Beyond the arches, netted to keep the crows away, it made pictures with the tops of the trees. There was the small iron bed with the confused outline under the bedclothes, very quiet, and the Sister--the whitewashed wall rose sharp behind her black draperies--sitting with a book in her hands. Some sc.r.a.ps of lint on the floor beside the bed, and hardly anything else except the silence which had almost a presence, and a faint smell of carbolic acid, and a certain feeling of impotence and abandonment and waiting which seemed to be in the air. Arnold moved on the pillow and saw her standing in the door. The bars of the bed"s foot were in the way, he tried to lift his head to surmount the obstruction, and the Sister perceived her too.
"I think absolutely still was our order, wasn"t it, Mr. Arnold?" she said, with her little pink smile. "And I"m afraid Miss Howe isn"t in time to be of much use to us, is she?" It was the bedside pleasantry that expected no reply, that indeed forbade one.
"I"m sorry," Hilda said. As she moved into the room she detached her eyes from Arnold"s, feeling as she did so that it was like tearing something.
"There was so little to do," Sister Margaret said; "Surgeon-Major Wills saw at once where the mischief lay. Nothing disagreeable was necessary, was it, Mr. