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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path of a Star, by 
+Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Path of a Star
+
+Author: Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2006 [EBook #5102]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATH OF A STAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Don Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PATH OF A STAR
+
+
+By Mrs. Everard Cotes
+
+(AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
+
+
+1899
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+She pushed the portiere aside with a curved hand and gracefully
+separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed it
+after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little forward,
+eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew precisely who
+was there. You would have been aware at once that she was an actress.
+She entered the room with a little stride and then crossed it quickly,
+the train of her morning gown--it cried out of luxury with the cheapest
+voice--taking folds of great audacity as she bent her face in its loose
+mass of hair over Laura Filbert, sitting on the edge of a bamboo sofa,
+and said--
+
+"You poor thing! Oh, you POOR thing!"
+
+She took Laura's hand as she spoke, and tried to keep it; but the hand
+was neutral, and she let it go. "It is a hand," she said to herself,
+in one of those quick reflections that so often visited her ready-made,
+"that turns the merely inquiring mind away. Nothing but feeling could
+hold it."
+
+Miss Filbert made the conventional effort to rise, but it came to
+nothing, or to a mere embarrassed accent of their greeting. Then her
+voice showed this feeling to be superficial, made nothing of it, pushed
+it to one side.
+
+"I suppose you cannot see the foolishness of your pity," she said. "Oh
+Miss Howe, I am happier than you are--much happier." Her bare feet, as
+she spoke, nestled into the coarse Mirzapore rug on the floor, and her
+eye lingered approvingly upon an Owari vase three feet high, and thick
+with the gilded landscape of Japan, which stood near it, in the cheap
+magnificence of the room.
+
+Hilda smiled. Her smile acquiesced in the world she had found,
+acquiesced, with the gladness of an explorer, in Laura Filbert as a
+feature of it.
+
+"Don't be too sure," she cried; "I am very happy. It is such a pleasure
+to see you."
+
+Her gaze embraced Miss Filbert as a person, and Miss Filbert as a
+pictorial fact, but that was because she could not help it. Her eyes
+were really engaged only with the latter Miss Filbert.
+
+"Much happier than you are," Laura repeated, slowly moving her head from
+side to side as if to negative contradiction in advance. She smiled too;
+it was as if she had remembered a former habit, from politeness.
+
+"Of course you are--of course!" Miss Howe acknowledged. The words were
+mellow and vibrant; her voice seemed to dwell upon them with a kind of
+rich affection. Her face covered itself with serious sweetness. "I can
+imagine the beatitudes you feel--by your clothes."
+
+The girl drew her feet under her, and her hand went up to the only
+semi-conventional item of her attire. It was a brooch that exclaimed in
+silver letters "Glory to His Name!" "It is the dress of the Army in this
+country," she said; "I would not change it for the wardrobe of a queen."
+
+"That's just what I mean." Miss Howe leaned back in her chair with her
+head among its cushions, and sent her words fluently across the room,
+straight and level with the glance from between her half-closed eyelids.
+A fine sensuous appreciation of the indolence it was possible to enjoy
+in the East clung about her. "To live on a plane that lifts you up like
+that--so that you can defy all criticism and all convention, and go
+about the streets like a mark of exclamation at the selfishness of the
+world--there must be something very consummate in it or you couldn't go
+on. At least I couldn't."
+
+"I suppose I do look odd to you." Her voice took a curious, soft,
+uplifted note. "I wear three garments only--the garments of my sisters
+who plant the young shoots in the rice-fields, and carry bricks for the
+building of rich men's houses, and gather the dung of the roadways to
+burn for fuel. If the Army is to conquer India it must march bare-footed
+and bare-headed all the way. All the way," Laura repeated, with a
+tremor of musical sadness. Her eyes were fixed in appeal upon the other
+woman's. "And if the sun beats down upon my uncovered head, I think, 'It
+struck more fiercely upon Calvary'; and if the way is sharp to my unshod
+feet, I say, 'At least I have no cross to bear.'" The last words seemed
+almost a chant, and her voice glided from them into singing--
+
+
+     "The blessed Saviour died for me,
+      On the cross!  On the cross!
+      He bore my sins at Calvary,
+      On the rugged cross!"
+
+
+She sang softly, her body thrust a little forward in a tender swaying--
+
+
+     "Behold His hands and feet and side,
+      The crown of thorns, the crimson tide,
+      'Forgive them, Father!' loud He cried,
+      On the rugged cross!"
+
+
+"Oh, thank you!" Miss Howe exclaimed. Then she murmured again, "That's
+just what I mean."
+
+A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the
+moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it, with penetrant anxiety. "Did
+you really enjoy that hymn?" she asked.
+
+"Indeed I did."
+
+"Then, dear Miss Howe, I think you cannot be very far from the Kingdom."
+
+"I? Oh, I have my part in a kingdom." Her voice caressed the idea. "And
+the curious thing is that we are all aristocrats who belong to it. Not
+the vulgar kind, you understand--but no, you don't understand. You'll
+have to take my word for it." Miss Howe's eyes sought a red hibiscus
+flower that looked in at the window half drowned in sunlight, and the
+smile in them deepened.
+
+"Is it the Kingdom of God and His righteousness?" Laura Filbert's clear
+glance was disturbed by a ray of curiosity, but the inflexible quality
+of her tone more than counterbalanced this.
+
+"There's nothing about it in the Bible, if that's what you mean. And yet
+I think the men who wrote 'The time of the singing of birds has come,'
+and 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,' must have belonged to it."
+She paused, with an odd look of discomfiture. "But one shouldn't talk
+about things like that--it takes the bloom off. Don't you feel that way
+about your privileges now and then? Don't they look rather dusty and
+battered to you after a day's exposure in Bow Bazar?"
+
+There came a light crunch of wheels on the red soorkee drive outside,
+and a switch past the bunch of sword-ferns that grew beside the door.
+The muffled crescendo of steps on the stair and the sound of an inquiry
+penetrated from beyond the portiere, and without further preliminary
+Duff Lindsay came into the room.
+
+"Do I interrupt a rehearsal?" he asked; but there was nothing in the way
+he walked across the room to Hilda Howe to suggest that the idea abashed
+him. For her part she rose and made one short step to meet him, and then
+received him as it were with both hands and all her heart.
+
+"How ridiculous you are!" she cried. "Of course not. And let me tell you
+it is very nice of you to come this very first day when one was dying to
+be welcomed. Miss Filbert came too, and we have been talking about our
+respective walks in life. Let me introduce you. Miss Filbert--Captain
+Filbert, of the Salvation Army--Mr. Duff Lindsay of Calcutta."
+
+She watched with interest the gravity with which they bowed, and the
+difference in it: his the simple formality of his class, Laura's a
+repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he looked,
+although any Bond Street tailor would have impeached his waistcoat, and
+one shabby glove had manifestly never been on. Yet Miss Filbert's first
+words seemed to show a slight unbending. "Won't you sit there?" she
+said, indicating the sofa corner she had been occupying. "You get
+the glare from the window where you are." It was virtually a command,
+delivered with a complete air of dignity and authority; and Lindsay, in
+some confusion, found himself obeying. "Oh, thank you, thank you," he
+said. "One doesn't really mind in the least. Do you--do you object to
+it? Shall I close the shutters?"
+
+"If you do," said Miss Howe delightedly, "we shall not be able to see."
+
+"Neither we should," he assented; "the others are closed already. Very
+badly built these Calcutta houses, aren't they? Have you been long in
+India, Miss--Captain Filbert?"
+
+"I served a year up-country, and then fell ill and had to go home on
+furlough. The native food didn't suit me. I am stationed in Calcutta
+now, but I have only just come."
+
+"Pleasant time of the year to arrive," Mr. Lindsay remarked.
+
+"Yes; but we are not particular about that. We love all the times and
+the seasons, since every one brings its appointed opportunity. Last
+year, in Mugridabad, there were more souls saved in June than in any
+other month."
+
+"Really?" asked Mr. Lindsay; but he was not looking at her with those
+speculations. The light had come back upon her face.
+
+"I will say good-bye now," said Captain Filbert. "I have a meeting at
+half-past five. Shall we have a word of prayer before I go?"
+
+She plainly looked for immediate acquiescence; but Miss Howe said,
+"Another time, dear."
+
+"Oh, why not?" exclaimed Duff Lindsay. Hilda put the semblance of a
+rebuke into her glance at him, and said, "Certainly not."
+
+"Oh," Captain Filbert cried, "don't think you can escape that way! I
+will pray for you long and late to-night, and ask my lieutenant to do
+so too. Don't harden your heart, Miss Howe--the Lord is waiting to be
+compassionate."
+
+The two were silent, and Laura walked toward the door. Just where the
+sun slanted into the room and made leaf-patterns on the floor she turned
+and stood for an instant in the full tide of it; and it set all the
+loose tendrils of her pale yellow hair in a little flame, and gave the
+folds of the flesh-coloured sari that fell over her shoulder the texture
+of draperies so often depicted as celestial. The sun sought into her
+face, revealing nothing but great purity of line and a clear pallor
+except where below the wide light blue eyes two ethereal shadows brushed
+themselves. Under the intentness of their gaze she made as if she would
+pass out without speaking; and the tender curves of her limbs, as she
+wavered, could not have been matched out of mediaeval stained glass. But
+her courage, or her conviction, came back to her at the door, and she
+raised her hand and pointed at Hilda.
+
+"She's got a soul worth saving."
+
+Then the portiere fell behind her, and nothing was said in the room
+until the pad of her bare feet had ceased upon the stair.
+
+"She came out in the Bengal with us," Hilda told him--this is not a
+special instance of it, but she could always gratify Duff Lindsay in
+advance--"and she was desperately seedy, poor girl. I looked after her a
+little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got me on her mind.
+And as the two hundred and eighty million benighted souls of India are
+her continual concern, I seem a superfluity. To think of being the two
+hundred and eighty millionth and first oppresses one."
+
+Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.
+
+"You weren't at that end of the ship?" he demanded.
+
+"Of course I was--we all were. And some of us--little Miss Stace, for
+instance--thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and sardines for
+tea every night for a whole month. And, after Suez, ices for dinner on
+Sundays. It was luxury."
+
+Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache. "I don't call it fair
+or friendly," he said, "when you know how easily it could have been
+arranged. Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told you
+that the second-class saloon was no place for you. For YOU!"
+
+Plainly she did not intend to argue the point. She poised her chin in
+her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help seeing, as
+he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful. But this had been so
+long acknowledged between them that she could hardly have been conscious
+that she was insisting on it afresh. Then by the time he might have
+thought her launched upon a different meditation, her mind swept back to
+his protest, like a whimsical bird.
+
+"I didn't want to extract anything from the mercantile community of
+Calcutta in advance," she said. "It would be most unbusinesslike.
+Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself, as
+leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season. Then I
+think," she said with defiance, "that I shall avoid you."
+
+"And pray why?"
+
+"Because you would put too much in. According to your last letters you
+are getting beastly rich. You would take all the tragedy out of the
+situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque."
+
+"I don't know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the way
+of your experiences," Lindsay said. She retorted, "Oh yes, you do";
+and they regarded each other through an instant's silence with visible
+good-fellowship.
+
+"A reasonably strong company this time?" Lindsay asked.
+
+"Thank you. 'Company' is gratifying. For a month we have been a
+'troupe'--in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling. Fifteen
+of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with
+light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors
+with a thousand candlepower. Bradley and I will have to do most of the
+serious work. But I have improved--oh, a lot. You wouldn't know my Lady
+Whippleton."
+
+It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
+appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.
+
+"Then Bradley is here too?" he remarked.
+
+"Oh yes," she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face. "But it
+is much better than it was, really. He is hardly ever troublesome now.
+He understands. And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.
+You know," she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view,
+"as an artist he has my unqualified respect."
+
+"You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they
+are not women," Duff said. "I don't believe their behaviour is a bit
+more affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the
+higher mathematics."
+
+She turned indignant eyes on him. "Fancy YOUR saying that! Fancy your
+having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry! At what
+Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?" she cried derisively.
+"Well, it shows that one can't trust one's best friend loose among the
+conventions!"
+
+He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such matters
+were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when she added, with
+apparent inconsistency and real dejection, "It IS a hideous bore."
+
+Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it
+aside he felt that she was generous. Yet something in him--perhaps the
+primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch impulse
+to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to say, "He gives
+up a good deal, doesn't he, for his present gratification?"
+
+"He gives up everything! That is the disgusting part of it. Leander
+Morris offered him--But why should I tell you? It's humiliating enough
+in the very back of one's mind."
+
+"He is a clever fellow, no doubt."
+
+"Not too clever to act with me! Oh, we go beautifully--we melt, we run
+together. He has given me some essential things, and now I can give them
+back to him. I begin to think that is what keeps him now. It must be
+awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in--in anybody, and watch
+it grow."
+
+"Doubtless," said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her eyebrows
+twitched together, but she said nothing. Although she knew his very
+moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with his eyes on the
+carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical
+clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her
+mouth. "Well," he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, "it's
+a satisfaction to have you back. I have been doing nothing, literally,
+since you went away, but making money and playing tennis. Existence,
+as I look back upon it, is connoted by a varying margin of profit and a
+vast sward."
+
+She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely,
+considering the advisability of returning. "It's a pity you can't act,"
+she said; "then you could come away and let it all go."
+
+Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed. "How simple life is
+to you!" he said. "But anyway I couldn't act."
+
+"Oh no, you couldn't, you couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent, you
+are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent even
+for an instant to be the flame in anybody else--any of those people who,
+for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary. Never!"
+
+It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was: "I wish you would go
+on. You can't think how gratifying it is--after the tennis."
+
+"If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable."
+
+"Oh then, stop. We can't quarrel yet--I've hardly seen you. Are you
+comfortable here? Would you like some French novels?"
+
+"Yes, thank you. Yes, please!" She grew before him into a light and
+conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of speech.
+He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the spring she had
+detached herself from, and after failing for a quarter of an hour he got
+up to go.
+
+"I shan't bother you again before Saturday," he said; "I know what a
+week it will be at the theatre. Remember you are to give the man
+his orders about the brougham. I can get on perfectly with the cart.
+Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you."
+
+"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with yawns
+and much whisky and soda." She gave him a stately inclination with her
+hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his heart in a
+burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He
+stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun
+was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic
+army," he said.
+
+"You saw, you heard, you know."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for yourself, at
+the Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street--you man!"
+
+Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way down
+the stairs her voice appealed to him over the banisters.
+
+"You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it."
+
+"I know you didn't," he returned. "You woman! But you yourself--you're
+not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"
+
+Hilda leaned upon the banisters, her arms dropping over from the elbows.
+"I suppose I may look at her," she said; and her smile glowed down upon
+him.
+
+"Do you think it really rewards attention?--the type, I mean."
+
+"How you will talk of types! Didn't you see that she was unique? You
+may come back if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we will discuss
+her."
+
+Lindsay looked at his watch. "I would come back for a quarter of an hour
+to discuss anything, or nothing," he replied, "but there isn't time. I
+am dining with the Archdeacon. I must go to church."
+
+"Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to
+church? Why not say on arrival: 'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon and
+your mutton the same evening--c'est trop! I cannot so impose upon your
+generosity. I have come for the mutton!'"
+
+Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often before,
+by an orthodox consideration. Duff Lindsay drove away in his cart; and
+still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss Howe stood leaning
+over the banisters, her eyes fixed full of speculation on the place
+where he had stood. She was thinking of a scene--a dinner with an
+Archdeacon--and of the permanent satisfactions to be got from it; and
+she renounced almost with a palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's
+asking her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone. "It is the lowest, isn't it--in
+the scale of human endowment? Mimicry."
+
+Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned
+her eyes and her delicate chin up to Duff Lindsay with the protest.
+Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if
+they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.
+
+"Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's
+a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen
+mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway."
+
+"You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked
+Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
+
+"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
+
+Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their
+energy and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways, and
+since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with it.
+
+"I've met them in London," she said. "Oh, I remember one hot little
+North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--and they were
+always disappointing. There seemed to be somehow no basis--nothing to go
+upon."
+
+She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful
+deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in
+calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined. That
+was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will
+do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he
+might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the
+somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens
+to find out anything at all.
+
+"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his
+words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured
+to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her
+comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. "But Miss
+Hilda Howe has one."
+
+"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
+
+"I don't know. She's an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on
+that."
+
+"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but
+she closed them instead, and turned her head again to listen to Mrs.
+Barberry. The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating the
+conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and
+relief.
+
+"I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather," Mrs. Barberry said;
+"I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the Fort,
+and I said, 'Never again!' Fortunately the girls were just out, and not
+one of them understood, but those poor boys didn't know where to look!
+And no more did I. So disgustingly real."
+
+Alicia's eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a
+little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her
+lips.
+
+"I was in England last year," she said; "I--I saw A Woman of Honour in
+London. What could possibly be done with it by an Australian scratch
+company in a Calcutta theatre! Imagination halts."
+
+"Miss Howe did something with it," observed Mr. Lindsay. "That and one
+or two other things carried one through last cold weather. One supported
+even the gaieties of Christmas week with fortitude, conscious that there
+was something to fall back upon. I remember I went to the State ball,
+and cheerfully."
+
+"That's saying a good deal, isn't it?" commented Dr. Livingstone,
+vaguely aware of an ironical intention. "By Jove! yes."
+
+"Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn't he?" Mrs. Barberry said. "Such a
+magnificent head. I adore him in Shakespeare."
+
+"He knows the conventions, and uses them with security," Lindsay
+replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air,
+demanded--
+
+"Is the story true?"
+
+"The story of their relations? I suppose there are fifty. One of them
+is."
+
+Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a
+reminiscence of amateur theatricals. "Their relations!" she murmured to
+Dr. Livingstone. "What awful things to talk about!"
+
+"The story I mean," Alicia explained, "is to the effect that Mr.
+Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he
+met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her passion
+for her art--I mean, of course, her affections--"
+
+"My dear girl, we know what you mean," cried Mrs. Barberry, entering a
+protest as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.
+
+"And precisely the reverse happened."
+
+"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.
+
+"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.
+
+"That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man," Lindsay
+contributed again.
+
+"Tables turned, eh? Daresay it served him right," remarked Dr.
+Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
+Barberry, we ought to be off?"
+
+"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
+enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught
+it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him!
+Good-bye, you nice thing"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--"Good-bye,
+Mr. Lindsay. Fancy--a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it
+better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--goodbye."
+
+With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
+room, and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
+one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
+Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
+oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
+tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
+brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
+agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in
+a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could
+almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
+forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
+bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a
+trifle gross and material. Certainly as she sat there in her grace and
+slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
+morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
+vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
+present her in. With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
+traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
+appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
+elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
+was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
+her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness
+of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
+personal world of many effects. Into her making of tea, for example, she
+put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she ordered more bread
+and butter in the worst possible rendering of her servants' tongue,
+without a thought except that the bread and butter should be brought.
+Lindsay liked to think that with him she was particularly simple
+and direct, that he was of those who freed her from the pretty
+consciousness, the elegant restraint that other people fixed upon her.
+It must be admitted that this conviction had reason in establishing
+itself, and it is perhaps not surprising that, in the security of it,
+he failed to notice occasions when it would not have held, of which this
+was plainly one. Alicia reflected, with her cheek against the Afghan
+wolf-skins on the back of the chair. It was characteristic of her eyes
+that one could usually see things being turned over in them. She would
+sometimes keep people waiting while she thought. She thought perceptibly
+about Hilda Howe, slanting her absent gaze between sheltering eyelids
+to the floor. Presently she rearranged the rose in its green glass vase,
+and said, "Then it's impossible not to be interested."
+
+"I thought you would find it so."
+
+Alicia was further occupied in bestowing small fragments of cress
+sandwich upon a terrier. "Fancy your being so sure," she said, "that you
+could present her entertainingly!" She looked past him toward the light
+that came in at the draped window, and he was not aware that her regard
+held him fast by the way.
+
+"Anyone could," he said cheerfully. "She presents herself. One is only
+the humblest possible medium. And the most passive."
+
+Alicia's eyes were still attracted by the light from the window. It
+silhouetted a rare fern from Assam which certainly rewarded them.
+
+"I like to hear you talk about her. Tell me some more."
+
+"Haven't I exhausted metaphor in describing her?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Livingstone, with conviction; "but I'm not a bit
+satisfied. A few simple facts sometimes--sometimes are better. Wasn't it
+a little difficult to make her acquaintance?"
+
+"Not in the very least. I saw her in A Woman of Honour, and was
+charmed. Charmed in a new way. Next day I discovered her address--it's
+obscure--and sent up my card for permission to tell her so. I explained
+to her that one would have hesitated at home, but here one was protected
+by the custom. And she received me warmly. She gave me to understand
+that she was not overwhelmed with tribute of that kind from Calcutta.
+The truthful ring of it was pathetic, poor dear."
+
+"That was in--"
+
+"In February."
+
+"In February we were at Nice," Alicia said, musingly. Then she took up
+her divining-rod again. "One can imagine that she was grateful. People
+of that kind--how snobbish I sound, but you know what I mean--are rather
+stranded in Calcutta, aren't they? They haven't any world here;" and,
+with the quick glance which deprecated her timid clevernesses, she
+added, "The arts conspire to be absent."
+
+"Ah, don't misunderstand. If there was any gratitude it was all mine.
+But we met as kindred, if I may vaunt myself so much. A mere theory of
+life will go a long way, you know, toward establishing a claim of that
+sort. And, at all events, she is good enough to treat me as if she
+admitted it."
+
+"What is her theory of life?" Alicia demanded quickly. "I should be glad
+of a new one."
+
+Lindsay's communicativeness seemed to contract a little, as at the touch
+of a finger light, but cold.
+
+"I don't think she has ever told me," he said. "No, I am sure she has
+not." His reflection was: "It is her garment--how could it fit another
+woman!"
+
+"But you have divined it--she has let you do that! You can give me your
+impression."
+
+He recognised her bright courage in venturing upon impalpabilities, but
+not without a shade of embarrassment.
+
+"Perhaps. But having perceived, to pass on--it doesn't follow that one
+can. I don't seem able to lay my hand upon the signs and symbols."
+
+The faintest look of disappointment, the lightest cloud of submission,
+appeared upon Miss Livingstone's face.
+
+"Oh, I know!" she said. "You are making me feel dreadfully out of it,
+but I know. It surrounds her like a kind of atmosphere, an intellectual
+atmosphere. Though I confess that is the part I don't understand in
+connection with an actress."
+
+There was a sudden indifference in this last sentence. Alicia lay back
+upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among them, and
+looked away from the subject at the teacups. Duff picked up his hat. He
+had the subtlest intimations with women.
+
+"It's an intoxicating atmosphere," he said. "My continual wonder is that
+I'm not in love with her. A fellow in a novel, now, in my situation,
+would be embroiled with half his female relations by this time, and
+taking his third refusal with a haggard eye."
+
+Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness. She lifted
+her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty suddenly
+revealed.
+
+"Why aren't you?" she said. "I wonder, too."
+
+"I should like it enormously," he laughed. "I've lain awake at nights
+trying to find out why it isn't so. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me. I
+think it must be because she's such a confoundedly good fellow."
+
+Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a
+shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was over; she was
+full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.
+
+"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said. "But why are you going? Don't
+go. Stay and have another cup of tea."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same terms
+at New College, and now found themselves again together in the social
+poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their
+walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in
+Bentinck Street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why anyone should
+be walking there, to begin with, anyone, at all events, not a Chinaman,
+or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture, or an able-bodied seaman
+luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets, and describing
+an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest glass of country
+spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a
+Bulgarian, a Levantine, or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a
+carriage, to whom the able-bodied seaman represented the whole port.
+The cramped twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they
+overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left, and
+walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings and
+the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with
+prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible
+aside. Three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black, but
+many shades of brown, written down in the census as "of mixed Mood," and
+wearing still, through the degenerating centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril
+of the first Englishmen who came to conjugal ties of Hindustan. The
+place sent up to the stars a vast noise of argument and anger and
+laughter, of the rattling of hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered
+in its exaggeration, the red turban of a policeman here and there
+denoted little more than a unit in the crowd. There were gas-lamps, and
+they sent a ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside
+the banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.
+They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built
+into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for
+Bentinck Street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour
+of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together
+into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and
+yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated.
+There where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and
+the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads
+passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial,
+remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human,
+practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the
+head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels
+of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little
+flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, and showed
+his heap of cakes that they were well-browned and full of butter. From
+the "Cape of Good Cheer," where many bottles glistened in rows inside,
+came a braying upon the conch, and a flame of burnt brandy danced along
+the bar to the honour and propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied
+seaman might be thirsty when he came, for the "Cape of Good Cheer" did
+not owe its prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of
+our theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe
+shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the stitching. There
+were endless shoe shops, and they all belonged to Powson or Singson or
+Samson, while one sign-board bore the broad impertinence "Macpherson."
+The proprietors stood in the door, the smell came out in the
+street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped in fried oil and fresh
+leather that out-fans even the south wind in Bentinck Street. They were
+responsible but not anxious, the proprietors: they buried their fat
+hands in their wide sleeves and looked up and down, stolid and smiling.
+They stood in their alien petticoat trousers for the commercial
+stability of the locality, and the rows of patent leather slippers that
+glistened behind them testified to it further. Everything else shifted
+and drifted, with a perpetual change of complexion, a perpetual
+worsening of clothes. Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of prosperity.
+It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue
+cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking
+up and down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise
+of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in his queue.
+
+Lindsay liked Bentinck Street as an occasional relapse from the scenic
+standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made personal
+business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial impression thrown
+into the transaction. Arnold, in his cassock, waited in the doorway with
+his arms crossed behind him, and his thin face thrust as far as it would
+go into the air outside. It is possible that some intelligences might
+have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession, a figure to be
+copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the
+common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish
+in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only
+occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which
+had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had the long thin nose
+which looked as if for preference it would be forever thrust among the
+pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the width of his mouth
+without perhaps detecting the patience and decision of the upper lip.
+The indignity of spectacles he did not yet wear, but it hovered over
+him; it was indispensable to his personality in the long-run. In
+figure he was indifferently tall and thin and stooping, made to pass
+unobservedly along a pavement or with the directness of humble but
+important business among crowds. At Oxford he had interested some of his
+friends and worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of
+that Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her
+the responsibility. Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to exist
+on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent animal,
+under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was among those who
+observed his waverings without prejudice or anything but an affectionate
+solicitude that, whichever way Arnold went, he should find the
+satisfactions he sought. The conviction that settled the matter was
+accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with
+hands--the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed
+him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of University College. Here
+one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head
+in confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
+claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which
+he saw deeply concealed in his bosom, and disguised with a host of
+spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic
+bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that
+he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the
+effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of
+spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept
+upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
+point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away
+in another direction, from which, if he turned his head, he could see
+the Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in
+her skirts, looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the
+Clarke Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood
+in the door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck Street, while Lindsay
+explained to Ahsing his objection to patent leather toe-caps; six years
+which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully
+admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
+achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself
+as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to
+the great future already shining behind coming aeons of the universal
+Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
+from the granular nature of all change, moral and material. He never
+talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar
+Oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather
+the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in
+this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
+to survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to
+attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held vastly,
+on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of
+symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye
+of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be
+hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and
+intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it
+about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys,
+who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of
+mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round
+boxes of white grapes in sawdust from Kabul. He seldom dwelt upon the
+converts that already testified to the success of the mission; it might
+be gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.
+
+As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his hand
+within Arnold's elbow. It was an impulse, and the analysis of it would
+show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value continually
+renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common ground. The physical
+nearness, the touch, was something, and each felt it in the remoteness
+of his other world with satisfaction. There was absurdly little in what
+they had to say to each other; they talked of the Viceroy's attack of
+measles and the sanitary improvements in the cloth dealers' quarter.
+Their bond was hardly more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness
+of sentiment, clearness of eye. Such as it was, it was strong enough
+to make both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
+impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
+Arnold's soutane. It made its universal way for them, however, this
+garment. Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and pressed with
+one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the padre sahib. He, with
+his eyes cast down, took the tribute with humility, as meet, in a
+way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at the persistence of
+ecclesiastical tradition.
+
+Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
+broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a wave of
+rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and
+mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual auction
+of Kristo Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-hand. In its vivid
+familiarity it seemed to make straight for the two Englishmen, to
+surround and take possession of them, and they paused. The source of it
+was plain--an open door under a vast white signboard dingily lettered
+"The Salvation Army." It loomed through the smoke and the streetlights
+like a discovery.
+
+"Our peripatetic friends," said Arnold, with his rare smile; and as if
+the music seized and held them, they stood listening.
+
+
+     "I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
+      All day on Sunday and six days a week!
+      I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
+      Fifty-two weeks in the year."
+
+
+It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh
+animation. Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they picked
+their steps across the street to the door, and there hesitated, revolted
+in different ways. Perhaps, I have forgotten to say that Lindsay came
+to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse, and had had a mother before
+whose name, while she lived, people wrote "The Hon." Besides, the
+singing had stopped, and casual observation from the street was checked
+by a screen.
+
+"I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are," said Arnold.
+
+Their methods were just on the other side of the screen. A bullet-headed
+youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders, fingering a
+cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, passing the two men
+beside the door, and a light, clear voice seemed to call after him--
+
+"Ah! don't go away!"
+
+Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical speculation
+whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe was still
+pursuing the broad road to perdition. The desire to enter sprang up
+in him: he was reminded of a vista of some interest which had recently
+revealed itself by an accident, and which he had not explored. It had
+almost passed out of his memory; he grasped at it again with something
+like excitement, and fell adroitly upon the half inclination in Arnold's
+voice.
+
+"I suppose I can't expect you to go in?" he said.
+
+"Precisely why not?" Stephen retorted. "My dear fellow, we make broad
+our sympathies, not our phylacteries."
+
+At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic was
+the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with amusement the
+pulpit tone of the little epigram. But this moment found him only aware
+of the consent in it. His hand on Arnold's elbow clinched the agreement;
+he half pushed the priest into the room, where they dropped into seats.
+Stephen's hand went to his breast instinctively, for the words in the
+air were holy by association, and stopped there, since even the breadth
+of his sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
+Booth. Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General Booth;
+he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline and bushy,
+from a frame on the wall at the end of it. The texts on the other walls
+seemed emanations from him; and the man in the short loose, collarless
+red coat, with "Salvation Army" in crooked black letters on it, who
+stood talking in high, rapid tones with his hands folded, had the look
+of a puppet whose strings were pulled by the personality in the frame
+above him. It was only by degrees that they observed the other objects
+in the room--the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the
+exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of
+people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting
+up the curtness of the texts. There were half a dozen men of the Duke's
+Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and three
+or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the Hooghly, who
+leaned well forwards their elbows on their knees, twirling battered
+straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the instant off the
+defensive. One was a Scandinavian, another a Greek, with earrings. There
+was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded negro, very respectable with a
+plaid tie and a silk hat; and beside, two East Indian girls of different
+shades, tittering at the Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali
+boy, who spelled out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very
+clean Chinaman, who appreciated his privilege, since it included a
+seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no
+further. The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like
+the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest, lying
+along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.
+
+Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of
+the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in
+mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura
+Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair;
+her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A
+tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay,
+palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.
+The folds hung from her waist, and she wore above them a short close
+bodice like a Bengali woman. Her head covering had slipped, and
+clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked,
+pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward. She was unaware
+even of the gaze of the Duke's Own, though it had fixity and absorption.
+
+The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have caught as a
+text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung. "Yes, indeed," he said.
