Hilda Part 31

"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 regret--for you."

"Ah!" Hilda cried with a vivid note of pain, "I am sorry! 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.

"My G.o.d is a jealous G.o.d," 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d has turned my back upon."

Then it came to her that he had asked for no caress. He was going una.s.soiled to his G.o.d, 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, 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 Sister 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 her 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 att.i.tude 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. Then a harsh quarrelling of dogs--Christian dogs--arose in the distance and died away, and again there was night and silence. Suddenly 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 nearest 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 change 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.

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, pa.s.sing 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 f.a.gged. 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 G.o.d.

"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.

"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 circ.u.mstance, and turned in at the gate of the Baker Inst.i.tution. 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 before. 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 ha.s.sock 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 overwhelming 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.