without turquoises. "Believe it or not as you
like, but I love you better every time I see you in that necklace."
Lady Dolly clasped her hands, with her fan in them, in the
abandonment of her affection, and "love you better" floated back
and dispersed itself among the men. Alicia smiled the necessary
acknowledgment. All the women she knew made compliments to her; it
was a kind of cult among them. The men had sometimes an air of
envying their freedom of tongue. "Don't say that," she returned
lightly, "or Herbert will never give me any diamonds." She too
looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice, but said nothing. It
was doubtless precisely because she disdained certain forms of
feminine barter that she got so much for nothing.
"And where," demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, "did you
find that dear sweet little priest? Do introduce him to me--at
least by and by, when I've thought of something to say. Let me
see, wasn't it Good Friday last week? I'll ask him if he had hot-
cross buns--or do people eat those on Boxing Day? Pancakes come in
somewhere, if one could only be sure!"
Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box. His senses were
filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh
correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to
spring from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front,
a kind of lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to
enjoy. They were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed
to proceed partly from the usual sources and partly from their own
personalities; he saw them in a way which underlined their
significance at every point. It seemed to Stephen that in a manner
he profaned this temple of what he held to be poorest and cheapest
in life, a paradox of which he was but dimly aware in his
dejection. A sharp impression of his physical inferiority to the
other men assailed him; his appreciation of their muscular
shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to
which he held failed to offer him a refuge, his eye wandered
restlessly as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing
most present with him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck
of his cassock. He fixed his attention presently in a climax of
passive discomfort on the curtain, where unconsciously, his gaze
crept with a subtle interrogation in it to the wide eyeballs of the
Sphinx.
The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production,
in the middle of the week, and although the gallery and the rupee
seats under it were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both.
When Duff Lindsay said at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he
spoke, I fancy, from the nearest point of view he could take to
that of the Order of St. Barnabas. As a matter of fact, The Victim
of Virtue was up to a very great deal, but its points were so
delicate that one must have been educated rather broadly to grasp
them, which is again perhaps a foolish contrariety of terms. At
all events they carried no appeal to the theatre-goers from the
sailing ships in the river or the regiments in the fort, who turned
as one than that night to Jimmy Finnigan.
Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect. He
savoured the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the
Saturday Review; he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the
productions of this particular playwright through that medium for a
long time. They formed a manifestation of the outer world fit
enough to draw a glance of speculation from the inner; their author
was an acrobat of ideas. Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes
of the angels, yet we have the habit of supposing that they
sometimes look down upon us. It was thus, if the parallel is not
exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of The Victim of
Virtue. His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased
playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the
basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such
things. Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed
promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips as it were, against the
rising of the curtain. He thought of Hilda separately, and he
looked for her upon the boards with the simplicity of a desire to
see the woman he knew.
When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was
to remain with him always as his last impression of an art from
which in all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned.
From the aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she
was mondaine. 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 accentuated the swell of
her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude; it expressed a
temperament, a character, fifty other things; but especially it
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, assuring 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 Cummins? 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 to keep its current and
direction through the floating debris of constrained sayings with
which it was encumbered; 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 amusement, Arnold shifted 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 Cummins lifted in further quotation,
"'To be good AND charming--what a sinful superfluity!' I'm sure
nobody 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 sex 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 embarrassed alacrity to Colonel Cummins,
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 rushing 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 passion. She offered to the shaping circumstance 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 movement 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 passed 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
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 teakwood dressing-table held make up saucers and powder-
puffs and some remnants of cold fowl which had not been partaken
of, apparently, with the assistance of a knife and fork. A candle
stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the looking-
glass, 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 passed 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 damnable
play."
"Damnable? 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 women 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 God 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
"I would simply give anything to be there," Miss Livingstone said,
with a look of sincere desire.
"I should love to have you, but it isn't possible. You might meet
men you knew who had been invited by particular lady friends among
the company."
"Oh, well, that of course would be odious."
"Very, I should think," Hilda agreed. "You must be satisfied with
a faithful report of it. I promise you that."
"You have asked Mr. Lindsay," Alicia complained.
"That's quite a different thing. And if I hadn't, Llewellyn
Stanhope would; Stanhope cherishes Duff as he cherishes the critic
of the Chronicle. He refers to him as a pillar of the legitimate.
Whenever he begs me to turn the Norwegian crank, he says, 'I'm sure
Mr. Lindsay would come.'"
Miss Howe was at the top of the staircase in Middleton Street, on
the point of departure. It was to be the night of her last
appearance for the season and her benefit, followed by a supper in
her honour, at which Mr. Stanhope and his company would take leave
of those whose acquaintance, as he expressed it, business and
pleasure had given them during the months that were past. It was
this function that Alicia, at the top of the staircase, so ardently
desired to attend.
"No, I won't kiss you," Hilda said, as the other put her cool cheek
forward; "I'm so divinely happy--some of it might escape."
Alicia's voice pursued her as she ran downstairs. "Remember," she
said, "I don't approve. I don't at all agree either with my
reverend cousin or with you. I think you ought to find some other
way, or let it go. Go home instead; go straight to London and
insist on your chance. After six weeks you will have forgotten the
name of his Order."
Hilda looked back with a smile. Her face was splendid with the
dawn and the promise of success. "Don't say that," she cried.
Alicia, leaning down, was visited by a flash of quotation. "Well,"
she said, "nothing in this life becomes you like the leaving of
it," and went back to her room to write to Laura Filbert in
Plymouth. She wrote often to Miss Filbert, at Duff's request. It
gratified her that she was able, without a pang, to address four
pages of pleasantly colourless communication to Mr. Lindsay's
fiancee. Her letters stood for a medicine surprisingly easy to
take, aimed at the convalescence which she already anticipated in
the future immediately beyond Duff's miserable marriage. If that
event had promised felicitously she would have faced it, one
fancies, with less sanguine anticipations for herself: but the
black disaster that rode on with it brought her certain aids to the
spirit, certain hopes of herself. Laura's prompt replies, with
their terrible margins and painstaking solecisms, came to be things
Miss Livingstone looked forward to. She read them with a beating
heart, however, in the unconscious apprehension of some revelation
of improvement. She was quite unaware of it, but she entertained
towards the Simpsons an attitude of misgiving in this regard.
Hilda went on about her business. As usual her business was
important and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last
day. She drove about from place to place in the hot, slatternly
city, putting more than her usual vigour and directness into all
she did. It seemed to her that the sunlight burning on the tiles,
pouring through the crowded streets, had more than ever a vivid
note; and so much spoke to her, came to her, from the profuse and
ingenuous life which streamed about her, that she leaned a little
forward to meet it with happy eyes and tender lips that said, "I
know. I see." She was living for the moment which should exhale
itself somewhere about midnight after the lights had gone out on
her last appearance--living for it as a Carmelite might live for
the climax of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that
beyond the cell and the grating she saw the movement and the colour
and the passion of a wider life. All Hilda's splendid vitality
went into her intention, of which she was altogether mistress,
riding it and reining it in a straight course through the
encumbered hours. It keyed her to a finer and more eager
susceptibility; and the things she saw stayed with her, passing
into a composite day which the years were hardly to dim for her.
She could live like that, for the purposes of a period, wrought up
to immense keenness of sense and brilliancy of energy, making
steadily for some point of feeling or achievement flashing
gloriously on the horizon. It is already plain, perhaps, that she
rejoiced in such strokes, and that life as she found it worth
living was marked by a succession of them.
She had kept, even from Lindsay, what she meant to do. When she
stepped from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of
the evening, with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's--
no eight-anna bazar confections edged with silver tinsel--it
occurred to her that this reticence was not altogether fair to so
constant a friend. He was there, keen and eager as ever in all
that concerned her, foremost with his congratulations on the
smiling fringe of the party assembled to do her honour. It was a
party of some brilliance in its way, though its way was diverse;
there was no steady glow. Fillimore said of the company that it
comprised all the talent, and Fillimore, Editor of the Indian
Sportsman and Racing Gazelle, was a judge. He said it to Hagge, of
the Bank of Hindostan, who could hardly have been an owner on three
hundred rupees a month without conspicuous ability disconnected
with his ledgers; and Hagge looked gratified. Though so promising,
he was young. Lord Bobby was there from Government House. Lord
Bobby always accompanied the talent, who were very kind to him. He
was talking when Hilda arrived to the Editor of the Indian Empire,
who wanted to find out the date of her Excellency's fancy dress
party for children, in order that he might make a leaderette of it;
but Lord Bobby couldn't remember--had to promise to drop him a
line. Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with coldness
because the Sportsman had discovered too many virtues in his
Musquito, exalted her indeed into a favourite for Saturday's hurdle
race, a notability for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest.
"They say," Fillimore had written, "that Musquito has been seen
jumping by moonlight"--the sort of thing to spoil any book.
Fillimore was an acute and weary-looking little man, with a
peculiarly sweet smile and an air of cynicism which gave to his
lightest word a dangerous and suspicious air. It was rumoured in
official circles that he had narrowly escaped beheading for
pointing out too ironically the disabilities of a Viceroy who
insisted on reviewing the troops from a cushioned carriage with the
horses taken out. Fillimore seemed to think that if nature had not
made such a nobleman a horseman, the Queen-Empress should not have
made him Governor-General of India. Fillimore was full of
prejudices. Gianacchi, however, found it impossible to treat him
coldly. His smoothness of temperament stood in the way. Instead,
he imparted the melodious information that Musquito had pecked
badly twice at Tollygunge that morning, and smiled with pathetic
philosophy. "Always let 'em use their noses," said Fillimore, and
there seemed to be satire in it. Fillimore certainly had a flair,
and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of him, "What's the dead
bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?" he put it generously at her
service. Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his company were
also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect, with
the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange--gentlemen of high
finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors' reports,
but never in the visitors' book at Government House, who were
little more to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so
many lakhs, except when they were seen now and then driving, in
fleet dogcarts across the Maidan toward comfortable suburban
residences where ladies were not entertained. They were extremely,
curiously, devoted to business; but if they allowed themselves any
amusement other than company promoting, it was the theatre, of
which their appreciation had sometimes an odd relation to the
merits of performance. This supper, on the part of Miss Beryl
Stace and one or two others of Mr. Stanhope's artistes, might have
been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since
the suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.
Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that
looked for the sentiment, the pity of things, would have
distinguished at once on about half the faces, especially those of
the women, the used, underlined look that spoke of the continual
play of muscle and forcing of feeling. It gave them a shabbily
complicated air, contrasting in a strained and sorry way even, with
the countenances of the brokers and bankers, where nature had laid
on a smooth wash and experience had not interfered. They were all
gay and enthusiastic as Miss Howe entered, they loafed forward,
broad shirt-fronts lustrous, fat hands in financial pockets, with
their admiration, and Fillimore put out his cigarette. Hilda came
down among them from the summit of her achievement, clasping their
various hands. They were all personally responsible for her
success, she made them feel that, and they expanded in the
conviction. She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality,
subtly drawing from every human flavour in the room the power to
hold and show something akin to it in herself, a fugitive
assimilation floating in the lamplight with the odour of the
flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the occasion. They
looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling attraction,
they told each other that she was in great form. Mr. Fillimore was
of the opinion that she couldn't be outclassed at the Lyceum, and
Mr. Hagge responded with vivacity that there were few places where
she wouldn't stretch the winner's neck. The feast was not after
all one of great bounty, Mr. Stanhope justly holding that the
opportunity, the little gathering, was the thing, and it was not
long before the moment of celebration arrived for which the
gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, to judge from their undrained
glasses, seemed to be reserving themselves. There certainly had
been one tin of pate, and it circulated at that end; on the other
hand the ladies had all the fondants. So that when Mr. Llewellyn
Stanhope rose with the sentiment of the evening he found
satisfaction, if not repletion, in the regards turned upon him.
Llewellyn got up with modest importance, and ran a hand through his
yellow hair, not dramatically, but with the effect of collecting
his ideas. He leaned a little forward, he was extremely, happily
conspicuous. The attention of the two lines of faces seemed to
overcome him, for an instant, with dizzy pleasure; Hilda's beside
him was bent a little, waiting.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Stanhope, looking with precision
up and down the table to be still more inclusive, "we have met
together to-night in honour of a lady who has given this city more
pleasure in the exercise of her profession than can be said of any
single performer during the last twenty years. Cast your eye back
over the theatrical record of Calcutta for that space of time, and
you yourselves will admit that there has been nobody that could be
said to have come within a mile of her shadow, if I may use the
language of metaphor." (Applause, led by Mr. Fillimore.) "I would
ask you to remember, at the same time, that this pleasure has been
of a superior class. I freely admit that this is a great
satisfaction to me personally. Far be it from me to put myself
forward on this auspicious occasion, but, ladies and gentlemen, if
I have one ambition more than another, it is to promote the noble
cause of the unfettered drama. To this I may say I have been vowed
from the cradle, by a sire who was well-known in the early days of
the metropolis of Sydney as a pioneer of the great movement which
has made the dramatic talent of Australia what it is. To-day a
magnificent theatre rises on the site forever consecrated to me by
those paternal labours, but--but I can never forget it. In Miss
Hilda Howe I have found a great coadjutor, and one who is willing
to consecrate her royal abilities in the same line as myself, so
that we have been able to maintain a high standard of production
among you, prices remaining as usual. I have to thank you, as
representing the public of the Indian capital, for the kind support
which has been so encouraging to Miss Howe, the Company, and myself
personally, during the past season. Many a time ladies and
gentlemen of my profession have said to me, 'Mr. Stahhope, why do
you go to Calcutta? That city is a death-trap for professionals,'
and now the past season proves that I was right and they were
wrong; and the magnificent houses, the enthusiasm, and the
appreciation that have greeted our efforts, especially on the
Saturday evening performances, show plainly enough that when a good
thing is available the citizens of Calcutta won't be happy till
they get it. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to join me in
drinking the health, happiness, and prosperity of Miss Hilda Howe!"
"Miss Howe!" "Miss Howe!" "Miss Hilda Howe!" In the midst of a
pushing back of chairs and a movement of feet, the response was
quick and universal. Hilda accepted their nods and becks and
waving glasses with a slow movement of her beautiful eyes and a
quiet smile, in the subsidence of sound Mr. Stanhope's voice was
heard again, "We can hardly expect a speech from Miss Howe, but
perhaps Mr. Hamilton Bradley, whose international reputation need
hardly be referred to, will kindly say a few words on her behalf."
Then with deliberate grace, Hilda rose from her chair, a tall
figure among them, looking down with a hint of compassionateness on
the little man at her left. She stood for an instant without
speaking, as if the flushed silence, the expectation, the warm
magnetism that drew all their eyes to her were enough. Then out of
something like reverie she came to the matter, she threw up her
beautiful face with one of the supreme gestures which belonged to
her. "I think," she said, with a little smiling bow in his
direction, "that I will not trouble my friend Mr. Bradley. He has
rendered me so many kind services already that I am sure I might
count upon him again, but this is a thing I should like to do for
myself. I would not have my thanks chilled by even the passage
from my heart to his." There was something like bravado in the
glance that rested lightly on Bradley with this. One would have
said that parley of hearts between them was not a thing that as a
rule she courted. "I can only offer you my thanks, poor things to
which we can give neither life nor substance, yet I beg that you
will somehow take them and remember them. It is to me, and will
always be, a kind of crowning satisfaction that you were pleased to
come together to-night to tell me I had done well. You know
yourselves, and I know, how much too flattering your kindness is,
but perhaps it will hurt nobody if to-night I take it as it is
generously offered, and let it make me as happy as you intend me to
be. At all events, no one could disturb me in believing that in
obtaining your praise and your good wishes I have done well
enough."
For a few seconds she stopped speaking, but she held them with her
eyes from the mistake of supposing she had done. Lindsay, who was
watching her closely and hanging with keen pleasure on the
sweetness and precision of what she found to say, noted a swift
constriction pass upon her face. There was a half-tone of
difference, too, in her voice, when she raised it again, a firmer
vibration, as if she passed, deliberate and aware, out of one phase
into another.
"No," she went on, "I am not shy on this occasion; indeed, I feel
that I should like to keep your eyes upon me for a long time to-
night, and go on talking far past your patience or my wit. For I
cannot think it likely that our ways will cross again." Here her
words grew suddenly low and hurried. "If I may trespass upon your
interest so much further, I have to tell you that my connection
with the stage closes with this evening's performance. To-morrow I
join the Anglican Order of the Sisters of St. Paul--the Baker
Institution--in Calcutta, as a novice. They have taken me without
much question because--because the plague hospitals of this
cheerful country"--she contrived a smile--"have made a great demand
upon their body. That is all. I have nothing more to say."
It was, after all, ineffective, the denouement, or perhaps it was
too effective. In any case it was received in silence, the
applause that was ready falling back on itself, inconsistent and
absurd. The incredulity of Llewellyn Stanhope might have been
electric had it found words, but that gentleman's protests were
made in violent whispers, to which Hilda, who sat playing with a
faded rose, seemed to pay no attention whatever. One might have
thought her more overcome than anyone. She seemed to make one or
two unsuccessful efforts to raise her head. There was a moment of
waiting for someone to reply; eyes were turned towards Mr. Bradley,
and when it became plain that no one would, broken murmurs of talk
began with a note of deprecation and many shakes of the head. The
women, especially, looked tragically at their neighbours with very
wide-open eyes. Presently a chair was drawn back, and then
another, and people began to filter, in slow embarrassment, towards
the door. Lindsay came with Hilda's cloak. "You won't mind my
coming with you," he said, "I should like to hear the details."
Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her, pouring out abusive
disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture almost of
irritation. Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two, and
went away with lingering backward looks. In a quarter of an hour,
Mr. Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicles into the
lamp-lit ways of Calcutta, and only the native table-servants
remained in somewhat resentful possession of what was left.
CHAPTER XXIV
If Duff Lindsay had apprehended that the reception of Miss Filbert
by the Simpsons would involve any strain upon the affection his
friends bore him, the event must have relieved him in no small
degree. He was soon made aware of its happy character, and
constantly kept assured; indeed, it seemed that whenever Mrs.
Simpson had nothing else to do she laid her pen to the task of
telling him once again how cherished a satisfaction they found in
Laura, and how reluctant they would be to lose it. She wrote in
that strain of facile sympathy which seems part of an Englishwoman's
education, and often begged him to believe that the more she knew
of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly she
realised how dreary for him must have been the pang of parting and
how arid the months of separation. Mrs. Simpson herself was well
acquainted with these trials of the spirit. She and her husband
had been divided by those wretched thousands of miles of ocean for
three years one week and five days all told during their married
life: she knew what it meant. But if Duff could only see how well
and blooming his beloved one was--she had gained twelve pounds
already--Mrs. Simpson was sure the time of waiting would pass less
heavily. For herself, it was cruel but she smiled upon the
deferred reunion of hearts, she would keep Laura till the very last
day, and hoped to establish a permanent claim on her. She was just
the daughter Mrs. Simpson would have liked, so unspotted, so pure,
so wrapped in high ideals; and then the page would reflect
something of the adoring awe in which Mrs. Simpson would have held
such a daughter. It will be seen that Mrs. Simpson knew how to
express herself, but there was a fine sincerity behind the mask of
words; Miss Filbert had entered very completely into possession.
It had its abnormal side, the way she entered into possession.
Everything about Laura Filbert had its abnormal side, none the less
obvious because it was inward, and invisible. Nature, of course,
worked with her, one might say that nature really did it all, since
in the end she was practically unconscious, except for the hope
that certain souls had been saved, that anything of the sort had
happened. She conquered the Simpsons and their friends chiefly by
the simple impossibility that they should conquer her, walking
immobile among them even while she admired Mr. Simpson's
cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs. Simpson's house
linen. It must be confessed that nothing in her surroundings spoke
to her more loudly or more subtly than these things. In view of
what happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation that the
Simpsons and their circle would have a radical personal effect upon
Laura Filbert became ludicrous. They had no effect at all. She
took no tint, no curve. She appeared not to see that these
precious things were to be had for the assimilation. Her grace
remained exclusively that of holiness, and continued to fail to
have any relation to the common little things she did and said.
