Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




"Stop!" he cried. "You've gone off your head--you've got fever. You're
acting wicked with that jewelry. 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
toward 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 Sunder-bunds;
instead of it, one met around 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 brought 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. 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.

"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 seemed nearly always now to have 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 dusty gown and shoes. "God's wayfarer," she murmured.

"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 in her eyes, and she
marvelled at the lightness 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 Archdiaconal
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 snow-flake 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. She did not repeat it, 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. "He brought Mr. Lappe to tea," Miss Howe
said.

The shadow went. "Should you think Brother Lappe," she 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 tack 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.

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.


Doctor 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 bazaar."

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, a retreat. 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 moneylenders. 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 Bura Bazaar. 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
her with a note of the profound and of the supreme. "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 2. She went more and more slowly toward Private Ward Number 2.

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 were 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 6 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. In
obedience to it 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 regret--for you."

"Ah!" Hilda cried with a vivid note of pain, "I am sorry! 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.

"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,
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 Sister 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 her 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. Then a harsh quarrelling of
dogs--Christian dogs--arose in the distance and died away, and again
there was night and silence. Suddenly 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
nearest 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 change 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.

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.

"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 before. 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 overwhelming
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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