Hilda

"And is there anything we Army officers can do for you, Mr. Arnold?" she inquired.

There was a hint in her voice that, whatever it was, they would have done it more willingly if she had not been obliged to ask.

"I am afraid," he said; "my mission is not quite so simple. I could wish it were. It is so easy to show our poor needs to one another; and I should have confidence----" he paused, amazed at the duplicity that grinned at him in his words. At what point more remote within the poles was he likely to show himself with a personal request?

"I have nothing to ask for myself," he went on, with concentration almost harsh. "I am here to see if you will consent to speak with me about a matter which threatens your--your community--about your possible loss of Miss Filbert."

Mrs. Sand looked blank. "The Captain isn"t leavin" us, as far as I know," she said.

"Oh--is it possible that you are not aware that--that very strong efforts are being made to induce her to do so?"

Mrs. Sand looked about her as if she expected to find an explanation lying somewhere near her chair. Light came to her suddenly and brought her a conscious smile; it only lacked force to be a giggle. She glanced at her lap as she smiled; her air was deprecating and off-putting, as if she had detected in what Arnold said some suggestion of a gallant nature aimed at herself. Happily, he was not looking.

"You mean Mr. Lindsay," she exclaimed, twisting her wedding-ring and its coral guard.

"I hope--I beg--that you will not think me meddlesome or impertinent. I have the matter very much at heart. It seems to lie in my path. I must see it. Surely you perceive some way of averting the disaster in it!"

"I"m sure I don"t know what you refer to." Mrs. Sand"s tone was prudish and offended. "She hasn"t said a word to me--she"s a great one for keeping things to herself--but if Mr. Lindsay don"t mean marriage with her----"

"Why, of course!" Arnold, startled, turned furiously red, but Mrs. Sand in her indignation did not reflect the tint. "Of course! Is not that,"

he went on after an instant"s pause, "precisely what is to be lamented--and prevented?"

Mrs. Sand looked at her visitor with dry suspicion. "I suppose you are a friend of his," she said.

"I have known him for years. Pray don"t misunderstand me. There is nothing against him--nothing whatever."

"Oh, I don"t suppose there is, except that he is not on the Lord"s side.

But I don"t expect any of his friends are anxious for him to marry an officer in the Salvation Army. Society people ain"t fond of the Army, and never will be."

"His people--he has only distant relatives living--are all at home,"

Stephen said, vaguely. The situation had become slightly confused.

"Then you speak for them, I suppose."

"Indeed not, I am in no communication with them whatever. I fancy they know nothing about it. I am here entirely--_entirely_ of my own accord.

I have come to place myself at your disposition if there is anything I can do, any word I can say, to the end of preventing this catastrophe in a spiritual life so pure and devoted; to ask you at all events to let me join my prayers to yours that it shall not come about."

The squalor of the room seemed to lift before his eyes and be suffused with light. At last he had made himself plain. But Mrs. Sand was not transfigured. She seemed to sit, with her hands folded, in the midst of a calculation.

"Then he _has_ proposed. I told her he would," she said.

"I believe he has asked her to marry him and she has refused, more than once. But he is importunate, and I hear she needs help."

"Mr. Lindsay," said Mrs. Sand, "is a very takin" young man."

"I suppose we must consider that. There is position, too, and wealth.

These things count--we are all so human--even against the Divine realities into possession of which Miss Filbert must have so perfectly entered."

"I thought he must be pretty well off. Would he be one of them Government officials?"

"He is a broker."

"Oh, is he indeed?" Mrs. Sand"s enlightenment was evidently doubtful.

"Well, if they get married Captain Filbert"ll have to resign. It"s against the regulations for her to marry outside of the Army."

"But is she not vowed to her work; isn"t her life turned forever into that channel? Would it not be horrible to you to see the world interfere?"

"I won"t say but what I"d be sorry to see her leave us. But I wouldn"t stand in her way either, and neither would Captain Sand."

"Stand in her way! In her way to material luxury, poverty of spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral mediocrity of the world. I would to G.o.d I could be that stumbling block! I have heard her--I have seen the light in her that may so possibly be extinguished."

"I don"t deny she has a kind of platform gift, but she"s losin" her voice. And she doesn"t understand briskin" people up, if you know what I mean."