The Simpsons were more plastic. Laura had been with them hardly a
week before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to
remodel her spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the
word is admissible, presented. The dear lady had never before
realised, by her own statement, how terribly her religious feelings
were mingled with domestic and social considerations, how firmly
her spiritual edifice was based upon the things of this world. She
felt that her soul was honeycombed--that was her word--with
conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like
these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight.
They were very soothing, these confessions. Laura would take Mrs.
Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge
herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's
case. She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt
for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace, she made short work of special
services and ladies' Bible classes. The world was white with
harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was a recreation society
for shop girls. But it was something, it was everything, to be
uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift themselves in
prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching supplication in
which to represent the matter that the burden of her friend and
hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears. Mrs.
Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as
since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the
gentle paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss
Filbert's presence.
Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his
choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings
and goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little
sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday
evening, for instance, and accompany her to the firemen's halls and
skating rinks lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner
from which their guest seemed to derive benefit. With all this,
the Simpsons were sometimes troubled by the impression that they
could not claim to be making their angel in the house completely
happy. The air, the garden, the victoria, the turbot and the
whitebait, these were all that has been vaunted, and even to the
modesty of the Simpsons it was evident that the intimacy they
offered their guest should count for something. There were other
friends too, young friends who tried to teach her to play tennis,
robust and silent young persons who threw shy flushed glances at
her in the pauses of the games, and wished supremely, without
daring to hint it, that she would let fall some word about her
wonderful romance--a hope ever renewed, ever to be disappointed.
And physically Laura expanded before their eyes. The colour that
came into her cheek gave her the look of a person painted by
Bouguereau; that artist would have found in her a model whom he
could have represented with sincerity. Yet something was missing
to her, her friends were dimly aware. Her desirable surroundings
kindled her to but a perfunctory interest in life--the electric
spark was absent. Mrs. Simpson relied strategically upon the
wedding preparations and hurried them on, announcing in May that it
was quite time to think about various garments of which the fashion
is permanent, but the issue was blank. No ripple stirred the
placid waters, unless indeed we take that way of describing Laura's
calm demand, when the decision lay between Valenciennes and Torchon
lace for under-bodies, to hear whether Mrs. Simpson had ever known
Duff Lindsay to be anxious about his eternal future. The girl
continued to give forth a mere pale reflection of her circumstances,
and Mrs. Simpson was forced into the deprecation that perhaps one
would hardly call her a joyous Christian.
But for the Zenana Light Society this impression of Miss Filbert
might have deepened. The committee of that body was almost
entirely composed of Mrs. Simpson's friends, and naturally came to
learn much about her guest. The matter was vastly considered, but
finally Miss Filbert was asked to speak at one of the monthly
meetings the ladies held among themselves to keep the society "in
touch" with the cause. Laura brought them, as one would imagine,
surprisingly in touch. She made pictures for them, letting her own
eyelashes close deliberately while they stared. She moved these
ladies, inspired them, carried them away, and the fact that none of
them found themselves able afterward to quote the most pathetic
passages seemed rather to add to the enthusiasm with which they
described the address. The first result was a shower of
invitations to tea, occasions when Laura was easily led into
monologue. Miss Filbert became a cult of evangelistic drawing-
rooms, and the same kind of forbearance was extended to her little
traces of earlier social experiences as is offered, in salons of
another sort, to the eccentricities of persons of genius. Very
soon other applications had to be met and considered, and Mrs.
Simpson freely admitted that Laura would not be justified in
refusing to the Methodists and Baptists what she had given
elsewhere. She reasserted her platform influence over audiences
that grew constantly larger, and her world began to revolve again
in that great relation to the infinities which it was her life to
perceive and point out. Mrs. Simpson charged her genially with
having been miserable in Plymouth until she was allowed to do good
in her own way, and saw that she had beef-tea after every occasion
of doing it. She became in a way a public character, and a lady
journalist sent an account of her, with a photograph, to a well-
known London fashion paper. Perhaps the strongest effect she made
was as the voice of the Purity Association, when she delivered an
address, in the picturesque costume she had abandoned, attacking
measures contemplated by Government for the protection of the
health of the Army in India. This was reported in full in the
local paper, and Mr. Simpson sent a copy to Duff Lindsay, who
received it, I regret to say, with an unmistakable imprecation.
But Laura rejoiced. Deprived of her tambourine she nevertheless
rejoiced exceedingly.
CHAPTER XXV
The Mother Superior had a long upper lip, which she was in the
habit of drawing still further down; it gave her an air of great
diplomatic caution, almost of casuistry. Her face was pale and
narrow; she had eyes that desired to be very penetrating, and a
flat little stooping figure within her voluminous draperies. She
carried about with her all the virtues of a monastic order,
patience was written upon her, and repression, discipline, and the
love of administration, written and underlined, so that the
Anglican Sister whom no Pope blessed was more priestly in her
personal effect than any Jesuit. It was difficult to remember that
she had begun as a woman; she was now a somewhat anaemic formula
making for righteousness. Sister Ann Frances, who in her turn
suggested the fat capons of an age of friars more indulgent to the
flesh, and whose speech was of the crispest in this world where
there was so much to do, thought poorly of the executive ability of
the Mother Superior, and resented the imposition, as it were, of
the long upper lip. Out of this arose the only irritations that
vexed the energetic flow of duty at the Baker Institution, slight
official raspings which the Mother Superior immediately laid before
Heaven at great length. She did it with publicity, too, kneeling
on the chunam floor of the chapel for an hour at a time obviously
explaining matters. The bureaucracy of the country was reflected
in the Baker Institution; it seemed to Sister Ann Frances that her
superior officer took undue advantage of her privilege of direct
communication with the Supreme Authority, giving any colour she
liked to the incident. And when the Mother Superior's lumbago came
on in direct consequence of the cold chunam, the annoyance of
Sister Ann Frances was naturally not lessened.
There were twenty or thirty of them, with their little white caps
tied close under their chins, their long veils and their girdled
black robes. They were the most self-sacrificing women in Asia,
the most devout, the most useful. Government gave hospitals and
doctors into their hands; they took the whole charge of certain
schools. They differed in complexion, some of the newly arrived
being delightfully fresh and pink under their starched bandeaux;
but they were all official, they all walked discreetly and directly
about their business, with a jangle of keys in the folds of their
robes, immensely organised, immensely under orders. Hilda, when
she had time, had the keenest satisfaction in contemplating them.
She took the edge off the fact that she was not quite one, in aim
and method, with these dear women as they supposed her to be, with
the reflection that after all it might be worth while to work out a
solution of life in those terms, standing aside from the world--the
world was troublesome--and keeping an unfaltering eye upon the pity
of things, an unfaltering hand at its assuagement. It was simple
and fine and indisputable, this work of throwing the clear shadow
of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world; it carried the
boon of finality in itself. One might be stopped and put away at
any moment, and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and
it absolutely barred out such considerations as were presented by
Hamilton Bradley. There was a time early in her probation when she
thought seriously that if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be
this.
She begged to be put on hospital work, and was sent for her
indiscretion to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of
British Troops. The first duty of a novice was to be free of
preference, to obey without a sigh of choice. On the third day,
however, Sister Ann Frances, supervising, stopped at the open
schoolroom door to hear the junior female orphans repeating in
happy chorus after their instructress the statement that seven
times nine were fifty-six. I think Hilda saw Sister Ann Frances in
the door. That couldn't go on, even in the name of discipline, and
Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the Chief Nursing Sister at
the General Hospital next day. Sister Ann Frances was inclined to
defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary arithmetic.
"We all have our gifts," she said. "Miss Howe's is not the
multiplication table; but neither is mine stage-acting." At which,
the upper lip lengthened further into an upward curving smile, and
the Mother Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe
would develop one for making bandages, otherwise-- And there for
the time being the matter rested.
The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the
ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the
two women. The full understanding of it was an abyss between them,
across which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the
surprise of Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance
away, lest her eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the
situation. It had never been discussed, but it had to be accepted,
and occasionally referred to; and the terms of acceptance and
reference made no implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost
privacy Alicia gazed breathless at the conception as a whole; she
leaped at it, and caught it and held it to look, with a feverish
comparison of possibilities. It was not strange, perhaps, that she
took a vivid personal interest in the essentials that enabled one
to execute a flank movement like Hilda's, not that she should
conceive the first of them to be that one must come out of a cab.
She dismissed that impression with indignation as ungenerously
cynical, but it always came back for redismissal. It did not
interfere in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to
Stephen to come to Ten, Middleton Street, on afternoons or evenings
when Hilda was there. She was like one standing denied in the
Street of Abundance; she had an avidity of the eye for even love's
reflection.
That was a little later. At first there was the transformation to
lament, the loss, the break.
"You look," cried Miss Livingstone, the first time Hilda arrived in
the dress of the novice, a kind of under-study of the Sisters'
black and white, "you look like a person in a book, full of salient
points, and yet made so simple to the reader. If you go on wearing
those things I shall end by understanding you perfectly."
"If you don't understand me," Hilda said, dropping into the corner
of a sofa, "Cela que je m'en doute, it's because you look for too
much elaboration. I am a simple creature, done with rather a broad
brush--voila tout!"
Nevertheless, Miss Livingstone's was a happy impression. The
neutrality of her hospital dress left Hilda in a manner exposed:
one saw in a special way the significance of lines and curves; it
was an astonishingly vigorous human expression.
Alicia leaned forward, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin
tucked into her palm, and looked at it. The elbow bent itself in
light blue muslin of extreme elegance, trimmed with lace. The
colour found a wistful echo in the eyes that regarded Miss Howe,
who was accustomed to the look, and met it with impenetrable
commonplace, being made impatient by nothing in this world so much
as by futility, however charming.
"Just now," Alicia said, "the shadows under your eyes are brushed
too deep."
