Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose Part 29

Everything comes at last, you know, to him that waits."

"And yet," I put in, with a meditative air, "I have never observed that waiters are so much better off than the rest of the community. They seem to me--"

"Don't talk nonsense. It is YOU who are wandering from the question now.

Please return to it."

I returned at once. "So I am to depend on what turns up?"

"Yes. Leave that to me. When we see our fellow-pa.s.sengers on the Bombay steamer, I shall soon discover some ostensible reason why we two should be travelling through India with one of them."

"Well, you are a witch, Hilda," I answered. "I found that out long ago; but if you succeed between here and Bombay in inventing a Mission, I shall begin to believe you are even more of a witch than I ever thought you."

At Aden we changed into a P. and O. steamer. Our first evening out on our second cruise was a beautiful one; the bland Indian Ocean wore its sweetest smile for us. We sat on deck after dinner. A lady with a husband came up from the cabin while we sat and gazed at the placid sea. I was smoking a quiet digestive cigar. Hilda was seated in her deck chair next to me.

The lady with the husband looked about her for a vacant s.p.a.ce on which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-sh.e.l.l optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her.

After a minute's effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us. In other words, she sat as far away from everybody present as the necessarily restricted area of the quarter-deck permitted.

Hilda glanced at me and smiled. I s.n.a.t.c.hed a quick look at the lady again. She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness of detail that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean. A cruise on a P.

and O. steamer is not a garden party. Her chair was most luxurious, and had her name painted on it, back and front, in very large letters, with undue obtrusiveness. I read it from where I sat, "Lady Meadowcroft."

The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and most expensively attired. Her face had a certain vacant, languid, half ennuyee air which I have learned to a.s.sociate with women of the nouveau-riche type--women with small brains and restless minds, habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left for a pa.s.sing moment to their own resources.

Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the bow of the steamer. I rose, too, and accompanied her. "Well?" she said, with a faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got out of earshot.

"Well, what?" I answered, unsuspecting.

"I told you everything turned up at the end!" she said, confidently.

"Look at the lady's nose!"

"It does turn up at the end--certainly," I answered, glancing back at her. "But I hardly see--"

"Hubert, you are growing dull! You were not so at Nathaniel's.... It is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose--though I grant you THAT turns up too--the lady I require for our tour in India; the not impossible chaperon."

"Her nose tells you that?"

"Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her chair, her mental att.i.tude to things in general."

"My dear Hilda, you can't mean to tell me you have divined her whole nature at a glance, by magic!"

"Not wholly at a glance. I saw her come on board, you know--she transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been watching her ever since. Yes, I think I have unravelled her."

"You have been astonishingly quick!" I cried.

"Perhaps--but then, you see, there is so little to unravel! Some books, we all know, you must 'chew and digest'; they can only be read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the pages tells you what little worth knowing there is in them."

"She doesn't LOOK profound," I admitted, casting an eye at her meaningless small features as we paced up and down. "I incline to agree you might easily skim her."

"Skim her--and learn all. The table of contents is SO short.... You see, in the first place, she is extremely 'exclusive'; she prides herself on her 'exclusiveness': it, and her shoddy t.i.tle, are probably all she has to pride herself upon, and she works them both hard. She is a sham great lady."

As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice.

"Steward! this won't do! I can smell the engine here. Move my chair. I must go on further."

"If you go on further that way, my lady," the steward answered, good-humouredly, but with a man-servant's deference for any sort of t.i.tle, "you'll smell the galley, where they're cooking the dinner.

I don't know which your ladyship would like best--the engine or the galley."

The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of resignation.

"I'm sure I don't know why they cook the dinners up so high," she murmured, pettishly, to her husband. "Why can't they stick the kitchens underground--in the hold, I mean--instead of bothering us up here on deck with them?"

The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman--stout, somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead: the personification of the successful business man. "My dear Emmie," he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, "the cooks have got to live. They've got to live like the rest of us. I can never persuade you that the hands must always be humoured. If you don't humour 'em, they won't work for you. It's a poor tale when the hands won't work.

