Hilda Part 29

"Jewelry!" 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 crucify Him afresh daily, 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, "n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body. 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 jewelry. Stop and let us reason it out together."

She already had the turquoises, and with a jerk of her left hand she freed it and threw them after the rest. The necklace caught the handrail as it fell, and Markin made a vain spring to save it. He turned and stared at Laura, who stood fighting the greatest puissance of feeling she had known, looking at the pearls. As he stared, she kissed them twice, and then, leaning over the ship's side, let them slowly slide out of her fingers and fall, into the waves below. The moonlight gave them a divine gleam as they fell. She turned to Markin with tears in her eyes.

"Now," she faltered, "I can be happy again. But not to-night."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

While the _Coromandel_ was throbbing out her regulation number of knots toward Colombo, October was pa.s.sing over Bengal. It went with lethargy, the rains were too close on its heels; but at the end of the long hot days, when the resplendent sun struck down on the glossy trees and the over-lush Maidan, there often stole through Calcutta a breath of the coming respite of December. The blue smoke of the people's cooking fires began to hang again in the streets, the pungent smell of it was pleasant in the still air. The south wind turned back at the Sunder-bunds; instead of it, one met around corners a sudden crispness that stayed just long enough to be recognised and melted damply away. A week might have two or three of such promises and foretastes.

Hilda Howe, approaching the end of her probation at the Baker Inst.i.tution, threw the dormitory window wide to them, went out to seek them. They brought her a new stirring of vitality, something deep within her leaped up responding to the voucher the evenings brought that presently they would bring something new and different. She vibrated to an irrepressible pulse of accord with that: it made her hand strong and her brain clear for the unimportant matters that remained within the scope of the monotonous moment. Her spirits gained an enviable lightness, she began again to see beautiful, touching things in the life that carried her on with it. She explained to Stephen Arnold that she was immensely happy at having pa.s.sed the last of her nursing examinations.

"I hardly dare ask you," he said, "what you are going to do now."

He looked furtive and anxious; she saw that he did.

"I hardly dare ask myself," she answered, and was immediately conscious that for the first time in the history of their relations she had spoken to him that which was expedient.

"I hope the Sisters are not trying to influence you," he said firmly.

"Fancy!" she cried irrelevantly. "I heard the other day that Sister Ann Frances had described me as the pride of the Baker Inst.i.tution!" She laughed with delight at the humour of it, and he smiled too. When she laughed he seemed nearly always now to have confidence enough to smile too.

"You might ask for another six months."

"Heavens, no! No--I shall make up my mind."

"Then you may go away," Arnold said. They were standing at the crossing of the wide red road from which they would go in different directions.

She saw that the question was momentous to him. She also saw how curiously the sun sallowed him and how many more hollows he had in his face than most people. She had a pathetic impression of the figure he made, in his dusty gown and shoes. "G.o.d's wayfarer," she murmured.

"Come too," she said aloud. "Come and be a Clarke Brother where the climatic conditions suit you better. The world wants Clarke Brothers everywhere."

He looked at her and tried to smile, but his lips quivered. He opened them in an effort to speak, gave it up, and turned away silently, lifting his hat. Hilda watched him for an instant as he went. His figure took strange proportions through the tears in her eyes, and she marvelled at the lightness with which she had touched, had almost revealed, her heart's desire.

CHAPTER XXIX.

"I knew it would happen in the end," Hilda said, "and it has happened.

The Archdeacon has asked me to tea."

She was speaking to Alicia Livingstone in the dormitory, changing at the same time for a "turn" at the hospital. It was six o'clock in the afternoon. Alicia's landau stood at the door of the Baker Inst.i.tution.

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 Sat.u.r.day. 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."