"She will be pulled down--she will go under!" Arnold repeated in the depths of his spirit. He stood up, fumbling with his hat. Mrs. Sand and her apartment, her children out of doors in the perambulator, and the whole organisation to which she appertained, had grown oppressive and unnecessary. He was aware of a supreme desire to put his foot again in his own world, where things were seen, were understood. He thought there might be solace in relating the affair to Brother Colquhoun.

"It"s a case," said Mrs. Sand, judicially, "where I wouldn"t think myself called on to say one word. Such things everyone has a right to decide for themselves. But you oughtn"t to forget that a married woman"--she looked at Arnold"s celibate habit as if to hold it accountable for much--"can have a great influence for good over him that she chooses. I am pretty sure Captain Filbert"s already got Mr. Lindsay almost persuaded. I shouldn"t be at all surprised if he joined the Army himself when she"s had a good chance at him."

Arnold put on his hat with a groan and began the descent of the stairs.

"Good-afternoon, then," Mrs. Sand called out to him from the top. He turned mechanically and bared his head. "I beg your pardon," he said, "Good-afternoon."

CHAPTER XIV.

Mrs. Sand found it difficult to make up her mind upon several points touching the visit of the Reverend Stephen Arnold. Its purport, of which she could not deny her vague, appreciation, drew a cloud across a rosy prospect, and in this light his conduct showed unpardonable; on the other hand, it implied a compliment to the corps, it made the spiritual position of an officer of the Army, a junior too, a matter of moment in a wider world than might be suspected; and before this consideration Mrs. Sand expanded. She reflected liberally that salvation was not necessarily frustrated by the laying-on of hands; she had serene fancies of a republic of the redeemed. She was a prey to further hesitations regarding the expediency of mentioning the interview to Laura, and as private and confidential it ministered for two days to her satisfactions of superior officer. In the end, however, she had to sacrifice it to the girl"s imperturbable silence. She chose an intimate and a private hour and shut the door carefully upon herself and her captain, but she had not at all decided, when she sat down on the edge of the bed, what complexion to give to the matter, nor had she a very definite idea, when she got up again, of what complexion she had given it. Laura, from the first word, had upset her by an intense eagerness, a determination not to lose a syllable. Captain Filbert insisted upon hearing all before she would acknowledge anything; she hung upon the sentences Mrs. Sand repeated, and joined them together as if they were parts of a puzzle; she finally had possession of the conversation much as I have already written it down. As Mrs. Sand afterward told her husband, Miss Filbert sat there growing whiter and whiter, more and more worked up, and it was impossible to take any comfort in talking to her. It seemed as if she, the Ensign, might save herself the trouble of giving an opinion one way or the other, and not a thing could she get the girl to say except that it was true enough that the gentleman wanted to marry her, and she was ashamed of having let it go so far. But she would never do it--never.

She declared she would write to this Mr. Arnold and thank him, and ask him to pray for her, "and she as much as ordered me to go and do the same," concluded Mrs. Sand with an inflection which made its own comment upon such a subversion of discipline.

Stephen, under uncomfortable compulsion, sent Laura"s letter--she did write--to Lindsay. "I cannot allow you to be in the dark about what I am doing in the matter," he explained; "though if I had not this necessity for writing you might reasonably complain of an intrusive and impertinent letter. But I must let you know that she has appealed to me, and that as far as I can I will help her."

Duff read both communications--Laura"s to the priest was brief and very technical--between the business quarters of Ralli Brothers and the Delhi and London Bank, with his feet in the opposite seat of his office-gharry and his forehead puckered by an immediate calculation forward in rupee paper. His irritation spoiled his transaction--there was a distinct edge in the manager"s manner when they parted, and it was perhaps a pardonable weakness that led him to dash in blue pencil across the page covered with Arnold"s minute handwriting, "Then you have done with pasty compromises--you have gone over to the Jesuits. I congratulate you," and re-addressed the envelope to College street. The brown tide of the crowd brought him an instant messenger, and he stood in the doorway for a moment afterwards frowning upon the yellow turbans that swung along in the sunlight against the white wall opposite, across the narrow commercial road. The flame of his indignation set forth his features with definiteness and relief, consuming altogether the soft amused _bien-etre_ which was nearly always there. His lips set themselves together, and Mrs. Sand would have been encouraged in any scheme of practical utility by the lines that came about his mouth. A brother in finance of some astuteness, who saw him scramble into his gharry, divined that with regard to a weighty matter in jute-mill shares pending, Lindsay had decided upon a _coup_, and made his arrangements accordingly. He also went upon his way with a fresh impression of Lindsay"s undeniable good looks, as sometimes in a coin new from the mint one is struck with the beauty of a die dulled by use and familiarity.

Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel distress, but when he had read it, that emotion was somewhat lightened in him by another sentiment.

"A community admirable in many ways," he murmured, refolding the page.

"Does he think he is insulting me!"

Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was inclined to concede to Stephen"s intermediary, he was compelled to recognise without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of her profession, had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of defensive operations. She retired effectively into camp; the quarters in Crooked lane became her fortified retreat, whence she issued only under escort and upon service strictly obligatory. Succour from Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and Lindsay felt it an anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to a.s.sault her position. Nor could Alicia induce any _sortie_ to Middleton street. Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in reticence and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal excuse. They loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss Livingstone"s shoulders, these notes which bore so much the atmosphere of Crooked lane, and at the same time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them at arm"s length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "G.o.d bless you, yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrifaction, she was almost satisfied to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to enc.u.mber. The new French poet, the American novelist of the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia"s table many days together for this reason. She sometimes remembered what she expected of these volumes, what _plein air_ sensations, or what profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself intellectually jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days. She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside of it. At all events, she took a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always measure the strength of one"s opinions against these things. She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this gave her a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be. The result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the process. We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of Duff"s confidences, her unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the a.n.a.lytic turn we may almost suppose it. Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough. She did not even abate the usual number of Duff"s invitations to dinner, when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver and a tide of conversation about the season"s paper-chasing except the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in Bentinck street, desirous and unsatisfied.

It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect, for it was effectively after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual whiskey and soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed. Lindsay was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for four and five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbow up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the club. The next evening"s meeting saw his place empty under the window of the hall in Crooked lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of these exercises. The world shrank, for Laura, to the compa.s.s of the kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against which she must key herself to indifference. When on the second and third evenings she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her that either she or Mr. Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she offered up thanks. On the fourth she reflected recurrently and anxiously that it was not after all a very glorious victory if the Devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the opportunities that had been his, should slip back without profit to the level from which she had striven--they had all striven--to lift him. Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations, sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own account and obtained information.

Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the circ.u.mstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which Mrs.

Barberry came for hours to take advantage of. There were the usual two nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the Arab further afield than ever, and she did. One can imagine her cantering fast and far with a sense of conscious possession in spite of Mrs. Barberry and the two nurses. There may be a certain solace in the definite and continuous knowledge available about a person hovering on the brink of typhoid under your own roof tree. It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major Livingstone could not make up his mind. Alicia knew only of this uncertainty; other satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs.

Barberry. She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so uniformly cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from Lindsay"s room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the temperature was the same, hadn"t budged a point, must manage to get it down somehow in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to envelop himself in the newspapers. Those arbitrary and obstinate figures, which stood for apprehension to the most casual ear, stamped themselves on most things as the day wore on, and at tea-time Mrs. Barberry gave her other details, thinking her rather cold in the reception of them. But she plainly preferred to be out of it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a glance at the boiled-milk preparations of the butler. "And you know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these people have to be watched." To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy.

There was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone"s conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her att.i.tude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has been given in the highest to somebody else. These pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the importance of motives. She rather stood aside with folded hands, and in an infinite terror of prejudicing fate, devoured her heart by way of keeping its beating normal. Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final alternative to Lindsay"s marriage, and one can imagine her forcing herself to look at it.

Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid pa.s.sing Lindsay"s room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o"clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tip-toe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert"s face. Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the direction of her skirts. She stood silent, stricken in the dusk with fear and wonder, but the sense that was strangest in her was plainly that of having made a criminal discovery.

Laura stumbled upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant; words held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door. Then Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, further on, a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both. It was a s.p.a.cious room, with pale, high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebon crucifix over the bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet table.