Hilda Part 15

"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 purpose 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 plat.i.tude, 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 plat.i.tude 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 subst.i.tutes 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-gla.s.s 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 baptise 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 miasm 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 Murphy. I shall be dignified some day--some day! But you see I must make it possible myself, since n.o.body 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 ta.s.sel 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 little limits, were n.o.ble--she was the keenest, loyalist little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the woman as 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 ill.u.s.tration.

"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, 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 sh.e.l.l; 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 usual, in spite of the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes. 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 lat.i.tude. 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 b.u.t.tons 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 imitation 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 Inst.i.tution, 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 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 a.s.sent. 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 embarra.s.sment, sharpening her curiosity.