Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




"Oh," Laura said, simply, "do not be afraid! I have heard confessions! I
work at home, you see, a good deal among the hospitals, and--we do not
shrink, you know, in the Army from things like that."

"Good God!" he exclaimed, staring, "you don't think--you don't
suppose----"

"Ah! don't say that! It's so like swearing."

As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something intelligible,
the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl of eighteen, also
in the dress of the Army, came through from the bedroom part. She smiled
in a conscious, meaningless way, as she sidled past them. At the door
her smile broadened, and as she closed it after her she gave them a
little nod.

"That's my lieutenant," said Laura.

"The place is like a warren," Lindsay groaned. "How can we talk here?"

Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis. "Do you think,"
she said, "a word of prayer would help you?"

"No," said Lindsay. "No, thank you. What is making me miserable," he
added, quietly, "is the knowledge that we are being overheard. If you go
into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs. Sand listening
by the wall."

"She's gone out! She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take the
evening meeting. Nobody is in there except the two children, and they
are asleep." Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of her. "Indeed, we
are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now. So please don't be afraid,
Mr. Lindsay! Say whatever is in your heart, and the mere saying----"

"Oh," Lindsay cried, "stop! Don't, for Heaven's sake, look at me in that
light any longer. I'm not penitent. I'm not--what do you call it?--a
soul under conviction. Nothing of the sort." He waited with
considerateness for this to have its effect upon her; he could not go on
until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the inundation of it. But she was
not even staggered by it. She only looked down at her folded hands with
an added seriousness and a touch of sorrow.

"Aren't you?" she said. "But at least you feel that you ought to be. I
thought it had been accomplished. But I will go on praying."

"Shall you be very angry, if I tell you that I'd rather you didn't? I
want to come into your life differently--sincerely."

She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution was
swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.

"I won't tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-night
except this--I find that you are influencing all my thoughts and all my
days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way. You hear as much
as that often, and from many people, don't you? So there is nothing in
it that need startle you or make you uncomfortable." He paused, and she
nodded in a visible effort to follow him.

"So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you just
for my own pleasure--there must be some way of helping you, and being
your friend----"

"As Mr. Harris is," she interrupted. "I do influence Mr. Harris for
good, I know. He says so."

"Influence me," he begged, "in any way you like."

"I will pray for you," she said. "I promise that."

"And you will let me see you sometimes?" he asked, conceding the point.

"If I thought it would do you any good"--she looked at him doubtfully,
clasping and unclasping her hands--"I will see; I will ask for guidance.
Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways. If you have no objection, I
will give you this little book, _Almost Persuaded_. I am sure you are
almost persuaded. Above all, I hope, you will go on coming to the
meetings."

And in the course of the next two or three moments Lindsay found
himself, somewhat to his astonishment, again in the night of the
staircase, dismissed exactly as Mr. Harris had been, by the agency of a
printed volume. Only in his case, a figure of much angelic beauty stood
at the top, holding a patent kerosene lamp high to illumine his way. He
refrained from looking back lest she should see something too human in
his face and vanish, leaving him in darkness which would be indeed
impenetrable.




CHAPTER VII.