"I don't believe I sleep well in a dormitory."
"Horrible! All the little comforts of life--don't you miss them?"
"I never had them, my dear--I never had them. Life has never given
me very many luxuries--I don't miss them. An occasional hour to
one's self--and that we get even at the Institution. The
conventions are strictly conserved, believe me."
"One imagines that kind of place is always clean."
"When I have time I think of Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and
believe myself in Paradise. The repose is there, the angels also--
dear commanding things--and a perpetual incense of cheap soap. And
there is some good in sleeping in a row. It reminds one that after
all one is very like other women."
"It wouldn't convince me if I were you. And how did the sisters
receive you--with the harp and the psaltery?"
"That was rather," said Hilda gravely, "what I expected. On the
contrary. They snubbed me--they really did. There were two of
them. I said, 'Reverend ladies, please be a little kind. Convents
are strange to me; I shall probably commit horrible sins without
knowing it. Give me your absolution in advance--at least your
blessing.'"
"Hilda, you didn't!"
"It is delightful to observe the Mother Abbess, or whatever she is,
disguising the fact that she takes any interest in me. Such
diplomacy--funny old thing."
"They must be devoured with curiosity!"
"Well, they ask no questions. One sees an everlasting finger on
the lip. It's a little boring. One feels inclined to speak up and
say, 'Mesdames, entendez--it isn't so bad as you think.' But then
their fingers would go into their ears."
"And the rules, Hilda? I can't imagine you, somehow, under rules."
"I am attached to the rules; I think about them all day long. They
make the thing simple and--possible. It is a little like living
for the first time in a house all right angles after--after a
lifelong voyage in a small boat."
"Isn't the house rather empty?"
"Oh, well!"
Alicia put out her hand and tucked an irrelevant bit of lace into
Hilda's bosom. "I can tell you who is interested," she cried.
"The Archdeacon--the Archdeacon and Mrs. Barberry. They both dined
here last night; and you lasted from the fish to the pudding. I
got so bored with you, my dear, in your new capacity."
A new ray of happiness came into the smile of the novice. "What
did they say? Do tell me what they said."
"There was a difference of opinion. The Archdeacon held that with
God all things were possible. He used an expression more suitable
to a dinner-party; but I think that is what he meant. Mrs.
Barberry thought it wouldn't last. Mrs. Barberry was very cynical.
She said anyone could see that you were as emotional as ever you
could be."
The eyes of the two women met, and they laughed frankly. A sense
of expansion came between them, in which for an instant they were
silent.
"Tell me about the hospital," Alicia said presently. "Ah, the
hospital!" Hilda's face changed; there came into her eyes the
moved look that always waked a thrill in Alicia Livingstone, as if
she were suddenly aware that she had stepped upon ground where feet
like hers passed seldom.
"There is nothing to tell you that is not--sad. Such odds and
ends, of life, thrown together!"
"Have you had any experiences yet?"
Hilda stared for a moment absently in front of her, and then turned
her head aside to answer as if she closed her eyes on something.
"Experiences? Delightful Alicia, speaking your language, no. You
are thinking of the resident surgeon, the medical student, the
interesting patient. My resident surgeon is fifty years old; the
medical student is a Bengali in white cotton and patent leather
shoes. I am occupied in a ward full of deck hands. For these I
hold the bandage and the bottle; they are hardly aware of me."
"You are sure to have them," Alicia said. "They crop up wherever
you go in this world, either before you or behind you."
Hilda fixed her eyes attentively upon her companion. "Sometimes,"
she said, "you say things that are extremely true in their general
bearing. A fortuneteller with cards gives one the same shock of
surprise. Well, let me tell you, I have been promoted to
temperatures. I took thirty-five to-day. Next week I am to make
poultices; the week after, baths and fomentations."
"What are the others like--the other novices?"
"Nearly all Eurasians, one native, a Hindu widow--the Sisters are
almost demonstrative to her--and one or two local European girls:
the commissariat sergeant class, I should think."
"They don't sound attractive, and I am glad. You will depend the
more upon me."
Hilda looked thoughtfully at Miss Livingstone. "I will depend,"
she said, "a good deal upon you."
It was Alicia's fate to meet the Archdeacon again that evening at
dinner. "And is she really throwing her heart into the work?"
asked that dignitary, referring to Miss Howe.
"Oh, I think so," Alicia said. "Yes."
CHAPTER XXVI
The labours of the Baker Institution and of the Clarke Mission were
very different in scope, so much so that if they had been secular
bodies working for profit, there would have been hardly a point of
contact between them. As it was they made one, drawing together in
affiliation for the comfort of mutual support in a heathen country
where all the other Englishmen wrote reports, drilled troops, or
played polo, with all the other Englishwomen in the corresponding
female parts. Doubtless the little communities prayed for each
other. One may imagine, not profanely, their petitions rising on
either side of the heedless, multitudinous, idolatrous city, and
meeting at some point in the purer air above the yellow dust-haze.
I am not aware that they held any other mutual duty or privilege,
but this bond was known, and enabled people whose conscience
pricked them in that direction to give little garden teas to which
they invited Clarke Brothers and Baker Sisters, secure in doing a
benevolent thing and at the same time embarrassing nobody except,
possibly, the Archdeacon, who was officially exposed to being asked
as well and had no right to complain. The affiliation was thus a
social convenience, since it is unlikely that without it anybody
would have hit upon so ingenious a way of killing, as it were, a
Baker Sister and a Clarke Brother with one stone. It is not
surprising that this degree of intelligence should fail to see the
profound official difference between Baker Sisters and Baker
novices. As the Mother Superior said, it did not seem to occur to
people that there could be in connection with a religious body,
such words as discipline and subordination, which were certainly
made ridiculous for the time being, when she and Sister Ann Frances
were asked to eat ices on the same terms as Miss Hilda Howe. It
must have been more than ever painful to these ladies, regarded
from the official point of view, when it became plain, as it
usually did, that the interest of the afternoon centred in Miss
Howe, whether or not the Archdeacon happened to be present. Their
displeasure was so clear, after the first occasion, that Hilda felt
obliged when the next one came, to fall back on her original
talent, and ate her ice abashed and silent speaking only when she
was spoken to, and then in short words and long hesitations.
Thereupon the Sisters were of opinion that after all poor Miss Howe
could not help her unenviable lot, she was perhaps more to be
pitied on account of it than--anything else. It came to this, that
Sister Ann Frances even had an exhibitor's pride in her, and Hilda
knew the sensations of a barbarian female captive in the bonds of
the Christians. But she could not afford to risk being cut off
from those little garden teas. All told, they were few; ladies
disturbed by ideas of social duties toward missionaries being so
uncommon.
She told Stephen so, frankly, one afternoon when he charged her
with being so unlike herself, and he heard her explanation with a
gravity which contained an element of satisfaction. "It is, of
course, a pleasure to us to meet," he said, "a pleasure to us
both." That was part of the satisfaction, that he could meet her
candour with the same openness. He was not even afraid to mention
to her the stimulus she gave him always and his difficulty in
defining it, and once he told her how, after a talk with her, he
had lain awake until the small hours unable to stop his excited
rush of thought. He added that he was now personally and selfishly
glad she had chosen as she did three months before; it made a
difference to him, her being in Calcutta, a sensible and material
difference. He had better hope and heart in his work. It was the
last luxury he would ever have dreamed of allowing himself, a woman
friend; but since life had brought it in the oddest way the boon
should be met with no grudging of gratitude. A kind of sedate
cheerfulness crept into his manner which was new to him; he went
about his duties with the look of a man to whom life had dictated
its terms and who found them acceptable. His blood might have
received some mysterious chemical complement, so much was his eye
clearer, his voice firmer, and the things he found to say more
decisive. Nor did any consideration of their relations disturb
him. He never thought of the oxygen in the air he breathed, and he
seldom thought of Hilda.
They were walking toward the Institution together the day he
explained to her his gratification that she had elected to remain.
Sister Ann Frances and Sister Margaret led; Arnold and Hilda came
behind. He had an errand to the Mother Superior--he would go all
the way. It was late in May and late in the afternoon; all the
treetops on the Maidan were bent under the sweep of the south wind,
blowing a caressing coolness from the sea. It spread fragrances
about and shook down blossoms from the gold-mohur trees. One could
see nothing anywhere, so red and yellow as they were, except the
long coat of a Government messenger, a point of scarlet moving in
the perspective of a dusty road. The spreading acres of turf were
baked to every earth-colour; wherever a pine dropped needles and an
old woman swept them up, a trail of dust ran curling along the
ground like smoke. The little party was unusual in walking;
glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias
and landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British
soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped
bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-
skirts so near the powder of the road. The Sisters in front walked
with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to
be consulting. Hilda reflected, looking at them, that they always
seemed to be consulting; it was the normal attitude of that long
black veil that flowed behind.
Arnold walked beside his companion, his hands loosely clasped
behind him, with the air of semi-detachment that young clergymen
sometimes have with their wives. Whether it was that, or the trace
of custom his satisfaction carried, the casual glance might easily
have taken them for a married pair.
"There is a kind of folly and stupidity in saying it," he said,
"but you have done--you do--a great deal for me."
She turned toward him with a wistful, measuring look. It searched
his face for an instant and came back baffled. Arnold spoke with
so much kindness, so much appreciation.
"Very little," she said mechanically, looking at the fresh
footprints of Sister Ann Frances and Sister Margaret.
"But I know. And can't you tell me--it would make me so very
happy--that I have done something for you too--something that you
value?"
Hilda's eyes lightened curiously, reverie came into them, and a
smile. She answered as if she spoke to herself, "I should not know
how to tell you."
Then scenting wonder in him she added, "You were thinking of
something--in particular?"
"You have sometimes made me believe," Stephen returned, "that I may
account myself, under God, the accident which induced you to take
up your blessed work. I was thinking of that."
"Oh," she said, "of that!" and seemed to take refuge in silence.
"Yes," Arnold said, with infinite gentleness.