+"I can tell heveryone 'ere this night, heveryone, that the Saviour is
+mighty to keep. I 'ave got it out of my own personal experience, I 'ave.
+Jesus don't only look after you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my
+friends, six days a week. Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on
+you--that's all your part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an'
+fall into sin. There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but
+oh, my friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
+of Jesus? No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person. The
+person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is prayers;
+what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is Jesus a-keeping
+you? And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it foolish to put off
+any longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night; we may never all meet
+together again. You and I may never 'ear each other speaking again or
+see each other sitting there. Thank God," the speaker continued, as his
+eye rested on Arnold and Lindsay, "the vilest sinner may be saved, the
+respectable sinner may be saved. We've got God's word for that. Now just
+a little word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
+Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls inside
+these four walls to-night."
+
+Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters
+on her knees on the floor. As she moved she bent upon the audience a
+preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers, chances, from
+a point remote and emotionally involved. Lindsay's impression was that
+she looked at him as from behind a glass door. Then her eyes closed as
+the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see
+that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands
+interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition. The
+Ensign was a little meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless
+hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she
+would have been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was
+plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation
+of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
+complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
+fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
+influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
+commission. She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained minor
+key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened, her key to
+hearts. She told the Lord in confidence that however appearances might
+be against it every soul before him was really longing to be gathered
+within His almighty arms, and when she said this, Laura Filbert, on the
+floor, threw back her head and cried "Hallelujah!" and Duff started.
+The mothers broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations. They had a
+recurrent, perfunctory sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again
+cried "Praise the Lord!" Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty
+impulse to leave the premises. Then she rose, and he watched with the
+Duke's Own to see what she would do next. The others looked at her too,
+as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign Sand
+with humble eyes and disapproving lips. As she began to speak the
+silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped shuffling his
+feet. "Oh come," she said, "Come and be saved!" Her voice seemed to
+travel from her without effort, and to penetrate every corner and every
+consciousness. There was a sudden dip in it like the fall of water, that
+thrilled along the nerves. "Who am I that ask you? A poor weak woman,
+ignorant, unknown. Never mind. It is not my voice but the voice in your
+heart that entreats you 'Come and be saved!' You know that voice; it
+speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a
+little, little child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers
+that you have forgotten now. Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender
+voice"--her own had dropped to the cooing of doves--"it is hard to
+know why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper
+it! Strange, strange! But the world is full of the clamour of its own
+foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where people
+come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches. You hear
+it now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.' Why must I beg of
+you? Why do you not come hastening, running? Are you too wise? But when
+did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next? Are you too
+much occupied? But in the day of judgment what will you do?"--
+
+
+     "When you come to Jordan's flood,
+      How will you do?  How will you do?"
+
+
+It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
+opportunity. Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
+disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine, singing,
+and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum thumping out the
+measure, all the tambourines shaking together.
+
+
+     "You who now contemn your God,
+      How will you do?  How will you do?"
+
+
+The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made little of
+the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment,
+but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the
+thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with
+their feet. Through the medley of voices--everybody sang except Arnold
+and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's seemed to flow, separate and
+clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into
+an appeal, direct, intense. When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to
+him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.
+
+
+     "Death will be a solemn day
+      When the soul is forced away,
+      It will be too late to pray;
+      How will you do?"
+
+
+It was simple enough. All her supreme desire to convince, to turn, to
+make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with
+whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could
+seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay
+tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock,
+of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped
+and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed
+shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were
+enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to
+depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin,
+wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice. The hymn stopped, and
+he found a few minutes' respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the
+meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over
+the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware,
+for airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his
+untaken, sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
+wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort
+of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state
+with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their
+knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning
+of a single word that she said, only that her voice was threading itself
+in and out of his consciousness burdened with a passion that made it
+exquisite to him. Her appeal lifted itself in the end into song, low and
+sweet.
+
+
+     "Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
+      Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
+      There to my heart was the blood applied,
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it was
+over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the preliminary
+pangs of conversion by the methods of the Salvation Army. Deliberately,
+however, he postponed further analysis of them until after the meeting
+was over. He would be compelled then to go away, back to the club to
+dinner, or something; they would put out the lights and lock the place
+up: he thought of that. He glanced at the lamps with a perception of the
+finality that would come when they were extinguished--she would troop
+away with the others into the darkness--and then at his watch to see how
+much time there was left. More exhortation followed and more prayer; he
+was only aware that she did not speak. She sat with her hand over her
+eyes, and Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
+herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether
+anyone else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning
+between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of
+ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells.
+When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell
+her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he
+should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable thing was
+that she should know him conscious, receptive. She read three or four
+sacred verses, a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart,
+"Come unto Me."... The words stole about the room like tears. Then she
+would ask "all present," she said, to engage for a moment in silent
+prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street noises
+surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as Laura brought
+it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her feet as the others
+raised their heads, breaking forth clear and jubilant.
+
+
+     "I am so wondrously saved from sin,
+      Jesus so sweetly abides within;
+      There at the Cross where He took me in,
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+She smiled as she sang. It was a happy confident smile, and it was
+plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of the last
+ten minutes' spiritual experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's
+perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested for
+an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy of her
+calling, he felt a pang of compunction. It was a formless reproach, too
+vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest to defining itself
+in the idea that he had gone too far--he who had not left his seat. When
+the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand said, "The meeting is now open
+for testimonies," he knew that all her hope was upon him, though she
+looked at the screen above his head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal
+sense surging through him of what he would rejoice to do for her in
+compensation. In the little chilly silence that followed he surprised
+his own eyes moist with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and
+so vain--and he felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum
+stood up and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with
+details about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.
+
+"Hallelujah!" said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air
+of hearing it for the first time. "Any more?" and a Norwegian sailor
+lurched shamefacedly upon his feet. He had a couple of inches of
+straggling yellow beard all round his face, and fingered an old felt
+hat.
+
+"I haf' to say only dis word. I goin' sdop by Jesus. Long time I subbose
+I sdop by Jesus. I subbose--"
+
+"Glory be to God!" remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of the
+Duke's Own who were inclined to be amused. "That will do, thank you.
+Now, is there nobody else? Speak up, friends. It'll do you no harm, none
+whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll be surprised. Now, who'll
+be the next to say a word for Jesus?" She was nodding encouragement at
+the negro cook as if she knew him for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in
+his gleaming white collar, was aware, in silent smiling misery, that the
+expectations of the meeting were toward him. Laura had again hidden her
+eyes in her hand. The negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and
+the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
+perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of sin
+was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself
+upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It
+was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat,
+got upon his feet instead.
+
+"I also," he said, "would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
+God--with all my heart."
+
+It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance of his
+office. Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay, "Shall we go now?"
+he whispered, and the two made their way to the door, leaving a silence
+behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part of Ensign Sand at least,
+to be somewhat resentful. As they passed out a voice recovered itself,
+and cried, "Hallelujah!" It was Laura's; and all the way to the
+club--Arnold was dining with him there--Lindsay listened to his friend's
+analysis of religious appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that
+clear music above a sordid din, "Hallelujah!" "Hallelujah!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When Alicia Livingstone, almost believing she liked it, drove to Number
+Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and left cards upon Miss Hilda Howe, she was
+only partially rewarded. Through the plaster gate-posts, badly in want
+of repair, and bearing, sunk in one of them, a marble slab announcing
+"Residence with Board," she perceived the squalid attempt the place made
+at respectability, the servants in dirty livery salaaming curiously,
+the over-fed squirrel in a cage in the door, the pair of damaged wicker
+chairs in the porch, suggesting the easiest intercourse after dinner,
+the general discoloration. She observed with irritation that it was
+a down-at-heels shrine for such a divinity, in spite of its six dusty
+crotons in crumbling plaster urns, but the irritation was rather at her
+own repulsion to the place than at any inconsistency it presented. What
+she demanded and expected of herself was that Number Three, Lal Behari's
+Lane should be pleasing, interesting, acceptable on its merits as a
+cheap Calcutta boarding-house. She found herself so unable to perceive
+its merits that it was almost a relief to see nothing of Miss Howe
+either; Hilda had gone to rehearsal, to the "dance-house" the servant
+said, eyeing the unusual landau. Alicia rolled back into streets with
+Christian names, distressed by an uncertainty as to whether her visit
+had been a disappointment or an escape. By the next day, however, she
+was well pulled together in favour of the former conclusion--she could
+nearly always persuade herself of such things in time--and wrote a frank
+sweet little note in her picturesque hand--she never joined more than
+two syllables--to say how sorry she had been, and would Miss Howe come
+to lunch on Friday. "I should love to make it dinner," she, said to
+herself, as she sealed the envelope, "but before one knows how she will
+behave in connection with the men--I suppose one must think of the other
+people."
+
+It was Friday, and Hilda was lunching. The two had met among the
+faint-tinted draperies of Alicia's drawing-room--there was something
+auroral even about the mantelpiece--a little like diplomatists using
+a common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia drew the
+conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had more to cover,
+but was less particular about it. The only thing she was bent upon
+making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of Miss Livingstone's
+effort to receive her as if she had been anybody else. Alicia was hardly
+aware of what she wanted to conceal, unless it was her impression that
+Miss Howe's dress was cut a trifle too low in the neck, that she was
+almost too effective in that cream and yellow to be quite right. Alicia
+remembered afterwards to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of
+intercourse with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set
+Celine at her--with such a foundation to work upon what could Celine
+not have done? She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things
+Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room tones
+of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery,
+and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements
+which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women
+and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them,
+and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazar rode on
+long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the
+encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they
+might have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and
+acknowledged no demand for more than the smile.
+
+The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of her
+head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her elbow on
+the table. They had found a portrait-painter.
+
+"He has such an eye," said Alicia, "for the possibilities of character."
+
+"Such an eye that he develops them. I know one man he painted. I suppose
+when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime he and
+everybody else had forgotten about it. All but Salter. Salter re-created
+it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a
+lodging behind the man's, wrinkles. I saw the picture. It was
+fantastic--psychologically."
+
+"Pysychology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know," Alicia said.
+"Do let him give you a little more. It's only Moselle." She felt
+quite direct and simple too in uttering her postulate. Her eyes had a
+friendly, unembarrassed look, there was nothing behind them but the joy
+of talking intelligently about Salter.
+
+Hilda did not even glance away. She looked at her hostess instead,
+with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have
+mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she could swim
+in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in
+Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent
+quality.
+
+"It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially, thank
+Heaven, to my trade." Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the
+way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms. That was the
+case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.
+
+"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make
+a picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
+voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to
+do it, or a pen or a chisel!"
+
+"I know what you mean," said Alicia. She had a little flush, and an
+excited hand among the wineglasses. "No, I don't want any; please don't
+bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in aspic. "It's much
+more direct--your way."
+
+"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
+abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh yes! if we are lightly
+esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity
+enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to
+appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's--with being
+unliterary. You might--good Heavens!--as well accuse a painter of not
+being a musician! Our business lies behind the words--they are our mere
+medium! Rosalind wasn't literary--why should I be? But don't indulge me
+in my shop, if it bores you," Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that
+Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.
+
+"Oh, please go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed
+the tedium of Calcutta small talk. "But why do you say you are lightly
+esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone--and you hold the public in
+the hollow of your hand!"
+
+Hilda smiled. "Dear old public! It does its best for us, doesn't it?
+One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in
+its treachery in the end. But I don't know why I say we are lightly
+esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all. I've done nothing--I've
+no right. In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll write signed articles for
+the New Review about modern dramatic tendencies. Meanwhile you'll have
+to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective."
+
+"But already you have succeeded--you have made a place."
+
+"In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg, I think they remember me in
+Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila. But that wasn't
+legitimate drama," and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her
+unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and gold. She waited
+an instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe's smile slid
+discreetly into her wineglass instead.
+
+"There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines," she went on, her
+look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her
+hat. "Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions. One wonders what
+America will do with those friars, when she does go there."
+
+"Do you think she is going?" asked Alicia vaguely. It was the merest
+politeness--she did not wait for a reply. With a courageous air which
+became her charmingly, she went on, "Don't you long to submit yourself
+to London? I should."
+
+"Oh, I must. I know I must. It's in the path of duty and
+conscience--it's not to be put off for ever. But one dreads the chained
+slavery of London"--she hesitated before the audacity of adding, "the
+sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as
+if she had watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.
+
+"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt curiously
+buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate
+achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had
+become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together,
+and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an
+instant of consideration before she said--"I might as well tell you--you
+won't misunderstand--that I AM sure. I expect things of myself. I hold a
+kind of mortgage on my success; when I foreclose it will come, bringing
+the long, steady, grasping chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never
+a day to live in, only to accomplish, every moment straddled with
+calculation, an end to all the byways where one finds the colour of the
+sun. The successful London actress, my dear--what existence has she? A
+straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights
+in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net
+result in every newspaper--an existence of pure artificiality infested
+by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's
+the house for ever on your back; at the last you are buried in it,
+smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings.
+There never was reward so qualified by its conditions."
+
+"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"
+
+"Oh yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But then
+you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but the
+eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
+begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
+understood even in the profession--but there are so many, honestly, that
+London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of
+going has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an
+illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've
+been saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated
+interview."
+
+"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make you
+sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"
+
+Hilda threw her head back and laughed, almost, Alicia noted, like a man.
+She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief,
+as women often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much
+as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented
+themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession.
+They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the
+wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.
+
+Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
+prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar
+again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews. "They ARE
+atrocities," she said. "On their merits they ought to be cast out
+of even the suburbs of art and literature. But they help to make
+the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do that,
+of course--" and the pursed seriousness of her lips gave Alicia the
+impression that, though the whole world took offence, the expediency of
+the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.
+
+The servant brought them coffee. "Shall we smoke here," said Miss
+Livingstone, "or in the drawing-room?"
+
+"Oh, do you want to? Are you quite sure you like it? Please don't on my
+account--you really mustn't. Suppose it should mike you ill?" If Hilda
+felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her face. Nothing was
+there but cheerful concern.
+
+"It won't make me ill." Alicia lifted her chin with delicate
+assertiveness. "I suppose you do smoke, don't you?"
+
+"Occasionally--with some people. Honestly, have you ever done it
+before?"
+
+"Four times," said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the
+apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them. "I thought
+it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--"
+
+"Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some Serene
+Highness's neck. I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer to dispense
+with it. In my bath, for instance, and almost always in omnibuses."
+
+"How absurd you are! Then we'll stay here."
+
+Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice
+two matches.
+
+"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor, dear old Rosy!
+She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look
+of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear;
+but blow her, if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her
+smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up and went
+away."
+
+"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting her
+cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace. "I'm not
+old and I'm not grotesque."
+
+"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."
+
+"I BEG your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out.
+Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp."
+
+"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette between
+her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it between her
+first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end,
+leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It
+was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss
+Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's
+way of doing it.
+
+"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said contemplatively; "you're
+young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and
+enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so
+little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the
+common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something
+different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.
+
+"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there
+was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be
+dismissed between them.
+
+"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She felt
+delightfully terse and to the point.
+
+"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know
+him well?"
+
+Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of
+them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would
+have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.
+
+"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the sensation
+of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.
+She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette crisped over
+with grey, in its blackened calyx.
+
+"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to
+the rest of the people--bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its
+torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know,
+the way hepatic influences can be idealised--made to serve ennobling
+ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different."
+
+"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her,
+the asking note was in the word.
+
+"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the
+queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square,
+to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it."
+
+"A statue?"
+
+"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to
+me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was, and the performance.
+She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all
+colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come
+from her, from her hair or her eyes or something. I almost expected to
+see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended."
+
+"It sounds most unusual," Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest
+was rather obviously curbed.
+
+"It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one
+doesn't go round the corner."
+
+There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss
+Livingstone's desire to be informed.
+
+Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and waited.
+The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.
+
+"And I regret to say it was I who introduced them," she said.
+
+"Introduced whom?"
+
+"Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at
+Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,"
+Hilda went on tranquilly, "because I would only lend it to her while she
+was there."
+
+"Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is
+always grateful to be amused."
+
+"Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather intense
+about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's
+account. Did I say so?" They were simple, amiable words, and
+their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia's crude
+blush--everything else about her was so perfectly worked out--cried
+aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. "Perhaps though," Hilda hurried
+on with a pang, "we generalise too much about the men."
+
+What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no
+generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant brought
+her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider. The card saved
+her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then
+exclaimed, "My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend--a Clarke Mission
+priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our
+cigarettes?"
+
+Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.
+
+"Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it? Drown
+the corpse in here, and I'll pretend it belongs to me." She pushed
+the finger-bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant went into it.
+"Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and there was no time for
+remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.
+
+"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portiere.
+
+Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of
+the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It
+reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully.
+
+Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it
+amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless
+it.
+
+"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee." He flavoured what he
+said, and made it pretty, like a woman. "Let me confess at once, that is
+what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality
+and self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee-time, isn't it?" Then
+he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the
+luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been
+to him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a
+little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical
+attitudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she
+could hardly have expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with
+upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his
+self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
+them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet
+that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all
+as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she
+decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and
+Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to
+tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would
+represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their
+lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really
+hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the
+shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went
+to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness
+stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced
+her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too
+general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on
+smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of
+insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found
+that he had forgotten it.
+
+"Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said, and
+the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought Hilda a
+flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.
+
+"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street," she
+said, "but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.
+Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help
+knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty of her
+well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity;
+it was one of those least of little things which are enough.
+
+Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
+armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again quickly, and
+looked at the floor as he said he feared they were terribly out of it
+in College Street, for which, however, he had evidently no apology to
+offer. He continued to look at the floor with a careful air, as if it
+presented points pertinent to the situation. Hilda felt herself--it
+was an odd sensation--too sunny upon the nooked, retiring current that
+flowed in him. He might have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that
+Alicia made, but she was aware that he did not, that he was struggling
+through her strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He
+stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled as if
+he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked, making light
+accusations against the rigours of the Mission House, complaining of her
+cousin that he was altogether given over to bonds and bands, that she
+personally would soon cease to hold him in affection at all; she saw so
+little of him it wasn't really worth while.
+
+This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
+pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other
+end of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the firm,
+lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.
+
+"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules
+should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times a
+year." She spoke with a kind of grave brightness; it was difficult to
+know whether she was altogether in jest.
+
+"There would be secession all over the place," Arnold responded, with
+his repressed smile. "You would get any number of probationers; I wonder
+whether you would keep them!"
+
+"During that week," Hilda went on, "they should be compelled to dine
+and dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning before
+luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to all the
+variety entertainments. Think of the austere bliss of the return to the
+cloisters! All joy lies in a succession of sensations, they say. Do you
+remember how Lord Ormont arranged his pleasures? Oh yes, my brotherhood
+would be popular, as soon as it was understood."
+
+Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember
+flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sign
+or token of disapproval in Arnold's face. What she might have
+observed there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight
+disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and something
+like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.
+
+Hilda began to put on her gloves. The left one gaped at two finger-ends;
+she buttoned it with the palm thrown up and outward, as if it were the
+daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opera.
+
+"Not yet!" Alicia cried.
+
+"Thanks, I must. To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have to
+dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock. And, after pulling
+all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two in bed."
+
+"You! But it's monstrous. Is there nobody else?"
+
+"I wouldn't let anybody else," Hilda laughed. "Don't forget, please,
+that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of people, mostly
+from the Antipodes. Don't confound our manners and customs with anything
+you've heard about the Lyceum. Good-bye. It has been charming. Goodbye,
+Mr. Arnold."
+
+But Alicia held her hand. "The papers say it is to be The Offence of
+Galilee, after all," she said.
+
+"Yes. Hamilton Bradley is all right again, and we've found a pretty
+fair local Judas--amateur. We couldn't possibly put it on without
+Mr. Bradley. He takes the part of"--Hilda glanced at the hem of the
+listening priestly robe--"of the chief character, you know."
+
+"That was the great Nonconformist success at home last year, wasn't
+it?" Arnold asked; "Leslie Patullo's play? I knew him at Oxford. I can't
+imagine--he's a queer chap to be writing things like that."
+
+"It works out better than you--than one might suppose," Hilda returned,
+moving toward the door. "Some of the situations are really almost novel,
+in spite of all your centuries of preaching." She sent a disarming
+smile with that, looking over her shoulder in one of her most effective
+hesitations, one hand holding back the portiere.
+
+"And next week?" cried Alicia.
+
+"Oh, next week we do L'Amourette de Giselle--Frank Golding's re-vamp.
+Good-bye! Good-bye!"
+
+"I wonder very much what Patullo has done with The Offence of Galilee,"
+Arnold said, after she had gone.
+
+"Come and see, Stephen. We have a box, and there will be heaps of room.
+It's--suitable, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, quite."
+
+"Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on. Why not?"
+
+"Thanks very much indeed. It is sure to reward one. I think I shall be
+able to give myself that pleasure."
+
+Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed, became
+a cup of tea; and his talk, while he stayed, seemed to suffer less from
+the limitations of his Order than it usually did. He was fluent and
+direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more than his prayers; that
+his glance at the world had still a speculation in it; and when he went
+away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring
+a vague inward corollary upon her day--
+
+"It pays! It pays!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
+offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday
+night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"--he
+sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the
+hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9.30. Prices as
+usual" with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In the
+Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof and nobody could hear the orchestra
+when it rained--the Midgets were presenting the earlier collaborations
+of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine
+years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full
+blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great Occidental circus when
+Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both staying at the
+Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through
+cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say
+nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And
+certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while
+hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably
+imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold
+weather. There was the Mystic Bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a
+pipal tree, which gave you by an arrangement of looking-glasses the
+most unaccountable sensations for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know
+Thyself!" where a physiological display lurked from the eyes of the
+police behind a perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri
+Chandra's Gully. Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition,
+sighed to think how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the
+Imperial Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape,
+and pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that
+rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought bitterly,
+standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims of legitimate
+drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the
+flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season's welcome to
+Jimmy Finnigan. "I might've learned this town well enough by now," he
+reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel show's about the size of it."
+Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's art of the large red lips and
+the twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious. He
+aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the
+incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since
+nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits. His
+upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while
+the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave
+him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully
+misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection
+with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down
+with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost
+ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that
+misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this
+design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance
+that it would be fruitless and expensive, but the paths of Eastern
+capitals were strewn with his compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese
+dollars, Indian rupees, for salaries which no amount of advertising
+could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came, Llewellyn
+usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in
+pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding
+statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the
+public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a
+number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting
+in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda-water. "I'm in hospital,"
+Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and I'm d---- glad of it,"--he
+always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to
+the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority,--"for, upon my soul,
+I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the
+talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive
+line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a
+ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.
+Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton--she had a small inalienable income, and
+they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable
+reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour--would depart
+in another direction, full of gratification for the present and of
+confidence for the future. Llewellyn usually made a parting statement to
+the newspapers that although his aims were unalterably high he was not
+above profiting by experience, and that next season he could be relied
+upon to hit the taste of the community with precision. This year, as
+we know, he had made a serious effort by insisting that at least a
+proportion of his ladies and gentlemen should be high-kickers and equal
+to an imitation, good enough for the Orient, of most things done by the
+illustrious Mr. Chevalier. But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected
+The Offence of Galilee to open with tells its own tale. He was
+convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs
+apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the
+chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one
+more chance to redeem itself.
+
+It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable. A
+ticca-gharry deposited a sea-captain; three carriages arrived in
+succession; an indefinite number of the Duke's Own, hardly any of them
+drunk, filed in to the rupee seats under the gallery: an overflow from
+Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons even standing room.
+When this occurred Llewellyn turned and swung indifferently away in the
+direction of the dressing-rooms. When Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors
+so early there was no further cause for anxiety. Calcutta was abroad and
+stirring, and would turn for amusement even to The Offence of Galilee.
+
+Eventually--that is, five minutes before the curtain rose--the
+representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they were
+justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable audience.
+The Viceroy had taken a box, and sent an Aide-de-Camp to sit in it,
+also a pair of M.P.'s from the North of England, whom he was expected to
+attend to in Calcutta, and the governess. The Commander-in-Chief had not
+been solicited to be present, the theatrical season demanding an economy
+in such personalities if they were to go round; but a Judge of the
+High Court had a party in the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal
+Government sat behind him. To speak of unofficials, there must have been
+quite forty lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial
+and prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold
+money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their wives'
+hair. A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders; much of the
+hair was shining and abundant, and very black. A turn of the head showed
+a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy
+mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent
+and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote
+motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun. An audience of
+fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars--the evening was warm under
+the gas-lights--sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an
+old woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those
+who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five--an
+audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for good
+manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait for the
+rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an atmosphere of
+affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with imperious chins, the
+use of quick orders in a world of personal superiority.
+
+Thus the stalls--they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs--and
+the boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs
+supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss
+Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other people.
+The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam
+and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the look-out for offensive
+personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely. Here,
+too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the cares of life--at
+a venture the wives were taking in washing in Brixton, and the children
+sent to Board School at the expense of the nation. And in a climate like
+this it was a popular opinion that a man must either enjoy himself or
+commit suicide.
+
+The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all. It
+was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.
+
+Hilda's audience that night knew all about The Offence of Galilee from
+the English illustrated papers. The illustrated papers had a great way
+of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences; they contained
+photographs of almost every striking scene, composed at the leisure of
+the cast, but so vividly supplemented with descriptions of the leading
+lady's clothes that it hardly required any effort of the imagination to
+conjure up the rest. The postures and the chief garments of Pilate--he
+was eating pomegranates when the curtain rose, and listening to scandal
+from his slave-maidens about Mary Magdalene--were at once recognised in
+their resemblance to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of
+this satisfaction any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally
+unobserved. A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as
+if with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations
+to cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and people
+listened for familiar sentences with something like the composed gravity
+with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson.
+But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves
+without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and
+a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to
+note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain after all that no
+standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The relief
+was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe
+at him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint
+inclination to be amused. It was to be a play evidently like any other
+play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals. It is
+doubtful whether this idea was critically present to anyone but Stephen
+Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance
+offered them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient
+acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too much of a company that
+found it worth while to come to Calcutta. The house grew submissive
+and stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the
+dress-circle. The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent
+of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting
+that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with
+a notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent--it was Mrs.
+Barberry--replied that it did seem strange. The depths under the gallery
+were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile
+and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank
+into the farthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box, and knew
+all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate's fat
+wife, and an unspeakable comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more
+than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already
+projected upon Arnold's suffering imagination. This, then, was what
+Patullo had done with it. But what other, he asked himself in quiet
+anger, could Patullo have been expected to do? the fellow he remembered.
+Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre
+brows, at the opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit
+of self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be made
+with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story,
+what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities
+concerned? He remembered, with the touch of almost physical nausea
+that assailed him when he saw them, one or two pictures in recent Paris
+exhibitions where the coveted accent of surprise had been produced by
+representing the sacred figure in the trivial monde of the boulevards,
+and fixed upon them as the source of Patullo's intolerable inspiration.
+Certain muscles felt responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold
+had forgotten he possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest,
+even of athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required
+to be kicked.
+
+Alicia was in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing plummet
+into the evening's experience. Arnold, hesitating over the rudeness of
+departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she would hardly mind.
+The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest, which reached
+Stephen over his hostess's shoulder, and seemed to brand him where he
+sat. He looked about for his hat and some excuse that would serve, and
+while he looked the sound of applause rose from the house. It was a
+demonstration without great energy, hardly more than a flutter from
+stall to stall, with a vague, fundamental noise from the gallery; but
+it had the quality which acclaimed something new. Arnold glanced at the
+stage, and saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested slaves and the
+tin centurion were still on, they had somehow lost significance and
+colour, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation
+had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was
+almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and
+the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of
+her fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls,
+crouching, looked like painted shells. She danced before Pilate in
+strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed
+to be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown
+instrument sobbed out to help her. The women of the people have ever
+bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick
+grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in
+the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and
+twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened
+lips had the immobility of the bazar. People looked at their playbills
+to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed
+from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his
+foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
+unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a
+keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed
+the applause, as it does with children at a pantomime.
+
+"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
+Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly
+so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun the
+well-known passage with Pilate, about which the newspapers absurdly
+reported later that if Miss Howe had not been a Protestant, and so
+impervious the Pope would have excommunicated her, and as he looked his
+movement imperceptibly changed to afford him a better place. He put
+an undecided hand upon a prop of the box that rose behind Alicia's
+shoulder, and so stood leaning and looking, more conspicuous in the
+straight lines and short shoulder cape of the frock of his Order than
+he knew. Hilda, in one of those impenetrable regards which she threw
+straight in front of her, while Pilate yawped and posed nearer and
+nearer the desire of the Magdalene to be admitted to his household,
+was at once aware of him. Presently he sat down again--it was still the
+profane, the fabulous, the horrible Patullo, but a strain of pure gold
+had come into the fabric worth holding in view, impossible, indeed, to
+close the eyes upon. Far enough it was from any semblance to historical
+fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman,
+as historical fiction. She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the
+ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast,
+with her back half turned to her lord, the friend of Caesar, so that
+he could not see the design that sat behind the mask of her sharp
+indifference. She rested her chin upon her knees, and let the blankness
+of her beauty exclaim upon the subtlety of her replies, plainly
+measuring the power of her provocation against the impoverished quality
+that camp and grove, court and schools, might leave upon august Roman
+sensibilities. It was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its
+concentration behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the
+igniting, flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage. Alicia, when
+it was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, "How the modern woman goes off upon
+side issues!" to which that lady nodded a rather suspicious assent.
+
+Long before Hilda had begun to act for Arnold, to play to his special
+consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so to speak, by
+a whirlpool of conflicting impulses. She did so much more than "lift"
+the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in the common sense;
+she inspired and transfused it so that whenever she appeared people
+irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made private acknowledgments
+to the effect that something was to be said even for an impious fantasy
+which gave her so unique an opportunity. To Arnold her vivid embodiment
+of an incident in that which was his morning and evening meditation
+made special appeal, and though it was in a way as if she had thrust
+her heathen torch into his Holy of Holies, he saw it lighted with
+fascination, and could not close the door upon her. The moment of her
+discovery of this came early, and it is only she, perhaps, who
+could tell how the strange bond wove itself that drew her being--the
+Magdalene's--to the priest who sat behind a lady in swansdown and
+chiffon in the upper box nearest to the stage on the right. The
+beginnings of such things are untraceable, but the fact may be
+considered in connection with this one that Hamilton Bradley, who
+represented, as we have been told he would, the Chief Character, did it
+upon lines very recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred
+books, very correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of
+the Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable
+remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving,
+the limitations and the depression. Under it one saw the painful
+inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other presentations,
+and realised with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda, how
+he rebelled against the part. Perhaps this was enough in itself to
+send her dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the
+adventure was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever may be said
+about it, while yet the shock of the woman's earthly passion with its
+divine object was receding from Arnold's mind before the exquisite charm
+and faithfulness of the worshipping Magdalene, he became aware that in
+some special way he sat judging and pitying her. She had hardly lifted
+her eyes to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded as
+if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement,
+the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew, his lips
+tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he
+folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood, and was caught
+up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would
+have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of
+the play faded out; he became almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the
+fustian of Patullo's invention, and its insufferable mixture with the
+fabric of which every thread was precious beyond imagination. He looked
+down with tender patience and compassion upon the development of the
+woman's intrigue in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts
+and guiles, to save Him who had transfigured her from the hands of
+the rabble and the high priests; he did not even shrink from the
+inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene's final passionate
+tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured Pilate as the price
+of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet where He lay
+bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment,
+in the hair of her head, the priest's lips almost moved in words other
+than those of the playwright--words that told her he knew the height
+and the depth of her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn
+thee...." In his exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles,
+to remit sins. The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a
+white heat; the woman on the stage warmed her hands at it in two
+consciousnesses. She was stirred through all her artistic sense in a
+new and delicious way, and wakened in some dormant part of her to
+a knowledge beautiful and surprising. She felt in every nerve the
+exquisite quality of that which lay between them, and it thrilled her
+through all her own perception of what she did, and all the applause at
+how she did it. It was as if he, the priest, was borne out upon a deep
+broad current that made toward solar spaces, toward infinite bounds, and
+as if she, the actress, piloted him....
+
+The Sphinx on the curtain--it had gone down in the old crooked
+lines--again looked above and beyond them all. I have sometimes fancied
+a trace of malignancy about her steady eyeballs, but perhaps that is
+the accident or the design of the scene-painter; it does not show
+in photographs. The audience was dispersing a trifle sedately;
+the performance had been, as Mrs. Barberry told Mr. Justice Horne,
+interesting but, depressing. "I hope," said Alicia to Stephen, fastening
+the fluffy-white collar of the wrap he put round her, "that I needn't
+be sorry I asked you to come. I don't quite know. But she did redeem it,
+didn't she? That last scene--"
+
+"Can you not be silent?" Arnold said, almost in a whisper; and her look
+of astonishment showed her that there were tears in his eyes. He left
+the theatre and walked light-headedly across Chowringhee and out into
+the starlit empty darkness of the Maidan, where presently he stumbled
+upon a wooden bench under a tree. There, after a little, sleep fell
+upon his amazement, and he lay unconscious for an hour or two, while the
+breeze stole across the grass from the river and the mast-head lights
+watched beside the city. He woke chilled and normal, and when he reached
+the Mission House in College Street his servant was surprised at the
+unusual irritation of a necessary rebuke.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting
+for Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a notable
+presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees crossed on the
+bench farthest back and the corner obscurest of the Salvation Army
+Headquarters in Bentinck Street. It had become his accustomed place;
+sitting there he had begun to feel like the adventurer under Niagara,
+it was the only spot from which he could observe, try to understand and
+cope with the torrential nature of his passion. Nearer to the fair charm
+of his kneeling Laura, in the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and
+the sound of the big drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away.
+His persistent refusal of a better place also profited him in that it
+brought to Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he
+was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
+Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not
+noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there,
+a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came
+round. After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual
+interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the
+fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the
+gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the
+"amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even
+Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold
+away from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional
+allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they
+fell, he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness,
+to visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four
+hours he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her
+face; they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the
+manner of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour, it is
+to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of
+emotional hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and
+there was no appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for
+example, could properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.
+
+On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through
+other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which he meditated
+mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted
+to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his
+transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When
+Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked
+at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of
+the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he
+almost immediately began to read his life; and it was because he thought
+he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind
+her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest,
+with her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
+Street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see you.
+When may I? Any time that suits you. Have you half an hour to spare
+to-morrow?"
+
+It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which
+she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory. Not the
+frankness though, or the touch of "Now we are getting to business," that
+stood in her expression. She looked alert and pleased.
+
+"You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?" she said. Her
+manner took Lindsay a trifle aback; it suggested that she conferred this
+privilege so freely. "To-morrow--let me see, we march in the morning,
+and I have an open-air at four in the afternoon--the Ensign takes the
+evening meeting. Yes, I could see you to-morrow about two or about
+seven, after I get back from the Square." It was not unlike a
+professional appointment.
+
+Lindsay considered. "Thanks," he said, "I'll come at about seven--if you
+are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a day."
+
+He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly reddened
+at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's road dust, and
+a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which she said
+matter-of-factly, "We are never too exhausted to attend to our Master's
+business."
+
+Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation; he looked gravely the
+other way. "And the address?" he said.
+
+"Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is in
+Crooked Lane. Anybody will tell you."
+
+At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Lindsay said "Thanks"
+again, and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for him--and picked
+his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From
+there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked
+Lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part
+in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also
+localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make
+her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and
+found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in
+advance, to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he
+said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
+already there was one who guessed, who knew.
+
+One gropes in Crooked Lane after the lights of Bentinck Street have done
+all that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid,
+washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps
+of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted
+these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was
+positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out, and the man showed
+him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It
+was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"* lived. There were three
+tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and
+one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho--it was finished.
+Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to
+avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss Filbert's
+whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar,
+disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty
+shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events he
+had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on, it was the third
+storey. Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution, and just missed
+treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At
+the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the
+side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably
+short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite
+stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile
+pattern. Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian
+way to summon a servant, "Qui hai?"# he called, "Qui hai?"
+
+
+     * Festival-making women.
+
+     # "Whoever is there?"
+
+
+He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door
+farther down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert
+with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture.
+"Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced. "Won't you come
+in?" She clung to the handle until he had passed into the room, then she
+closed the door after him. "I was expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris,
+let me make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."
+
+Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little chairs.
+He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's garb of the
+Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a newspaper; he
+had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura's formula he looked up
+and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other side out and
+returned to it.
+
+"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a demon
+of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt dumb.
+Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed his legs in
+greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible, looking at Laura, who
+sat down like a third stranger, curiously detached from any sense of
+hospitality.
+
+"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said
+pleasantly. "I guess you can tell him what to do as well as I can."
+
+"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. "Is he?" said Mr.
+Harris, without looking up from his paper. "Well, what I've got to say
+on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a proper an' a
+public place. He can hear it there any day of the week."
+
+"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to
+say."
+
+"Then that's all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon his
+newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to the other
+of them and fell upon an expedient.
+
+"If you'll excuse me," she said, "I'll just get you that bicycle story
+you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take it with
+you. The Ensign's got it," and she left the room. Lindsay glanced round,
+and promptly announced to himself that he could not come there again.
+It was taking too violent an advantage. The pursuit of an angel does not
+imply that you may trap her in her corner under the Throne. The place
+was divided by a calico curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a
+mosquito curtain--she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts
+about loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed
+with photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic
+eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras, Ceylon,
+China. A little wooden table stood against the wall holding an album,
+a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an irrelevant Japanese doll
+which seemed to stretch its absurd arms straight out in a gay little
+ineffectual heathen protest. There was another more embarrassing table:
+it had a coarse cloth; and was garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a
+plate of plantains and a tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal
+evidently impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its
+core in Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked
+up. "If you're here on private business," he said to Lindsay, fixing his
+eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him, "maybe you ain't
+aware that the Ensign"--he threw his head back in the direction of the
+next room--"is the person to apply to. She's in command here. Captain
+Filbert's only under her."
+
+"Indeed?" said Lindsay. "Thanks."
+
+"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered, still
+searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eyes could
+permanently rest, "where, if you remember, Ensigns are the smallest
+officer we have."
+
+"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, governing a
+deep and irritated frown.
+
+"Maybe so. This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the
+other--not in discipline anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity. "But
+you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can for you.
+She's a hard-working officer."
+
+A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and canvas
+partition, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in
+the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mrs. Sand
+seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris
+shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking
+sternly at an advertisement. The air was full of their mutual annoyance,
+although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively,
+under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white
+silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only
+sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he
+ought to find this person humorous. Then Laura came back and resolved
+the situation.
+
+"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have all
+enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest mixture of
+the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the
+book, had no alternative.
+
+"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went, stumbling at the door.
+
+"Mr. Harris," said Laura equably, "found salvation about a month ago. He
+is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage works here.
+He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in in
+the evening."
+
+"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.
+
+"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find
+himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he
+wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign
+doesn't think there's any objection."
+
+Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs, her
+sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress
+clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions
+seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything
+else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay
+felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to
+resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly
+thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a
+glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her
+desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how
+far he had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her
+to a wider view of him.
+
+"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly it
+seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile.
+"Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"
+
+"There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied
+Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult--" he glanced at the
+lath and plaster partition, but she to whom publicity was a condition
+salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no
+interpretation for that.
+
+"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our
+tongues."
+
+The misunderstanding was absurd, but he saw only its difficulties,
+knitting his brows.
+
+"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said. "I
+cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."
+
+"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
+tram-car held on its course in conscious invincibility. A pariah tore
+along beside the vehicle barking; crows flew up from the rubbish heaps
+in the road by half-dozens, protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead
+necklaces just escaped being knocked down. Little groups of native
+clerks and money-lenders 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 farther 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 crash 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 bazar, 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 vague possibility of
+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.
+
+"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 was held in a frightened silence.
+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 explained. 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, golden-tongued Kali, half
+visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
+dishes and glass armlets 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 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 Number Three, 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 whisky 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 whisky! 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 on 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. 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 out-sitting 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'm 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 looked with careful criticism at the violets in his
+buttonhole.
+
+"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 Heaven'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 out 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 defence 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
+perturbation 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 messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace in
+Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal 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--
+
+"I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon. No
+rehearsal--they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the theatre, so
+you will find me, anyway. And I'll be delighted to see you."
+
+She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the
+scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-office
+stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went back to an
+extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the reflection--"Can she
+possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?"
+
+Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in order
+apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing. Hilda was
+agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about anything, tipped on
+the edge of her bed--Alicia had surmounted that degree of intimacy at
+a bound by the declaration that she could no longer endure the blue
+umbrellas--and clasping one knee, with an uncertain tenure of a chipped
+bronze slipper deprived of its heel. Wonderful silk draperies fell about
+her, with ink-spots on the sleeves; her hair was magnificent.
+
+"It's so curious to me," she was saying of the novel, "that anyone
+should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book. It's
+like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass."
+
+"I fancy that the most desirable way," said Alicia, glancing at the
+door.
+
+"Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow out
+of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the value of
+contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You, poor dear, were
+born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But you couldn't help it."
+
+"Everybody doesn't grow out of it." The concentration in Alicia's eyes
+returned again with vacillating wings.
+
+"She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet." The slipper dropped at
+this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She kept her foot in
+her hands, and regarded it pensively.
+
+"Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter," she
+continued; "at all events, ready-made."
+
+"You have an audacity--" Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.
+
+"Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?"
+
+"I know it."
+
+"From him?"
+
+"From him."
+
+"Oh!"--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--"Really? Well, we
+can't let that happen."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don't you see
+anything?"
+
+Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips. "I
+see only one thing that matters--he wants it," she said.
+
+"And won't be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an
+intolerably self-sacrificing sex." Hilda felt about for pillows, and
+stretched her length along the bed. "They've taught us well, the men;
+it's a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female line. You may
+be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated between the lady and
+the tiger. A civilised one would have introduced the lady and given her
+a dot, and retired to the nearest convent. Bah! It's a deformity, like
+the dachshund's legs."
+
+Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not quite
+worth while, to follow.
+
+"The happiness of his whole life is involved," she said simply.
+
+"Oh dear yes--the old story! And what about the happiness of yours? Do
+you imagine it's laudable, admirable, this attitude? Do you see yourself
+in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?"
+
+Contempt accumulated in Miss Howe's voice, and sat in her eyes. To mark
+her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.
+
+"It is idiotic--it's disgusting," she said.
+
+Alicia caught a flash from her. "My attitude!" she cried. "What in the
+world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no attitude. I
+care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he shall have what
+he wants--so far as I can help him to it. You have never cared for
+anybody--what do you know about it?"
+
+Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling. "I assure you I'm
+not an angel," she cried. "Haven't I cared! Several times."
+
+"Not really--not lastingly."
+
+"I don't know about really; certainly not lastingly. I've never thought
+the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities. They entail
+the prettiest experiences."
+
+"Of course, in your profession--"
+
+"Don't be nasty, sweet lady. My affections have never taken the
+opportunities of our profession. They haven't even carried me into
+matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to the
+brink! We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay."
+
+"You assume too much--a great deal too much. She must be beautiful--and
+good."
+
+"Give me a figure. She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty that
+lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious enthusiasm.
+Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage would touch and
+bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of stale vegetation. You
+want him to clasp that to his bosom for the rest of his life?"
+
+"I won't believe you. You're coarse and you're cruel."
+
+Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this. Hilda, still
+regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient
+shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
+
+"I'm sorry, dear," she said. "I forgot. You are usually so intelligent,
+one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the
+bathroom and get my salts--they're on the washhand-stand--will you? I'm
+quite faint with all I'm about to undergo."
+
+Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring the
+third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside and laid
+her hand on Hilda's head.
+
+"Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry," she said. It was a
+cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a necessity.
+
+"I am not very bad," Hilda improvised. "Hardly more than a headache."
+
+"She makes light of everything," Miss Filbert said, smiling toward
+Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression. Discovering the
+blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from her hands.
+
+"And what," said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss Livingstone,
+"might your name be?"
+
+There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a conventionality
+of the other world, and before its assurance Alicia stood helpless.
+
+"Her name is Livingstone," called Hilda from the bed, "and she is as
+good as she is beautiful. You needn't be troubled about HER soul--she
+takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral."
+
+"Hallelujah!" said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious congratulation.
+
+"Much better," said Hilda cheerfully, "to take it at the Cathedral, you
+know, than nowhere."
+
+Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of the
+bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda's hair.
+
+"You don't seem to have much fever," she said. "There was a poor fellow
+in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of one hundred
+and seven. I could hardly bear to touch him."
+
+"What was the matter?" asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses about
+the third person in the room.
+
+"Oh, I don't know exactly. Some complication, I suppose, of Satan's
+tribute--"
+
+"Divinest Laura!" Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back. "Do
+take a chair. It will be even more soothing to see you comfortable."
+
+Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed. "Miss Howe is more
+thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones," she said, with
+vast kindness. "I have often told her so. I have had a long day."
+
+"It may improve me in that character," Hilda said, "to suggest that if
+you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is a good
+thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your bath. Do
+you use those things?"
+
+Laura shook her head. "Faith is better than disinfectants. I never get
+any harm. My Master protects me."
+
+"My goodness!" Hilda said. And in the silence that occurred, Captain
+Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid for was a
+decayed tooth. Presently Alicia made a great effort. She laid hands on
+Hilda's previous reference as a tangibility that remained with her.
+
+"Do you ever go to the Cathedral?" she said.
+
+The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert's features, as
+when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant from a
+flower. Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries of dogma it
+may have been some other obscurity, but that was the effect.
+
+"No. I never go there. We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a tabernacle to
+ourselves."
+
+"Isn't it exquisite--her way of speaking!" cried Hilda from the bed, and
+Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof
+of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she went on as if she were
+conscious of a stimulus.
+
+"Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary
+enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied
+fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is
+Lord of our hosts."
+
+"A kind of chant," murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware
+that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism. Then
+that impression was carried away as it were on a puff of air, and it is
+hardly likely that she thought of it again.
+
+"I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?" Laura said. The sanctity
+of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon it, and
+behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue of some other
+thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine, and narrowed her
+eyes.
+
+"Dear me, yes," she said for Alicia. "His Excellency the Viceroy and all
+his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their ladies, Secretaries
+to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under-Secretaries so
+thick they're kept in the vestibule till the bells stop. 'And make Thy
+chosen people joyful'!" she intoned. "Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and
+Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the
+main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit."
+
+"You know already what a humbug she is," Alicia said, but Captain
+Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.
+
+"Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me," she said, rising to go
+through the little accustomed function of her departure. "I'll be going
+now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to take her place
+at the Believers' Meeting." She took Hilda's hand in hers and held it
+for an instant. "Good-bye, and God bless you--in the way you most need,"
+she said, and turned to Alicia, "Good-bye. I am glad to know that we
+will be one in the glad hereafter though our paths may diverge"--her eye
+rested with acknowledgment upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves--"in this
+world. To look at you I should have thought you were of the bowed down
+ones, not yet fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little
+more oxygen in the blood of your religion. Remember the word of the
+Lord--'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!' Goodbye."
+
+She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door. It
+sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes clung
+about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way. Miss Howe
+looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as uncontrollable as it
+was unreasonable. "A saved soul, perhaps. A woman--oh, assuredly," she
+said in the depths of her hair.
+
+The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made
+something like a dash at an object about to elude her. "Oh," she
+exclaimed, "wait a minute. Will you come and see me? I think--I think
+you might do me good. I live at Number Ten, Middleton Street. Will you
+come?"
+
+Laura came back into the room. There was a little stiffness in her air,
+as if she repressed something.
+
+"I have no objection," she said.
+
+"To-morrow afternoon--at five? Or--my brother is dining at the
+club--would you rather come to dinner?"
+
+"Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me." She spoke carefully, after
+an instant's hesitation.
+
+"Then do come and dine--at eight," Alicia said; and it was agreed.
+
+She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and only
+turned when Hilda spoke.
+
+"You are going to have him to meet her," she said. "May I come too?"
+
+"Certainly not." Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door
+handle.
+
+"Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!" Hilda cried.
+
+"I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home," said
+Alicia, and went out swiftly.
+
+"My goodness!" Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her
+slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend Stephen
+Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street. "Thanks immensely," it
+ran, "for your delightful offer to introduce me to Father Jordan and
+persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders he keeps in his tower
+at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an hour of milk and honey, and
+belonging to that charming Order, he won't mind my coming on a Sunday
+evening--the first clear one."
+
+Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her pen.
+Then she added: "If you have any influence with Duff Lindsay, it may
+be news to you that you can exert it with advantage to keep him from
+marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the Salvation Army named
+Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you should expostulate with her,
+but I don't advise that."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful air
+when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in any case
+it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand walked the floor,
+carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with blotches, which had inherited
+from its maternal parent a conspicuous lack of buttons. Mrs. Sand's room
+was also ornamented with texts, but they had apparently been selected at
+random, and they certainly hung that way. The piety of the place seemed
+at the control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with
+his father's regimental cap. On the other side of the curtain Captain
+Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.
+
+"What kind of meetin' did you have?" asked Mrs. Sand. "There--there now;
+he shall have his bottle, so he shall!"
+
+"A beautiful meeting. Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro, you
+know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss Rozario
+from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's. We had such a happy time."
+
+"What sort of collection?"
+
+Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper coins.
+
+"Only seven annas three pice! And you call that a good meeting! I don't
+believe you exhorted them to give!"
+
+"Oh, I think I did!" Laura returned mechanically.
+
+"Seven annas and three pice! And you know what the Commissioner wrote
+out about our last quarter's earnings! What did you say?"
+
+"I said--I said the collection would now be taken up," Laura faltered.
+
+"Oh dear! oh dear! Leopold, stop clawing me! Couldn't you think of
+anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that? Fever or no fever, it
+does not do for me to stay away from the regular meetin's. One thing is
+plain--HE wasn't there!"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your
+reasons." Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful. "I mean
+the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind, under the window.
+A society man, I should say, to look at him, though the officers of this
+Army are no respecters of persons, and I don't suppose the Lord takes
+any notice of his clothes."
+
+"His name is Mr. Lindsay. No, he wasn't there."
+
+The girl's tone was distant and cold. The rebuke about the collection
+had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.
+
+"I hope you haven't been discouraging him?"
+
+Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.
+
+"I have entreated him to come to the meetings. But he never attends a
+Believers' Rally. Why should he?"
+
+"What's his state of mind? He came to see you, didn't he, the other
+night?"
+
+"Yes, he did. I don't think he's altogether careless."
+
+"Ain't he seeking?"
+
+"He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself. The Lord has
+different ways of working. What else should bring him, night after
+night?"
+
+Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with lifted
+eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly-disciplined smile
+behind her baby's head. When she looked back again Laura had flushed
+all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which she felt was
+absurd.
+
+"My!" she said,--scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have been
+expected of her,--"you do look nice when you've got a little colour. But
+if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the meetin's, you must
+be blind, that's all."
+
+Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a wand.
+
+"Then I hope I may go on bringing him," she said. "He couldn't come to a
+better place."
+
+"Well, you'll have to be careful," said Mrs. Sand, as if with severe
+intent. "But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say that. You may be
+an influence for good. It may be His will that you should be pleasant to
+the young man. But don't make free with him. Don't, on any account, have
+him put his arm round your waist."
+
+"Nobody has done that to me," Laura replied austerely, "since I left
+Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will. Not that Mr.
+Lindsay" (she blushed again) "would ever want to. The class he belongs
+to look down on it."
+
+"The class he belongs to do worse things. The Army doesn't look down on
+it. It's only nature, and the Army believes in working with nature. If
+it was Mr. Harris I wouldn't say a word--he marches under the Lord's
+banner."
+
+Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even
+slightly complacent.
+
+"Well," she said, "I told Mr. Harris last evening that the Lieutenant
+and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and he seemed to
+think he'd been keeping company with me. I had to tell him I hadn't any
+such idea."
+
+"Did he seem much disappointed?"
+
+"He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging to
+the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have to learn
+to walk alone."
+
+Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lips.
+
+"I don't know but what you did right," she said. "By the grace of God
+you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you. But I have a
+kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay 'll be harder to convince."
+
+"I daresay."
+
+"It would be splendid, though, to garner him in. He might be willing to
+march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor Captain Corby, of
+the Queen's army, did in Rangoon."
+
+"He might be proud to."
+
+"We must all try and bring sin home to him," Mrs. Sand remarked with
+rising energy; "and don't you go saying anything to him hastily. If he's
+gone on you--"
+
+"Oh Ensign! let us hope he is thinking of higher things! Let us both
+pray for him. Let Captain Sand pray for him too, and I'll ask the
+Lieutenant. Now that she's got Miss Rozario safe into the kingdom, I
+don't think she has any special object."
+
+"Oh yes, we'll pray for him," Ensign Sand returned, as if that might
+have gone without saying, "but you--"
+
+"And give me that precious baby. You must be completely worn out. I
+should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should."
+
+"It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin' child
+out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her husband
+and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant
+without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her own room with
+something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes,
+dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.
+
+The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some
+selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of
+his perception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of
+all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of
+conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young lady friends away,
+and these also doubtless operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not
+attend a Believers' Rally unless one's personal faith extends beyond
+the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one's spiritual
+condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley
+Square, later in the evening, the conditions were different. It would
+not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of
+sentiment. The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted
+shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone,
+and tram-drivers whistled bullock-carts off the lines, and street
+pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the group of
+exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the
+buttons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to the people in their
+own language; the "open air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!"
+(Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on
+the edge of the crowd. He looked down at a coolie-woman with shrivelled
+breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil
+of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not
+delay until to-morrow!" Laura besought them. "Kul ka dari mut karo!" A
+sensation of disgust assailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse
+of atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back
+and dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap. But he grew more
+miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench
+at a distance where he could not hear her voice. Only the hymn
+pursued him; they sang presently a hymn. In the chorus the words were
+distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand--
+
+
+     "Us ki ho tarif,
+      Us ki ho tarif!"
+
+
+The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle,
+a discordance of a specially intolerable sort.
+
+
+     "Glory to His name!
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman
+were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable
+reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.
+
+His "Good-evening!" when the meeting was over, was a cheerful, general
+salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the
+response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant
+Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had thought of
+interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which
+Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including
+her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.
+
+"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
+appeal, as they moved off.
+
+"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called out, and
+they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer the East Indian paused in his
+tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and
+slipped away.
+
+"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said. Lindsay
+marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and seemed
+perturbed.
+
+"What she said was quite true," he ventured.
+
+"But--anybody would think--"
+
+"What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road? It's
+quieter. What would anybody think?"
+
+"Oh, silly things." Laura threw up her head with a half laugh. "Things I
+needn't mention."
+
+Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then "Between us?" he asked, and she
+nodded.
+
+Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He found
+her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he
+said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His
+passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all
+complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I
+possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase
+that would serve.
+
+"I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay." Her
+head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed to be
+a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved
+sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious
+entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls
+going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.
+Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it
+came so near that he bounded to meet it.
+
+"Dear," he said, "you can't know--there is no way of telling you--what I
+mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves;
+but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you.
+I can't explain to you how poor it was, and I won't try; but I fancy God
+sends every one of us, if we know it, some one blessed chance, and He
+did more for me--He lifted the veil of my stupidity and let me see it,
+passing by in its halo, trailing clouds of glory. I don't want to
+make you understand, though--I want to make you promise. I want to be
+absolutely sure from to-night that you'll marry me. Say that you'll
+marry me--say it before we get to the crossing. Say it, Laura." She
+listened to his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then
+made as if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and
+she heard him through, walking beside him formally on her bare feet, and
+looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in Putney.
+
+"I don't object to your calling me by my given name," she said when he
+had done, "but it can't go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay, and you
+ought not to bring God into it--indeed you ought not. You are no son or
+servant of His--you are among those whose very light is darkness, and
+how great is your darkness!"
+
+"Don't," he said shortly. "Never mind about that--now. You needn't be
+afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know, outside your
+particular Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants you to marry him,
+that's how it is. Will you?"
+
+"I don't wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I'm very much obliged, but
+I couldn't dream of it."
+
+"Don't dream of it; consider it, accept it. Why, dear creature, you are
+mine already--don't you feel that?"
+
+Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of his
+eyes in her. Her tired body even clung to him. "Are you quite sure you
+haven't begun to think of loving me?" he demanded.
+
+"It isn't a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it's a question of the Army.
+You don't seem to think the Army counts for anything."
+
+One is convinced that it wasn't a question of love, the least in the
+world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and the flame
+in him leaped up.
+
+"Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question."
+
+"Is that a quotation?" she asked. She spoke coldly, and this time she
+succeeded in withdrawing her hand. "I daresay you think the Army very
+common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great and holy
+crusade, and I march with it. You would not ask me to give up my
+life-work?"
+
+"Only to take it into another sphere," Duff said unreflectingly. He was
+checked, but not discouraged; impatient, but in no wise cast down. She
+had not flown, she walked beside him placidly. She had no intention
+of flight. He tried to resign himself to the task of beating down her
+trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse to leap over them.
+
+"Another sphere,"--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation. "I
+suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same."
+
+"Not quite the same. You would have to drive to see your sinners in a
+carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them in--what
+do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or pearls.
+I think I would rather see you in pearls." He was aware of the
+inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped to laugh
+inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn of her head.
+
+"We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most of
+them would be on Government House list, just as most of your present
+ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the police
+magistrates. But you would find just as much to do for them."
+
+"I should not even know how to act in such company."
+
+"You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some people I
+know; delightful people, who will understand. A year! You will learn in
+three months--what odds and ends there are to know. I couldn't spare you
+for a year."
+
+Lindsay stopped. He had to. Captain Filbert was murmuring the cadences
+of a hymn. She went through two stanzas, and covered her eyes for a
+moment with her hand. When she spoke it was in a quiet, level, almost
+mechanical way. "Yes," she said. "The Cross and the Crown, the Crown and
+the Cross. Father in heaven, I do not forget Thy will and Thy purpose,
+that I should bring the word of Thy love to the poor and the lowly, the
+outcast and those despised. And what I say to this man, who offers me
+the gifts and the gladness of a world that had none for Thee, is the
+answer Thou hast put in my heart--that the work is Thine and that I
+am Thine, and he has no part or lot in me, nor can ever have. Here is
+Crooked Lane. Good-night, Mr. Lindsay." She had slipped into the devious
+darkness of the place before he could find any reply, before he quite
+realised, indeed, that they had reached her lodging. He could only utter
+a vague "Goodnight," after her, formulating more definite statements to
+himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Miss Howe was walking in the business quarter of Calcutta. It was the
+business quarter, yet the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes,
+and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats
+above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew
+banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of
+palms in pots showed behind the balustrades of the flat roofs whenever
+a storey ran short. Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary
+well-being, a sense of lifted burden. The stucco streets were too
+slovenly to be purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them,
+the pariahs blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in
+the cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices or
+circled against the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be abroad, in
+the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with brown humility
+half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility seemed well
+affected toward the world, alert and content. The air was full of the
+comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced luxuries, and the incense
+of wayside trees; it was as if the sun laid a bland compelling hand upon
+the city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange fruits increase.
+Brokers' gharries rattled past, each holding a pale young man
+preoccupied with a notebook; where the bullock-carts gathered themselves
+together and blocked the road the pale young men put excited heads out
+of the gharry windows and used remarkable imprecations. One of them, as
+Hilda turned into the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out to
+take off his hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the
+pleasant reflection of his infinite interest in life. "Upon my word,"
+she said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of
+a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, "he's so
+lighthearted, so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous effect even
+of a failure like the one he contemplates."
+
+She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman, and
+followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who hardly
+lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to look at
+her--so many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle gave
+prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and they were so much alike.
+At all events they carried a passport to indifference in the fact that
+they all wanted something, and it was clear to the meanest intelligence
+that they appeared to be more magnificent than they were, visions in
+dazzling complexions and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-class
+ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts. It was
+less interesting still when they belonged to the other class, the shabby
+ladies, nearly always in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court,
+or sons before the police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible,
+"kept out of the paper." Successful or not these always wept on their
+way out, and nothing could be more depressing. The only gleam of
+entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib
+occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of a
+boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading
+Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local columns of the
+Chronicle--a lady who had never known what a bailiff looked like in the
+lifetime of her first husband, or her second either. Then at the sound
+of a pudgy blow upon a table, or high abusive accents in the rapid
+elaborate cadences of the domiciled East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would
+glance at Gobind Babu with a careful smile, for the manager-sahib who
+dispensed so much galli* was now receiving the same, and defenceless.
+
+
+     * Abuse.
+
+
+The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in. He did not rise--he was
+one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee exports in
+such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and she had come
+on business. He gave her a nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and
+indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table.
+He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him
+the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table
+with his blue pencil he asked Miss Howe how the world was using HER.
+
+"Let me see," said Hilda, a trifle absent-mindedly, "were you here last
+cold weather--I rather imagine you were, weren't you?"
+
+"I was; I had the pleasure of--"
+
+"To be sure. You got the place in December, when that poor fellow Baker
+died. Baker was a country-bred I know, but he always kept his
+contracts, while you got your po-lish in Glesca, and your name is
+Macphairson--isn't it?"
+
+"I was never in Glasgow in my life, and my name is Macandrew," said the
+manager, putting with some aggressiveness a paper-weight on a pile of
+bills.
+
+"Never mind," said Hilda, again wrapped in thought, "don't
+apologise--it's near enough. Well, Mr. Macandrew,"--her tone came to a
+point,--"what is the Stanhope Company's advertisement worth a month to
+the Chronicle?"
+
+"A hundred rupees maybe--there or thereabouts;" and Mr. Macandrew, with
+a vast show of indifference, picked up a letter and began to tear at the
+end of it.
+
+"One hundred and fifty-five I think, to be precise. That communication
+will wait, won't it? What is it--Kally Nath Mitter's paper and stores
+bill? You won't be able to pay it any quicker if we withdraw our
+advertisement."
+
+"Why should ye withdraw it?"
+
+"It was given to you on the understanding that notices should appear of
+every Wednesday and Saturday's performance. For two Wednesdays there has
+been no notice, and last Saturday night you sent a fool."
+
+"So Muster Stanhope thinks o' withdrawin' his advertisement?"
+
+"He is very much of that mind."
+
+The manager put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back
+in his chair, and demonstrated the principle that had given him a gold
+watch chain--"never be bluffed."
+
+"Ye can withdraw it," he said, with a warily experimental eye upon her.
+
+"How reasonable of you not to make a fuss! We'll have the order
+to discontinue in writing, please. If you'll give me a pen and
+paper--thanks--and I'll keep a copy."
+
+"Stanhope has wanted to transfer it to the Market Gazette for some
+time," she went on as she wrote.