There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a "ticca-gharry"--the shabby oblong
box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a hackney
carriage--was running away. Coolie mothers dragged naked children up on
the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts dug their lean
beasts in the side and turned out of the way almost at a trot; only the
tramcar held on its course in conscious invincibility. A pariah tore
along beside the vehicle barking; crows flew up from the dung in the
road by half-dozens, protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead necklaces
just escaped being knocked down. Little groups of baboos[4] and
bunnias[5] stood looking after, laughing and speculating; a native
policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse, and they
said to him, "Peace, brother." To each other they said, "Behold, the
driver is a 'mut-wallah,'" (or drunken person); and presently, as the
thing whirled further up the emptied perspective, "Lo! the syce has
fallen." The driver was certainly very drunk; his whip circled
perpetually above his head; the syce clinging behind was stiff with
terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags. Inside, Hilda Howe, with a
hand in the strap at each side and her feet against the opposite seat,
swayed violently, and waited for what might happen, breathing short.
Whenever the gharry thrashed over the tram-lines, she closed her eyes.
There was a point near Cornwallis street where she saw the off front
wheel make sickeningly queer revolutions; and another, electrically
close, when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared in a gate to
the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely right angles
to her own derelict equipage. That was the juncture of the Reverend
Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with Amiruddin
Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and Mohammedan
fasting. It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did in that
interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to Amiruddin. The
ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any resolute hand could have
impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans
threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however,
made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth-merchant's shop,
and precipitating a clash while he still clung to the reins. The door
flew open on the under side and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust
of the road; while the driver, discovering that his seat was no longer
horizontal, entered suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with tears
that the cloth-merchant should restore his wheel--was he not a poor man?
Hilda, struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by various
lean hands of the bazaar, and observed herself the central figure in yet
another situation. When she was in a condition to see, she saw Arnold
soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the possibility of vague police
complication, having slipped away. Stephen had believed the gharry
empty. The sight of her, in her disordered draperies, was a revelation
and a reproach.

[Footnote 4: Clerks.]

[Footnote 5: Small dealers.]

"Is it possible?" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not hurt?"

"Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this." She held up her
right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck
the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine
it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with
anxiety so obviously deep and troubled that Hilda silently smiled. She
who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it
disproportionate.

"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his glance.

"Indeed, I fear not." The priest made a solicitous bandage with his
handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. "It is quite
unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the nearest
chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a
vast amount of trouble--but I am walking."

"I will walk, too," Hilda said, readily. "I should prefer it, truly."
With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a
few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. "I
really can't afford any more," she said. "He can get his wheel mended
with that, can't he?"

"It is three times his fare," Arnold said, austerely, "and he deserved
nothing--but a fine, perhaps." The man was suppliant before them,
cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda lifted her head
and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood
golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink
kite. Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when
she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.

"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."

It was the merest echo and she had done it on purpose, but he could not
know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands and
turned and walked away with him, he had nothing to say. There was
nothing, perhaps, that he wanted to talk of more than of his experience
at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and explained; yet in
that space of her two words the impossibility of mentioning it had
sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant fervour, that she
would refrain from any allusion to _The Offence of Galilee_. And for the
time being she did refrain. She said, instead, that her hand was
smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would use
a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look, said very possibly not
but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-off day when the
little girl of her was brought tactfully to disagreeable necessities,
covered a preposterous impulse to cry with another smile.

A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his arms
full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery. "Oh, the
good man!" Hilda exclaimed, "My parcels!" and looked on equably, while
Arnold took them by their puckered ends. "I have been buying gold lace
and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume," she exclaimed. The bags
dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers; he looked very much aware of
them. "Let me carry at least one," she begged. "I can perfectly with my
parasol hand;" but he refused her even one. "If I may be permitted to
take the responsibility," he said, happily, and she rejoined, "Oh, I
would trust you with things more fragile." At which, such is the
discipline of these orders, he looked steadily in front of him and
seemed deaf with modesty.

"But are you sure," said Hilda, suddenly considerate, "that it looks
well?"

"Is the gold lace, then, so very meretricious?"

"It goes doubtfully with your cloth," she laughed, and instantly looked
stricken with the conviction that she might better have said something
else. But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see no gibe in it,
only a pleasant commonplace.

"It might look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a
censorious public." Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, "They
will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when
it is plain that I might ride--and they see me doing that every day."

All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt did
impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since humour goes
so far to destroy the picturesque. Hilda without the paper bags would
have been vastly enough for contrast. She walked--one is inclined to
dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being unintelligible--in a
wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk, rather frayed at the seams, a
trifle spent in vulnerable places, surmounted by an extravagant collar
and a Paris hat. The dress was of artistic intention, inexpensively
carried out, the hat had an accomplished _chic_; it had fallen to her in
the wreck and ruin of a too ambitious draper of Coolgardie. As a matter
of fact it was the only one she had. The wide sleeves ended a little
below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long suede
gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself
buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in
that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside her;
he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something less
impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint
uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this
accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's
lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of
the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a
perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets
of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the
pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half
visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and
silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line
upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference. So they
passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.