"But you were profoundly the cause! I might say you are, for
without you I doubt whether I should have the--courage--"
"Oh no! Oh no! He who inspired you in the beginning will sustain
you to the end. Think that. Believe that."
"Will He?" Her voice was neutral, as if it would not betray too
much, but there was a listlessness that spoke louder in the bend of
her head, the droop of her shoulder.
"For you perhaps," Arnold said thoughtfully, "there is only one
assurance of it--the satisfaction your vocation brings you now.
That will broaden and increase," he went on, almost with buoyancy,
"growing more and more your supreme good as the years go on."
"How much you give me credit for!"
"Not nearly enough--not nearly. Who is there like you?" he
demanded simply.
His words seemed a baptism. She lifted up her face after them, and
the trace of them was on her eyes and lips. "I have passed two
examinations, at all events," she informed him, with sudden gaiety,
"and Sister Ann Frances says that in two or three months I shall
probably get through the others. Sister Ann Frances thinks me more
intelligent than might be expected. And if I do pass those
examinations I shall be what they call a quick-time probationer. I
shall have got it over in six months. Do you think," she asked, as
if to please herself; "that six months will be long enough?"
"It depends. There is so much to consider."
"Yes--it depends. Sometimes I think it will be, but oftener I
think it will take longer."
"I should be inclined to leave it entirely with the Sisters."
"I am so undisciplined," murmured Hilda, "I fear I shall cling to
my own opinion. Now we must overtake the others and you must walk
the rest of the way with Sister Ann--no, Sister Margaret, she is
senior."
"I don't at all see the necessity," Stephen protested. He was
wilful and wayward; he adopted a privileged air, and she scolded
him. In their dispute they laughed so imprudently that Sister Ann
Frances turned her draped head to look back at them. Then they
quickened their steps and joined the elder ladies, and Stephen
walked with Sister Margaret to the door of the Institution. She
mentioned to the Mother Superior afterwards that young Mr. Arnold
was really a delightful conversationalist.
CHAPTER XXVII
They talked a great deal in Plymouth about the way the time was
passing in Calcutta during those last three months before Laura
should return, the months of the rains. "Now," said Mrs. Simpson,
early in July, "it will be pouring every day, with great patches of
the Maidan under water, and rivers, my dear, RIVERS, in the back
streets"; and Laura had a reminiscence about how, exactly at that
time, a green mould used to spread itself fresh every morning on
the matting under her bed in Bentinck Street. Later on they would
agree that perhaps by this time there was a "break in the rains,"
and that nothing in the world was so trying as a break in the
rains, the sun grilling down and drawing up steam from every
puddle. In September, things, they remembered, would be at their
very worst and most depressing; one had hardly the energy to lift a
finger in September. Mrs. Simpson looked back upon the discomfort
she had endured in Bengal at this time of year with a kind of
regret that it was irretrievably over; she lingered upon a severe
illness which had been part of the experience. She seemed to think
that with a little judicious management she might have spent more
time in that climate, and less in England. There was in her tone a
suggestion of gentle envy of Laura, going forth to these dismal
conditions with her young life in her hands all tricked out for the
sacrifice, which left Duff Lindsay and his white and gold drawing-
room entirely out of consideration. Any sacrifice to Mrs. Simpson
was alluring, she would be killed all day long, in a manner, for
its own sake.
The victim had taken her passage early in October, and during the
first week of that month Plymouth gathered itself into meetings to
bid her farewell. A curiously sacred character had fastened itself
upon her; it was not in the least realised that she was going out
to be married to an altogether secular young broker moving in
fashionable circles in one of the gayest cities in the world. Ones
or two reverend persons in the course of commending their young
sister to the protection of the Almighty in her approaching
separation from the dear friends who surrounded her in Plymouth,
made references implying that her labours would continue to the
glory of God, taking it as a matter of course. Miss Filbert was by
this time very much impregnated with the idea that they would, she
did not know precisely how, but that would open itself out. Duff
had long been assimilated as part of the programme. All that money
and humility could contribute should be forthcoming from him; she
had a familiar dream of him as her standard-bearer, undistinguished
but for ever safe.
Yet it was with qualified approval that Mrs. Simpson, amid the
confusion of the Coromandel's preparations for departure at London
Docks, heard the inevitable strains of the Salvation Army rising
aft. Laura immediately cried, "I shall have friends among the
passengers," and Mrs. Simpson so far forgot herself as to say,
"Yes, if they are nice." The ladies were sitting on deck beside
the pile of Laura's very superior cabin luggage. Mrs. Simpson
glanced at it as if it offered a kind of corroboration of the
necessity of their being nice. "There are always a few delightful
Christian people, if one takes the trouble to find them out, at
this end of the ship," she said defensively. "I have never failed
to find it so."
"I don't think much of Christians who are so hard to discover,"
Laura said with decision; and Mrs. Simpson, rebuked, thought of the
mischievous nature of class prejudices. Laura herself--had she not
been drawn from what one might call distinctly the other end of the
ship?--and who, among those who vaunted themselves ladies and
gentlemen, could compare with Laura! The idea that she had shown a
want of sympathy with those dear people who were so strenuously
calling down a blessing on the Coromandel somewhere behind the
smoke stacks, embittered poor Mrs. Simpson's remaining tears of
farewell, and when the bell rang the signal for the last good-bye,
she embraced her young friend with the fervent request, "Do make
friends with them, dear one--make friends with them at once"; and
Laura said, "If they will make friends with me."
By the time the ship had well got her nose down the coast of Spain,
Miss Filbert had created her atmosphere, and moved about in it from
end to end of the quarter-deck. It was a recognisable thing, her
atmosphere, one never knew when it would discharge a question
relating to the gravest matters; and persons unprepared to give
satisfaction upon this point--one fears there are some on a ship
bound east of Suez--found it blighting. They moved their long
chairs out of the way, they turned pointedly indifferent backs, the
lady who shared Miss Filbert's cabin--she belonged to a smart
cavalry regiment at Mhow--went about saying things with a distinct
edge. Miss Filbert exhausted all the means. She attempted to hold
a meeting forward of the smoking cabin, standing for elevation on
one of the ship's quoit buckets to preach, but with this the
captain was reluctantly compelled to interfere on behalf of the
whist-players inside. In the evening, after dinner, she established
herself in a sheltered corner and sang. Her recovered voice lifted
itself with infinite pathetic sweetness in songs about the poverty
of the world and the riches of heaven; the notes mingled with the
churning of the screw, and fell in the darkness beyond the ship's
lights abroad upon the sea. The other passengers listened aloof;
the Coromandel was crowded, but you could have drawn a wide circle
round her chair. On the morning of the fourth day out--she had not
felt quite well enough for adventures before--she found her way to
the second-class saloon, being no doubt fully justified of her
conscience in abandoning the first to the flippancies of its
preference.
In the second-class end the tone was certainly more like that of
Plymouth. Laura had a grateful sense of this in coming, almost at
once, upon a little group gathered together for praise and prayer,
of which four or five persons of both sexes, labelled "S. A.,"
naturally formed the centre. They were not only praying and
praising without discouragement, they had attracted several other
people who had brought their chairs into near and friendly
relation, and even joined sometimes in the chorus of the hymns.
There was a woman in mourning who cried a good deal--her tears
seemed to refresh the Salvationists and inspire them to louder and
more cheerful efforts. There was a man in a wide, soft felt hat
with the malaria of the Terai in the hollows under his eyes; there
was a Church Missionary with an air of charity and forbearance, and
the bushy-eyed colonel of a native regiment looking vigilant
against ridicule, with his wife, whose round red little face
continually waxed and waned in a smile of true contentment. It was
not till later that Laura came to know them all so very well, but
her eye rested on them one after another, with approval, as she
drew near. Without pausing in his chant--it happened to be one of
triumph--without even looking at her, the leader indicated an empty
chair. It was his own chair. "Colonel Markin, S. A." was printed
in black letters on its striped canvas back; Laura noticed that.
After it was over, the little gathering, Colonel Markin specially
distinguished her. He did it delicately. "I hope you won't mind
my expressin' my thanks for the help you gave us in the singin',"
he said. "Such a voice I've seldom had the pleasure to join with.
May I ask where you got it trained?"
He was a narrow-chested man with longish sandy hair and thin
features. His eyes were large, blue, and protruding, his forehead
very high and white. There was a pinkness about the root of his
nose, and a scanty yellow moustache upon his upper lip, while his
chin was partly hidden by a beard equally scanty and even more
yellow. He had extremely long white hands; one could not help
observing them as they clasped his book of devotion.
Laura looked at him with profound appreciation of these details.
She knew Colonel Markin by reputation, he had done a great work
among the Cingalese. "It was trained," she said, casting down her
eyes, "on the battlefields of our Army."
Colonel Markin attempted to straighten his shoulders and to stiffen
his chin. He seemed vaguely aware of a military tradition which
might make it necessary for him, as a very senior officer indeed,
to say something. But the impression was transitory. Instead of
using any rigour he held out his hand. Laura took it reverently,
and the bones shut up, like the sticks of a fan, in her grasp.
"Welcome, comrade!" he said, and there was a pause, as there should
be after such an apostrophe.
"When you came among us this afternoon," Colonel Markin resumed, "I
noticed you. There was something about the way you put your hand
over your eyes when I addressed our Heavenly Father that spoke to
me. It spoke to me and said, 'Here we have a soul that knows what
salvation means--there's no doubt about that.' Then when you
raised a Hallelujah I said to myself, 'That's got the right ring to
it.' And so you're a sister in arms!"
"I was," Laura murmured.
"You was--you were. Well, well--I want to hear all about it. It
is now," continued Colonel Markin, as two bells struck and a
steward passed them with a bugle, "the hour for our dinner, and I
suppose that you too," he bent his head respectfully towards the
other half of the ship, "partake of some meal at this time. But if
you will seek us out again at the meeting between four and five I
shall be at your service afterwards, and pleased," he took her hand
again, "PLEASED to see you."
