Hilda

"He might be proud to."

"We must all try and bring sin home to him," Mrs. Sand remarked with rising energy; "and don"t you go saying anything to him hastily. If he"s gone on you----"

"Oh, Ensign; let us hope he is thinking of higher things! Let us both pray for him. Let Captain Sand pray for him, too, and I"ll ask the Lieutenant. Now that she"s got Miss Rozario safe into the Kingdom, I don"t think she has any special object."

"Oh, yes, we"ll pray for him," Ensign Sand returned, as if that might have gone without saying, "but you----"

"And give me that precious baby. You must be completely worn out. I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should."

"It"s the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin" child out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.

The Believers" Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of his reception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario"s young lady friends away, and these also, doubtless, operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not attend a Believers" Rally unless one"s personal faith extends beyond the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one"s spiritual condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley square, later in the evening, the conditions were different. It would not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment. The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone, and tram-drivers whistled bullock carts off the lines, and street pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the group of exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura"s hair, and made glorious the b.u.t.tons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to the people in their own language; the "open air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!" (Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd.

He looked down at a coolie woman with shrivelled b.r.e.a.s.t.s crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the bricks of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not delay until to-morrow!" Laura besought them. "_Kul-ka dari mut karo!_" A sensation of disgust a.s.sailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse of atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back and dropped a coin into the coolie creature"s lap. But he grew more miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench at a distance, where he could not hear her voice. Only the hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn.

In the chorus the words were distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand--

"_Us ki ho tarif, Us ki ho tarif!_"

The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle, a discordance of a special intolerable sort.

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn"t, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

"Glory to His name!" "Glory to His name!"

His "Good evening!" when the meeting was over was a cheerful, general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant Da Cruz"s smile was even further significant, if he had thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate appeal, as they moved off.

"I guess you"ve got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called put, and they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer, the East Indian paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and slipped away.

"The Ensign knows she oughtn"t to talk like that," Laura said. Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed and seemed perturbed.

"What she said was quite true," he ventured.

"But--anybody would think----"

"What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road? It"s quieter. What would anybody think?"

"Oh, silly things." Laura threw up her head with a half-laugh. "Things I needn"t mention."

Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then "Between us?" he asked, and she nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His pa.s.sion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.

"I don"t believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay." Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed to be a circ.u.mstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.

Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.

"Dear," he said, "you can"t know--there is no way of telling you--what I mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves; but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you.

I can"t explain to you how poor it was, and I won"t try; but I fancy G.o.d sends every one of us, if we know it, some one blessed chance, and He did more for me--He lifted the veil of my stupidity and let me see it, pa.s.sing by in its halo, trailing clouds of glory. I don"t want to make you understand, though--I want to make you promise. I want to be absolutely sure from to-night that you"ll marry me. Say that you"ll marry me--say it before we get to the crossing. Say it, Laura." She listened to his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then made as if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and she heard him through, walking beside him formally in her bare feet, and looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in Putney.

"I don"t object to your calling me by my given name," she said when he had done, "but it can"t go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay, and you ought not to bring G.o.d into it--indeed you ought not. You are no son or servant of His--you are among those whose very light is darkness, and how great is your darkness!"

"Don"t," he said shortly, "never mind about that--now. You needn"t be afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know, outside the Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants you to marry him, that"s how it is. Will you?"

"I don"t wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I"m very much obliged, but I couldn"t dream of it."

"Don"t dream of it; consider it, accept it. Why, darling, you are half mine already--don"t you feel that?"

Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of his eyes in her. Her tired body even clung to him. "Are you quite sure you haven"t begun to think of loving me?" he demanded.

"It isn"t a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it"s a question of the Army.

You don"t seem to think the Army counts for anything."

One is convinced that it wasn"t a question of love, the least in the world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and the flame in him leaped up.

"Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question."

"Is that a quotation?" she asked. She spoke coldly, and this time she succeeded in withdrawing her hand. "I dare say you think the Army very common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great and holy crusade, and I march with it. You would not ask me to give up my life-work?"