They talked of the accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?" Hilda
said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to
which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal
robes worn every day.

"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly to be
persuaded."

"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she
adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She
did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The
necessity for feeling such a vast emotion--I shouldn't know how to cope
with it."

"I will claim to have saved your other hand," he smiled. "You will be
quite grateful enough for that."

She noted that he did not hasten, behind pyramidal blushes, into the
shelter of a general disavowal. The cassock seemed to cover an
obligation to acknowledge things.

"I see," she said, veering round. "You are quite right to circumscribe
me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out. It is
only the absence of it, too plainly expressed, that is unpleasant. But
you won't find that in me either." She gave him a smile as she lowered
her parasol to turn into the shop of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell
European drugs, that promised, infinite possibilities of friendship; and
he, following, took pleased and careful possession of it.

An hour later, as they approached No. 3, Lal Behari's Lane, Miss Howe
looked pale, which is not surprising, since they had walked and talked
all the way. Their talk was a little strenuous too; it was as if they
had fallen upon an opportunity, and mutually, consciously, made the most
of it.

"You must have some tea immediately," Arnold said, before the battered
urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.

"A little whiskey and soda, I think. And you will come up, please, and
have some, too. You must."

"Thanks," he said, looking at his watch. "If I do--"

"You'll have the soda without the whiskey! All right!" she laughed, and
led the way.

"This is vicious indulgence," Arnold said of his beverage, sitting under
the inverted Japanese umbrellas. "I haven't been pitched out of a
ticca-gharry."

It is doubtful whether the indulgence was altogether in the soda, which
is, after all, ascetic in its quality, and only suitably effervescent,
like ecclesiastical humour. It may very probably be that there was no
indulgence; indeed one is convinced that the word, like so many words,
says too much. The springs of Arnold's chair were bursting through the
bottom, and there were stains on its faded chintz-arms, but it was
comfortable, and he leaned back in it, looking up at the paper
umbrellas. You know the room; I took you into it with Duff Lindsay, who
did not come there from rigidities and rituals, and who had a qualified
pleasure in it. But there were lines in the folds of the flowered window
curtains dragging half a yard upon the floor which seemed to disband
Arnold's spirit, and a twinkle in the blue bead of a bamboo screen where
the light came through that released it altogether. The shabby,
violent-coloured place encompassed him like an easy garment, and the
lady, with her feet tucked up in a sofa and a cushion under her tumbled
head, was an unembarrassing invitation to the kind of happy things he
had not said for years. They sat in the coolness of the room for half an
hour, and then, after a little pause, Hilda said suddenly,

"I am glad you saw me in _The Offence of Galilee_ on Saturday night. We
shall not play it again."

"It has been withdrawn?"

"Yes. The rights, you know, really belong to Mr. Bradley; and he can't
endure his part."

"Is there no one else to--"

"He objects to anyone else. We generally play together." This was
inadvertent, but Stephen had no reason to imagine that she contracted
her eyebrows in any special irritation. "It is an atrocious piece," she
added.

"Is it?" he said, absently, and then, "Yes, it is an atrocious piece.
But I am glad, too, that I saw you." He looked away from her, reddening
deeply, and stood up. His bands fell upon him again, he bade her a
measured and precise farewell. It seemed as if he hurried. She only half
rose to give him her unwounded hand, and when he was gone she sank back
again thoughtfully.




CHAPTER VIII.


"I have outstayed all the rest," Lindsay said, with his hat and stick in
his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, "because I want
particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time," he
added, glancing at his watch.