+
+"That's not a newspaper. You'll get no notices there."
+
+"Cheaper on that account, probably."
+
+"They charge like the very deevil. D'ye know the rates of them?"
+
+"I can't say I do."
+
+"There's a man on our staff that doesn't like your show. We'll be able
+to send him every night now."
+
+"When we withdraw our advertisement?"
+
+"Just then."
+
+"All right," said Hilda. "It will be interesting to point out in the
+Indian Empire the remarkable growth of independent criticism in the
+Chronicle since Mr. Stanhope no longer uses the space at his disposal. I
+hope your man will be very nasty indeed. You might as well hand over the
+permanent passes--the gentleman will expect, I suppose, to pay."
+
+"They'll be in the yeditorial department," said Mr. Macandrew, but
+he did not summon a messenger to go for them. Instead he raised his
+eyebrows in a manner that expressed the necessity of making the best of
+it, and humorously scratched his head.
+
+"We have four hundred pounds of new type coming out in the Almora--she's
+due on Thursday," he said. "Entirely for the advertisements. We'll have
+a fine display next week. It's grand type--none of your Calcutta-made
+stuff."
+
+"Pays to bring it out, does it?" asked Hilda inattentively, copying her
+letter.
+
+"Pays the advertisers." There were ingratiating qualities in the
+managerial smile. Hilda inspected them coldly.
+
+"There's your notice of withdrawal," she said. "Good-morning."
+
+"Think of that new type, and how lovely Jimmy Finnigan's ad will look in
+it."
+
+"That's all right. Good-morning." Miss Howe approached the door, the
+blue glance of Macandrew pursuant.
+
+"No notices for two Wednesdays, eh? We'll have to see about that. I
+was thinkin' of transferrin' your space to the third page; it's a more
+advantageous position--and no extra charge--but ye'll not mention it to
+Jimmy."
+
+Miss Howe lifted an arrogant chin. "Do I understand you'll do that, and
+guarantee regular notices, if we leave the advertisement with you?"
+
+Mr. Macandrew looked at her expressively, and tore, with a gesture of
+moderated recklessness, the notice of withdrawal in two.
+
+"Rest easy," he said, "I'll see about it. I'd go the len'th of attendin'
+myself to-night, if ye could spare two three extra places."
+
+"Moderate Macandrew!"
+
+"Moderate enough. I've got some frien's stayin' in the same place with
+me from Behar--indigo people. I was thinkin' I'd give them a treat, if
+three places c'd be spared next to the Chronicle seats."
+
+"We do Lady Whippleton to-night and the booking's been heavy. Five is
+too many, Mr. Macandrew, even if you promised not to write the notice
+yourself."
+
+"I might pay for one;" Macandrew drew red cartwheels on his
+blotting-pad.
+
+"Those seats are sure to be gone. I'll send you a box. Stanhope's as bad
+as he can be with dysentery--you might make a local out of that. Be sure
+to mention he can't see anybody--it's absurd the way Calcutta people
+want to be paid."
+
+"A box'll be Grand," said Mr. Macandrew. "I'll see ye get plenty of
+ancores. Can ye manage the door? Good-day, then."
+
+Hilda stepped out on the landing. The heavy, regular thud of the presses
+came up from below. They were printing the edition that took the world's
+news to planters' bungalows in the jungle of Assam and the lonely
+policeman on the edge of Manipore. The smell of the newspaper of to-day
+and of yesterday, and of a year ago, stood in the air; through an open
+door she saw the dusty, uneven edges of files of them, piled on the
+floor. Three or four messengers squatted beside the wall, with slumbrous
+heads between their knees. Occasionally a shout came from the room
+inside, and one of them, crying "Hazur!" with instant alacrity,
+stretched himself mightily, loafed upon his feet and went in, emerging a
+moment later carrying written sheets, with which he disappeared into the
+regions below. The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it,
+through an open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and
+green leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his
+grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation. A Government peon in
+scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace, bearing a packet
+with an official seal. The place, with its ink-smeared walls and high
+ceilings, spoke between dusty yawns of the languor and the leisure which
+might attend the manipulation of the business of life, and Hilda paused
+for an instant to perceive what it said. Then she walked behind her card
+into the next room, where a young gentleman, reading proofs in his
+shirt sleeves, flung himself upon his coat and struggled into it at her
+approach. He seemed to have the blackest hair and the softest eyes and
+the neatest moustache available, all set in a complexion frankly
+olive, amiable English cut, in amiable Oriental colour, and the whole
+illumined, when once the coat was on and the collar perfectly turned
+down, by the liveliest, most engaging smile. Standing with his head
+slightly on one side and one hand resting on the table, while the
+other saw that nothing was disarranged between collar and top waistcoat
+button, he was an interjection point of invitation and attention.
+
+"The Editor of the Chronicle?" Hilda asked with diffident dignity, and
+very well informed to the contrary.
+
+"NOT the editor--I am sorry to say." The confession was delightfully
+vivid--in the plenitude of his candour it was plain that he didn't
+care who knew that he was sorry he was not the editor. "In journalistic
+parlance, the sub editor," he added. "Will you be seated, Miss Howe?"
+and with a tasteful silk pocket handkerchief he whisked the bottom of a
+chair for her.
+
+"Then you are Mr. Molyneux Sinclair," Hilda declared. "You have been
+pointed out to me on several first nights. Oh, I know very well where
+the Chronicle seats are!"
+
+Mr. Sinclair bowed with infinite gratification, and tucked the silk
+handkerchief back so that only a fold was visible. "We members of the
+Fourth Estate are fairly well known, I'm afraid, in Calcutta," he said.
+"Personally, I could sometimes wish it were otherwise. But certainly not
+in this instance."
+
+Hilda gave him a gay little smile. "I suppose the editor," she said,
+with a casual glance about the room, "is hammering out his leader for
+to-morrow's paper. Does he write half and do you write half, or how do
+you manage?"
+
+A seriousness overspread Mr. Sinclair's countenance, which nevertheless
+irradiated, as if he could not help it, with beaming eyes. "Ah, those
+are the secrets of the prison-house, Miss Howe. Unfortunately it is
+not etiquette for me to say in what proportion I contribute the leading
+articles of the Chronicle. But I can tell you in confidence that if it
+were not for the editor's prejudices--rank prejudices--it would be a
+good deal larger."
+
+"Ah, his prejudices! Why not be quite frank, Mr. Sinclair, and say that
+he is just a little tiny bit jealous of his staff. All editors are,
+you know." Miss Howe shook her head in philosophical deprecation of the
+peccadillo, and Mr. Sinclair cast a smiling, embarrassed glance at his
+smart brown leather boot. The glance was radiant with what he couldn't
+tell her as a sub-editor of honour about those cruel prejudices, but he
+gave it no other medium.
+
+"I'm afraid you know the world, Miss Howe," he said, with a noble
+reserve, and that was all.
+
+"A corner of it here and there. But you are responsible for the whole of
+the dramatic criticism,"--Hilda charged him roundly,--"the editor can't
+claim any of THAT."
+
+An inquiring brown face under an embroidered cap appeared at the door;
+a brown hand thrust in a bunch of printed slips. Mr. Sinclair motioned
+both away, and they vanished in silence.
+
+"That I can't deny," he said. "It would be useless if I wished to
+do so--my style betrays me--I must plead guilty. It is not one of my
+legitimate duties--if I held this position on the Times, or say the
+Daily Telegraph, our London contemporaries, it would not be required of
+me. But in this country everything is piled upon the sub-editor. Many
+a night, Miss Howe, I send down the last slips of a theatre notice at
+midnight and am here in this chair"--Mr. Sinclair brought his open palm
+down upon the arm of it--"by eleven the following day!" Mr. Sinclair's
+chin was thrust passionately forward, moisture dimmed the velvety
+brightness of those eyes which, in more dramatic moments, he confessed
+to have inherited from a Nawab great-grandfather. "But I don't
+complain," he said, and drew in his chin. It seemed to bring his
+argument to a climax, over which he looked at Hilda in warm, frank
+expansion.
+
+"Overworked, too, I daresay," she said, and then went on a trifle
+hurriedly. "Well, I must tell you, Mr. Sinclair, how kind your criticism
+always is, and how much I personally appreciate it. None of the little
+points and effects one tries to make seem to escape you, and you are
+always generous in the matter of space too."
+
+Molyneux impartially threw out his hand. "I believe in it!" he
+exclaimed. "Honour where honour is due, Miss Howe, and the Stanhope
+Company has given me some very enjoyable evenings. And you'll hardly
+believe me, but it is a fact, I assure you, I seldom get a free hand
+with those notices. Suicidal to the interests of the paper as it is, the
+editor insists as often as not on cutting down my theatre copy!"
+
+"Cuts it down, does he? The brute!" said Miss Howe.
+
+"I've known him sacrifice a third of it for an indigo market report.
+Now, I ask you, who reads an indigo market report? Nobody. Who wants to
+know how Jimmy Finnigan's--how the Stanhope Company's latest novelties
+went off? Everybody. Of course, when he does that sort of thing, I make
+it warm for him next morning?"
+
+The door again opened and admitted a harassed little Babu in spectacles,
+bearing a sheaf of proof slips, who advanced timidly into the middle of
+the room and paused.
+
+"In a few minutes, Babu," said Mr. Sinclair; "I am engaged."
+
+"It iss the Council isspeech of the Legal Member, sir, and it iss to go
+at five p.m. to his house for last correction."
+
+"Presently, Babu. Don't interrupt. As I was saying, Miss Howe, I make it
+warm for him till he apologises. I must say he always apologises, and I
+don't often ask more than that. But I was obliged to tell him the last
+time that if it happened again one of us would have to go."
+
+"What did he say to that?"
+
+"I don't exactly remember. But it had a tremendous effect--tremendous.
+We became good friends almost immediately."
+
+"Quite so. We miss you when you don't come, Mr. Sinclair--last Saturday
+night, for example."
+
+"I HAD to go to the Surprise Party. Jimmy came here with tears in his
+eyes that morning. 'My show is tumbling to pieces,' he said. 'Sinclair,
+you've got to come to-night.' Made me dine with him--wouldn't let me
+out of his sight. We had to send a reporter to you and Llewellyn that
+night."
+
+"Mr. Sinclair, the notice made me weep."
+
+"I know. All that about the costumes. But what can you expect? The man
+is as black as your hat."
+
+"We have to buy our own costumes," said Hilda, with a glance at the
+floor, "and we haven't any too much, you know, to do it on."
+
+"The toilets in Her Second Son were simply magnificent. Not to be
+surpassed on the boards of the Lyceum in tasteful design or richness
+of material. They were ne plus ultra!" cried Mr. Sinclair. "You will
+remember I said so in my critique."
+
+"I remember. If I were you I wouldn't go so far another time. There's
+a lot of cotton velvet and satin about it, you know, between ourselves,
+and Finnigan's people will be getting the laugh on us. That's one of
+the things I wanted to mention. Don't be quite so good to us. See?
+Otherwise--well, you know how Calcutta talks, and what a pretty girl
+Beryl Stace is, for example. Mrs. Sinclair mightn't like it, and I don't
+blame her."
+
+"As I said before, Miss Howe, you know the world," Mr. Sinclair replied,
+with infinite mellow humour, and as Miss Howe had risen he rose too,
+pulling down his waistcoat.
+
+"There was just one other thing," Hilda said, holding out her hand.
+"Next Wednesday, you know, Rosa Norton takes her benefit. Rosy's as
+well known here as the Ochterlony monument; she's been coming every cold
+weather for ten years, poor old Rosy. Don't you think you could do her
+a bit of an interview for Wednesday's paper? She'll write up very
+well--get her on variety entertainments in the Australian bush."
+
+Mr. Molyneux Sinclair looked pained to hesitate. "Personally," he said
+confidentially, "I should like it immensely, and I daresay I could get
+it past the editor. But we're so short-handed."
+
+Miss Howe held up a forefinger which seemed luminous with solution.
+"Don't you bother," she said, "I'll do it for you; I'll write it myself.
+My 'prentice hand I'll try on Rosy, and you shall have the result ready
+to print on Tuesday morning. Will that do?"
+
+That would do supremely. Mr. Sinclair could not conceal the admiration
+he felt for such a combination of talents. He did not try; he
+accompanied it to the door, expanding and expanding until it seemed more
+than ever obvious that he found the sub-editorial sphere unreasonably
+contracted. Hilda received his final bow from the threshold of what he
+called his "sanctum," and had hardly left the landing in descent when
+a square-headed, collarless, red-faced male in shirt sleeves came
+down, descending, as it seemed, in bounds from parts above. "Damn
+it, Sinclair!" she heard, as he shot into the apartment she had
+left, "here's the whole council meeting report set up and waiting
+three-quarters of an hour--press blocked; and the printer Babu says
+he can get nothing out of you. What the devil.... If the dak's* missed
+again, by thunder!... paid to converse with itinerant females... seven
+columns... infernal idiocy...."
+
+
+     * Country post.
+
+
+Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with amusement as
+she made her way down that Mr. Sinclair was doubtless waiting until his
+lady visitor was well out of earshot to make it warm for the editor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything very
+exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged themselves
+between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the Reverend Stephen
+Arnold, had it been aware of them; and I conclude reluctantly that it
+would not. Reluctantly, because such imperviousness argues a lack of
+perception, of flair in directions which any Continental centre would
+recognise as vastly tickling, regrettable in a capital of such vaunted
+sophistication as that which sits beside the Hooghly. It may as well be
+shortly admitted, however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you
+must, for example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty
+technical equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from
+England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of your
+dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the sex that does
+not hunt jackals it is easier--you have only to be a little frivolous
+and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-shaking nickname, as in
+the case of three ladies known in a viceroyalty of happy legend as
+the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I should be sorry to give the
+impression that Calcutta is therefore a place of gloom. The source of
+these things is perennial, and the noise of laughter is ever in the air
+of the Indian capital. Between the explosions, however, it is natural
+enough that the affairs of a priest of College Street and an actress
+of no address at all should slip unnoticed, especially as they did
+not advertise it. Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was
+no rehearsal, to tea. He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts which
+answered fairly well the purposes of a sense of humour, and nobody could
+question hers; it operated obscurely to keep them in the house.
+
+She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her to
+take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of beauty;
+although she mentioned to herself that he took it with a difference,
+a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of not having yet
+quite sounded. The depths of his faith of course--there she could only
+scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often
+find herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her.
+The atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world,
+and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel
+for Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment. He
+warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and
+she was not on the whole the poorer by any exchange they made, but she
+was sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between
+them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour
+of adventure. She found herself inclined--and the experience was new--to
+make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be
+considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand
+under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious concentrated quality, and a
+strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also
+the impression--was it too fantastic?--of words carried over a medium,
+an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by
+the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came
+running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a
+midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after
+a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to
+declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of
+Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be--one hardly
+paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would
+certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to
+Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she
+was less oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own.
+Perhaps it is already evident that this was her grievance with life,
+when the joy of it left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction
+of her personal lines, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body
+claimed of her and found her willing to perform, the fact that it meant
+more to her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best
+when she got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point
+of view except the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these
+conditions--her experience had not been upon that plane--but she
+bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading; one
+came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains. It was
+absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman kind with
+vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected.
+So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so
+interfering--so horribly interfering! Personally she did not see herself
+one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the
+necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might
+have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and
+communities in every direction. She had not, I am convinced, any of the
+notions of a crusader upon this popular subject, nor may I portray her
+either shocked or revolted, only rather bored, being a creature whom it
+was unkind to hamper; and she would have explained quite in these simple
+terms the reason why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament
+was to her a pervasive charm of his society.
+
+She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not classify
+him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and there was in
+this no doubt a vague perception that the confession showed a limitation
+of experience on her part for which he might be inclined to call her to
+account; since cultured young Oxonians with an altruistic bias, if they
+do not exactly abound, are still often enough to be discovered if one
+happens to belong to the sphere which they haunt, they and their ideals.
+Not that any such consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the
+disabilities of her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching
+her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance
+following her into its queer byways--her sphere's--full of spangles and
+limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry.
+There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to
+those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This
+remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear
+by the most indefinite signs possible, that he saw what she saw, peering
+over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside found it
+enough.
+
+He was there when she came back from the Chronicle office, patient under
+the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had told him she
+would not be long in returning. He had gone so far as to order tea for
+her, and it was waiting with him. "Make it," she commanded; "why haven't
+you had some already?" and while he bent over the battered Britannia
+metal spout she sank into the nearest seat and let her hat make a frame
+for her face against the back of it. She was too tired, she said, to
+move, and her hands lay extended, one upon each arm of her chair, with
+the air of being left there to be picked up at her convenience. Arnold,
+over the teapot, agreed that walking in Calcutta was an insidious
+pleasure--one gathered a lassitude--and brought her cup. She looked at
+him for an instant as she took it.
+
+"But I am not too tired to hear what you have on your mind," she said.
+"Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his convictions?
+Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the roof after all?"
+
+"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I
+don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not. Kally
+Nath is to be baptized to-morrow. We are certain to get our oratory."
+
+"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted. "When one prays for so long a
+time together it must be better to have fresh air. It will certainly be
+better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a weak chest."
+
+"It will be better for us all." Arnold seemed to reflect, across his
+teacup, how much better it would be. Then he added, "I saw Lindsay last
+night."
+
+"Again? And--"
+
+"I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way."
+
+"Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all--another
+man--it's naturally of no use!"
+
+"I spoke as a priest!"
+
+"Did he swear at you?"
+
+"Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But I could
+get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."
+
+"How far did you go?"
+
+"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit
+sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her."
+
+"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you don't
+suspect the irony in it" Hilda said. "Pray who is to make it up to him?"
+
+"I suppose there is that point of view."
+
+"I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her
+here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before
+him. I succeeded too--he gave me the most uncomfortable looks--but I
+might as well have let it alone. The great end of nature," Hilda went
+on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state would
+never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities.
+And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.
+That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's irresistibly
+suggested."
+
+Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of
+the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the
+vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and
+sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the
+moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed
+sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if,
+indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the
+wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the
+qualm--it was really something like that--which the wide sweep of her
+cynicism brought him.
+
+"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed
+determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied she was
+being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't
+sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him."
+
+"The devil, no doubt," Hilda replied concisely; "and with equal
+certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."
+
+Arnold gave her a look of surprise. "Surely not my cousin!" he
+protested. "She can't understand."
+
+"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I think
+she's only too tortuously intelligent."
+
+Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. "May I ask?--" he began,
+formally.
+
+"Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely
+self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay
+herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing
+about a member of your family?" she went on, at Arnold's blush; "but
+you asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring
+this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method
+with the girl--having her there constantly and showing her little
+scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away.
+People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality."
+
+"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest in
+his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was not quite
+a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication between Alicia
+and Lindsay. He sat for a moment without saying more, covering his eyes
+with his hand.
+
+"Why should you care so much?" Hilda asked gently. "You are at the very
+antipodes of her sect. You can't endorse her methods--you don't trust
+her results."
+
+"Oh, all that! It's of the least consequence." He spoke with a curious,
+governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes. "It's seeing
+another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that held, as best it
+could, a ray from the source. It's another glimpse of the strength of
+the tide--terrible. It's a cruel hint that one lives above it in the
+heaven of one's own hopes, by some mere blind accident. To have set
+one's feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world and to feel the
+possibility of that--"
+
+"I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed her.
+She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to
+a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat. She was refreshed
+and vivified--she wanted to talk of the warm world. She let a decent
+interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his hand from his
+eyes. Even then, to make the transition easier, she said, "You ought to
+be lifted up to-day, if you are going to baptize Kally Nath to-morrow."
+
+"The Brother Superior will do it. And I don't know--I don't know. The
+young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes over to
+us--"
+
+"The, young woman he is to marry! Oh my dear and reverend friend! Avec
+ces gens la! I have had a most amusing afternoon," she went on quickly.
+"I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your halo." She was safe
+with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at any imputation of
+saintship. He held himself a person of broad indulgences, and would
+point openly to his consumption of tea-cakes. But this afternoon a
+miasma hung over him. Hilda saw it, and bent herself, with her graphic
+recital, to dispel it, perceived it thicken and settle down upon him,
+and went bravely on to the end. Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair
+lived and spoke before him. It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread
+over a matinee.
+
+"And that is the sort of thing you store up and value," he said, when
+she had finished. "These persons will add to your knowledge of life?"
+
+"Extremely," she replied to all of it.
+
+"I suppose they will in their measure. But personally I could wish you
+had not gone. Your work has no right to make such demands."
+
+"Be reasonable," she said, flushing. "Don't talk as if personal
+dignity were within the reach of everybody. It's the most expensive of
+privileges. And nothing to be so very proud of--generally the product
+of somebody else's humiliations, handed down. But the humiliations must
+have been successful, handed down in cash. My father drove a cab and
+died in debt. His name was Cassidy. I shall be dignified some day--some
+day! But you see I must make it possible myself, since nobody has done
+it for me."
+
+"Well, then, I'll alter my complaint. Why should you play with your
+sincerity?"
+
+"I didn't play with it," she flashed; "I abandoned it. I am an actress."
+
+They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance their
+discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain that Arnold
+was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves. He fidgeted with the
+tassel of his ceinture, and she watched his moving fingers. Presently
+she spoke quietly, in a different key.
+
+"I sometimes think," she said, "of a child I knew, in the other years.
+She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts. Her impulses, within
+her small limits, were noble--she was the keenest, loyalest little
+person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the
+woman she is now I think the uses of life are hard, my friend--they are
+hard."
+
+He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as an
+illustration.
+
+"And yet," he replied, "they can be turned to admirable purpose."
+
+"I wonder!" Hilda exclaimed brightly. She had turned down the leaf of
+that mood. "But we are not cheerful--let us be cheerful. For my part I
+am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of December. Look at
+this!"
+
+She opened a small black leather bag, and poured money out of it, in
+notes and currency, into her lap.
+
+"Is it a legacy?"
+
+"It's pay," she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips. "I have
+been paid--we have all been paid! It's so unusual--it makes me
+feel quite generous. Let me see. I'll give you this, and this, and
+this,"--she counted into her open palm ten silver rupees,--"all those I
+will give you for your mission. Prends!" and she clinked them together
+and held them out to him.
+
+He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small. Something in him
+had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood. He could
+only draw into his shell; doubtless he thought that a legitimate and
+inoffensive proceeding.
+
+"Thanks, no," he said, "I think not. We desire people's prayers, rather
+than their alms."
+
+He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous behaviour,
+and said farewell to him as she always did, in spite of the unusual
+look of consciousness in her eyes. She continued to hold the ten
+rupees carefully and separately, as if she would later examine them in
+diagnosing her pain. It was keener and profounder than any humiliation,
+the new voice, crying out, of a trampled tenderness. She stood and
+looked after him for a moment with startled eyes and her hand, in a
+familiar gesture of her profession, upon her heart. Then she went to her
+room, and deliberately loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed,
+first to sob like that little child she remembered, and afterwards to
+think, until the world came and knocked at her door and bade her come
+out of herself and earn money.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+The compulsion which took Stephen Arnold to Crooked Lane is hardly
+ours to examine. It must have been strong, since going up to Mrs. Sand
+involved certain concessions, doubtless intrinsically trifling, but of
+exaggerated discomfort to the mind spiritually cloistered, whatever its
+other latitude. Among them was a distinctly necessary apology, difficult
+enough to make to a lady of rank so superior and authority so voyant
+in the Church militant, by a mere fighting soul without such straps and
+buttons as might compel recognition upon equal terms. It is impossible
+to know how far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty--the priestly
+horizon is perhaps not wholly free from mirage--or to what extent he
+confessed it an indulgence. He was certainly aware of a stronger desire
+than he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not
+desert her post. The idea had an element of irritation oddly personal;
+he could not bear to reflect upon it. It may be wondered whether in any
+flight of venial imagination Arnold saw himself in a parallel situation
+with a lady. I am sure he did not. It may be considered, however, that
+among mirages there are unaccountable resemblances--resemblances without
+shape or form. He might fix his gaze, at all events, upon the supreme
+argument that those who were given to holy work, under any condition,
+in any degree, should make no rededication of themselves. This had to
+support him as best it could against the conviction that had Captain
+Filbert been Sister Anastasia, for example, of the Baker Institution,
+and Ensign Sand the Mother Superior of its Calcutta branch, it was
+improbable that he would have ventured to announce his interest in the
+matter by his card, or in any other way.
+
+It was a hesitating step, therefore, that carried him up to the
+quarters, and a glance of some nervous distress that made him aware, as
+he stood bowing upon her threshold, clasping with both hands his soft
+felt hat to his breast, that Mrs. Sand was not displeased to see him.
+She hastened, indeed, to give him a chair; she said she was very glad
+he'd dropped in, if he didn't mind the room being so untidy--where there
+were children you could spend the whole day picking up. They were out
+at present, with Captain Sand, in the perambulator, not having more
+servants than they could help. A sweeper and a cook they did with; it
+would surprise the people in this country, who couldn't get along with
+less than twenty, she often said.
+
+Mrs. Sand's tone was casual; her manner had a quality somewhat
+aggressively democratic. It said that under her welcome lay the right
+to criticise, which she would have exercised with equal freedom had her
+visitor been the Lord Bishop John Calcutta himself; and it made short
+work of the idea that she might be over-gratified to receive Holy Orders
+in any form. She was not unwilling, however, to show, as between Ensign
+and man, reasonable satisfaction; presently, in fact, she went so far
+as to say, still vaguely remarking upon his appearance there, that she
+often thought there ought to be more sociability between the different
+religious bodies; it would be better for the cause. There was nothing
+narrow, she said, about her, nor yet about Captain Sand. And then,
+with the distinct intimation that that would do, that she had gone far
+enough, she crossed her hands in her lap and waited. It became her to
+have it understood that this visit need have no further object than an
+exchange of amiabilities; but there might be another, and Mrs. Sand's
+folded hands seemed to indicate that she would not necessarily meet it
+with opposition.
+
+Stephen made successive statements of assent. He sat grasping his hat
+between his knees, his eyes fixed upon an infant's sock which lay upon
+the floor immediately in front of him, looking at Mrs. Sand as seldom
+and as briefly as possible, as if his glance took rather an unfair
+advantage, which he would spare her.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said. "Yes, certainly," revolving his hat in his hands.
+And when she spoke of the fraternity that might be fostered by such
+visits, he looked for an instant as if he had found an opening, which
+seemed, however, to converge and vanish in Mrs. Sand's folded hands. He
+flushed to think afterwards, that it was she who was obliged to bring
+his resolution to a head, her scent of his embarrassment sharpening her
+curiosity.
+
+"And is there anything we Army officers can do for you, Mr. Arnold?" she
+inquired.
+
+There was a hint in her voice that, whatever it was, they would have
+done it more willingly if she had not been obliged to ask.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, "my mission is not quite so simple. I could
+wish it were. It is so easy to show our poor needs to one another; and
+I should have confidence--" He paused, amazed at the duplicity that
+grinned at him in his words. At what point more remote within the poles
+was he likely to show himself with a personal request?
+
+"I have nothing to ask for myself," he went on, with concentration
+almost harsh. "I am here to see if you will consent to speak with me
+about a matter which threatens your--your community--about your possible
+loss of Miss Filbert."
+
+Mrs. Sand looked blank. "The Captain isn't leavin' us, as far as I
+know," she said.
+
+"Oh--is it possible that you are not aware that--that very strong
+efforts are being made to induce her to do so?"
+
+Mrs. Sand looked about her as if she expected to find an explanation
+lying somewhere near her chair. Light came to her suddenly, and brought
+her a conscious smile; it only lacked force to be a giggle. She glanced
+at her lap as she smiled; her air was deprecating and off-putting, as if
+she had detected in what Arnold said some suggestion of a gallant nature
+aimed at herself. Happily, he was not looking.
+
+"You mean Mr. Lindsay!" she exclaimed, twisting her wedding-ring and its
+coral guard.
+
+"I hope--I beg--that you will not think me meddlesome or impertinent. I
+have the matter very much at heart. It seems to lie in my path. I must
+see it. Surely you perceive some way of averting the disaster in it!"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what you refer to." Mrs. Sand's tone was prudish
+and offended. "She hasn't said a word to me--she's a great one for
+keeping things to herself--but if Mr. Lindsay don't mean marriage with
+her--"
+
+"Why, of course!" Arnold, startled, turned furiously red, but Mrs. Sand
+in her indignation did not reflect the tint. "Of course! Is not
+that," he went on after an instant's pause, "precisely what is to be
+lamented--and prevented?"
+
+Mrs. Sand looked at her visitor with dry suspicion. "I suppose you are a
+friend of his," she said.
+
+"I have known him for years. Pray don't misunderstand me. There is
+nothing against him--nothing whatever."
+
+"Oh, I don't suppose there is, except that he is not on the Lord's side.
+But I don't expect any of his friends are anxious for him to marry an
+officer in the Salvation Army. Society people ain't fond of the Army,
+and never will be."
+
+"His people--he has only distant relatives living--are all at home,"
+Stephen said vaguely. The situation had become slightly confused.
+
+"Then you speak for them, I suppose?"
+
+"Indeed not. I am in no communication with them whatever. I fancy they
+know nothing about it. I am here entirely--ENTIRELY of my own accord. I
+have come to place myself at your disposition if there is anything I can
+do, any word I can say, to the end of preventing this catastrophe in a
+spiritual life so pure and devoted; to ask you at all events to let me
+join my prayers to yours that it shall not come about."
+
+The squalor of the room seemed to lift before his eyes and be suffused
+with light. At last he had made himself plain. But Mrs. Sand was not
+transfigured. She seemed to sit, with her hands folded, in the midst of
+a calculation.
+
+"Then he HAS put the question. I told her he would," she said.
+
+"I believe he has asked her to marry him and she has refused, more than
+once. But he is importunate, and I hear she needs help."
+
+"Mr. Lindsay," said Mrs. Sand, "is a very takin' young man."
+
+"I suppose we must consider that. There is position too, and wealth.
+These things count--we are all so human--even against the Divine
+realities into possession of which Miss Filbert must have so perfectly
+entered."
+
+"I thought he must be pretty well off. Would he be one of them
+Government officials?"
+
+"He is a broker."
+
+"Oh, is he indeed?" Mrs. Sand's enlightenment was evidently doubtful.
+"Well, if they get married Captain Filbert 'll have to resign. It's
+against the regulations for her to marry outside of the Army."
+
+"But is she not vowed to her work; isn't her life turned for ever
+into that channel? Would it not be horrible to you to see the world
+interfere?"
+
+"I won't say but what I'd be sorry to see her leave us. But I wouldn't
+stand in her way either, and neither would Captain Sand."
+
+"Stand in her way! In her way to material luxury, poverty of spirit, the
+shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral mediocrity of
+the world. I would to God I could be that stumbling block! I have heard
+her--I have seen the light in her that may so possibly be extinguished."
+
+"I don't deny she has a kind of platform gift, but she's losin' her
+voice. And she doesn't understand briskin' people up, if you know what I
+mean."
+
+"She will be pulled down--she will go under!" Arnold repeated in the
+depths of his spirit. He stood up, fumbling with his hat. Mrs. Sand and
+her apartment, her children out of doors in the perambulator, and the
+whole organisation to which she appertained had grown oppressive and
+unnecessary. He was aware of a desire to put his foot again in his own
+world, where things were seen, were understood. He thought there might
+be solace in relating the affair to Brother Colquhoun.
+
+"It's a case," said Mrs. Sand judicially, "where I wouldn't think myself
+called on to say one word. Such things everyone has a right to decide
+for themselves. But you oughtn't to forget that a married woman"--she
+looked at Arnold's celibate habit as if to hold it accountable for
+much--"can have a great influence for good over him that she chooses.
