Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




"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
re-addressed 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
_bien-etre_ 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 somewhat 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 into camp; 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 petrifaction, she was almost satisfied 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 opinions 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 her 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, 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 effectively after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major
Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual
whiskey 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 and five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal
staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbow 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
evenings 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 further
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
typhoid 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, and 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 tip-toe, 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 fear and wonder, but the sense that was
strangest 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, further
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 ebon 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 forget. 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 No. 10, 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 habited 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. In such a case it's all so
physical. It must be."

"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 my 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?"

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