She had wondered when he came early in the formal Sunday noon hour for
men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when
he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while
Major-Generals and Deputy Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in
her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy Secretaries--it
did not in the least obscure what she found to say--and in the midst of
it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to
his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke
of outsitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and open
it. "You might stay to lunch," she said, addressing a pair of crows in
altercation on the verandah.

"There is nearly half-an-hour before lunch," he said. "Can I convince
you, in that time, I wonder, that I am not an absolute fool."

Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of
the need of support. "I hardly think," she said, drawing the long breath
with which we try to subdue a tempest within, "that it would take so
long." She tried to look at him, but her eyes would not carry above the
violets in his button-hole.

"I've had a supreme experience," he said, "very strange and very lovely.
I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it," he added quickly,
watching her face; "so don't, for God's sake, touch it roughly."

She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. "Why should you
suppose I would touch it roughly?" There was that in her voice which
cried put that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the
brink of his confidence, could not suppose it--did not hear it. He knew
her so well.

"A great many people will," he said. "I can't bear the thought of their
fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you."

She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked
straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in
the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.

"I believe you know already," Lindsay cried.

"I have heard something. Don't be alarmed--not from people, from Miss
Howe."

"Wonderful woman! I haven't told her."

"Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case," Alicia
went on, with immense courage, "I didn't believe them."

"Why?" he asked, enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight--he would
even submit it to analysis.

She hesitated--her business was in great waters, the next instant might
engulf her. "It's so curiously unlike you," she faltered. "If she had
been a duchess--a very exquisite person, or somebody very
clever--remember I haven't seen her."

"You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons." Lindsay
visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.

Alicia raised her eyebrows.

"What do you expect one to imagine?" she asked, with quietness.

"A miracle," he said, sombrely.

"Ah, that's difficult!"

There was silence for a moment between them, then she added, perversely,

"And, you know, faith is not what it was."

Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed
to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running
watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she
seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she
could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he
stood.

"Don't make a mistake," she said, "don't." She thrust her hand for a
fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it,
gathering herself together to meet what he might say.

What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. "That's what everybody
will tell me; but I thought you might understand." He tapped the toe of
his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down
and counted them too.

"Then you won't help me to marry her," he said definitely, at last.

"What could I do?" She twisted her sapphire ring. "Ask somebody else."

"Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as
my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you
know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid
colours of the lost."

The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the
cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting
Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise
of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked
too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more
unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.

"No," she said; "it must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become
involved--I might do harm." She had surmounted her emotion; she was able
to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. "I should
do harm," she repeated.

"You don't count with her effect on you."

"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man."

"But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm really
not a fool--not even very impressionable."

"Oh, no!" she said impatiently, "no--of course not."

"Pray, why?"

"There are other things to reckon with." She looked coldly beyond him
out of the window. "A man's intelligence when he is in love--how far can
one count on it?"

There was nothing but silence for that or perhaps the murmured "Oh, I
don't agree," with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a
simple appeal. "Then after all," he said, "you're not my friend."

It goaded her into something like an impertinence. "After you have
married her," she said, "you'll see."

"You will be hers then," he declared.

"I will be yours." Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a
brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.

"And I thought you broad in these views," Lindsay said, glancing at her
curiously. Her opportunity for defense was curtailed by a heavy step in
the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon-Major Livingstone,
looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a
profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin,
though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear
it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his
perturbations away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud
upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling
to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence
on the other side of the door.




CHAPTER IX.


That same Sunday Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about Hilda
Howe, "We have not stood still--we know each other well now," and when
he commented with some reserve upon this, to follow it up. "But these
things have so little to do with mere length of time or number of
opportunities," she declared. "One springs at some people."

A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance; and
they talked about something else. But perhaps this is enough to explain
a note which went by a messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace
in Middleton street to No. 3, La Behari's Lane on Monday morning. It was
a short note, making a definite demand with an absence of colour and
softness and emotion which was almost elaborate. Hilda, at breakfast,
tore off the blank half sheet, and wrote in pencil--

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