Even with galleys on deck, the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt an enviable position. Is not a happy one--not a happy one, as the fellah says in the opera. You must humour your cooks. If you stuck 'em in the hold, you'd get no dinner at all--that's the long and the short of it."

The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air. "Then they ought to have a conscription, or something," she said, pouting her lips.

"The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow. It's bad enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without having one's breath poisoned by--" the rest of the sentence died away inaudibly in a general murmur of ineffective grumbling.

"Why do you think she is EXCLUSIVE?" I asked Hilda as we strolled on towards the stern, out of the spoilt child's hearing.

"Why, didn't you notice?--she looked about her when she came on deck to see whether there was anybody who WAS anybody sitting there, whom she might put her chair near. But the Governor of Madras hadn't come up from his cabin yet; and the wife of the chief Commissioner of Oude had three civilians hanging about her seat; and the daughters of the Commander-in-Chief drew their skirts away as she pa.s.sed. So she did the next best thing--sat as far apart as she could from the common herd: meaning all the rest of us. If you can't mingle at once with the Best People, you can at least a.s.sert your exclusiveness negatively, by declining to a.s.sociate with the mere mult.i.tude."

"Now, Hilda, that is the first time I have ever known you to show any feminine ill-nature!"

"Ill-nature! Not at all. I am merely trying to arrive at the lady's character for my own guidance. I rather like her, poor little thing.

Don't I tell you she will do? So far from objecting to her, I mean to go the round of India with her."

"You have decided quickly."

"Well, you see, if you insist upon accompanying me, I MUST have a chaperon; and Lady Meadowcroft will do as well as anybody else. In fact, being be-ladied, she will do a little better, from the point of view of Society, though THAT is a detail. The great matter is to fix upon a possible chaperon at once, and get her well in hand before we arrive at Bombay."

"But she seems so complaining!" I interposed. "I'm afraid, if you take her on, you'll get terribly bored with her."

"If SHE takes ME on, you mean. She's not a lady's-maid, though I intend to go with her; and she may as well give in first as last, for I'm going. Now see how nice I am to you, sir! I've provided you, too, with a post in her suite, as you WILL come with me. No, never mind asking me what it is just yet; all things come to him who waits; and if you will only accept the post of waiter, I mean all things to come to you."

"All things, Hilda?" I asked, meaningly, with a little tremor of delight.

She looked at me with a sudden pa.s.sing tenderness in her eyes. "Yes, all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn't talk of that--though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my chaperon, I'm not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is constant companionship, bright talk, excitement.

She has come away from London, where she swims with the crowd; she has no resources of her own, no work, no head, no interests. Accustomed to a whirl of foolish gaieties, she wearies her small brain; thrown back upon herself, she bores herself at once, because she has nothing interesting to tell herself. She absolutely requires somebody else to interest her.

She can't even amuse herself with a book for three minutes together.

See, she has a yellow-backed French novel now, and she is only able to read five lines at a time; then she gets tired and glances about her listlessly. What she wants is someone gay, laid on, to divert her all the time from her own inanity."

"Hilda, how wonderfully quick you are at reading these things! I see you are right; but I could never have guessed so much myself from such small premises."

"Well, what can you expect, my dear boy? A girl like this, brought up in a country rectory, a girl of no intellect, busy at home with the fowls, and the pastry, and the mothers' meetings--suddenly married offhand to a wealthy man, and deprived of the occupations which were her salvation in life, to be plunged into the whirl of a London season, and stranded at its end for want of the diversions which, by dint of use, have become necessaries of life to her!"

"Now, Hilda, you are practising upon my credulity. You can't possibly tell from her look that she was brought up in a country rectory."

"Of course not. You forget. There my memory comes in. I simply remember it."

"You remember it? How?"

"Why, just in the same way as I remembered your name and your mother's when I was first introduced to you. I saw a notice once in the births, deaths, and marriages--'At St. Alphege's, Millington, by the Rev.