Hilda Part 19

"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 sc.r.a.p 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. Half way up she paused and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her glance, and something of primitive puissance pa.s.sed, 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 appet.i.te 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 s.p.a.ces 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 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 afterward? 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 pa.s.sed them in mechanical succession; a tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke the silence afterward, 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 a.s.sent 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 to some kind of action. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 _durwan_[8] yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first boarding 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 poster 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.

[Footnote 8: Doorkeeper.]

The life of the market, the bazaar, was all awake and moving. They rolled up though 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-b.u.t.tons, 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 contributory 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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. Further on, beyond the cage of the money-changer, the country people were hoa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.s 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 put 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 circ.u.mstances that suggested projection, 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 debas.e.m.e.nt 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, and no one had a pice for her except one man, a sailor who refused the paper. When he rejoined his companions there was a hoa.r.s.e 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"

pa.s.sed 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! G.o.d 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 gra.s.s. 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g tank-ponds 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 s.p.a.ce 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 traditions, and a thinking 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 gra.s.s 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 sweetness 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 gra.s.s, 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 arguments--which is like saying all the arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical outcome of these things had been an intimate object-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 at 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 gra.s.sy s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sed 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 it, breasting the glow and the colour and 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 colourable, 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sive delight that they should meet and take a path together, he 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 a.s.serted, "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 succ.u.mbed, as you say, to her n.o.bler instincts."

Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent the grimness of this 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."