Laura went back to the evening meeting, and after that missed none
of these privileges. In due course she was asked to address it,
and then her position became enviable from all points of view, for
people who did not draw up their chairs and admire her inspirations
sat at a distance and admired her clothes. Very soon, at her
special request, she was allowed to resign her original place at
table and take a revolving chair at the nine o'clock breakfast, one
o'clock dinner, and six o'clock tea which sustained the second
saloon. Daily, ascending the companion ladder to the main deck aft
she gradually faded from cognisance forward. There they lay back
in their long chairs and sipped their long drinks, and with neutral
eyes and lips they let the blessing go.
In the intervals between the exercises Miss Filbert came and went
in the cabin of three young Salvationists of her own sex. They
could always make room for her, difficult as it may appear; she
held for them an indefinite store of fascination. Laura would
extend herself on a top berth beside the round-eyed Norwegian to
whom it belonged, with the cropped head of the owner pillowed on
her sisterly arm, and thus they passed hours, discussing
conversions as medical students might discuss cases, relating,
comparing. They talked a great deal about Colonel Markin. They
said it was a beautiful life. More beautiful if possible had been
the life of Mrs. Markin, who was his second wife, and who had been
"promoted to glory" six months before. She had gained promotion
through jungle fever, which had carried her off in three days. The
first Mrs. Markin had died of drink--that was what had sent the
Colonel into the Army, she, the first Mrs. Markin, having willed
her property away from him. Colonel Markin had often rejoiced
publicly that the lady had been of this disposition, the results to
him had been so blessed. Apparently he spoke without reserve of
his domestic affairs in connection with his spiritual experiences,
using both the Mrs. Markins when it was desirable as "illustrations."
The five had reached this degree of intimacy by the time the
Coromandel was nearing Port Said, and every day the hemispheres of
sea and sky they watched through the porthole above the Norwegian
girl's berth grew bluer.
From the first Colonel Markin had urged Miss Filbert's immediate
return to the Army. He found her sympathetic to the idea, willing
indeed to embrace it with open arms, but there were difficulties.
Mr. Lindsay, as a difficulty, was almost insuperable to anything
like a prompt step in that direction. Colonel Markin admitted it
himself. He was bound to admit it he said, but nothing, since he
joined the Army, had ever been so painful to him. "I wish I could
deny it," he said with frankness; "but there is no doubt that for
the present your first duty is towards your gentleman, towards him
who placed that ring upon your finger." There was no sarcasm in
his describing Lindsay as a gentleman; he used the term in a kind
of extra special sense where a person less accustomed to polite
usages might have spoken of Laura's young man. "But remember, my
child," he continued, "it is only your poor vile body that is yours
to dispose of, your soul belongs to God Almighty, and no earthly
husband, especially as you say he is still in his sins, is going to
have the right to interfere." This may seem vague, as the
statement of a position, but Laura found it immensely fortifying.
That and similar arguments built her up in her determination to
take up what Colonel Markin called her life-work again at the
earliest opportunity. She had forfeited her rank, that she
accepted humbly as a proper punishment, ardently hoping it would be
found sufficient. She would go back as a private, take her place
in the ranks, and nothing in her married life should interfere with
the things that cried out to be done in Bentinck Street. Somehow
she had less hope of securing Lindsay as a spiritual companion in
arms since she had confided the affair to Colonel Markin. As he
said, they must hope for the best, but he could not help admitting
that he took a gloomy view of Lindsay.
"Once he has secured you," the Colonel said, with an appreciative
glance at Laura's complexion, "what will he care about his soul?
Nothing."
Their enthusiasm had ample opportunity to strengthen, their mutual
satisfactions to expand, in the close confines of life on board
ship, and as if to seal and sanctify the voyage permanently a
conversion took place in the second saloon, owning Laura's agency.
It was the maid of the lady in the cavalry regiment, a hardened
heart, as two stewards and a bandmaster on board could testify.
When this occurred the time that was to elapse between Laura's
marriage and her return to the ranks was shortened to one week.
"And quite long enough," Colonel Markin said, "considering how much
more we need you than your gentleman does, my dear sister."
It was plain to them all that Colonel Markin had very special views
about his dear sister. The other dear sisters looked on with
pleasurable interest, admitting the propriety of it, as Colonel
Markin walked up and down the deck with Laura, examining her lovely
nature, "drawing her out" on the subject of her faith and her
assurance. It was natural, as he told her, that in her peculiar
situation she should have doubts and difficulties. He urged her to
lay bare her heart, and she laid it bare. One evening--it was
heavenly moonlight on the Indian Ocean, and they were two days past
Aden on the long south-east run to Ceylon--she came and stood
before him with a small packet in her hand. She was all in white,
and more like an angel than Markin expected ever to see anything in
this world, though as to the next his anticipations may have been
extravagant.
"Now I wonder," said he, "where you are going to sit down?"
A youngster in the Police got up and pushed his chair forward, but
Laura shook her head.
"I am going out there," she said, pointing to the farthermost stern
where passengers were not encouraged to sit, "and I want to consult
you."
Markin got up. "If there's anything pressin' on your mind," he
said, "you can't do better."
Laura said nothing until they were alone with the rushing of the
screw, two Lascars, some coils of rope, and the hand-steering gear.
Then she opened the packet. "These," she said, "these are pressing
on my mind."
She held out a string of pearls, a necklace of pearls and
turquoises, a heavy band bracelet studded, Delhi fashion, with
gems, one or two lesser fantasies.
"Jewellery!" said Markin. "Real or imitation?"
"So far as that goes they are good. Mr. Lindsay gave them to me.
But what have I to do with jewels, the very emblem of the folly of
the world, the desire that itches in palms that know no good works,
the price of sin!" She leaned against the masthead as she spoke,
the wind blew her hair and her skirt out toward the following seas.
With that look in her eyes she seemed a creature who had alighted
on the ship but who could not stay.
Colonel Markin held the pearls up in the moonlight.
"They must have cost something to buy," he said.
Laura was silent.
"And so they're a trouble to you. Have you taken them to the Lord
in prayer?"
"Oh, many times."
"Couldn't seem to hear any answer?"
"The only answer I could hear was. 'So long as you have them I
will not speak with you.'"
"That seems pretty plain and clear. And yet?" said the Colonel,
fondling the turquoises, "nobody can say there's any harm in such
things, especially if you don't wear them."
"Colonel, they are my great temptation. I don't know that I
wouldn't wear them. And when I wear them I can think of nothing
sacred, nothing holy. When they were given to me I used--I used to
get up in the night to look at them."
"Shall I lay it before the Almighty? That bracelet's got a
remarkably good clasp."
"Oh no--no! I must part with them. To-night I can do it, to-
night--"
"There's nobody on this ship that will give you any price for
them."
"I would not think of selling them. It would be sending them from
my hands to do harm to some other poor creature, weaker than I!"
"You can't return them to-night."
"I wouldn't return them. That would be the same as keeping them."
"Then what--oh, I see!" exclaimed Markin. "You want to give them
to the Army. Well, in my capacity, on behalf of General Booth--"
"No," cried Laura with sudden excitement, "not that either. I will
give them to nobody. But this is what I will do!" She seized the
bracelet and flung it far out into the opaline track of the vessel,
and the smaller objects, before her companion could stop her,
followed it. Then he caught her wrist.
"Stop!" he cried. "You've gone off your head--you've got fever.
You're acting wicked with that jewellery. Stop and let us reason
it out together."
She already had the turquoises, and with a jerk of her left hand,
she freed it and threw them after the rest. The necklace caught
the handrail as it fell, and Markin made a vain spring to save it.
He turned and stared at Laura, who stood fighting the greatest
puissance of feeling she had known, looking at the pearls. As he
stared she kissed them twice, and then, leaning over the ship's
side, let them slowly slide out of her fingers and fall into the
waves below. The moonlight gave them a divine gleam as they fell.
She turned to Markin with tears in her eyes. "Now," she faltered,
"I can be happy again. But not to-night."
CHAPTER XXVIII
While the Coromandel was throbbing out her regulation number of
knots towards Colombo, October was passing over Bengal. It went
with lethargy, the rains were too close on its heels; but at the
end of the long hot days, when the resplendent sun struck down on
the glossy trees and the over-lush Maidan, there often stole
through Calcutta a breath of the coming respite of December. The
blue smoke of the people's cooking fires began to hang again in the
streets, the pungent smell of it was pleasant in the still air.
The south wind turned back at the Sunderbunds; instead of it, one
met round corners a sudden crispness that stayed just long enough
to be recognised and melted damply away. A week might have two or
three of such promises and foretastes.
Hilda Howe, approaching the end of her probation at the Baker
Institution, threw the dormitory window wide to them, went out to
seek them. They gave her a new stirring of vitality, something
deep within her leaped up responding to the voucher the evenings
brought that presently they would bring something new and different.
She vibrated to an irrepressible pulse of accord with that; it made
her hand strong and her brain clear for the unimportant matters
that remained within the scope of the monotonous moment. There had
come upon her a stimulating assurance that it would be only a
moment--now. She did not consider this, she could hardly be said
to be intelligently aware of it, but it underlay all that she said
and did. Her spirits gained an enviable lightness, she began again
to see beautiful, touching things in the life that carried her on
with it. She explained to Stephen Arnold that she was immensely
happy at having passed the last of her nursing examinations.
"I hardly dare ask you," he said, "what you are going to do now."
He looked furtive and anxious; she saw that he did, and the
perception irritated her. She had to tell herself that she had
given him the right to look in any way he pleased--indeed yes.
"I hardly dare ask myself," she answered, and was immediately
conscious that for the first time in the history of their relations
she had spoken to him that which was expedient.
"I hope the Sisters are not trying to influence you," he said
firmly.
"Fancy!" she cried irrelevantly. "I heard the other day that
Sister Ann Frances had described me as the pride of the Baker
Institution!" She laughed with delight at the humour of it, and he
smiled too. When she laughed, he had nearly always now confidence
enough to smile too.
"You might ask for another six months."
"Heavens, no! No--I shall make up my mind."
"Then you may go away," Arnold said. They were standing at the
crossing of the wide red road from which they would go in different
directions. She saw that the question was momentous to him. She
also saw how curiously the sun sallowed him, and how many more
hollows he had in his face than most people. She had a pathetic
impression of the figure he made in his coarse gown and shoes.