+I am pretty sure Captain Filbert's already got Mr. Lindsay almost
+persuaded. I shouldn't be at all surprised if he joined the Army himself
+when she's had a good chance at him."
+
+Arnold put on his hat with a groan, and began the descent of the stairs.
+"Good-afternoon then," Mrs. Sand called out to him from the top. He
+turned mechanically and bared his head. "I beg your pardon," he said.
+"Good-afternoon."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Mrs. Sand found it difficult to make up her mind upon several points
+touching the visit of the Reverend Stephen Arnold. Its purport, of which
+she could not deny her vague appreciation, drew a cloud across a rosy
+prospect, and in this light his conduct showed unpardonable; on the
+other hand it implied a compliment to the corps, it made the spiritual
+position of an officer of the Army, a junior too, a matter of moment
+in a wider world than might be suspected; and before this consideration
+Mrs. Sand expanded. She reflected liberally that salvation was not
+necessarily frustrated by the laying-on of hands; she had serene fancies
+of a republic of the redeemed. She was a prey to further hesitations
+regarding the expediency of mentioning the interview to Laura, and as
+private and confidential it ministered for two days to her satisfactions
+of superior officer. In the end, however, she had to sacrifice it to the
+girl's imperturbable silence. She chose an intimate and a private hour,
+and shut the door carefully upon herself and her captain, but she had
+not at all decided, when she sat down on the edge of the bed, what
+complexion to give to the matter, nor had she a very definite idea, when
+she got up again, of what complexion she had given it. Laura, from the
+first word, had upset her by an intense eagerness, a determination not
+to lose a syllable. Captain Filbert insisted upon hearing all before
+she would acknowledge anything; she hung upon the sentences Mrs. Sand
+repeated, and joined them together as if they were parts of a puzzle;
+she finally had possession of the conversation much as I have already
+written it down. As Mrs. Sand afterward told her husband, Miss Filbert
+sat there growing whiter and whiter, more and more worked up, and it was
+impossible to take any comfort in talking to her. It seemed as if she,
+the Ensign, might save herself the trouble of giving an opinion one way
+or the other, and not a thing could she get the girl to say except that
+it was true enough that the gentleman wanted to marry her, and she was
+ashamed of having let it go so far. But she would never do it--never!
+She declared she would write to this Mr. Arnold and thank him, and ask
+him to pray for her, "and she as much as ordered me to go and do the
+same," concluded Mrs. Sand, with an inflection which made its own
+comment upon such a subversion of discipline.
+
+Stephen, under uncomfortable compulsion, sent Laura's letter--she did
+write--to Lindsay. "I cannot allow you to be in the dark about what I am
+doing in the matter," he explained; "though if I had not this
+necessity for writing you might reasonably complain of an intrusive and
+impertinent letter. But I must let you know that she has appealed to me,
+and that as far as I can I will help her."
+
+Duff read both communications--Laura's to the priest was brief and very
+technical--between the business quarters of Ralli Brothers and the Delhi
+and London Bank, with his feet in the opposite seat of his office-gharry
+and his forehead puckered by an immediate calculation forward in rupee
+paper. His irritation spoiled his transaction--there was a distinct
+edge in the manager's manner when they parted, and it was perhaps a
+pardonable weakness that led him to dash in blue pencil across the page
+covered with Arnold's minute handwriting, "Then you have done with pasty
+compromises--you have gone over to the Jesuits. I congratulate you," and
+readdressed the envelope to College Street. The brown tide of the crowd
+brought him an instant messenger, and he stood in the doorway for a
+moment afterwards frowning upon the yellow turbans that swung along
+in the sunlight against the white wall opposite, across the narrow
+commercial road. The flame of his indignation set forth his features
+with definiteness and relief, consuming altogether the soft amused
+well-being which was nearly always there. His lips set themselves
+together, and Mrs. Sand would have been encouraged in any scheme of
+practical utility by the lines that came about his mouth. A brother
+in finance of some astuteness, who saw him scramble into his gharry,
+divined that with regard to a weighty matter in jute mill shares
+pending, Lindsay had decided upon a coup, and made his arrangements
+accordingly. He also went upon his way with a fresh impression of
+Lindsay's undeniable good looks, as sometimes in a coin new from
+the mint one is struck with the beauty of a die dulled by use and
+familiarity.
+
+Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel distress,
+but when he had read it, that emotion was lightened in him by another
+sentiment.
+
+"A community admirable in many ways," he murmured, refolding the page.
+"Does he think he is insulting me?"
+
+Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was inclined
+to concede to Stephen's intermediary, he was compelled to recognise
+without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of her profession,
+had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of defensive operations. She
+retired effectively, the quarters in Crooked Lane became her fortified
+retreat, whence she issued only under escort and upon service strictly
+obligatory. Succour from Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and
+Lindsay felt it an anomaly in military tactics that the same agency
+should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which
+he strove to assault her position. Nor could Alicia induce any sortie
+to Middleton Street. Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and luncheons
+were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in reticence and the
+palest ink, always with the negative of a formal excuse. They loosed the
+burden of her complicity from Miss Livingstone's shoulders, these notes
+which bore so much the atmosphere of Crooked Lane, and at the same
+time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best
+calculated to weigh upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them at
+arm's length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out
+the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God bless you,
+yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the
+limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself
+without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest
+hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw
+him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the
+body of this petrification, she was almost disposed to abandon the pair,
+to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which
+did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to
+devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she
+was so likely to encumber. The new French poet, the American novelist
+of the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table
+many days together for this reason. She sometimes remembered what she
+expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what profound
+plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her
+expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself intellectually
+jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to daily rides which
+carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights
+to sustain the burden of her dreaming days. She had ideas about her
+situation; she believed she lived outside of it. At all events she took
+a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which
+she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical
+fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one
+could always measure the strength of one's pinions against these things.
+She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses
+those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish
+woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her meditations
+of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the
+luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this gave hers a skeleton to
+live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was
+anatomically as it should be. The result that one saw from the outside
+was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little frayed,
+but showing a quality in the process. We may hope that some unconfessed
+satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of Duff's
+confidences--it has long been evident that he found her persuadable--her
+unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the analytic turn we
+may almost suppose it. Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift
+of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as
+an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case
+which Alicia kept conventional enough. She did not even abate the usual
+number of Duff's invitations to dinner when there was certainly nothing
+to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver,
+and a tide of conversation about the season's paper-chasing, except the
+impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in Bentinck
+Street, desirous and unsatisfied.
+
+It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect,
+for it was eventually after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major
+Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual
+whisky and soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of
+support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed. Lindsay
+was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for
+four or five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal
+staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbows up, he was indistinctly
+convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the
+club.
+
+The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of the
+hall in Crooked Lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of these
+exercises. The world shrank, for Laura, to the compass of the kerosene
+lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against which she must
+key herself to indifference. When on the second and third evening she
+was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her that either she or Mr.
+Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she offered up thanks. On the fourth
+she reflected recurrently and anxiously that it was not after all a very
+glorious victory if the devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay,
+after all the opportunities that had been his, should slip back without
+profit to the level from which she had striven--they had all striven--to
+lift him. Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations,
+sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own account
+and obtained information.
+
+Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the
+circumstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which Mrs.
+Barberry came for hours to take advantage of. There were the usual two
+nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the Arab farther
+afield than ever, and she did. One can imagine her cantering fast and
+far with a sense of conscious possession in spite of Mrs. Barberry
+and the two nurses. There may be a certain solace in the definite and
+continuous knowledge available about a person hovering on the brink of
+enteric under your own roof-tree. It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major
+Livingstone could not make up his mind. Alicia knew only of this
+uncertainty; other satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and
+Mrs. Barberry. She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so
+uniformly cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from
+Lindsay's room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the temperature
+was the same, hadn't budged a point, must manage to get it down somehow
+in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to envelop himself in
+the newspapers. Those arbitrary and obstinate figures, which stood for
+apprehension to the most casual ear, stamped themselves on most things
+as the day wore on, and at tea-time Mrs. Barberry gave her other
+details, thinking her rather cold in the reception of them. But she
+plainly preferred to be out of it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs,
+refraining from so much as a glance at the boiled milk preparations of
+the butler. "And you know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these
+people have to be watched." To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum,
+only to be solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy.
+There was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct
+as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either by
+this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to
+take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has
+been given in the highest to somebody else. These pangs and penalties
+may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the
+importance of motives. She rather stood aside with folded hands, and
+in an infinite terror of prejudicing fate, devoured her heart by way of
+keeping its beating normal. Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final
+alternative to Lindsay's marriage, one can imagine her forcing herself
+to look at it.
+
+Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing Lindsay's
+room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o'clock half light of a
+February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted
+upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the
+native way, near his door, profoundly asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but
+the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than
+common, Captain Filbert's face. Alicia drew her hand away and made an
+imperceptible movement in the direction of her skirts. She stood silent,
+stricken in the dusk with astonishment, but the sense that was strongest
+in her was plainly that of having made a criminal discovery. Laura
+stumbled upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant,
+words held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door.
+Then Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been
+the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on, a
+bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both. It was
+a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such
+things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony crucifix over the
+bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling
+almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet-table.
+Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold,
+and a tall palm of the garden cut all its fronds sharply against the
+light.
+
+"Well?" said Alicia, when the door was shut.
+
+Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.
+
+"I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone out.
+And the nurse was in the room; I couldn't get to her. There was nobody
+but the servants about."
+
+"Objection to what?"
+
+"To my being there. I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay."
+
+"Did you make any noise?"
+
+Miss Filbert looked professionally touched. "It was silent prayer, of
+course," she said.
+
+Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet-table, had an air of
+eagerness, of successful capture. The yellow sky in the window behind
+her made filmy lights round her hair, and outlined her tall figure, in
+the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped effect, like a
+conventional pose taken easily, from habit. Laura Filbert thought she
+looked like a princess.
+
+"I seem to hear of nothing but petitions," she said. "Isn't somebody
+praying for you?"
+
+The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such a
+suggestion. Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the space
+between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.
+
+"I hope so, miss," she said, and looked as if for calming over Alicia's
+shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky. The colour
+sank back out of her face, and the light from the window rested on it
+ethereally. The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to seek, and their blue
+seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old splendour of the uplifted
+golden gates rewarded them.
+
+"Why do you use that odious word?" Alicia explained. "You are not my
+maid! Don't do it again--don't dream of doing it again!"
+
+"I--I don't know." The girl was still plainly covered with confusion
+at being found in the house uninvited. "I suppose I forgot. Well,
+good-evening," and she turned to the door.
+
+"Don't go," Alicia commanded. "Don't. You never come to see me now. Sit
+down." She dragged a chair forward and almost pushed Laura into it. "I
+will sit down too--what am I thinking of?"
+
+Laura reflected for a moment, looking at her folded hands. "I might as
+well tell you," she said, "that I have not been praying that Mr. Lindsay
+should get better. Only that he should be given time to find salvation
+and die in Jesus."
+
+"Don't--don't say those things to me. How light you are--it's wicked!"
+Alicia returned with vehemence, and then as Captain Filbert stared, half
+comprehending, "Don't you care?" she added curiously.
+
+It was so casual that it was cruel. The girl's eyes grew wider still
+during the instant she fixed them upon Alicia in the effort of complete
+understanding. Then her lip trembled.
+
+"How can I care?" she cried; "how can I?" and burst into weeping. She
+drew her sari over her face and rocked to and fro. Her dusty bare foot
+protruded from her cotton skirt. She sat huddled together, her head in
+its coverings sunk between weak shaking shoulders. Alicia considered her
+for an instant as a pitiable and degraded spectacle. Then she went over
+and touched her.
+
+"You are completely worn out," she said, "and it is almost dinner-time.
+The ayah will bring you a hot bath and then you will come down and have
+some food quietly with me. My brother is dining out somewhere. I will go
+away for a little while and then I know you will feel better. And after
+dinner," she added gently, "you may come up if you like and pray again
+for Mr. Lindsay. I am sure he would--"
+
+The faintest break in her own voice warned her, and she hurried out of
+the room.
+
+It was a foolish thing, and the Livingstones' old Karim Bux much
+deplored it, but the miss-sahib had forgotten to give information
+that the dinner of eight commanded a fortnight ago would not take
+place--hence everything was ready in its sequence for this event, with a
+new fashion of stuffing quails and the first strawberries of the season
+from Dinapore. The feelings of Karim Bux in presenting these things to
+a woman in the dress of a coolie are not important; but Alicia, for some
+reason, seemed to find the trivial incident gratifying.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white
+sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a flagrant
+ticca-gharry. The driver lay extended on the top of it, asleep, the syce
+squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it perfunctorily with hay
+from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind. A fringe of palms and ferns
+in pots ran between the pillars, and orchids hung from above, shutting
+out the garden where heavy scents stood in the sun, and mynas chattered
+on the drive. The air was full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to
+the lavish energy of growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the
+compound rose the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue.
+A long time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse,
+uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.
+
+Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped
+handkerchief agreeably scented. The night nurse had realised herself
+equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of practical
+views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept from day to day
+to see her patient fed, and hand him books and writing materials. She
+had not even the duty of debarring visitors, but sat most of the time in
+the dressing-room where echoes fell about her of the stories with which
+riotous young men, in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's
+convalescence. There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in
+vain, to express her views upon such waste of scientific training. She
+had Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his
+sister's.
+
+There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two women in
+the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated these things
+to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was already half disengaged
+from the subject, her eye wandered as if in search for the avenue to
+another. By a sudden inclination Alicia began the story of Laura
+Filbert on her knees at Lindsay's door. She told it in a quiet, steady,
+colourless way, pursuing it to the end--it came with the ease of
+frequent private rehearsals--and then with her elbows on her knees and
+her chin in her palms she stopped and gazed meditatively in front of
+her. There was something in the gaze to which Hilda yielded an attention
+unexpectedly serious, something of the absolute in character and life
+impervious to her inquiry. Yet to analysis it was only the grey look
+of eyes habituated to regard the future with penetration and to find
+nothing there.
+
+"Have you told him?" Hilda asked after an instant's pause, during which
+she conceded something, she hardly knew what; she meant to find out
+later.
+
+"I haven't seen him. But I will tell him, I promise you."
+
+"I have no doubt you will! But don't promise ME. I won't even witness
+the vow!" Hilda cried.
+
+"What does it matter? I shall certainly tell him." The words fell
+definitely like pebbles. Hilda thoughtfully picked them up.
+
+"On the whole," she said, "perhaps it would be as well. Yes, it is
+my advice. It is quite likely that he will be revolted. It may be
+curative."
+
+Alicia turned away her head to hide the faint frown that nevertheless
+crept into her voice. "I don't think so," she said. "How you do juggle
+with things! I don't know why I talk to you about this--this matter. I
+am sure I ought not."
+
+"I was going to say," pursued Hilda, indifferent to her scruple, "that
+I shouldn't be at all surprised if his illness leaves him quite
+emotionally sane. The poison has worked itself out of his blood--perhaps
+the passion and the poison were the same."
+
+"I wonder!" Alicia said. She said it mechanically, as the easiest
+comment.
+
+"When I knew you first your speculation would have been more active, my
+dear. You would have looked into the possibility and disputed it. What
+has become of your modernity?"
+
+It was the tenderest malice, but it obtained no concessive sign. Alicia
+seemed to weigh it. "I think I like theories better than illustrations,"
+she said in defence.
+
+"One can look at theories as one looks at the sky, but an illustration
+wants a careful point of view. For this one perhaps you are a little
+near."
+
+"Perhaps," Alicia assented, "I am a little near." She glanced quickly
+down as she spoke, but when she raised her eyes they were dry and clear.
+
+"I can see it better," Hilda went on, with immense audacity, "much
+better."
+
+"Isn't it safer to feel?"
+
+"Jamais de la vie! The nerves lie always."
+
+They were on the edge of the vortex of the old dispute. Alicia leaned
+back among the cushions and regarded the other with an undecided eye.
+
+"You are not sure," said Hilda, "that you won't ask me, at this point,
+to look at the pictures in that old copy of the Persian classic--I
+forget its lovely name--or inquire what sort of house we had last night.
+Well, don't be afraid of hurting my feelings. Only, you know, between us
+as between more doubtful people, the door must be either open or shut. I
+fancy you take cold easily; perhaps you had better shut the door."
+
+"Not for worlds," Alicia said, with promptitude. Then she added, rather
+cleverly, "That would be spoiling my one view of life."
+
+Hilda smiled. "Isn't there any life where you live?" She glanced round
+her, at the tapestried elegance of the room, with sudden indifference.
+"After all," she said, "I don't know what I am doing here, in your
+affairs. As the world swings no one could be more remote from them or
+you. I belong to its winds and its highways--how have you brought me
+here, a tramp-actress, to your drawing-room?"
+
+Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. "Don't go away,"
+she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a
+foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.
+
+"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure impulse, you
+don't know. One only asks the things that minister--one goes and finds
+and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's head under any roof. What
+difference does it make? The only thing that counts, that rules, is the
+chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something
+better."
+
+Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the
+actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement.
+It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight. Then
+she glanced about her again with a kind of appraisement, which ended
+with Alicia and embraced her. What she realised seemed to urge her,
+I think, in some weak place of her sex, to go on intensely, almost
+fiercely.
+
+"Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone. We
+leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow
+of their illusions. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of
+the broad sun and the sincerity of things."
+
+"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said, wearing,
+as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.
+
+But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
+impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find the
+atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."
+
+Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the
+window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at
+Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean;
+and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination."
+
+"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add
+up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have none!"
+
+As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. "At
+least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I felt you,
+too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond
+properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable thing
+that I can have--the only permanent fact that is left."
+
+Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. "Who said anything about
+giving up?" she interrupted.
+
+"Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean it, if
+you say so." She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful
+consideration in Hilda's, and as if it called them forth two tears
+sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head upon her
+lap.
+
+"Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm
+overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately." She possessed herself
+of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her head bent for
+a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other
+woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt
+guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat together for a
+moment or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful
+aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda's. Presently
+it grew heavy, embarrassing. Alicia got up and began a slow, restless
+pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in. Hilda watched her--it
+was a rhythmic progress--and when she came near with a sound of brushing
+silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a
+long breath as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner
+obtained, assimilated.
+
+"Oh yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile,
+"I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth
+while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling.
+There's rather a good man here just now."
+
+"Yes," Hilda assented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It
+is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things
+sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh,
+my dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a
+consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen
+among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious
+and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I
+am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more
+than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you
+have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
+my dear."
+
+"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light
+of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room
+overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do me?" she
+cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"
+
+"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What
+simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in your own
+house?"
+
+Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. "Oh,
+hush!" she cried. "Go on!"
+
+"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be
+full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come
+between him and the twilight with a scent of violets."
+
+"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.
+
+"It IS a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot.
+If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you
+perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent
+ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're
+naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us. 'Without our aid He did
+us make,' you know."
+
+"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I
+could."
+
+Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back
+and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees
+were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her
+symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that
+sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a
+tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he sometimes thought of wine
+and death and roses.
+
+"I would go farther," she said, and looked as if some other thing
+charged with sweetness had come before her.
+
+"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success," Alicia
+faltered.
+
+"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she smiled on
+her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came
+upon her lips. Her thought turned inward absently; it embraced with
+sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity, obedience. As if she knew
+her betrayal already complete, "I wish I had such a chance," she said.
+
+"You wish you had such a chance!"
+
+"I didn't mean to tell you--you have enough to do to work out your own
+problem; but--"
+
+She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a
+miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her eyes
+instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia looked at
+her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the
+Promised Land.
+
+"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Hamilton Bradley."
+
+Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all
+the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it
+beautiful.
+
+"How you will hold me to my metier," she said. "Hamilton Bradley has
+given up trying."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."
+
+Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise
+on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently
+she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other
+woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their
+astonishment.
+
+"Well?" said Hilda.
+
+"I can think of no one--there IS no one--except--oh, it's too absurd!
+Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"
+
+The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant
+she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed
+with a gravity, a gentleness.
+
+"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems,"
+she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--like a thing
+born. But it is that--a thing born."
+
+"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.
+
+"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with
+its feet in a trap. The insane, insane improbability of it!" She laughed
+again. It was delicious to hear her.
+
+"But--he is a priest!"
+
+"Much more difficult. He is a saint."
+
+Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment
+twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.
+
+"Are you quite certain?" she said. "You told me once that--that there
+had been other times."
+
+"They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the
+difference." The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was
+aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost
+ranged her hostile. She hurried out of that position.
+
+"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarrassment. "I see
+nothing--nothing REALLY against it."
+
+"I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"
+
+"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.
+
+"I don't think I can let you ask me that."
+
+"There are such strange things to consider! Would he withdraw from the
+Church? Would you retire from the stage? I don't know which seems the
+more impossible!"
+
+Hilda got up.
+
+"It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?" she said. "I haven't
+made it out. And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls for
+redemption, never of me at all."
+
+A servant of the house with the air of a messenger brought Alicia a
+scrap of paper. She glanced at it, and then, with hands that trembled,
+began folding it together.
+
+"He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair," she murmured, "and
+he wants me to come and talk to him."
+
+"Well," said Hilda. "Come."
+
+She put her arm about Alicia, and drew her out of the room to the foot
+of the stairs. They went in silence, saying nothing even when they
+parted, and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend. Halfway up she
+paused and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her glance, and something
+of primitive puissance passed, conscious, comprehended, between the eyes
+of the two women.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign of
+anything but convalescence. An appetite to cry out upon, a chartered
+tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands; such
+indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for other
+betrayals. There had been opportunities--even the day nurse had gone,
+and Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he seemed to prefer
+to talk about the pattern in the carpet, or the corpulence of the
+khansamah, or things in the newspapers. Alicia, once, at a suggestive
+point, put almost a visible question into a silent glance, and Lindsay
+asked her for some more sugar. Surgeon-Major Livingstone, coming into
+his office, unexpectedly one morning, found his sister in the act of
+replacing a volume upon its professional shelf. It was somebody on the
+pathology of Indian fevers. Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve
+it--only technical corroboration. It might also be considered that,
+although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for
+intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again. They may
+have heard in Crooked Lane that Duff was better. We may freely
+imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to
+disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken advantage
+of. Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified repentance; they
+might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought, smiling, to the
+Archdeacon.
+
+As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay still
+in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make, was perhaps
+lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it
+might very probably work out in shades. So much would infallibly have to
+be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without
+any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda's
+theory might very well be lost in contingencies. Nevertheless, Alicia
+postponed her story, from day to day and from hour to hour. If her
+ideas about it--she kept them carefully in solution--could have been
+precipitated, they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her
+brother the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.
+
+She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went
+together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the carriage
+at a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven o'clock, and the
+morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river. There was a white
+light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and
+delicately purple to the west. The dust slept on the broad roads of the
+Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel
+of a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the
+streets that knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving
+past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country
+people with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
+red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the
+profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest
+freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered her
+shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any heaviness
+that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that might
+rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for
+purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must
+have been aware of it, though as a matter of fact when she finally told
+Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden
+Gardens, where the yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the
+morning sky; and so lost it.
+
+He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
+question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterwards? The
+yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road
+trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless
+going round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a
+tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke
+the silence afterwards she started as if in apprehension, but it
+was only to say something that anybody might have said, about the
+self-sacrificing energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert
+belonged. Her assent was little and meagre; nothing would help her to
+expand it. The Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton,
+without a suggestive bone.
+
+Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
+thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared." There was in it
+that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under
+pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his
+invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay extended beside her
+among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far
+as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.
+
+"She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only that if
+you died you might be saved first." Her eyes were still on his hand, and
+she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse. Then they
+relaxed again, and he said, "Oh, well," and smiled at the balancings of
+a crow drinking at a city conduit.
+
+That was all. Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to
+postpone her impressions, even her emotions. In the meantime it was
+something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to talk about
+the commonplaces of the roadside. In her escape from this oppression,
+she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent pleasure in what they
+saw; everything had in some way the likeness of the leafing teak-trees,
+tender and curative. In the broad early light that lay over the tanks
+there was a vague allurement, almost a presage, and the wide spaces of
+the Maidan made room for hope. She asked Lindsay presently if he would
+mind driving to the market; she wanted some flowers for that night. I
+think she wanted some flowers for that hour. Her thought broke so easily
+into the symbol of a rose.
+
+They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink and
+crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared houses
+servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches in the
+sun and were shaved. Where the street ran into shops there was still
+a shuttered blankness, but here and there a doorkeeper yawned and
+stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of
+dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first hoarding in a side street
+announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady
+Macbeth, under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy;
+with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy,
+advertising five complete novelties for the same evening. It made
+a cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial
+combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was
+something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the
+crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their
+shoes. Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had,
+a testimony to the difference of her. In Alicia's smile there was a
+satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of things.
+
+The life of the market, the bazar, was all awake and moving. They
+rolled up through a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the moment and
+abandoned, where the leisurely crowd with calculation under its turbans,
+swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a palm-dealer ran out of
+bounds and made a little grove before the stall of the man who sold pith
+helmets. The warm air held the smell of all sorts of commodities; there
+was a great hum of small transactions, clink of small profits. "It makes
+one feel immensely practical and acquisitive," Duff said, looking at the
+loaded baskets on the coolies' heads; and he insisted on getting out. "I
+am dying to buy an enormous number of desirable things very cheap. But
+not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you, nor any ribbons or lace--is
+that good lace, Miss Livingstone? Nor even a live duck--really I am
+difficult. We might inquire the price of the duck though."
+
+The sense of being contributive to his holiday satisfaction reigned
+in her. She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that played
+steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him without her sanction,
+how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being. They made their
+way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so many things he wanted
+to stop before as they went, leaning on his stick to examine them and
+delighting in opportunities for making himself quite ridiculous. The
+country tobacco-dealer laughed too, squatting behind his basket--it
+was a mad sahib, but not madder than the rest; and there was no hurry.
+Alicia saw the pink glow of the roses beyond, where the sun struck
+across them over the shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach
+them by degrees. They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of
+climax to the hour's experience, and after that she was not entirely
+sure that the day would be as grey as other days.
+
+This was the flood-time of roses, and it was exquisite in the
+flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and
+squares of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones. Some of the
+stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was room only
+for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the velvety Jacks, the
+rest over-ran the tables and the floor in anything that would hold them.
+The place rioted with the joy and the passion of roses, for buying and
+selling. There were other flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette,
+but they had a diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches
+beside the triumph of the roses. Farther on, beyond the cage of
+the money-changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their
+vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling crowd
+divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates. In this part
+there were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table-servants, and
+fat Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses, Armenian women with
+embroidered shawls drawn over their heads, sailors of the port. They
+came to pass that way, through the sweetness of it, and this made a
+coign of vantage for the men with trays who were very persecuting there.
+Lindsay and Alicia stood together beside the roses, her hands were deep
+in them, he perceived with pleasure that their glow was reflected in
+her face. "No," she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man who sat
+cross-legged in muslin draperies on the table. "These are certainly of
+yesterday. There is no scent left in them--and look!" she held up the
+bunch and shook it, a shower of pink petals and drops of water fell
+upon the round of her arm above the wrist where the laces of her sleeve
+slipped back. Lindsay had something like a poetic appreciation of her,
+observing her put the bunch down tenderly as if she would not, if she
+could help it, find fault with any rose. The dealer drew out another,
+and handed it to her; a long-stemmed, wide-open, perfect thing, and it
+was then that her glance of delight, wandering, fell upon Laura Filbert.
+Lindsay looked instantly, curiously in the same direction, and Alicia
+was aware that he also saw. There ensued a terse moment with a burden of
+silence and the strangest misgivings, in which he may have imagined that
+he had his part alone but which was the heavier for her because of
+him. These two had seen the girl before only under circumstances that
+suggested protection, that made excuse, on a platform receiving
+the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common
+conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the
+crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet
+and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its
+violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen
+her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She
+had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she
+offered them right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a
+sailor, who refused the paper. When he rejoined his companions there was
+a hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads to look after her.
+
+The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
+seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the "mem"
+passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good. He, too,
+looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan,
+a man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard.
+With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then
+Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled;
+he raised his arm, and Laura in white astonishment darted from under it.
+They seldom did that.
+
+Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made his
+stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and
+fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that
+it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the
+manner of Duff's coming back to the girl and the way in which, with a
+look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He
+was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and
+final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he
+wanted to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being
+forgotten, stepping up to them. "Take her home in the carriage," she
+said to Duff, "and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time
+still--quite a long time." She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke,
+but made no answer to the "Good-morning! God bless you!" with which the
+girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down
+at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep
+into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to
+suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not
+aware that she still held it, but that was the only rose she brought
+away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
+skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her, green where
+the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and yellow in
+the distance, where the light lay on the top of the withered grass. It
+was like a great English park, with something of the village common,
+only the trees, for the most part, made avenues over it, running an
+arbitrary half-mile this way or that, with here and there a group dotted
+about in the open; and the brimming tank-pots were of India, and of
+nowhere else in the world. The sun was dipping behind the masts that
+showed where the straight border of the river ran, and the shadows of
+the pipals and the banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light
+struck on the stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee
+which made behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push
+them back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
+Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta, the
+teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that chaste
+frontage, and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here cattle
+grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles of the
+trees. Calcutta the capital indeed was superimposed; one felt that
+always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among
+the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space
+and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What
+persisted then under the span of the sky, was the old India of rich
+tradition, and a bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the evening
+to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the rim of
+the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction and fabrication.
+
+The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its solace
+for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long the sun had
+been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and now the air had a
+sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests. The crickets had
+been at it since five o'clock, and though the city rose not half a mile
+across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to. In
+making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus
+of agreement, and they never interrupted. Not that she had much to
+consider, poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One
+might have thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own,
+not badly equipped. She had all the argument--which is like saying all
+the arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical
+outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in the small value
+of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and made it
+more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence as the
+result, because it had always admitted the existence of dominating
+facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only the absurd
+unexpectedness of coming across one herself. One might think round such
+a fact and talk round it--there were less exquisite satisfactions--but
+it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the things one said
+were only words.
+
+Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her
+veins with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she saw helped
+her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her profound sweet
+presciences. A coolie-woman, carrying a basket on her head, stopped and
+looked at her with full glistening eyes; they smiled at each other, and
+passed on. She found herself upon a narrow path, worn smooth by other
+barefooted coolie-folk; it made in its devious way toward the rich mists
+where the sun had gone down; and Hilda followed, breasting the glow and
+the colour and the wide, flat expanse, as if in the India of it there
+breathed something exquisitely sensuous and satisfying. It struck
+sharp on her senses; she almost consciously thanked Heaven for such
+a responsive set of nerves. Always and everywhere she was intensely
+conscious of what she saw and of how she saw it; and it was
+characteristic of her that she found in that saffron February evening,
+spreading to a purple rim, with wandering points of colour in a
+soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a mise en scene
+for her own complication. She could take a tenderly artistic view of
+that, more soothing a good deal than any result that came of examining
+it in other lights. And she did, aware, with smiling eyes, of how full
+of colour, how dramatic it was.
+
+Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome seemed
+a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time for that.
+For the present, there on the Maidan with the south wind, she took it
+with her head thrown up, in her glad, free fashion, as something that
+came in the way of life--the delightful way of life--with which it was
+absurd to quarrel because of a slight inconvenience or incongruity,
+things which helped, after all, to make existence fascinating.
+
+A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem,
+dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up, and drew in the
+crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on
+the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and
+all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought
+her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of dual perception of being
+near the core, the throbbing centre of the world's meaning.
