Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




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, it was so
whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers.
Alicia knew, of course; but that was much 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; but 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 among its features if she could help it. It was
a trick she played upon her own 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. Hilda sat under the blue umbrellas when the hour
arrived, devising with full heart-beats 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. Hilda 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 Brother 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 bazaar _Kerani_:[9]

[Footnote 9: Hired writer.]

"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 pig-tail 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 Calcutta 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 leaped
at actual personation, 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 bazaar--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. Murphy." He had never forgotten
the incongruity 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 added 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
potential 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 that 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 foot-stool 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 outside it definitely enough, yet some
vibration in it touched 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 own hands,
pressed one on each side of him to the seat of the sofa for support, and
he looked in fixed silence at the shapely white thing on 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
child-like 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----"

His eyes went in her direction, but lacked courage to go all the way. 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
flood-gate 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 leaped in 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 toward 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, indeed, 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 choose, 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
pleasure in 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 her 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 aware that he need not go away, and his head,
as it rose in the twilight against the window, was grave and calm.
Without a word a great tenderness 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. The moment died away, neither of them could have
measured it, and when it had finally ebbed--they were conscious of every
subsiding throb--a silence came instead, like a margin for the beauty of
it. 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 unforgivable sin she could explain it and
obtain justification rather than pardon.

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