"God's wayfarer," she murmured. There was pity in her mind,
infinite pity. Her thought had no other tinge. It was a curiously
simple feeling, and seemed to bring her an inconsistent lightness
of heart.
"Come too," she said aloud, "come and be a Clarke Brother where the
climatic conditions suit you better. The world wants Clarke
Brothers everywhere."
He looked at her and tried to smile, but his lips quivered. He
opened them in an effort to speak, gave it up, and turned away
silently, lifting his hat. Hilda watched him for an instant as he
went. His figure took strange proportions through the tears that
sprang to her eyes, and she marvelled at the gaiety with which she
had touched, had almost revealed, her heart's desire.
CHAPTER XXIX
"I knew it would happen in the end," Hilda said, "and it has
happened. The Archdeacon has asked me to tea."
She was speaking to Alicia Livingstone in the dormitory, changing
at the same time for a "turn" at the hospital. It was six o'clock
in the afternoon. Alicia's landau stood at the door of the Baker
Institution. She had come to find that Miss Howe was just going on
duty and could not be taken for a drive.
"When?" asked Alicia, staring out of the window at the crows in a
tamarind tree.
"Last Saturday. He said he had promised some friends of his the
pleasure of meeting me. They had besieged him, he said, and they
were his best friends, on all his committees."
"Only ladies?" The crows, with a shriek of defiance at nothing in
particular, having flown away, Miss Livingstone transferred her
attention.
"Bless me, yes. What Archdeacon has dear men friends! And
lesquelles pense-tu, mon Dieu!"
"Lesquelles?"
"Mrs. Jack Forrester, Mrs. Fitz--what you may call him up on the
frontier, the Brigadier gentleman--Lady Dolly!"
"You were well chaperoned."
"And--my dear--he didn't ask a single Sister!" Hilda turned upon
her a face which appeared still to glow with the stimulus of the
archidiaconal function. "And--it was wicked considering the
occasion--I dropped the character. I let myself out!"
"You didn't shock the Archdeacon?"
"Not in the least. But, my dear love, did you ever permit yourself
the reflection that the Venerable Gambell is a bachelor?"
"Hilda, you shall not! We all love him--you shall not lead him
astray!"
"You would not think of--the altar?"
Miss Livingstone's pale small smile fell like a snowflake upon
Hilda's mood, and was swallowed up. "You are very preposterous,"
she said. "Go on. You always amuse one." Then, as if Hilda's
going on were precisely the thing she could not quite endure, she
said quickly, "The Coromandel is telegraphed from Colombo to-day."
"Ah!" said Hilda.
"He leaves for Madras to-morrow. The thing is to take place there,
you know."
"Then nothing but shipwreck can save him."
"Nothing but--what a horrible idea! Don't you think they may be
happy? I really think they may."
"There is not one of the elements that give people, when they
commit the paramount stupidity of marrying, reason to hope that
they may not be miserable. Not one. If he were a strong man I
should pity him less. But he's not. He's immensely dependent on
his tastes, his friends, his circumstances."
Alicia looked at Hilda; her glance betrayed an attention caught
upon an accidental phrase. "The paramount stupidity." She did not
repeat it aloud, she turned it over in her mind.
"You are thinking," Hilda said accusingly. "What are you thinking
about?"
"Oh, nothing. I saw Stephen yesterday. I thought him looking
rather wretched."
A shadow of grave consideration winged itself across Hilda's eyes.
"He works so much too hard," she said. "It is an appalling waste.
But he will offer himself up."
Alicia looked unsatisfied. She had hoped for something that would
throw more light upon the paramount stupidity. "He brought Mr.
Lappe to tea," she said.
The shadow went. "Should you think Brother Lappe," Miss Howe
demanded, "specially fitted for the cure of souls? Never, never,
could I allow the process of my regeneration to come through
Brother Lappe. He has such a little nose, and such wide pink
cheeks, and such fat sloping shoulders. Dear succulent Brother
Lappe!"
A Sister passed through the dormitory on a visit of inspection.
Alicia bowed sweetly, and the Sister inclined herself briefly with
a cloistered smile. As she disappeared Hilda threw a black skirt
over her head, making a veil of it flowing backward, and rendered
the visit, the noiseless measured step, the little deprecating
movements of inquiry, the benevolent recognition of a visitor from
a world where people carried parasols and wore spotted muslins.
She even effaced herself at the door on the track of the other to
make it perfect, and came back in the happy expansion of an
artistic effort to find Alicia's regard penetrated with the light
of a new conviction.
"Hilda," she said, "I should like to know what this last year has
really been to you."
"It has been very valuable," Miss Howe replied. Then she turned
quickly away to hang up the black petticoat, and stood like that,
shaking out its folds, so that Alicia might not see anything
curious in her face as she heard her own words and understood what
they meant. Very valuable! She did understand, suddenly,
completely. Very valuable! A year of the oddest experiences, a
pictorial year, which she would look back upon, with its core in a
dusty priest. . . .
A probationer came rapidly along the dormitory to where Hilda
stood. She had the olive cheeks and the liquid eyes of the
country; her lips were parted in a smile.
"Miss Howe," she said, in the quick clicking syllables of her race,
"Sister Margaret wishes you to come immediately to the surgical
ward. A case has come in, and Miss Gonsalvez is there, but Sister
Margaret will not be bothered with Miss Gonsalvez. She says you
are due by right in five minutes,"--the messenger's smile broadened
irresponsibly, and she put a fondling touch upon Hilda's apron
string,--"so will you please to make haste!"
"What's the case?" asked Hilda; "I hope it isn't another ship's
hold accident." But Alicia, a shade paler than before, put up her
hand. "Wait till I'm gone," she said, and went quickly. The girl
had opened her lips, however, but to say that she didn't know, she
had only been seized to take the message, though it must be
something serious since they had sent for both the resident
surgeons.
CHAPTER XXX
Dr. Livingstone's concern was personal, that was plain in the way
he stood looking at the floor of the corridor with his hands in his
pockets, before Hilda reached him. Regret was written all over the
lines of his pausing figure with the compressed irritation which
saved that feeling in the Englishman's way from being too obvious.
"This is a bad business, Miss Howe."
"I've just come over--I haven't heard. Who is it?"
"It's my cousin, poor chap--Arnold, the padre. He's been badly
knifed in the bazar."
The news passed over her and left her looking with a curious face
at chance. It was lifted a little, with composed lips, and eyes
which refused to be taken by surprise. There was inquiry in them,
also a defence. Chance, looking back, saw an invincible silent
readiness, and a pallor which might be that of any woman. But the
doctor was also looking, so she said, "That is very sad," and moved
near enough to the wall to put her hand against it. She was not
faint, but the wall was a fact on which one could, for the moment,
rely.
"They've got the man--one of those Cabuli money-lenders. The
police had no trouble with him. He said it was the order of Allah--
the brute! Stray case of fanaticism, I suppose. It seems Arnold
was walking along as usual, without a notion, and the fellow sprang
on him, and in two seconds the thing was done. Hadn't a chance,
poor beggar."
"Where is it?"
"Root of the left lung. About five inches deep. The artery pretty
well cut through, I fancy."
"Then--"
"Oh no--we can't do anything. The haemorrhage must be tremendous.
But he may live through the night. Are you going to Sister
Margaret?"
His nod took it for granted, and he went on. Hilda walked slowly
forward, her head bent, with absorbed uncertain steps. A bar of
evening sunlight came before her, she looked up and stepped outside
the open door. She was handling this thing that had happened,
taking possession of it. It lay in her mind in the midst of a
suddenly stricken and tenderly saddened consciousness. It lay
there passively; it did not rise and grapple with her, it was a
thing that had happened--in Burra Bazar. The pity of it assailed
her. Tears came into her eyes, and an infinite grieved solicitude
gathered about her heart. "So?" she said to herself, thinking that
he was young and loved his work, and that now his hand would be
stayed from the use it had found. One of the ugly outrages of
life, leaving nothing on the mouth but that brief acceptance. It
came to hers with a note of the profound and of the supreme. She
turned resolutely from searching her heart for any wild despair.
She would not for an instant consider what she ought to feel.
"So," she said, and pressed her lips till they stopped trembling,
and went into the hospital.
She asked a question or two, in search of Sister Margaret and the
new case. It was "located," an assistant surgeon told her, in
Private Ward Number Two. She went more and more slowly toward
Private Ward Number Two.
The door was open; she stood in it for an instant with eyes nerved
to receive the tragedy. The room seemed curiously empty of any
such thing, a door opposite was also open, with an arched verandah
outside; the low sun streamed through this upon the floor with its
usual tranquillity. Beyond the arches, netted to keep the crows
away, it made pictures with the tops of the trees. There was the
small iron bed with the confused outline under the bedclothes, very
quiet, and the Sister--the whitewashed wall rose sharp behind her
black draperies--sitting with a book in her hands. Some scraps of
lint on the floor beside the bed, and hardly anything else except
the silence which had almost a presence, and a faint smell of
carbolic acid, and a certain feeling of impotence and abandonment
and waiting which seemed to be in the air. Arnold moved on the
pillow and saw her standing in the door. The bars of the bed's
foot were in the way, he tried to lift his head to surmount the
obstruction, and the Sister perceived her too.
"I think absolutely still was our order, wasn't it, Mr. Arnold?"
she said, with her little pink smile. "And I'm afraid Miss Howe
isn't in time to be of much use to us, is she?" It was the bedside
pleasantry that expected no reply, that indeed forbade one.
"I'm sorry," Hilda said. As she moved into the room she detached
her eyes from Arnold's, feeling as she did so that it was like
tearing something.
"There was so little to do," Sister Margaret said; "Surgeon-Major
Wills saw at once where the mischief lay. Nothing disagreeable was
necessary, was it, Mr. Arnold? Perfect quiet, perfect rest--that's
an easy prescription to take." She had rather prominent very blue
eyes, and an aquiline nose, and a small firm mouth, and her pink
cheeks were beginning to be a little pendulous with age. Hilda
gazed at her silently, noting about her authority and her flowing
draperies something classical. Was she like one of the Fates? She
approached the bed to do something to the pillow--Hilda had an
impulse to push her away with the cry, "It is not time yet--
Atropos!"