+
+Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay. He hastened to meet her,
+in his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that lay
+between them and gave transit to her senses from that other plane.
+They encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the
+accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course. It was a
+kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that
+they should meet and take a path together; she at least was aware. Hilda
+asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said "Absolutely" with
+a shade of emphasis. She charged him with having been a remarkable
+case, and he piled up illustrations of what he felt able to do in his
+convalescence. There was something in the way he insisted upon his
+restoration which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.
+
+"And I hear I may congratulate you," she said. "You have got what you
+wanted."
+
+"Someone has told you," he retorted, "who is not friendly to it."
+
+"On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial
+support--Alicia Livingstone."
+
+He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for the
+first time under such an aspect.
+
+"She has been immensely kind," he asserted. "But she wasn't at first. At
+first, she was hostile, like you, only that her hostility was different,
+just as she is different. She had to be converted," he went on
+hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I imagined. I think she takes
+a kind of pride in conquering her prejudices, and being true to the real
+breadth of her nature."
+
+"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad. She might very well
+be content that it is charming. And what is the difference between her
+hostility and mine?"
+
+"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon her,
+"is that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a dramatic
+gesture--"walks between us."
+
+"I know. I tried to stiffen her. I appealed to the worst in her on your
+behalf. But it wasn't any use. She succumbed, as you say, to her nobler
+instincts."
+
+Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent
+her paradox in twirling it.
+
+"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all proportion,"
+Duff said. "And I should be sorry--do you really want me to talk about
+this?"
+
+"Don't be stupid. Of course."
+
+He took her permission with plain avidity.
+
+"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody
+else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous
+desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't
+want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity
+and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's
+souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals
+especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm
+only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature
+like that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily
+life. That was my chance. I could offer her her place. It's not much to
+counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking, to equalise
+matters."
+
+Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an emanation
+from him. It was his enthusiasm. A cheerfulness had come upon him
+instead. Also what he said had something categorical in it, something
+crisp and arranged. He himself received benefit from the consideration
+of it, and she was aware that if this result followed, her own
+"conversion" was of very secondary importance.
+
+"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.
+
+"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so
+plainly right that nobody will think twice about it," Duff went on in
+an encouraged voice. "It's odd how one's ideas materialise. I want her
+drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk cushions."
+
+"When is it to happen?"
+
+"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."
+
+"Ah! then there will be time. Time to get the white and gold furniture.
+It wouldn't be my taste quite. Is it Alicia's?"
+
+"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine. We have talked it over
+together. And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In matters
+of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"
+
+"Oh Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss Filbert
+now?"
+
+"At Number Ten, Middleton Street."
+
+"With the Livingstones?"
+
+"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her
+kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and
+Laura is to stay with them until she sails."
+
+"She sails?"
+
+"In the Sutlej, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She
+really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating
+old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old
+friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got
+a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if
+it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her
+outfit together."
+
+"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you?"
+
+"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."
+
+"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
+
+"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I
+would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one
+offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
+
+"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.
+
+The coolie track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where
+it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing
+about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf underfoot. The
+cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man a little way off was a man,
+and not a horse, but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly,
+"let us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay
+dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket
+chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that
+direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling
+city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out,
+topaz points in the level glow.
+
+"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see
+its proportions more clearly now."
+
+Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good
+sort, Duff," she said; "I wish you were out of Asia."
+
+"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined
+himself to see.
+
+"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not endure,
+you know."
+
+"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim,
+and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without
+speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river, and
+left something chill and empty in the spaces about them. Things grew
+hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace,
+grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very
+near. "What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the
+vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"
+
+Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness
+far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said, with
+apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She
+made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if
+the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined,
+he kept her hand while he said, "you will always represent something in
+mine. I can depend upon you--I shall know that you are there."
+
+"Yes," she said sincerely. "Yes indeed," and it seemed to her that
+he looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was only
+another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to
+walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever has taken a good
+deal out of you."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof
+followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia
+at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared
+entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a
+rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust.
+It gave a soothing wistfulness to discontent to think this, which a
+discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as
+she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the
+south wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly,
+however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things
+require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command
+over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There
+was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or
+one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the
+days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
+worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the
+rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas
+and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter
+of fact there were not very many days, and they were largely filled
+with millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they asserted
+themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency,
+by billows of spotted muslin, with which Celine, who felt the romance
+of the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Celine, indeed, was
+worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend"
+her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert
+contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's
+beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the
+source, and they stitched together while she, with careful reserves,
+watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came
+from the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her
+Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs.
+Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had
+several times felt, seated beside Celine, how grateful she ought to
+be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such
+pleasantness, though Celine herself seemed to stand rather far from
+their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came
+occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh
+remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend
+as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that
+there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in
+Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would
+be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their
+bright faces.
+
+Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made tea, and pressed
+upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat. He found her
+submissive and wishful to be pleasant. She sat up straight, and said
+it was much hotter than they had it this time of year up-country,
+but nothing at all to complain of yet. He also discovered her to be
+practical; she showed him the bills for the muslins, and explained one
+or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make it clear to him that it need
+not be, after all, so very expensive to take a wife. In the course of a
+few days one of the costumes was completed, and when he came she had it
+on, appearing before him for the first time in secular dress. The stays
+insisted a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight
+bodice betrayed her narrow-chested. Above its frills her throat
+protruded unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading
+bird's, and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight
+at her sides. She had put on the hat that matched; it was the kind of
+pretty disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow of
+short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that way of
+making it becoming. Among these accessories the significance of her
+face retreated to a point vague and distant, its lightly-pencilled lines
+seemed half erased.
+
+She made no demand for admiration on this occasion, she seemed
+sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time when they were
+sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines of her
+garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the conventionalities
+of the situation.
+
+"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.
+
+The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river
+at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been
+completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff had only the
+duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her
+in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her
+Army clothes--she had come on board in one of the muslins--and she was
+softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid
+tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane,
+the over-ruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come
+apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no
+more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.
+
+
+     "Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
+      To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you,
+      We've laboured together, united in heart,
+      But now we must close and soon we must part."
+
+
+They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they
+evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside
+the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a
+consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to
+a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between
+the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless as she presently turned
+a calmed face to him with her pale apology he had the sensation of
+a rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted
+muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of
+smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he reflected
+that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.
+
+The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
+dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood, were
+to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency
+the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an
+assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose
+almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make if you like, with the
+geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case--he
+could almost have demanded an explanation--since it was one of those
+parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus
+of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society
+was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there
+were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they
+would "mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of
+Miss Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so
+fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She
+took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite
+comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner-party; and it was
+seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone
+from the feast. If you found this reprehensible she would have told you
+she had observed they do it in Japan, where manners are the best in the
+world.
+
+Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I,
+with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do.
+To me it is depressing and a little cruel to be compelled to betray the
+inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia's banquets, especially in
+connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking. A poverty of
+cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would
+have been offered up to the gods that season. The limitations of her
+resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she
+asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no
+better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Shelley under
+critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University. There was also a
+civilian who had written a few years before an article in the Nineteenth
+Century about the aboriginal tribes of the Central Provinces, and
+the lady attached to him, who had been at one time the daughter of a
+Lieutenant-Governor. The Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry
+loved meeting anybody that was clever, admired brains beyond anything;
+and an A.D.C. who had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was; and Captain
+Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when
+they were produced in Simla and was invariably considered up there to
+have done them better than any professional they have at home, though
+he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment
+happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay and Stephen Arnold
+as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with the contortionist as it
+were at the apex, on his head. The Livingstones had family connection
+with a leading London publishing firm, and Alicia may possibly have
+reflected as she surveyed her completed work, how much better than
+capering captains she could have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be
+admitted likely that she would harbour, at that particular instant, so
+ungracious a thought. And indeed it was a creditable party, it would
+almost unanimously call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe
+made the most agreeable excitement, you might almost have heard the
+heart-beats of the wife of the literary civilian, as she just escaped
+being introduced, and so availed herself of the dinner's opportunity for
+intimate observation without letting herself in a particle--most clever.
+Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed upon the spear, she always did, and
+made a gushing little speech with every eye upon her in the middle
+of the room, without a thought of consequences. The A.D.C. was also
+empresse, one would have thought that he himself was acting, the way he
+bowed and picked up Hilda's fan--a grace lingered in it from the minuet
+he had danced the week before, in ruffles and patches, with the daughter
+of the Commander-in-Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the newly
+introduced Head of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe that
+he never went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too badly
+ventilated; and Stephen Arnold arriving late, shot like an embarrassed
+arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still engaged there
+in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.
+
+There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were the
+pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he
+began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous half-checked smile.
+Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then
+she stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands like a
+reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew
+a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The
+civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was
+absurdly affected; and indeed to an acuter intelligence it might have
+looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not
+offered.
+
+That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife,
+observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she
+complained afterwards that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly
+went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to
+personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that
+night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was
+a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the
+Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about
+punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but
+after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have
+represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms
+instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance;
+she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the
+jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little
+dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's
+wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter
+of the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying
+qualities, which were oddly stimulated when she glanced over the brim of
+her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval, giving a gravely
+humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry, and drinking water.
+The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower, living, pulsating,
+and in the heart of its light and colour the petals closed over her
+secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the sloping shoulders,
+thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs. Barberry.
+
+It transpired when the men came up that there was no unanimity about
+going to Government House. The Livingstones craved the necessity of
+absence, if anyone would supply it by staying on; it would be a boon
+they said, and cited the advancement of the season. "One gets to bed so
+much earlier," Surgeon-Major Livingstone urged, at which Alicia raised
+her eyebrows and everybody laughed. Lindsay elected to gratify them,
+with the proclaimed purpose of seeing how long Livingstone could be kept
+up, and the civilian pair agreed, apparently from a tendency to remain
+seated. The A.D.C. had, of course, to go; duty called him; and he
+declared a sense of slighted hospitality that anybody should remain
+behind. "Besides," he cried, with ingenuous privilege, "who's goin' to
+chaperone Miss Howe?"
+
+Hilda stood in the midst. Tall, in violet velvet, she had a flush that
+made her magnificent; her eyes were deep and soft. It was patent that
+she was out of proportion to the other women, body and soul; there was
+altogether too much of her; and it was only the men, when Captain Corby
+spoke, who looked silently responsive.
+
+"We're coming away so early," said Mrs. Barberry, buttoning her glove.
+Hilda had begun to smile, and, indeed, the situation had its humour, but
+there was also behind her eyes an appreciation of another sort. "Don't,"
+she said to Alicia, in the low, quick reach of her prompting tone, as if
+the other had mistaken her cue, but the moment hardly permitted retreat,
+and Alicia turned an unflinching graceful front to the lady in the
+Department of Education. "Then I think I must ask you," she said.
+
+The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the very
+dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as
+she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would be
+delighted.
+
+"Nobody suggests ME!" exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully. They were
+gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the
+Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered
+vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with
+its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed
+upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in
+mid-stage of backward transformation.
+
+"I could chaperone you all!" she cried gaily back at them, as she passed
+down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed
+reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to
+see that she was quite comfortable. The unusual thing, which nobody else
+heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, "It doesn't
+matter--it doesn't matter," and that Hilda, driving away, found herself
+without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.
+
+Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dogcart, and Hilda, with her
+purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way. She
+re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it
+occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom. They were late; there was
+hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely,
+and said she loved the colour of Hilda's dress; also that she would give
+worlds for an invisible hairpin--oh, thank you!--and that it was simply
+ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out.
+She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening--they would meet again
+later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the
+ballroom--perfectly lovely. So she vanished; but Hilda went with
+certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red
+strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust
+forward, waiting for her.
+
+They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed
+women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the
+pillared spaces of the ballroom. People had not been asked to dance, and
+they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course,
+the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed
+in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social
+Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the
+neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the
+commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary,
+while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered
+or not. Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of
+this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness
+only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the
+natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.
+
+They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest.
+She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her
+pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious. Their interests were
+not in any way diffused, they had one straight line and it led upward,
+pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point
+in the head of a department. The Head of the Department was the only
+person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling eye in search over
+his shoulder of somebody with whom it would be more advantageous
+to converse. Yet there were a few people apparently not altogether
+indifferent to the presence of Miss Howe. She saw them here and there,
+and when Arnold said, "It must seem odd to you, but I know hardly
+anybody here. We attempt no social duties," she singled out this one and
+that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with
+a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the
+world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their
+dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow
+and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in
+their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her
+own vitality, her success and value as a human unit. There was that in
+her blood which assured her of a welcome, it had logic in it, with the
+basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women.
+She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as
+a delightful matter of course, going towards the people who were not
+indifferent to the fact that she was there, who could not be entirely,
+since they had some sort of knowledge of her.
+
+In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged
+in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her. She
+encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then turning
+she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places--were no
+longer in her path. One lady put herself at a safe distance and then
+bowed, with much cordiality. It was extraordinary in a group of five how
+many glistening shoulders would be presented, quite without offence,
+to her approach. Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of
+Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls
+of strawberry ice, her terrible situation. And from the lips of another
+lady whose face she knew, she heard after she had passed, "Don't you
+think it's rather an omnium gatherum?"
+
+It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment with serious interest,
+how the little world about them had the same negative attitude for the
+missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible
+difference. Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either.
+His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed with the kind of respect which
+implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain
+that he did not exist. She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure,
+that he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.
+Expecting nothing he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd,
+and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their
+mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious
+one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these
+things hurt her, she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of
+them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no
+stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at
+last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior,
+and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about
+it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social
+manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering up her egotism that
+way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one could
+hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her pause. She
+anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was relieved to find in
+her light comment that she took the typical Mrs. Winstick less seriously
+than he had supposed when they drove away from the Livingstones'. It
+could not occur to him to correct the impression he had then by the
+sound of his own voice uttering sympathy.
+
+"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff," she
+said. "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the wave's
+reflection."
+
+"It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there," said the
+priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high
+moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,--"and there, I think, is
+depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and
+a full beating upon many shores--"
+
+"Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even," she said
+half-reflectively, "when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I
+am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always with
+the calling in my ears--" She seemed to have dropped altogether into
+reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not
+understand.
+
+"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it? One
+doesn't blame these people. They are stupid--that's all. They want
+the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope--without the
+smallest diamond--who does song and dance on Saturday nights--what can
+you expect! If I had a great name they would be pleased enough to see
+me. It is one of the rewards of the fame." She was silent for a moment,
+and then she added, "They are very poor."
+
+"Those rewards! I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you were
+not devoured by thirst for them."
+
+"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never am."
+
+He took it at its face value. They had had some delightful
+conversations. If her words awakened anything in him it was the
+remembrance of these. The solace of her companionship presented itself
+to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence another
+seal; that was all. They sat where they were for half an hour, and
+something like antagonism and displeasure towards the secretaries' wives
+settled upon them, from which Hilda, interrupting a glance or two from
+the ladies purring past, drew suspicion. "I am going now," she said.
+"It--it isn't quite suitable here," and there was just enough suggestion
+in the point of her fan to make him think of his frock. "It is an
+unpardonable truth that if we stay any longer I shall make people talk
+about you."
+
+He turned astonished eyes upon her, eyes in which she remembered
+afterwards there was absolutely nothing but a literal and pained
+apprehension of what she said. "You are a good woman," he exclaimed.
+"How could such a thing be possible!"
+
+The faintest embarrassment, the merest suggestion of distress, came into
+her face and concentrated in her eyes, which she fixed upon him as if
+she would bring his words to the last analysis, and answer him as she
+would answer a tribunal.
+
+"A good woman?" she repeated, "I don't know--isn't that a refinement of
+virtue? No; standing on my sex I make no claim, but as PEOPLE go I am
+good. Yes, I am good."
+
+"In my eyes you are splendid," he replied, content, and gave her
+his arm. They went together through the reception-rooms, and the
+appreciation of her grew in him. If in the bright and silken distance he
+had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a cordiality of speech
+with his distinctive individual stamp on it. But he saw his Bishop, his
+ceinture tightened on him, and he uttered only the trite saying about
+the folly of counting on the sensibility of swine.
+
+"Yes," she laughed into her good-night to him, "but I'm not sure that it
+isn't better to be the pig than the pearl."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+"Not long ago," said Hilda, "I had a chat with him. We sat on the grass
+in the middle of the Maidan, and there was nothing to interfere with my
+impressions."
+
+"What were your impressions? No!" Alicia cried. "No! Don't tell me. It
+is all so peaceful now, and simple, and straightforward. You think such
+extraordinary things. He comes here quite often, to talk about her. He
+is coming this afternoon. So I have impressions too--and they are just
+as good."
+
+"All right." Hilda crossed her knees more comfortably. "WHAT did you say
+the Surgeon-Major paid for those Teheran tiles?"
+
+"Something absurd--I've forgotten. He writes to her regularly, diary
+letters, by every mail."
+
+"Do you tell him what to put into them?"
+
+"Hilda, sometimes--you're positively gross."
+
+"I daresay, my dear. You didn't come out of a cab, and you never are. I
+like being gross, I feel nearer to nature then, but I don't say that
+as an excuse. I like the smell of warm kitchens and the talk
+of bus-drivers, and bread and herrings for my tea--all the low
+satisfactions appeal to me. Beer, too, and hand-organs."
+
+"I don't know when to believe you. He talks about her quite freely,
+and--and so do I. She is really interesting in her way."
+
+"And in perspective."
+
+"Why should you be odiously smart. He and Stephen"--her glance was
+tentative--"have made it up."
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"He admits now that Stephen was justified, from his point of view. But
+of course that is easy enough when you have come off best."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Hilda, what do you THINK?"
+
+"Oh, I think it's deplorable--you have always known what I think. Have
+you seen him lately--I mean your cousin?"
+
+"He lunched with us yesterday. He was more enthusiastic than ever about
+you."
+
+"I wish you could tell me that he hadn't mentioned my name. I don't want
+his enthusiasm. The pit gives one that."
+
+"Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of--of what it ought to be? What is
+the principal part of it? Not enthusiasm--adoration?"
+
+"Goodness, no! Something quite different and quite simple--too simple to
+explain. Besides, it is a thing that requires the completest ignorance
+to discuss comfortably. Do you want me to vivisect my soul? You
+yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?"
+
+"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at the
+same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah! Mr. Lindsay."
+
+There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's
+greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a
+difference, and that he must find other things to say. He found them
+with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish her tea before
+she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to abandon them to
+each other, to take a decorative place in the conversation, interrupting
+it with brief inquiries about cream and sugar. Alicia waited, it was her
+way; she sank almost palpably into the tapestries until some reviving
+circumstance should bring her out again, a process which was quite
+compatible with her little laughs and comments. She waited, offering
+repose, and unconscious even of that. You know Hilda Howe as a creature
+of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the teapot,
+the conviction visited her that a sex three-quarters of this fibre
+explained the monastic clergy.
+
+"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible,"
+Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent."
+
+"I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm. He's
+on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll combine with
+Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts. The
+only way it would go, in this capital."
+
+"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed; "I've never seen one of his
+plays--doesn't it sound terrible!"
+
+"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should like to,
+for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a
+scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's no meaning.
+You see he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would be a tame
+travesty--nobody could redeem it alone. You must keep to the old
+situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia."
+
+"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in The Offence of
+Galilee?" Duff said. "Everyone who knows the least bit about it said you
+were marvellous in that."
+
+"Marvellous," said Alicia
+
+Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking. The
+others looked at her absent eyes. "A bazar trick or two helped me,"
+she said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that might be
+hanging on the wall, or visible out of the window.
+
+"And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in
+Calcutta?" Duff asked.
+
+"Not in Calcutta, or anywhere. The rest hate it--nobody has a chance but
+me," Hilda said, and got up.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Alicia began, but Miss Howe was already half-way
+out of the discussion, in the direction of the door. There was often a
+brusqueness in her comings and goings, but she usually left a flavour of
+herself behind. One turned with facility to talk about her, this being
+the easiest way of applying the stimulus that came of talking to her.
+It was more conspicuous than either of these two realised that they
+accepted her retreat without a word, that there was even between them a
+consciousness of satisfaction that she had gone.
+
+"This morning's mail," said Alicia, smiling brightly at Lindsay,
+"brought you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached she
+could be from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated
+to some background of her nature while she occupied herself with the
+immediate play of circumstance or was lost in her observation of him.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it," Lindsay said. "This was the first by
+which I could possibly hear from England."
+
+"Ah, well, now you will have no more anxiety. Letters from on board ship
+are always difficult to write and unsatisfactory," Alicia said. Miss
+Filbert's had been postcards, with a wide unoccupied margin at the
+bottom.
+
+"The Sutlej seems to have arrived on the third; that's a day later,
+isn't it, than we made out she would be?"
+
+Alicia consulted her memory, and found she couldn't be sure. Lindsay was
+vexed by a similar uncertainty, but they agreed that the date was early
+in the month.
+
+"Did they get comfortably through the Canal? I remember being tied up
+there for forty-eight hours once."
+
+"I don't think she says, so I fancy it must have been all right.
+The voyage is bound to do her good. I've asked the Simpsons to watch
+particularly for any sign of malaria later, though. One can't possibly
+know what she may have imported from that slum in Bentinck Street."
+
+"And what was it like after Gibraltar?" Alicia asked, with a barely
+perceptible glance at the envelope edges showing over his breast-pocket.
+
+"I'll look," and he sorted one out. It was pink and glossy, with a
+diagonal water-stripe. Lindsay drew out the single sheet it contained,
+and she could see that every line was ruled and faintly pencilled. "Let
+me see," said he. "To begin at the beginning. 'We arrived home on the
+third,'--you see it was the third,--'making very slow progress the
+last day on account of a fog in the Channel'--ah, a fog in the
+Channel!--'which was a great disappointment to some on board who were
+impatient to meet their loved ones. One lady had not seen her family of
+five for seven years. She said she would like to get out and swim, and
+you could not wonder. She was my s--stable companion."
+
+"Quaint!" said Alicia.
+
+"She has picked up the expression on board. 'So--so she told me this.'
+Oh yes. 'Now that it is all over I have written the voyage down among
+my mercies in spite of three days' sickness, when you could keep nothing
+on--' What are those two words, Miss Livingstone? I can't quite make
+them out."
+
+"'Your'--cambric?--stom--'stomach'--'your stomach.'"
+
+"Oh, quite so. Thanks!--'in the Bay of Biscay.' You see it WAS rough
+after Gib. 'Everybody was'--yes. 'The captain read Church of England
+prayers on Sunday mornings, in which I had no objection to join, and we
+had mangoes every day for a week after leaving Ceylon.'"
+
+"Miss Filbert was so fond of mangoes," Alicia said.
+
+"Was she? 'The passengers got up two dances, and quite a number of
+gentlemen invited me, but I declined with thanks, though I would not say
+it is wrong in itself.'" Lindsay seemed to waver; her glance went
+near enough to him to show her that his face had a red tinge of
+embarrassment. He looked at the letter uncertainly, on the point of
+folding it up.
+
+"You see she hasn't danced for so long," Alicia put in quickly; "she
+would naturally hesitate about beginning again with anybody but you. I
+shouldn't wonder," she added gently, "if she never does, with anybody
+else."
+
+"I know it's an idea some women have," he replied. "I think it's
+rather--nice."
+
+"And her impressions of the Simpsons--and Plymouth?"
+
+"She goes on to that." He reconsulted the letter. "'Mr. and Mrs. Simpson
+met me as expected and welcomed me very affably.' She has got hold of
+a wrong impression there, I fancy; the Simpsons couldn't be 'affable.'
+'They seem very kind and pleasant for such stylish people, and their
+house is lovely, with electric light in the parlour and hot and cold
+water throughout. They seem very earnest people and have family prayers
+regularly, but I have not yet been asked to lead. Four servants come in
+to prayers. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson are deeply interested in the work of
+the Army, though I think Plymouth as a whole is more taken up with the
+C.M.S.; but we cannot have all things.' Dear me, yes! I remember those
+evangelical teas and the disappointment that I could not speak more
+definitely about the work among the Sontalis."
+
+"Fancy her having caught the spirit of the place already!" exclaimed
+Alicia. "He went on: 'Mr. and Mrs. Simpson have a beautiful garden and
+grow most of their own vegetables. We sit in it a great deal and I think
+of all that has passed. I hope ever that it has been for the best and
+pray for you always. Oh that your feet may be set in the right path and
+that we may walk hand in hand upon the way to Zion!'" Lindsay lowered
+his voice and read the last sentences rapidly, as if the propulsion
+of the first part of the letter sent him through them. Then he stopped
+abruptly, and Alicia looked up.
+
+"That's all, only," he added, with an awkward smile, "the usual
+formula."
+
+"'God bless you'?" she asked, and he nodded.
+
+"It has a more genuine ring than most formulas," she observed.
+
+"Yes, hasn't it? May I have another cup?" He restored the pink sheet to
+its pink envelope, and both to his breast-pocket, while she poured out
+the other cup, but Miss Filbert was still present with them. They went
+on talking about her, and entirely in the tone of congratulation--the
+suitability of the Simpsons, the suitability of Plymouth, the
+probability that she would entirely recover, in its balmy atmosphere,
+her divine singing voice. Plymouth certainly was in no sense a tonic,
+but Miss Filbert didn't need a tonic; she was too much inclined to
+be strung up as it was. What she wanted was the soothing, quieting
+influence of just Plymouth's meetings and just Plymouth's teas. The
+charms that so sweetly and definitely characterised her would expand
+there; it was a delightful flowery environment for them, and she
+couldn't fail to improve in health. Devonshire's visitors got
+tremendously well fed, with fish items of especial excellence.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Nobody could have been more impressed with Hilda's influence upon Mr.
+Llewellyn Stanhope's commercial probity than Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope
+himself. He was a prey to all noble feelings; they ruled his life and
+spoiled his bargains; and gratitude, when it had a chance, which was
+certainly seldom in connection with leading ladies, dominated him
+entirely. He sat in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel with tears in
+his eyes, talking about what Miss Howe had done for him, and gave
+unnecessary backsheesh to coolies who brought him small bills--so long,
+that is, as they were the small bills of this season. When they had
+reference to the liabilities of a former and less prosperous year he
+waved them away with a bitter levity which belonged to the same period.
+His view of his obligations was strictly chronological, and in taking
+it he counted, like the poet, only happy hours. The bad debt and the
+bad season went consistently together to oblivion; the sun of to-day's
+remarkable receipts could not be expected to penetrate backwards.
+
+He had only one fault to find with Miss Howe--she had no artistic
+conscience--none, and he found this with the utmost leniency, basking
+in the consciousness that it made his own more conspicuous. She was
+altogether in the grand style, if you understood Mr. Stanhope, but
+nothing would induce her to do herself justice before Calcutta; she
+seemed to have taken the measure of the place and to be as indifferent!
+Try to ring in anything worth doing and she was off with the bit between
+her teeth, and you simply had to put up with it. The second lead had a
+great deal more ambition, and a very good little woman in her way, too,
+but of course not half the talent. He was obliged to confess that Miss
+Howe wasn't game for risks, especially after doing her Rosalind the
+night the circus opened to a twenty-five rupee house. It WAS monstrous.
+She seemed to think that nothing mattered so much as that everybody
+should be paid on the first of the month. There was one other grievance,
+which Llewellyn mentioned only in confidence with a lowered voice. That
+was Bradley. Hilda wasn't lifting a finger to keep Bradley. Result was,
+Bradley was crooking his elbow a great deal too often lately and going
+off every way. He, Llewellyn, had put it to her if that was the way to
+treat a man the Daily Telegraph had spoken about as it had spoken about
+Hamilton Bradley. Where was she--where was he--going to find another?
+No, he didn't say marry Bradley; there were difficulties, and after all
+that might be the very way to lose him. But a woman had an influence,
+and that influence could never be more fittingly exercised than in the
+cause of dramatic art based on Mr. Stanhope's combinations. Mr. Stanhope
+expressed himself with a difference, but it came to that.
+
+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 that was so
+whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers.
+Alicia knew, of course; but that was 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; 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 of her own among its features if she could
+help it. It was a trick she played upon her 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. When the time arrived she sat under the blue umbrellas
+devising 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. She 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 Father 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 hired scribe of the
+bazar:--
+
+
+"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 pigtail 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 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 reaped at actual personation of
+the Chinaman, 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 bazar--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. Cassidy." Arnold had never
+ignored the name 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 adding 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
+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 of one particular 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 footstool
+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 unmoved definitely enough, yet some vibration
+in it reached 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 hands,
+pressed one on each side of him to the seat of the sofa for support, and
+he looked in fixed silence at hers, upon 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 childlike
+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--" 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
+floodgate 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 thrilled 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 towards
+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 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 chose 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
+good from 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 the 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 endowed with the courage to face this problem,
+and his head, as it rose in the twilight against the window, was grave
+and calm. Without a word a great tenderness of understanding 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. It was a frail adventure upon a gaze,
+but it carried them infinitely far. The moment died away, neither of
+them could have measured it, and when it had finally ebbed--they were
+conscious of every subsiding throb--the silence remained, like a margin
+for the beauty of it. They sat immovable, while the light faded. 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 unforgiveable sin, she could explain it, and
+obtain justification rather than pardon. Her horizon had narrowed, she
+sought now only that it should enfold them both. She begged that
+he would wipe out her insanity, that he would not send her away. He
+listened and melted to conviction.
+
+"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 bazar
+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 altarpiece 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 bazar. 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 vigorous 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, 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, 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 had 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
+Offence of Galilee. I don't wonder that you do not wish to disturb that
+impression."
+
+Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallised 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 fifteenth. 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-Lieut.-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 got's 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,
+things highly appreciative of bodices, 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 love 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 disdained 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 by and
+by, 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 the 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 than 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 simplicity 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 accentuated the
+swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude; it expressed
+a temperament, a character, fifty other things; but especially it
+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.
+
+The play proceeded and Stephen did not move--did not wince. When Mrs.
+Halliday, whose mate was exacting, exclaimed, "The greatest apostle of
+expediency was St. Paul. He preached 'wives love your husbands,'" he
+even permitted himself the ghost of a smile. At one point he wished
+himself familiar with the plot; it was when Hamilton Bradley came
+jauntily on as Lord Ingleton, assuring Mrs. Halliday that immorality
+was really only shortsightedness. Lady Dolly in front, repeated Lord
+Ingleton's phrase with ingenuous wonder. "I know it's clever," she
+insisted, "but what does it mean? Now that other thing--what was
+it?--'Subtract vice, and virtue is what is left'--that's an easy one.
+Write it down on your cuff for me, will you, Colonel Cummins? I SHALL be
+so sick if I forget it."
+
+Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of Lady
+Dolly. He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play,
+wholly involved in an effort to keep its current and direction through
+the floating debris of constrained sayings with which it was encumbered;
+to know in advance whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how
+far Lord Ingleton would accompany. When Lord Ingleton paused as it were
+to beg four people to "have nothing to do with sentiment--it so often
+leads to conviction," and the house murmured its amusement, Arnold
+shifted his shoulders impatiently. "How inconsistent," Lord Ingleton
+reproached Mrs. Halliday a moment later, "to wear gloves on your hands
+and let your thoughts go candid." Arnold turned to Duff. "There's
+no excuse for that," he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda's
+rejoinder and did not hear him.