"Only to take it into another sphere," Duff said, unreflectively. He was checked but not discouraged, impatient, but in no wise cast down. She had not flown, she walked beside him placidly. She had no intention of flight. He tried to resign himself to the task of beating down her trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse to leap over them.

"Another sphere"--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation. "I suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same."

"Not quite the same. You would have to drive to see your sinners in a carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them in--what do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or pearls. I think I would rather see you in pearls." He was aware of the inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped to laugh inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn of her head.

"We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most of them would be on Government House list, just as most of your present ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the district magistrates. But you would find just as much to do for them."

"I should not even know how to act in such company."

"You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some people I know; delightful people, who will understand. A year! You will learn in three months--what odds and ends there are to know. I couldn"t spare you for a year."

Lindsay stopped. He had to. Captain Filbert was murmuring the cadences of a hymn. She went through two stanzas, and--covered her eyes for a moment with her hand. When she spoke it was in a quiet, level, almost mechanical way. "Yes," she said. "The Cross and the Crown, the Crown and the Cross. Father in Heaven, I do not forget Thy will and Thy purpose, that I should bring the word of Thy love to the poor and the lowly, the outcast and those despised. And what I say to this man, who offers me the gifts and the gladness of a world that had none for Thee, is the answer Thou hast put in my heart--that the work is Thine and that I am Thine, and he has no part or lot in me, nor can ever have. Here is Crooked lane. Good-night, Mr. Lindsay."

She had slipped into the devious darkness of the place before he could find any reply, before he quite realised, indeed, that they had reached her lodging. He could only utter a vague "Good-night" after her, formulating more definite statements to himself a few minutes later in Bentinck street.

CHAPTER XI.

Miss Howe was walking in the business quarter of Calcutta. It was the business quarter, and yet the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes, and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of palms in pots showed behind the bal.u.s.trades of the flat roofs whenever a story ran short. Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary well-being, a sense of lifted burden. The stucco streets were too slovenly to be purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them, the pariahs blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in the cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices or circled against the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be abroad, in the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with brown humility, half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility seemed well affected toward the world, alert and content. The air was full of the comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced luxuries and the incense of wayside trees; it was as if the sun laid a bland compelling hand upon the city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange fruits increase. Brokers" gharries rattled past, each holding a pale young man preoccupied with a note-book; where the bullock-carts gathered themselves together and blocked the road the pale young men put excited heads out of the gharry windows and used remarkable imprecations. One of them, as Hilda turned into the compound of the _Calcutta Chronicle_, leaned out to take off his hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the pleasant reflection of his infinite interest in life.

"Upon my word," she said to herself, as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, "he"s so light-hearted, so general, that one doubts the very tremendous effect even of a failure like the one he contemplates."

She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman, and followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who hardly lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to look at her--so many memsahibs to whose enterprises the _Chronicle_ gave prominence came to see the manager-sahib and they were so much alike. At all events they carried a pa.s.sport to indifference in the fact that they all wanted something, and it was clear to the meanest intelligence that they appeared to be more magnificent than they were, visions in dazzling complexions and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-cla.s.s ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts. It was less interesting still when they belonged to the other cla.s.s, the shabby ladies, nearly always in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court, or sons before the police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible, "kept out of the paper." Successful or not, these always wept on their way out, and nothing could be more depressing. The only gleam of entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of a boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local columns of the _Chronicle_--a lady who had never known what a bailiff looked like in the lifetime of her first husband, or her second either. Then at the sound of a pudgy blow upon a table or high abusive accents in the rapid, elaborate cadences of the domiciled East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would glance at Gobind Babu with a careful smile, for the manager-sahib who dispensed so much _galli_[6] was now receiving the same, and defenceless.

[Footnote 6: Abuse.]

The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in. He did not rise--he was one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee exports in such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and she had come on business. He gave her a nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table.

He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table with his blue pencil, he asked Miss Howe how the world was using _her_.