Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




"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 bazaar
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 altar-piece 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 bazaar. 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 vigourous 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, counted 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--he
had them laundried in England and sent out with the mails--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 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 Reproach of Galilee_. I don't wonder that you do not wish to
disturb that impression."

Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallized 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 15th. 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-Lieutenant-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's got 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,
that there was more in a good fit than meets the eye, 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 like 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 distained 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, bye
and bye, 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 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 man 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 _naivete_ 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 accented the
swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude. It expressed a
temperament, a character, fifty other things, but especially 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.

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