+
+At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday to
+her husband's divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing his
+hands with gratification at having made two such clever women "aware of
+each other," Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling to discuss the
+piece with the rest of the party. As he left the box to walk up and down
+the corridor outside where it was cooler, he heard the voice of Colonel
+Cummins lifted in further quotation, "'To be good AND charming--what a
+sinful superfluity!' I'm sure nobody ever called you superfluous, Lady
+Dolly," and was vividly aware of the advisability of taking himself and
+his Order out of the theatre. He had not been gratified, or even from
+any point appealed to. Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so
+perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest
+him. He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the
+restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the
+problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust. He was too far
+from the circle of her modern influence to consider her with anything
+but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection,
+her reproduction seemed to him frivolous and meaningless. If he went
+then, however, he would go as he came, in so far as the play was
+concerned; the first act, relying altogether upon the jugglery of its
+dialogue, gave no clue to anything. He owed it to Hilda after all to see
+the piece out. It was only fair to give her a chance to make the best
+of it. He decided that it was worth a personal sacrifice to give it her,
+and went back.
+
+He was sufficiently indignant with the leading idea of the play, and
+sufficiently absorbed in its progress, at the end of the second act, to
+permit Lady Dolly to capture him before it occurred to him that he had
+the use of his legs. Her enthusiasm was so great that it reduced him
+to something like equivocation. She wanted to know if anything could be
+more splendid than Mr. Bradley as Lord Ingleton; she confided to Stephen
+that that was what she called REAL wickedness, the kind that did the
+most harm, and invited him by inference, to a liberal judgment of stupid
+sinners. He sat emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes nervously
+fugitive from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the third act
+began. Then he gave place with embarrassed alacrity to Colonel Cummins,
+and folded his arms again at the back of the box.
+
+Before it was finished he had the gratification of recognising at least
+one Hilda that he knew. The newspapers found in her interpretation the
+development of a soul, and one remembered, reading them, that a cliche
+is a valuable thing in a hurry. A phrase which spoke of a soul bruised
+out of life and rushing to annihilation would have been more precise.
+The demand upon her increased steadily as the act went on, and as she
+met it there slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities
+of motive and of passion. She offered to the shaping circumstance
+rich material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her
+destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away she did it
+with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movement that was
+essentially of herself.
+
+The moment of it had a bold gruesomeness that caught the breath--a
+disinterment on the stage in search of letters that would prove the
+charge against the second year of Mrs. Halliday's married life, her
+letters buried with the poet. It was an advantage which only the husband
+of Mrs. Halliday would have claimed to bring so helpless a respondent
+before even the informal court at the graveyard; but it gave Hilda a
+magnificent opportunity of wild, mad apostrophe to the skull, holding it
+tenderly with both hands, while Lord Ingleton smiled appreciatively
+in advance of the practical benevolence which was to sustain the lady
+through the divorce court, and in the final scene offer to her and to
+the prejudices of the British public the respectability of his name.
+
+It was over with a rush at the end, leaving the audience uncertain
+whether after all enough attention had been paid to that tradition
+of the footlights which insists on so nice a sense of opprobrium and
+compensation, but convinced of its desire to applaud. Duff Lindsay
+turned as the wave of clapping spent itself, to say to Stephen that he
+had never respected Hamilton Bradley's acting so much. He said it to
+Herbert Livingstone instead; the priest had disappeared.
+
+The outgoers looked at Arnold curiously as he made his way among them in
+a direction which was not that of the exit. He went with hurried purpose
+in the face of them all toward the region, badly lighted and imperfectly
+closed, which led to the rear of the stage. He opened doors into dark
+closets, and one which gave upon the road, retraced his unfamiliar
+steps and asked a question, to which--it was so unusual from one in his
+habit--he received a hesitating but correct reply. A moment later he
+passed Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope, who stood in his path with a hostile
+stare, and got out of it with a deferential bow, and knocked at a door
+upon which was pasted the name, in large red letters cut from a poster,
+of Miss Hilda Howe. It was a little ajar, so he entered, when she cried
+"Come in!" with the less hesitation. Hilda sat on the single chair the
+place contained, in the dress and make-up of the last scene. A servant,
+who looked up incuriously, was unlacing her shoes. Various garments hung
+about on nails driven into the unpainted walls, others overflowed from a
+packing-box in one corner. A common teakwood dressing-table held make
+up saucers and powder-puffs and some remnants of cold fowl which had not
+been partaken of, apparently, with the assistance of a knife and fork.
+A candle stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the
+looking-glass, and there was no other light. On the floor a pair of
+stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern. The place looked sordid
+and miserable, and Hilda sitting in the middle of it, still in the
+yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that range,
+gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous. Stephen stood in
+the doorway grasping the handle, saying nothing, and an instant passed
+before she knew with certainty, in the wretched light, that it was he.
+Then she sprang up and made a step toward him as if toward victory and
+reward, but checked herself in time. "Is it possible!" she exclaimed. "I
+did not know you were in the theatre."
+
+"Yes," he said, with moderation, "I have seen this--this damnable play."
+
+"Damnable? Oh!--"
+
+"It has caused me," he went on, "to regret the substance of my letter
+this morning. I failed to realise that this was the kind of work you
+devote your life to. I now see that you could not escape its malign
+influence--that no women could. I now think that the alternative that
+has been revealed to you, of remaining in Calcutta, is a chance of
+escape offered you by God Himself. Take it. I withdraw my foolish,
+ignorant opposition."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "do you really think--"
+
+"Take it," he repeated, and closed the door.
+
+Hilda sat still for some time after the servant had finished unlacing
+her shoes. A little tender smile played oddly about her carmined lips.
+"Dear heart," she said aloud, "I was going to."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+"I would simply give anything to be there," Miss Livingstone said, with
+a look of sincere desire.
+
+"I should love to have you, but it isn't possible. You might meet men
+you knew who had been invited by particular lady friends among the
+company."
+
+"Oh, well, that of course would be odious."
+
+"Very, I should think," Hilda agreed. "You must be satisfied with a
+faithful report of it. I promise you that."
+
+"You have asked Mr. Lindsay," Alicia complained.
+
+"That's quite a different thing. And if I hadn't, Llewellyn Stanhope
+would; Stanhope cherishes Duff as he cherishes the critic of the
+Chronicle. He refers to him as a pillar of the legitimate. Whenever
+he begs me to turn the Norwegian crank, he says, 'I'm sure Mr. Lindsay
+would come.'"
+
+Miss Howe was at the top of the staircase in Middleton Street, on the
+point of departure. It was to be the night of her last appearance for
+the season and her benefit, followed by a supper in her honour, at
+which Mr. Stanhope and his company would take leave of those whose
+acquaintance, as he expressed it, business and pleasure had given them
+during the months that were past. It was this function that Alicia, at
+the top of the staircase, so ardently desired to attend.
+
+"No, I won't kiss you," Hilda said, as the other put her cool cheek
+forward; "I'm so divinely happy--some of it might escape."
+
+Alicia's voice pursued her as she ran downstairs. "Remember," she said,
+"I don't approve. I don't at all agree either with my reverend cousin
+or with you. I think you ought to find some other way, or let it go. Go
+home instead; go straight to London and insist on your chance. After six
+weeks you will have forgotten the name of his Order."
+
+Hilda looked back with a smile. Her face was splendid with the dawn and
+the promise of success. "Don't say that," she cried.
+
+Alicia, leaning down, was visited by a flash of quotation. "Well," she
+said, "nothing in this life becomes you like the leaving of it," and
+went back to her room to write to Laura Filbert in Plymouth. She wrote
+often to Miss Filbert, at Duff's request. It gratified her that she was
+able, without a pang, to address four pages of pleasantly colourless
+communication to Mr. Lindsay's fiancee. Her letters stood for a medicine
+surprisingly easy to take, aimed at the convalescence which she already
+anticipated in the future immediately beyond Duff's miserable marriage.
+If that event had promised felicitously she would have faced it, one
+fancies, with less sanguine anticipations for herself: but the black
+disaster that rode on with it brought her certain aids to the spirit,
+certain hopes of herself. Laura's prompt replies, with their terrible
+margins and painstaking solecisms, came to be things Miss Livingstone
+looked forward to. She read them with a beating heart, however, in the
+unconscious apprehension of some revelation of improvement. She was
+quite unaware of it, but she entertained towards the Simpsons an
+attitude of misgiving in this regard.
+
+Hilda went on about her business. As usual her business was important
+and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last day. She drove
+about from place to place in the hot, slatternly city, putting more than
+her usual vigour and directness into all she did. It seemed to her that
+the sunlight burning on the tiles, pouring through the crowded streets,
+had more than ever a vivid note; and so much spoke to her, came to her,
+from the profuse and ingenuous life which streamed about her, that she
+leaned a little forward to meet it with happy eyes and tender lips that
+said, "I know. I see." She was living for the moment which should exhale
+itself somewhere about midnight after the lights had gone out on her
+last appearance--living for it as a Carmelite might live for the climax
+of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that beyond the cell
+and the grating she saw the movement and the colour and the passion of
+a wider life. All Hilda's splendid vitality went into her intention,
+of which she was altogether mistress, riding it and reining it in a
+straight course through the encumbered hours. It keyed her to a finer
+and more eager susceptibility; and the things she saw stayed with her,
+passing into a composite day which the years were hardly to dim for her.
+
+She could live like that, for the purposes of a period, wrought up to
+immense keenness of sense and brilliancy of energy, making steadily for
+some point of feeling or achievement flashing gloriously on the horizon.
+It is already plain, perhaps, that she rejoiced in such strokes, and
+that life as she found it worth living was marked by a succession of
+them.
+
+She had kept, even from Lindsay, what she meant to do. When she stepped
+from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of the evening,
+with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's--no eight-anna
+bazar confections edged with silver tinsel--it occurred to her that this
+reticence was not altogether fair to so constant a friend. He was there,
+keen and eager as ever in all that concerned her, foremost with his
+congratulations on the smiling fringe of the party assembled to do her
+honour. It was a party of some brilliance in its way, though its way was
+diverse; there was no steady glow. Fillimore said of the company that it
+comprised all the talent, and Fillimore, Editor of the Indian Sportsman
+and Racing Gazelle, was a judge. He said it to Hagge, of the Bank of
+Hindostan, who could hardly have been an owner on three hundred rupees
+a month without conspicuous ability disconnected with his ledgers; and
+Hagge looked gratified. Though so promising, he was young. Lord Bobby
+was there from Government House. Lord Bobby always accompanied the
+talent, who were very kind to him. He was talking when Hilda arrived to
+the Editor of the Indian Empire, who wanted to find out the date of her
+Excellency's fancy dress party for children, in order that he might make
+a leaderette of it; but Lord Bobby couldn't remember--had to promise
+to drop him a line. Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with
+coldness because the Sportsman had discovered too many virtues in his
+Musquito, exalted her indeed into a favourite for Saturday's hurdle
+race, a notability for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest. "They
+say," Fillimore had written, "that Musquito has been seen jumping by
+moonlight"--the sort of thing to spoil any book. Fillimore was an acute
+and weary-looking little man, with a peculiarly sweet smile and an air
+of cynicism which gave to his lightest word a dangerous and suspicious
+air. It was rumoured in official circles that he had narrowly escaped
+beheading for pointing out too ironically the disabilities of a Viceroy
+who insisted on reviewing the troops from a cushioned carriage with the
+horses taken out. Fillimore seemed to think that if nature had not made
+such a nobleman a horseman, the Queen-Empress should not have made him
+Governor-General of India. Fillimore was full of prejudices. Gianacchi,
+however, found it impossible to treat him coldly. His smoothness
+of temperament stood in the way. Instead, he imparted the melodious
+information that Musquito had pecked badly twice at Tollygunge that
+morning, and smiled with pathetic philosophy. "Always let 'em use their
+noses," said Fillimore, and there seemed to be satire in it. Fillimore
+certainly had a flair, and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of
+him, "What's the dead bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?" he put it
+generously at her service. Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his
+company were also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect,
+with the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange--gentlemen of high
+finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors' reports, but
+never in the visitors' book at Government House, who were little more
+to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so many lakhs, except
+when they were seen now and then driving, in fleet dogcarts across the
+Maidan toward comfortable suburban residences where ladies were not
+entertained. They were extremely, curiously, devoted to business; but if
+they allowed themselves any amusement other than company promoting,
+it was the theatre, of which their appreciation had sometimes an odd
+relation to the merits of performance. This supper, on the part of Miss
+Beryl Stace and one or two others of Mr. Stanhope's artistes, might have
+been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since the
+suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.
+
+Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that looked for
+the sentiment, the pity of things, would have distinguished at once
+on about half the faces, especially those of the women, the used,
+underlined look that spoke of the continual play of muscle and forcing
+of feeling. It gave them a shabbily complicated air, contrasting in a
+strained and sorry way even, with the countenances of the brokers and
+bankers, where nature had laid on a smooth wash and experience had not
+interfered. They were all gay and enthusiastic as Miss Howe entered,
+they loafed forward, broad shirt-fronts lustrous, fat hands in financial
+pockets, with their admiration, and Fillimore put out his cigarette.
+Hilda came down among them from the summit of her achievement, clasping
+their various hands. They were all personally responsible for her
+success, she made them feel that, and they expanded in the conviction.
+She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality, subtly drawing from
+every human flavour in the room the power to hold and show something
+akin to it in herself, a fugitive assimilation floating in the lamplight
+with the odour of the flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the
+occasion. They looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling
+attraction, they told each other that she was in great form. Mr.
+Fillimore was of the opinion that she couldn't be outclassed at the
+Lyceum, and Mr. Hagge responded with vivacity that there were few places
+where she wouldn't stretch the winner's neck. The feast was not
+after all one of great bounty, Mr. Stanhope justly holding that the
+opportunity, the little gathering, was the thing, and it was not long
+before the moment of celebration arrived for which the gentlemen of
+the Stock Exchange, to judge from their undrained glasses, seemed to be
+reserving themselves. There certainly had been one tin of pate, and
+it circulated at that end; on the other hand the ladies had all the
+fondants. So that when Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope rose with the sentiment
+of the evening he found satisfaction, if not repletion, in the regards
+turned upon him.
+
+Llewellyn got up with modest importance, and ran a hand through his
+yellow hair, not dramatically, but with the effect of collecting
+his ideas. He leaned a little forward, he was extremely, happily
+conspicuous. The attention of the two lines of faces seemed to overcome
+him, for an instant, with dizzy pleasure; Hilda's beside him was bent a
+little, waiting.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Stanhope, looking with precision up
+and down the table to be still more inclusive, "we have met together
+to-night in honour of a lady who has given this city more pleasure in
+the exercise of her profession than can be said of any single performer
+during the last twenty years. Cast your eye back over the theatrical
+record of Calcutta for that space of time, and you yourselves will admit
+that there has been nobody that could be said to have come within a mile
+of her shadow, if I may use the language of metaphor." (Applause, led
+by Mr. Fillimore.) "I would ask you to remember, at the same time, that
+this pleasure has been of a superior class. I freely admit that this is
+a great satisfaction to me personally. Far be it from me to put myself
+forward on this auspicious occasion, but, ladies and gentlemen, if I
+have one ambition more than another, it is to promote the noble cause
+of the unfettered drama. To this I may say I have been vowed from the
+cradle, by a sire who was well-known in the early days of the metropolis
+of Sydney as a pioneer of the great movement which has made the dramatic
+talent of Australia what it is. To-day a magnificent theatre rises on
+the site forever consecrated to me by those paternal labours, but--but I
+can never forget it. In Miss Hilda Howe I have found a great coadjutor,
+and one who is willing to consecrate her royal abilities in the same
+line as myself, so that we have been able to maintain a high standard of
+production among you, prices remaining as usual. I have to thank you,
+as representing the public of the Indian capital, for the kind support
+which has been so encouraging to Miss Howe, the Company, and myself
+personally, during the past season. Many a time ladies and gentlemen of
+my profession have said to me, 'Mr. Stahhope, why do you go to Calcutta?
+That city is a death-trap for professionals,' and now the past season
+proves that I was right and they were wrong; and the magnificent houses,
+the enthusiasm, and the appreciation that have greeted our efforts,
+especially on the Saturday evening performances, show plainly enough
+that when a good thing is available the citizens of Calcutta won't be
+happy till they get it. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to join me in
+drinking the health, happiness, and prosperity of Miss Hilda Howe!"
+
+"Miss Howe!" "Miss Howe!" "Miss Hilda Howe!" In the midst of a pushing
+back of chairs and a movement of feet, the response was quick and
+universal. Hilda accepted their nods and becks and waving glasses with a
+slow movement of her beautiful eyes and a quiet smile, in the subsidence
+of sound Mr. Stanhope's voice was heard again, "We can hardly expect
+a speech from Miss Howe, but perhaps Mr. Hamilton Bradley, whose
+international reputation need hardly be referred to, will kindly say a
+few words on her behalf."
+
+Then with deliberate grace, Hilda rose from her chair, a tall figure
+among them, looking down with a hint of compassionateness on the little
+man at her left. She stood for an instant without speaking, as if the
+flushed silence, the expectation, the warm magnetism that drew all their
+eyes to her were enough. Then out of something like reverie she came
+to the matter, she threw up her beautiful face with one of the supreme
+gestures which belonged to her. "I think," she said, with a little
+smiling bow in his direction, "that I will not trouble my friend Mr.
+Bradley. He has rendered me so many kind services already that I am sure
+I might count upon him again, but this is a thing I should like to do
+for myself. I would not have my thanks chilled by even the passage from
+my heart to his." There was something like bravado in the glance that
+rested lightly on Bradley with this. One would have said that parley of
+hearts between them was not a thing that as a rule she courted. "I can
+only offer you my thanks, poor things to which we can give neither life
+nor substance, yet I beg that you will somehow take them and remember
+them. It is to me, and will always be, a kind of crowning satisfaction
+that you were pleased to come together to-night to tell me I had done
+well. You know yourselves, and I know, how much too flattering your
+kindness is, but perhaps it will hurt nobody if to-night I take it as it
+is generously offered, and let it make me as happy as you intend me
+to be. At all events, no one could disturb me in believing that in
+obtaining your praise and your good wishes I have done well enough."
+
+For a few seconds she stopped speaking, but she held them with her eyes
+from the mistake of supposing she had done. Lindsay, who was watching
+her closely and hanging with keen pleasure on the sweetness and
+precision of what she found to say, noted a swift constriction pass upon
+her face. There was a half-tone of difference, too, in her voice, when
+she raised it again, a firmer vibration, as if she passed, deliberate
+and aware, out of one phase into another.
+
+"No," she went on, "I am not shy on this occasion; indeed, I feel that
+I should like to keep your eyes upon me for a long time to-night, and
+go on talking far past your patience or my wit. For I cannot think it
+likely that our ways will cross again." Here her words grew suddenly low
+and hurried. "If I may trespass upon your interest so much further,
+I have to tell you that my connection with the stage closes with this
+evening's performance. To-morrow I join the Anglican Order of the
+Sisters of St. Paul--the Baker Institution--in Calcutta, as a novice.
+They have taken me without much question because--because the plague
+hospitals of this cheerful country"--she contrived a smile--"have made a
+great demand upon their body. That is all. I have nothing more to say."
+
+It was, after all, ineffective, the denouement, or perhaps it was too
+effective. In any case it was received in silence, the applause that was
+ready falling back on itself, inconsistent and absurd. The incredulity
+of Llewellyn Stanhope might have been electric had it found words, but
+that gentleman's protests were made in violent whispers, to which Hilda,
+who sat playing with a faded rose, seemed to pay no attention whatever.
+One might have thought her more overcome than anyone. She seemed to make
+one or two unsuccessful efforts to raise her head. There was a moment of
+waiting for someone to reply; eyes were turned towards Mr. Bradley, and
+when it became plain that no one would, broken murmurs of talk began
+with a note of deprecation and many shakes of the head. The women,
+especially, looked tragically at their neighbours with very wide-open
+eyes. Presently a chair was drawn back, and then another, and people
+began to filter, in slow embarrassment, towards the door. Lindsay came
+with Hilda's cloak. "You won't mind my coming with you," he said, "I
+should like to hear the details." Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her,
+pouring out abusive disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture
+almost of irritation. Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two,
+and went away with lingering backward looks. In a quarter of an hour,
+Mr. Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicles into the lamp-lit
+ways of Calcutta, and only the native table-servants remained in
+somewhat resentful possession of what was left.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+If Duff Lindsay had apprehended that the reception of Miss Filbert by
+the Simpsons would involve any strain upon the affection his friends
+bore him, the event must have relieved him in no small degree. He was
+soon made aware of its happy character, and constantly kept assured;
+indeed, it seemed that whenever Mrs. Simpson had nothing else to do
+she laid her pen to the task of telling him once again how cherished
+a satisfaction they found in Laura, and how reluctant they would be to
+lose it. She wrote in that strain of facile sympathy which seems part
+of an Englishwoman's education, and often begged him to believe that the
+more she knew of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly
+she realised how dreary for him must have been the pang of parting
+and how arid the months of separation. Mrs. Simpson herself was well
+acquainted with these trials of the spirit. She and her husband had been
+divided by those wretched thousands of miles of ocean for three years
+one week and five days all told during their married life: she knew what
+it meant. But if Duff could only see how well and blooming his beloved
+one was--she had gained twelve pounds already--Mrs. Simpson was sure the
+time of waiting would pass less heavily. For herself, it was cruel but
+she smiled upon the deferred reunion of hearts, she would keep Laura
+till the very last day, and hoped to establish a permanent claim on her.
+She was just the daughter Mrs. Simpson would have liked, so unspotted,
+so pure, so wrapped in high ideals; and then the page would reflect
+something of the adoring awe in which Mrs. Simpson would have held
+such a daughter. It will be seen that Mrs. Simpson knew how to express
+herself, but there was a fine sincerity behind the mask of words; Miss
+Filbert had entered very completely into possession.
+
+It had its abnormal side, the way she entered into possession.
+Everything about Laura Filbert had its abnormal side, none the less
+obvious because it was inward, and invisible. Nature, of course, worked
+with her, one might say that nature really did it all, since in the end
+she was practically unconscious, except for the hope that certain souls
+had been saved, that anything of the sort had happened. She conquered
+the Simpsons and their friends chiefly by the simple impossibility that
+they should conquer her, walking immobile among them even while she
+admired Mr. Simpson's cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs.
+Simpson's house linen. It must be confessed that nothing in her
+surroundings spoke to her more loudly or more subtly than these things.
+In view of what happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation
+that the Simpsons and their circle would have a radical personal effect
+upon Laura Filbert became ludicrous. They had no effect at all. She took
+no tint, no curve. She appeared not to see that these precious things
+were to be had for the assimilation. Her grace remained exclusively that
+of holiness, and continued to fail to have any relation to the common
+little things she did and said.
+
+The Simpsons were more plastic. Laura had been with them hardly a week
+before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to remodel
+her spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the word is
+admissible, presented. The dear lady had never before realised, by her
+own statement, how terribly her religious feelings were mingled with
+domestic and social considerations, how firmly her spiritual edifice
+was based upon the things of this world. She felt that her soul
+was honeycombed--that was her word--with conventionality and false
+standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in
+the girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these
+confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged
+hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the
+responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal
+her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace, she
+made short work of special services and ladies' Bible classes. The
+world was white with harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was
+a recreation society for shop girls. But it was something, it was
+everything, to be uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift
+themselves in prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching
+supplication in which to represent the matter that the burden of her
+friend and hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.
+Mrs. Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as
+since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the
+gentle paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss Filbert's
+presence.
+
+Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his
+choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings
+and goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little
+sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday evening,
+for instance, and accompany her to the firemen's halls and skating rinks
+lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner from which
+their guest seemed to derive benefit. With all this, the Simpsons were
+sometimes troubled by the impression that they could not claim to be
+making their angel in the house completely happy. The air, the garden,
+the victoria, the turbot and the whitebait, these were all that has been
+vaunted, and even to the modesty of the Simpsons it was evident that the
+intimacy they offered their guest should count for something. There were
+other friends too, young friends who tried to teach her to play tennis,
+robust and silent young persons who threw shy flushed glances at her in
+the pauses of the games, and wished supremely, without daring to hint
+it, that she would let fall some word about her wonderful romance--a
+hope ever renewed, ever to be disappointed. And physically Laura
+expanded before their eyes. The colour that came into her cheek gave her
+the look of a person painted by Bouguereau; that artist would have
+found in her a model whom he could have represented with sincerity.
+Yet something was missing to her, her friends were dimly aware. Her
+desirable surroundings kindled her to but a perfunctory interest in
+life--the electric spark was absent. Mrs. Simpson relied strategically
+upon the wedding preparations and hurried them on, announcing in May
+that it was quite time to think about various garments of which the
+fashion is permanent, but the issue was blank. No ripple stirred the
+placid waters, unless indeed we take that way of describing Laura's calm
+demand, when the decision lay between Valenciennes and Torchon lace for
+under-bodies, to hear whether Mrs. Simpson had ever known Duff Lindsay
+to be anxious about his eternal future. The girl continued to give forth
+a mere pale reflection of her circumstances, and Mrs. Simpson was forced
+into the deprecation that perhaps one would hardly call her a joyous
+Christian.
+
+But for the Zenana Light Society this impression of Miss Filbert might
+have deepened. The committee of that body was almost entirely composed
+of Mrs. Simpson's friends, and naturally came to learn much about her
+guest. The matter was vastly considered, but finally Miss Filbert was
+asked to speak at one of the monthly meetings the ladies held among
+themselves to keep the society "in touch" with the cause. Laura brought
+them, as one would imagine, surprisingly in touch. She made pictures for
+them, letting her own eyelashes close deliberately while they stared.
+She moved these ladies, inspired them, carried them away, and the fact
+that none of them found themselves able afterward to quote the most
+pathetic passages seemed rather to add to the enthusiasm with which they
+described the address. The first result was a shower of invitations to
+tea, occasions when Laura was easily led into monologue. Miss Filbert
+became a cult of evangelistic drawing-rooms, and the same kind of
+forbearance was extended to her little traces of earlier social
+experiences as is offered, in salons of another sort, to the
+eccentricities of persons of genius. Very soon other applications had to
+be met and considered, and Mrs. Simpson freely admitted that Laura would
+not be justified in refusing to the Methodists and Baptists what she had
+given elsewhere. She reasserted her platform influence over audiences
+that grew constantly larger, and her world began to revolve again in
+that great relation to the infinities which it was her life to perceive
+and point out. Mrs. Simpson charged her genially with having been
+miserable in Plymouth until she was allowed to do good in her own way,
+and saw that she had beef-tea after every occasion of doing it. She
+became in a way a public character, and a lady journalist sent an
+account of her, with a photograph, to a well-known London fashion paper.
+Perhaps the strongest effect she made was as the voice of the Purity
+Association, when she delivered an address, in the picturesque costume
+she had abandoned, attacking measures contemplated by Government for the
+protection of the health of the Army in India. This was reported in full
+in the local paper, and Mr. Simpson sent a copy to Duff Lindsay, who
+received it, I regret to say, with an unmistakable imprecation. But
+Laura rejoiced. Deprived of her tambourine she nevertheless rejoiced
+exceedingly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The Mother Superior had a long upper lip, which she was in the habit
+of drawing still further down; it gave her an air of great diplomatic
+caution, almost of casuistry. Her face was pale and narrow; she had eyes
+that desired to be very penetrating, and a flat little stooping figure
+within her voluminous draperies. She carried about with her all
+the virtues of a monastic order, patience was written upon her, and
+repression, discipline, and the love of administration, written and
+underlined, so that the Anglican Sister whom no Pope blessed was more
+priestly in her personal effect than any Jesuit. It was difficult to
+remember that she had begun as a woman; she was now a somewhat anaemic
+formula making for righteousness. Sister Ann Frances, who in her turn
+suggested the fat capons of an age of friars more indulgent to the
+flesh, and whose speech was of the crispest in this world where there
+was so much to do, thought poorly of the executive ability of the Mother
+Superior, and resented the imposition, as it were, of the long upper
+lip. Out of this arose the only irritations that vexed the energetic
+flow of duty at the Baker Institution, slight official raspings which
+the Mother Superior immediately laid before Heaven at great length. She
+did it with publicity, too, kneeling on the chunam floor of the chapel
+for an hour at a time obviously explaining matters. The bureaucracy of
+the country was reflected in the Baker Institution; it seemed to Sister
+Ann Frances that her superior officer took undue advantage of her
+privilege of direct communication with the Supreme Authority, giving any
+colour she liked to the incident. And when the Mother Superior's lumbago
+came on in direct consequence of the cold chunam, the annoyance of
+Sister Ann Frances was naturally not lessened.
+
+There were twenty or thirty of them, with their little white caps tied
+close under their chins, their long veils and their girdled black robes.
+They were the most self-sacrificing women in Asia, the most devout, the
+most useful. Government gave hospitals and doctors into their hands;
+they took the whole charge of certain schools. They differed in
+complexion, some of the newly arrived being delightfully fresh and pink
+under their starched bandeaux; but they were all official, they all
+walked discreetly and directly about their business, with a jangle of
+keys in the folds of their robes, immensely organised, immensely under
+orders. Hilda, when she had time, had the keenest satisfaction in
+contemplating them. She took the edge off the fact that she was not
+quite one, in aim and method, with these dear women as they supposed
+her to be, with the reflection that after all it might be worth while
+to work out a solution of life in those terms, standing aside from the
+world--the world was troublesome--and keeping an unfaltering eye upon
+the pity of things, an unfaltering hand at its assuagement. It was
+simple and fine and indisputable, this work of throwing the clear shadow
+of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world; it carried the boon
+of finality in itself. One might be stopped and put away at any moment,
+and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and it absolutely
+barred out such considerations as were presented by Hamilton Bradley.
+There was a time early in her probation when she thought seriously that
+if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be this.
+
+She begged to be put on hospital work, and was sent for her indiscretion
+to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of British Troops. The
+first duty of a novice was to be free of preference, to obey without
+a sigh of choice. On the third day, however, Sister Ann Frances,
+supervising, stopped at the open schoolroom door to hear the junior
+female orphans repeating in happy chorus after their instructress the
+statement that seven times nine were fifty-six. I think Hilda saw
+Sister Ann Frances in the door. That couldn't go on, even in the name
+of discipline, and Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the Chief
+Nursing Sister at the General Hospital next day. Sister Ann Frances
+was inclined to defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary
+arithmetic.
+
+"We all have our gifts," she said. "Miss Howe's is not the
+multiplication table; but neither is mine stage-acting." At which,
+the upper lip lengthened further into an upward curving smile, and
+the Mother Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe would
+develop one for making bandages, otherwise--And there for the time being
+the matter rested.
+
+The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
+Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite
+the ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
+acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the two
+women. The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across
+which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the surprise of
+Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her
+eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation. It
+had never been discussed, but it had to be accepted, and occasionally
+referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no
+implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed
+breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught it
+and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities. It
+was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the
+essentials that enabled one to execute a flank movement like Hilda's,
+not that she should conceive the first of them to be that one must
+come out of a cab. She dismissed that impression with indignation as
+ungenerously cynical, but it always came back for redismissal. It did
+not interfere in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to
+Stephen to come to Ten, Middleton Street, on afternoons or evenings
+when Hilda was there. She was like one standing denied in the Street of
+Abundance; she had an avidity of the eye for even love's reflection.
+
+That was a little later. At first there was the transformation to
+lament, the loss, the break.
+
+"You look," cried Miss Livingstone, the first time Hilda arrived in the
+dress of the novice, a kind of under-study of the Sisters' black and
+white, "you look like a person in a book, full of salient points, and
+yet made so simple to the reader. If you go on wearing those things I
+shall end by understanding you perfectly."
+
+"If you don't understand me," Hilda said, dropping into the corner of
+a sofa, "Cela que je m'en doute, it's because you look for too
+much elaboration. I am a simple creature, done with rather a broad
+brush--voila tout!"