"I must go now for an hour or so," the Sister went on. "That poor
creature in Number Six needs me; they daren't give her any more
morphia. You don't need it--happy boy!" she said to Stephen, and
at the look he sent her for answer she turned rather quickly to the
door. Dear Sister, she was none of the Fates, she was obliged to
give directions to Hilda standing in the door with her back turned.
Happily for a deserved reputation for self-command they were few.
It was chief and absolute that no one should be admitted. A
bulletin had been put up at the hospital door for the information
of inquiries; later on when the doctor came again there would be
another.
She went away and they were left alone. The sun on the floor had
vanished; a yellowness stood in its place with a grey background,
the background gaining, coming on. Always his eyes were upon her,
she had given hers back to him and he seemed satisfied. She moved
closer to the bed and stood beside him. Since there was nothing to
do there was nothing to say. Stephen put out his hand and touched
a fold of her dress.
The room filled itself with something that had not been there
before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and
pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand
that had so little more to do. Then Arnold spoke.
"You dear woman!" he said. "You dear woman!" She kept her head
bowed like that and did not answer. It was his happiest moment.
One might say he had lived for this. Her tears fell upon his hand,
a kind of baptism for his heart. He spoke again.
"We must bear this," he panted. "It is--less cruel--than it seems.
You don't know how much it is for the best."
She lifted her wet face. "You mustn't talk," she faltered.
"What difference--" he did not finish the sentence. His words were
too few to waste. He paused and made another effort.
"If this had not happened I would have been--counted--among the
unfaithful," he said. "I know now. I would have abandoned--my
post. And gladly--without a regret--for you."
"Ah!" Hilda cried, with a vivid note of pain. "Would you? I am
sorry for that! I am sorry!"
She gazed with a face of real tragedy at the form of her captive
delivered to her in the bonds of death. A fresh pang visited her
with the thought that in the mystery of the ordering of things she
might have had to do with the forging of those shackles--the price
of the year that had been very valuable.
"My God is a jealous God," Arnold said. "He has delivered me--into
His own hands--for the honour of His name. I acknowledge--I am
content."
"No, indeed no! It was a wicked, horrible chance! Don't charge
your God with it."
His smile was very sweet, but it paid the least possible attention.
"You did love me," he said. He spoke as if he were already dead.
"I did indeed," Hilda replied, and bent her shamed head upon her
hands again in the confession. It is not strange that he heard
only the affirmation in it.
He stroked her hair. "It is good to know that," he said, "very,
good. I should have married you." He went on with sudden boldness
and a new note of strength in his voice, "Think of that! You would
have been mine--to protect and work for. We should have gone
together to England--where I could easily have got a curacy--
easily."
Hilda looked up. "Would you like to marry me now?" she asked
eagerly, but he shook his head.
"You don't understand," he said. "It is the dear sin God has
turned my back upon."
Then it came to her that he had asked for no caress. He was going
unassoiled to his God, with the divine indifference of the dying.
Only his imagination looked backward and forward. And she thought,
"It is a little light flame that I have lit with my own taper that
has gone out--that has gone out--and presently the grave will
extinguish that." She sat quiet and sombre in the growing
darkness, and presently Arnold slept.
He slept through the bringing of a lamp, the arrival of flowers,
subdued knocks of inquirers who would not be stayed by the
bulletin--the visit of Surgeon-Major Wills, who felt his pulse
without wakening him. "Holding out wonderfully," the doctor said.
"Don't rouse him for the soup. He'll go out in about six hours
without any pain. May not wake at all."
The door opened again to admit the probationer come to relieve Miss
Howe. Hilda beckoned her into the corridor. "You can go back,"
she said, "I will take your turn."
"But the Mother Superior--you know how particular about the rules--"
"Say nothing about it. Go to bed. I am not coming."
"Then, Miss Howe, I shall be obliged to report it."
"Report and be--report if you like. There is nothing for you to do
here to-night," and Hilda softly closed the door. There was a
whispered expostulation when Sister Margaret came back, but Miss
Howe said, "It is arranged," and with a little silent nod of
appreciation the Sister settled into her chair, her finger marking
a place in the Church Service. Hilda sat nearer to the bed, her
elbow on the table, shading her eyes from the lamp, and watched.
"Is it not odd," whispered Sister Margaret, as the night wore on,
"he has refused to be confessed before he goes? He will not see
the Brother Superior--or any of them. Strange, is it not?"
Together they watched the quick short breathing. It seemed
strangely impossible to sleep against such odds. They saw the
lines of the face grow sharper and whiter, the dark eye-sockets
sink to a curious roundness, a greyness gather about the mouth.
There were times when they looked at each other in the last
surmise. Yet the feeble pulse persisted--persisted.
"I believe now," said Sister Margaret, "that he may go on like this
until the morning. I am going to take half an hour's nap. Rouse
me at once if he wakes," and she took an attitude of casual repose,
turning the Prayer-book open on her knee for readier use, open at
"Prayers for the Dying."
The jackals had wailed themselves out, and there was a long, dark
period when nothing but the sudden cry of a night bird in the
hospital garden came between Hilda and the very vivid perception
she had at that hour of the value and significance of the earthly
lot. She lifted her head and listened to that, it seemed a
comment. Suddenly, then, a harsh quarrelling of dogs--Christian
dogs--arose in the distance and died away, and again there was
night and silence. Night for hours. Time for reflection, alone
with death and the lamp, upon the year that had been very valuable.
"I would have married you," she whispered. "Yes, I would." Later
her lips moved again. "I would have taken the consequence;" and
again, "I would have paid any penalty." There he lay, a burden
that she would never bear, a burden that would be gone in the
morning. There were moments when she cried out on Fate for doing
her this kindness.
The long singing drone of a steamer's signal came across the city
from the river, once, twice, thrice; and presently the sparrows
began their twittering in the bushes near the verandah, an
unexpected unanimous bird talk that died as suddenly and as
irrelevantly away. A conservancy cart lumbered past creaking; the
far shrill whistle of an awakening factory cut the air from Howrah;
the first solitary foot smote through the dawn upon the pavement.
The light showed grey beyond the scanty curtains. A noise of
something being moved reverberated in the hospital below, and
Arnold opened his eyes. They made him in a manner himself again,
and he fixed them upon Hilda as if they could never alter. She
leaned nearer him and made a sign of inquiry toward the sleeping
Sister, with the farewells, the commendations of poor mortality
speeding itself forth, lying upon her lap. Arnold comprehended,
and she was amazed to see the mask of his face charge itself with a
faint smile as he shook his head. He made a little movement; she
saw what he wanted and took his hand in hers. The smile was still
in his eyes as he looked at her, and then at the cheated Sister.
"I would have married you," she whispered passionately as if that
could stay him. "Yes, I would."
So in the end he trusted the new wings of his mortal love to bear
his soul to its immortality. They carried their burden buoyantly,
it was such a little way. The lamp was still holding its own
against the paleness from the windows when the meaning finally went
out of his clasp of Hilda's hand, without a struggle to stay, and
she saw that in an instant when she was not looking, he had closed
his eyes upon the world. She sat on beside him for a long time
after that, watching tenderly, and would not withdraw her hand--it
seemed an abandonment.
Three hours later Miss Howe, passing out of the hospital gate, was
overtaken by Duff Lindsay, riding, with a look of singular
animation and vigour. He flung himself off his horse to speak to
her, and as he approached he drew from his inner coat pocket the
brown envelope of a telegram.
"Good-morning," he said. "You do look fagged. I have a--curious--
piece of news."
"Alicia told me that you were starting early this morning for
Madras!"
"I should have been, but for this."
"Read it to me," Hilda said, "I'm tired."
"Oh, do you very much mind? I would rather--"
She took the missive; it was dated the day before, Colombo, and
read--
"Do not expect me was married this morning to Colonel Markin S A we
may not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers glory be to
God Laura Markin"
She raised her eyes to his with the gravest, saddest irony.
"Then you--you also are delivered," she said; but he said "What?"
without special heed; and I doubt whether he ever took the trouble
to understand her reference to their joint indebtedness.
"One hopes he isn't a brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal
solicitude, "and can support her. I suppose there isn't any way
one could do anything for her. I heard a story only yesterday
about a girl changing her mind on the way out. By Jove, I didn't
suppose it would happen to me!"
"If you are hurt anywhere," Hilda said absently, "it is only your
vanity, I fancy."
"Ah, my vanity is very sore!" He paused for an instant, wondering
to find so little expansion in her. "I came to ask after Arnold,"
he said. "How is he?"
"He is dead. He died at half-past five this morning."
She left him with even less than her usual circumstance, and turned
in at the gate of the Baker Institution. It happened to be the
last day of her probation.
There has never been any difficulty in explaining Lindsay's
marriage with Alicia Livingstone even to himself; the reasons for
it, indeed, were so many and so obvious that he wondered often why
they had not struck him earlier. But it is worth noting, perhaps,
that the immediate precipitating cause arose in one evening service
at the Cathedral, where it had its birth in the very individual
charm of the nape of Alicia's neck, as she knelt upon her hassock
in the fitting and graceful act of the responses. His instincts in
these matters seem to have had a generous range, considering the
tenets he was born to, but it was to him then a delightful
reflection, often since repeated, that in the sheltered garden of
delicate perfumes where this sweet person took her spiritual
pleasure there was no rank vegetation.
It is much to Miss Hilda Howe's credit that amid the distractions
of her most successful London season she never quite abandons these
two to the social joys that circle round the Ochterlony Monument
and the arid scenic consolations of the Maidan. Her own experience
there is one of the things, I fancy, that make her fond of saying
that the stage is the merest cardboard presentation, and that one
day she means to leave it, to coax back to her bosom the life which
is her heritage in the wider, simpler ways of the world. She never
mentions that experience more directly or less ardently. But I
fear the promise I have quoted is one that she makes too often.
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