Hilda Part 7

"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered, still searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eye could permanently rest, "where, if you remember, ensigns are the smallest officer we have."

"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, trying to govern 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 suspiciously close to the lath and canvas part.i.tion on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mr.

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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 humourous. 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 cane-bottomed 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 part.i.tion, 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 almost 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 G.o.d!" 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. n.o.body 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 munic.i.p.al 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 tramcar held on its course in conscious invincibility. A pariah tore along beside the vehicle barking; crows flew up from the dung in the road by half-dozens, protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead necklaces just escaped being knocked down. Little groups of baboos[4] and bunnias[5] 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 further 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 clash 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 bazaar, 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 possibility of vague 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.

[Footnote 4: Clerks.]

[Footnote 5: Small dealers.]

"Is it possible?" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not hurt?"

"Only sc.r.a.ped, 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.