+
+Nevertheless, Miss Livingstone's was a happy impression. The neutrality
+of her hospital dress left Hilda in a manner exposed: one saw in
+a special way the significance of lines and curves; it was an
+astonishingly vigorous human expression.
+
+Alicia leaned forward, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin
+tucked into her palm, and looked at it. The elbow bent itself in light
+blue muslin of extreme elegance, trimmed with lace. The colour found a
+wistful echo in the eyes that regarded Miss Howe, who was accustomed to
+the look, and met it with impenetrable commonplace, being made impatient
+by nothing in this world so much as by futility, however charming.
+
+"Just now," Alicia said, "the shadows under your eyes are brushed too
+deep."
+
+"I don't believe I sleep well in a dormitory."
+
+"Horrible! All the little comforts of life--don't you miss them?"
+
+"I never had them, my dear--I never had them. Life has never given
+me very many luxuries--I don't miss them. An occasional hour to one's
+self--and that we get even at the Institution. The conventions are
+strictly conserved, believe me."
+
+"One imagines that kind of place is always clean."
+
+"When I have time I think of Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and
+believe myself in Paradise. The repose is there, the angels also--dear
+commanding things--and a perpetual incense of cheap soap. And there is
+some good in sleeping in a row. It reminds one that after all one is
+very like other women."
+
+"It wouldn't convince me if I were you. And how did the sisters receive
+you--with the harp and the psaltery?"
+
+"That was rather," said Hilda gravely, "what I expected. On the
+contrary. They snubbed me--they really did. There were two of them. I
+said, 'Reverend ladies, please be a little kind. Convents are strange
+to me; I shall probably commit horrible sins without knowing it. Give me
+your absolution in advance--at least your blessing.'"
+
+"Hilda, you didn't!"
+
+"It is delightful to observe the Mother Abbess, or whatever she
+is, disguising the fact that she takes any interest in me. Such
+diplomacy--funny old thing."
+
+"They must be devoured with curiosity!"
+
+"Well, they ask no questions. One sees an everlasting finger on the lip.
+It's a little boring. One feels inclined to speak up and say, 'Mesdames,
+entendez--it isn't so bad as you think.' But then their fingers would go
+into their ears."
+
+"And the rules, Hilda? I can't imagine you, somehow, under rules."
+
+"I am attached to the rules; I think about them all day long. They make
+the thing simple and--possible. It is a little like living for the first
+time in a house all right angles after--after a lifelong voyage in a
+small boat."
+
+"Isn't the house rather empty?"
+
+"Oh, well!"
+
+Alicia put out her hand and tucked an irrelevant bit of lace into
+Hilda's bosom. "I can tell you who is interested," she cried. "The
+Archdeacon--the Archdeacon and Mrs. Barberry. They both dined here last
+night; and you lasted from the fish to the pudding. I got so bored with
+you, my dear, in your new capacity."
+
+A new ray of happiness came into the smile of the novice. "What did they
+say? Do tell me what they said."
+
+"There was a difference of opinion. The Archdeacon held that with God
+all things were possible. He used an expression more suitable to a
+dinner-party; but I think that is what he meant. Mrs. Barberry thought
+it wouldn't last. Mrs. Barberry was very cynical. She said anyone could
+see that you were as emotional as ever you could be."
+
+The eyes of the two women met, and they laughed frankly. A sense of
+expansion came between them, in which for an instant they were silent.
+
+"Tell me about the hospital," Alicia said presently. "Ah, the hospital!"
+Hilda's face changed; there came into her eyes the moved look that
+always waked a thrill in Alicia Livingstone, as if she were suddenly
+aware that she had stepped upon ground where feet like hers passed
+seldom.
+
+"There is nothing to tell you that is not--sad. Such odds and ends, of
+life, thrown together!"
+
+"Have you had any experiences yet?"
+
+Hilda stared for a moment absently in front of her, and then turned her
+head aside to answer as if she closed her eyes on something.
+
+"Experiences? Delightful Alicia, speaking your language, no. You are
+thinking of the resident surgeon, the medical student, the interesting
+patient. My resident surgeon is fifty years old; the medical student is
+a Bengali in white cotton and patent leather shoes. I am occupied in a
+ward full of deck hands. For these I hold the bandage and the bottle;
+they are hardly aware of me."
+
+"You are sure to have them," Alicia said. "They crop up wherever you go
+in this world, either before you or behind you."
+
+Hilda fixed her eyes attentively upon her companion. "Sometimes," she
+said, "you say things that are extremely true in their general bearing.
+A fortuneteller with cards gives one the same shock of surprise.
+Well, let me tell you, I have been promoted to temperatures. I took
+thirty-five to-day. Next week I am to make poultices; the week after,
+baths and fomentations."
+
+"What are the others like--the other novices?"
+
+"Nearly all Eurasians, one native, a Hindu widow--the Sisters are
+almost demonstrative to her--and one or two local European girls: the
+commissariat sergeant class, I should think."
+
+"They don't sound attractive, and I am glad. You will depend the more
+upon me."
+
+Hilda looked thoughtfully at Miss Livingstone. "I will depend," she
+said, "a good deal upon you."
+
+It was Alicia's fate to meet the Archdeacon again that evening at
+dinner. "And is she really throwing her heart into the work?" asked that
+dignitary, referring to Miss Howe.
+
+"Oh, I think so," Alicia said. "Yes."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The labours of the Baker Institution and of the Clarke Mission were
+very different in scope, so much so that if they had been secular bodies
+working for profit, there would have been hardly a point of contact
+between them. As it was they made one, drawing together in affiliation
+for the comfort of mutual support in a heathen country where all the
+other Englishmen wrote reports, drilled troops, or played polo, with all
+the other Englishwomen in the corresponding female parts. Doubtless
+the little communities prayed for each other. One may imagine, not
+profanely, their petitions rising on either side of the heedless,
+multitudinous, idolatrous city, and meeting at some point in the purer
+air above the yellow dust-haze. I am not aware that they held any other
+mutual duty or privilege, but this bond was known, and enabled people
+whose conscience pricked them in that direction to give little garden
+teas to which they invited Clarke Brothers and Baker Sisters, secure
+in doing a benevolent thing and at the same time embarrassing nobody
+except, possibly, the Archdeacon, who was officially exposed to being
+asked as well and had no right to complain. The affiliation was thus a
+social convenience, since it is unlikely that without it anybody would
+have hit upon so ingenious a way of killing, as it were, a Baker Sister
+and a Clarke Brother with one stone. It is not surprising that this
+degree of intelligence should fail to see the profound official
+difference between Baker Sisters and Baker novices. As the Mother
+Superior said, it did not seem to occur to people that there could be
+in connection with a religious body, such words as discipline and
+subordination, which were certainly made ridiculous for the time being,
+when she and Sister Ann Frances were asked to eat ices on the same terms
+as Miss Hilda Howe. It must have been more than ever painful to these
+ladies, regarded from the official point of view, when it became plain,
+as it usually did, that the interest of the afternoon centred in Miss
+Howe, whether or not the Archdeacon happened to be present. Their
+displeasure was so clear, after the first occasion, that Hilda felt
+obliged when the next one came, to fall back on her original talent, and
+ate her ice abashed and silent speaking only when she was spoken to, and
+then in short words and long hesitations. Thereupon the Sisters were of
+opinion that after all poor Miss Howe could not help her unenviable lot,
+she was perhaps more to be pitied on account of it than--anything else.
+It came to this, that Sister Ann Frances even had an exhibitor's pride
+in her, and Hilda knew the sensations of a barbarian female captive in
+the bonds of the Christians. But she could not afford to risk being
+cut off from those little garden teas. All told, they were few; ladies
+disturbed by ideas of social duties toward missionaries being so
+uncommon.
+
+She told Stephen so, frankly, one afternoon when he charged her with
+being so unlike herself, and he heard her explanation with a gravity
+which contained an element of satisfaction. "It is, of course, a
+pleasure to us to meet," he said, "a pleasure to us both." That was
+part of the satisfaction, that he could meet her candour with the same
+openness. He was not even afraid to mention to her the stimulus she gave
+him always and his difficulty in defining it, and once he told her how,
+after a talk with her, he had lain awake until the small hours unable
+to stop his excited rush of thought. He added that he was now personally
+and selfishly glad she had chosen as she did three months before; it
+made a difference to him, her being in Calcutta, a sensible and material
+difference. He had better hope and heart in his work. It was the last
+luxury he would ever have dreamed of allowing himself, a woman friend;
+but since life had brought it in the oddest way the boon should be met
+with no grudging of gratitude. A kind of sedate cheerfulness crept into
+his manner which was new to him; he went about his duties with the
+look of a man to whom life had dictated its terms and who found them
+acceptable. His blood might have received some mysterious chemical
+complement, so much was his eye clearer, his voice firmer, and the
+things he found to say more decisive. Nor did any consideration of their
+relations disturb him. He never thought of the oxygen in the air he
+breathed, and he seldom thought of Hilda.
+
+They were walking toward the Institution together the day he explained
+to her his gratification that she had elected to remain. Sister Ann
+Frances and Sister Margaret led; Arnold and Hilda came behind. He had an
+errand to the Mother Superior--he would go all the way. It was late in
+May and late in the afternoon; all the treetops on the Maidan were bent
+under the sweep of the south wind, blowing a caressing coolness from
+the sea. It spread fragrances about and shook down blossoms from the
+gold-mohur trees. One could see nothing anywhere, so red and yellow as
+they were, except the long coat of a Government messenger, a point of
+scarlet moving in the perspective of a dusty road. The spreading acres
+of turf were baked to every earth-colour; wherever a pine dropped
+needles and an old woman swept them up, a trail of dust ran curling
+along the ground like smoke. The little party was unusual in walking;
+glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias and
+landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British soldiers facing
+each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped bullocks, and marked
+Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-skirts so near the powder of
+the road. The Sisters in front walked with their heads slightly bent
+toward one another; they seemed to be consulting. Hilda reflected,
+looking at them, that they always seemed to be consulting; it was the
+normal attitude of that long black veil that flowed behind.
+
+Arnold walked beside his companion, his hands loosely clasped behind
+him, with the air of semi-detachment that young clergymen sometimes
+have with their wives. Whether it was that, or the trace of custom his
+satisfaction carried, the casual glance might easily have taken them for
+a married pair.
+
+"There is a kind of folly and stupidity in saying it," he said, "but you
+have done--you do--a great deal for me."
+
+She turned toward him with a wistful, measuring look. It searched his
+face for an instant and came back baffled. Arnold spoke with so much
+kindness, so much appreciation.
+
+"Very little," she said mechanically, looking at the fresh footprints of
+Sister Ann Frances and Sister Margaret.
+
+"But I know. And can't you tell me--it would make me so very happy--that
+I have done something for you too--something that you value?"
+
+Hilda's eyes lightened curiously, reverie came into them, and a smile.
+She answered as if she spoke to herself, "I should not know how to tell
+you."
+
+Then scenting wonder in him she added, "You were thinking of
+something--in particular?"
+
+"You have sometimes made me believe," Stephen returned, "that I may
+account myself, under God, the accident which induced you to take up
+your blessed work. I was thinking of that."
+
+"Oh," she said, "of that!" and seemed to take refuge in silence.
+
+"Yes," Arnold said, with infinite gentleness.
+
+"But you were profoundly the cause! I might say you are, for without you
+I doubt whether I should have the--courage--"
+
+"Oh no! Oh no! He who inspired you in the beginning will sustain you to
+the end. Think that. Believe that."
+
+"Will He?" Her voice was neutral, as if it would not betray too much,
+but there was a listlessness that spoke louder in the bend of her head,
+the droop of her shoulder.
+
+"For you perhaps," Arnold said thoughtfully, "there is only one
+assurance of it--the satisfaction your vocation brings you now. That
+will broaden and increase," he went on, almost with buoyancy, "growing
+more and more your supreme good as the years go on."
+
+"How much you give me credit for!"
+
+"Not nearly enough--not nearly. Who is there like you?" he demanded
+simply.
+
+His words seemed a baptism. She lifted up her face after them, and the
+trace of them was on her eyes and lips. "I have passed two examinations,
+at all events," she informed him, with sudden gaiety, "and Sister Ann
+Frances says that in two or three months I shall probably get through
+the others. Sister Ann Frances thinks me more intelligent than might be
+expected. And if I do pass those examinations I shall be what they call
+a quick-time probationer. I shall have got it over in six months. Do
+you think," she asked, as if to please herself; "that six months will be
+long enough?"
+
+"It depends. There is so much to consider."
+
+"Yes--it depends. Sometimes I think it will be, but oftener I think it
+will take longer."
+
+"I should be inclined to leave it entirely with the Sisters."
+
+"I am so undisciplined," murmured Hilda, "I fear I shall cling to my own
+opinion. Now we must overtake the others and you must walk the rest of
+the way with Sister Ann--no, Sister Margaret, she is senior."
+
+"I don't at all see the necessity," Stephen protested. He was wilful
+and wayward; he adopted a privileged air, and she scolded him. In their
+dispute they laughed so imprudently that Sister Ann Frances turned her
+draped head to look back at them. Then they quickened their steps and
+joined the elder ladies, and Stephen walked with Sister Margaret to the
+door of the Institution. She mentioned to the Mother Superior afterwards
+that young Mr. Arnold was really a delightful conversationalist.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+They talked a great deal in Plymouth about the way the time was passing
+in Calcutta during those last three months before Laura should return,
+the months of the rains. "Now," said Mrs. Simpson, early in July, "it
+will be pouring every day, with great patches of the Maidan under water,
+and rivers, my dear, RIVERS, in the back streets"; and Laura had a
+reminiscence about how, exactly at that time, a green mould used to
+spread itself fresh every morning on the matting under her bed in
+Bentinck Street. Later on they would agree that perhaps by this time
+there was a "break in the rains," and that nothing in the world was so
+trying as a break in the rains, the sun grilling down and drawing up
+steam from every puddle. In September, things, they remembered, would
+be at their very worst and most depressing; one had hardly the energy to
+lift a finger in September. Mrs. Simpson looked back upon the discomfort
+she had endured in Bengal at this time of year with a kind of regret
+that it was irretrievably over; she lingered upon a severe illness which
+had been part of the experience. She seemed to think that with a little
+judicious management she might have spent more time in that climate, and
+less in England. There was in her tone a suggestion of gentle envy of
+Laura, going forth to these dismal conditions with her young life in her
+hands all tricked out for the sacrifice, which left Duff Lindsay and his
+white and gold drawing-room entirely out of consideration. Any sacrifice
+to Mrs. Simpson was alluring, she would be killed all day long, in a
+manner, for its own sake.
+
+The victim had taken her passage early in October, and during the first
+week of that month Plymouth gathered itself into meetings to bid her
+farewell. A curiously sacred character had fastened itself upon her; it
+was not in the least realised that she was going out to be married to an
+altogether secular young broker moving in fashionable circles in one
+of the gayest cities in the world. Ones or two reverend persons in
+the course of commending their young sister to the protection of
+the Almighty in her approaching separation from the dear friends who
+surrounded her in Plymouth, made references implying that her labours
+would continue to the glory of God, taking it as a matter of course.
+Miss Filbert was by this time very much impregnated with the idea that
+they would, she did not know precisely how, but that would open itself
+out. Duff had long been assimilated as part of the programme. All that
+money and humility could contribute should be forthcoming from him; she
+had a familiar dream of him as her standard-bearer, undistinguished but
+for ever safe.
+
+Yet it was with qualified approval that Mrs. Simpson, amid the confusion
+of the Coromandel's preparations for departure at London Docks,
+heard the inevitable strains of the Salvation Army rising aft. Laura
+immediately cried, "I shall have friends among the passengers," and Mrs.
+Simpson so far forgot herself as to say, "Yes, if they are nice." The
+ladies were sitting on deck beside the pile of Laura's very superior
+cabin luggage. Mrs. Simpson glanced at it as if it offered a kind of
+corroboration of the necessity of their being nice. "There are always a
+few delightful Christian people, if one takes the trouble to find them
+out, at this end of the ship," she said defensively. "I have never
+failed to find it so."
+
+"I don't think much of Christians who are so hard to discover,"
+Laura said with decision; and Mrs. Simpson, rebuked, thought of the
+mischievous nature of class prejudices. Laura herself--had she not
+been drawn from what one might call distinctly the other end of the
+ship?--and who, among those who vaunted themselves ladies and gentlemen,
+could compare with Laura! The idea that she had shown a want of sympathy
+with those dear people who were so strenuously calling down a blessing
+on the Coromandel somewhere behind the smoke stacks, embittered poor
+Mrs. Simpson's remaining tears of farewell, and when the bell rang the
+signal for the last good-bye, she embraced her young friend with the
+fervent request, "Do make friends with them, dear one--make friends with
+them at once"; and Laura said, "If they will make friends with me."
+
+By the time the ship had well got her nose down the coast of Spain, Miss
+Filbert had created her atmosphere, and moved about in it from end to
+end of the quarter-deck. It was a recognisable thing, her atmosphere,
+one never knew when it would discharge a question relating to the
+gravest matters; and persons unprepared to give satisfaction upon this
+point--one fears there are some on a ship bound east of Suez--found
+it blighting. They moved their long chairs out of the way, they
+turned pointedly indifferent backs, the lady who shared Miss Filbert's
+cabin--she belonged to a smart cavalry regiment at Mhow--went about
+saying things with a distinct edge. Miss Filbert exhausted all the
+means. She attempted to hold a meeting forward of the smoking cabin,
+standing for elevation on one of the ship's quoit buckets to preach, but
+with this the captain was reluctantly compelled to interfere on
+behalf of the whist-players inside. In the evening, after dinner, she
+established herself in a sheltered corner and sang. Her recovered
+voice lifted itself with infinite pathetic sweetness in songs about the
+poverty of the world and the riches of heaven; the notes mingled with
+the churning of the screw, and fell in the darkness beyond the ship's
+lights abroad upon the sea. The other passengers listened aloof; the
+Coromandel was crowded, but you could have drawn a wide circle round her
+chair. On the morning of the fourth day out--she had not felt quite
+well enough for adventures before--she found her way to the second-class
+saloon, being no doubt fully justified of her conscience in abandoning
+the first to the flippancies of its preference.
+
+In the second-class end the tone was certainly more like that of
+Plymouth. Laura had a grateful sense of this in coming, almost at once,
+upon a little group gathered together for praise and prayer, of which
+four or five persons of both sexes, labelled "S. A.," naturally
+formed the centre. They were not only praying and praising without
+discouragement, they had attracted several other people who had brought
+their chairs into near and friendly relation, and even joined sometimes
+in the chorus of the hymns. There was a woman in mourning who cried a
+good deal--her tears seemed to refresh the Salvationists and inspire
+them to louder and more cheerful efforts. There was a man in a wide,
+soft felt hat with the malaria of the Terai in the hollows under
+his eyes; there was a Church Missionary with an air of charity and
+forbearance, and the bushy-eyed colonel of a native regiment looking
+vigilant against ridicule, with his wife, whose round red little face
+continually waxed and waned in a smile of true contentment. It was not
+till later that Laura came to know them all so very well, but her eye
+rested on them one after another, with approval, as she drew near.
+Without pausing in his chant--it happened to be one of triumph--without
+even looking at her, the leader indicated an empty chair. It was his
+own chair. "Colonel Markin, S. A." was printed in black letters on its
+striped canvas back; Laura noticed that.
+
+After it was over, the little gathering, Colonel Markin specially
+distinguished her. He did it delicately. "I hope you won't mind my
+expressin' my thanks for the help you gave us in the singin'," he said.
+"Such a voice I've seldom had the pleasure to join with. May I ask where
+you got it trained?"
+
+He was a narrow-chested man with longish sandy hair and thin features.
+His eyes were large, blue, and protruding, his forehead very high and
+white. There was a pinkness about the root of his nose, and a scanty
+yellow moustache upon his upper lip, while his chin was partly hidden by
+a beard equally scanty and even more yellow. He had extremely long white
+hands; one could not help observing them as they clasped his book of
+devotion.
+
+Laura looked at him with profound appreciation of these details. She
+knew Colonel Markin by reputation, he had done a great work among the
+Cingalese. "It was trained," she said, casting down her eyes, "on the
+battlefields of our Army."
+
+Colonel Markin attempted to straighten his shoulders and to stiffen his
+chin. He seemed vaguely aware of a military tradition which might make
+it necessary for him, as a very senior officer indeed, to say something.
+But the impression was transitory. Instead of using any rigour he held
+out his hand. Laura took it reverently, and the bones shut up, like the
+sticks of a fan, in her grasp. "Welcome, comrade!" he said, and there
+was a pause, as there should be after such an apostrophe.
+
+"When you came among us this afternoon," Colonel Markin resumed, "I
+noticed you. There was something about the way you put your hand over
+your eyes when I addressed our Heavenly Father that spoke to me. It
+spoke to me and said, 'Here we have a soul that knows what salvation
+means--there's no doubt about that.' Then when you raised a Hallelujah
+I said to myself, 'That's got the right ring to it.' And so you're a
+sister in arms!"
+
+"I was," Laura murmured.
+
+"You was--you were. Well, well--I want to hear all about it. It is now,"
+continued Colonel Markin, as two bells struck and a steward passed them
+with a bugle, "the hour for our dinner, and I suppose that you too," he
+bent his head respectfully towards the other half of the ship, "partake
+of some meal at this time. But if you will seek us out again at the
+meeting between four and five I shall be at your service afterwards, and
+pleased," he took her hand again, "PLEASED to see you."
+
+Laura went back to the evening meeting, and after that missed none of
+these privileges. In due course she was asked to address it, and then
+her position became enviable from all points of view, for people who did
+not draw up their chairs and admire her inspirations sat at a distance
+and admired her clothes. Very soon, at her special request, she was
+allowed to resign her original place at table and take a revolving chair
+at the nine o'clock breakfast, one o'clock dinner, and six o'clock tea
+which sustained the second saloon. Daily, ascending the companion ladder
+to the main deck aft she gradually faded from cognisance forward. There
+they lay back in their long chairs and sipped their long drinks, and
+with neutral eyes and lips they let the blessing go.
+
+In the intervals between the exercises Miss Filbert came and went in
+the cabin of three young Salvationists of her own sex. They could always
+make room for her, difficult as it may appear; she held for them an
+indefinite store of fascination. Laura would extend herself on a top
+berth beside the round-eyed Norwegian to whom it belonged, with the
+cropped head of the owner pillowed on her sisterly arm, and thus they
+passed hours, discussing conversions as medical students might discuss
+cases, relating, comparing. They talked a great deal about Colonel
+Markin. They said it was a beautiful life. More beautiful if possible
+had been the life of Mrs. Markin, who was his second wife, and who had
+been "promoted to glory" six months before. She had gained promotion
+through jungle fever, which had carried her off in three days. The first
+Mrs. Markin had died of drink--that was what had sent the Colonel into
+the Army, she, the first Mrs. Markin, having willed her property away
+from him. Colonel Markin had often rejoiced publicly that the lady
+had been of this disposition, the results to him had been so blessed.
+Apparently he spoke without reserve of his domestic affairs in
+connection with his spiritual experiences, using both the Mrs. Markins
+when it was desirable as "illustrations." The five had reached this
+degree of intimacy by the time the Coromandel was nearing Port Said,
+and every day the hemispheres of sea and sky they watched through the
+porthole above the Norwegian girl's berth grew bluer.
+
+From the first Colonel Markin had urged Miss Filbert's immediate return
+to the Army. He found her sympathetic to the idea, willing indeed to
+embrace it with open arms, but there were difficulties. Mr. Lindsay, as
+a difficulty, was almost insuperable to anything like a prompt step
+in that direction. Colonel Markin admitted it himself. He was bound to
+admit it he said, but nothing, since he joined the Army, had ever been
+so painful to him. "I wish I could deny it," he said with frankness;
+"but there is no doubt that for the present your first duty is towards
+your gentleman, towards him who placed that ring upon your finger."
+There was no sarcasm in his describing Lindsay as a gentleman; he used
+the term in a kind of extra special sense where a person less accustomed
+to polite usages might have spoken of Laura's young man. "But remember,
+my child," he continued, "it is only your poor vile body that is
+yours to dispose of, your soul belongs to God Almighty, and no earthly
+husband, especially as you say he is still in his sins, is going to
+have the right to interfere." This may seem vague, as the statement of
+a position, but Laura found it immensely fortifying. That and similar
+arguments built her up in her determination to take up what Colonel
+Markin called her life-work again at the earliest opportunity. She had
+forfeited her rank, that she accepted humbly as a proper punishment,
+ardently hoping it would be found sufficient. She would go back as a
+private, take her place in the ranks, and nothing in her married life
+should interfere with the things that cried out to be done in Bentinck
+Street. Somehow she had less hope of securing Lindsay as a spiritual
+companion in arms since she had confided the affair to Colonel Markin.
+As he said, they must hope for the best, but he could not help admitting
+that he took a gloomy view of Lindsay.
+
+"Once he has secured you," the Colonel said, with an appreciative glance
+at Laura's complexion, "what will he care about his soul? Nothing."
+
+Their enthusiasm had ample opportunity to strengthen, their mutual
+satisfactions to expand, in the close confines of life on board ship,
+and as if to seal and sanctify the voyage permanently a conversion took
+place in the second saloon, owning Laura's agency. It was the maid of
+the lady in the cavalry regiment, a hardened heart, as two stewards and
+a bandmaster on board could testify. When this occurred the time that
+was to elapse between Laura's marriage and her return to the ranks was
+shortened to one week. "And quite long enough," Colonel Markin said,
+"considering how much more we need you than your gentleman does, my dear
+sister."
+
+It was plain to them all that Colonel Markin had very special views
+about his dear sister. The other dear sisters looked on with pleasurable
+interest, admitting the propriety of it, as Colonel Markin walked up and
+down the deck with Laura, examining her lovely nature, "drawing her out"
+on the subject of her faith and her assurance. It was natural, as he
+told her, that in her peculiar situation she should have doubts and
+difficulties. He urged her to lay bare her heart, and she laid it bare.
+One evening--it was heavenly moonlight on the Indian Ocean, and they
+were two days past Aden on the long south-east run to Ceylon--she came
+and stood before him with a small packet in her hand. She was all in
+white, and more like an angel than Markin expected ever to see anything
+in this world, though as to the next his anticipations may have been
+extravagant.
+
+"Now I wonder," said he, "where you are going to sit down?"
+
+A youngster in the Police got up and pushed his chair forward, but Laura
+shook her head.
+
+"I am going out there," she said, pointing to the farthermost stern
+where passengers were not encouraged to sit, "and I want to consult
+you."
+
+Markin got up. "If there's anything pressin' on your mind," he said,
+"you can't do better."
+
+Laura said nothing until they were alone with the rushing of the screw,
+two Lascars, some coils of rope, and the hand-steering gear. Then she
+opened the packet. "These," she said, "these are pressing on my mind."
+
+She held out a string of pearls, a necklace of pearls and turquoises, a
+heavy band bracelet studded, Delhi fashion, with gems, one or two lesser
+fantasies.
+
+"Jewellery!" said Markin. "Real or imitation?"
+
+"So far as that goes they are good. Mr. Lindsay gave them to me. But
+what have I to do with jewels, the very emblem of the folly of the
+world, the desire that itches in palms that know no good works, the
+price of sin!" She leaned against the masthead as she spoke, the wind
+blew her hair and her skirt out toward the following seas. With that
+look in her eyes she seemed a creature who had alighted on the ship but
+who could not stay.
+
+Colonel Markin held the pearls up in the moonlight.
+
+"They must have cost something to buy," he said.
+
+Laura was silent.
+
+"And so they're a trouble to you. Have you taken them to the Lord in
+prayer?"
+
+"Oh, many times."
+
+"Couldn't seem to hear any answer?"
+
+"The only answer I could hear was. 'So long as you have them I will not
+speak with you.'"
+
+"That seems pretty plain and clear. And yet?" said the Colonel, fondling
+the turquoises, "nobody can say there's any harm in such things,
+especially if you don't wear them."
+
+"Colonel, they are my great temptation. I don't know that I wouldn't
+wear them. And when I wear them I can think of nothing sacred, nothing
+holy. When they were given to me I used--I used to get up in the night
+to look at them."
+
+"Shall I lay it before the Almighty? That bracelet's got a remarkably
+good clasp."
+
+"Oh no--no! I must part with them. To-night I can do it, to-night--"
+
+"There's nobody on this ship that will give you any price for them."
+
+"I would not think of selling them. It would be sending them from my
+hands to do harm to some other poor creature, weaker than I!"
+
+"You can't return them to-night."
+
+"I wouldn't return them. That would be the same as keeping them."
+
+"Then what--oh, I see!" exclaimed Markin. "You want to give them to the
+Army. Well, in my capacity, on behalf of General Booth--"
+
+"No," cried Laura with sudden excitement, "not that either. I will give
+them to nobody. But this is what I will do!" She seized the bracelet and
+flung it far out into the opaline track of the vessel, and the smaller
+objects, before her companion could stop her, followed it. Then he
+caught her wrist.
+
+"Stop!" he cried. "You've gone off your head--you've got fever. You're
+acting wicked with that jewellery. 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
+towards 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 Sunderbunds; instead
+of it, one met round 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 gave 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. There had come upon her a stimulating
+assurance that it would be only a moment--now. She did not consider
+this, she could hardly be said to be intelligently aware of it, but
+it underlay all that she said and did. 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, and the perception
+irritated her. She had to tell herself that she had given him the right
+to look in any way he pleased--indeed yes.
+
+"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 had nearly always now 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 coarse gown and shoes. "God's wayfarer," she murmured. There
+was pity in her mind, infinite pity. Her thought had no other tinge. It
+was a curiously simple feeling, and seemed to bring her an inconsistent
+lightness of heart.
+
+"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 that sprang to her eyes,
+and she marvelled at the gaiety 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 archidiaconal
+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 snowflake 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. "The paramount stupidity." She did not repeat it
+aloud, 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. She had hoped for something that would throw
+more light upon the paramount stupidity. "He brought Mr. Lappe to tea,"
+she said.
+
+The shadow went. "Should you think Brother Lappe," Miss Howe 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 back
+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. Very valuable!
+She did understand, suddenly, completely. Very valuable! A year of the
+oddest experiences, a pictorial year, which she would look back upon,
+with its core in a dusty priest....
+
+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
+
+
+Dr. 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 bazar."
+
+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. 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 money-lenders. 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 Burra Bazar.
+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 hers with a note of the profound and of the supreme. She turned
+resolutely from searching her heart for any wild despair. She would
+not for an instant consider what she ought to feel. "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 Two. She went more and more slowly toward Private Ward Number
+Two.
+
+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 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 Six 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,
+his impotent love. 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 a regret--for you."
+
+"Ah!" Hilda cried, with a vivid note of pain. "Would you? I am sorry for
+that! 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--the price of the year that
+had been very valuable.
+
+"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--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 Mother 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 the 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. Suddenly, then, a harsh
+quarrelling of dogs--Christian dogs--arose in the distance and died
+away, and again there was night and silence. Night for hours. Time for
+reflection, alone with death and the lamp, upon the year that had
+been very valuable. "I would have married you," she whispered. "Yes,
+I would." Later her lips moved again. "I would have taken the
+consequence;" and again, "I would have paid any penalty." There he lay,
+a burden that she would never bear, a burden that would be gone in the
+morning. There were moments when she cried out on Fate for doing her
+this kindness.
+
+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 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 charge 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. "I would have married you," she whispered
+passionately as if that could stay him. "Yes, I would."
+
+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 her reference to their joint indebtedness.
+
+"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 earlier. 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path of a Star, by 
+Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
+
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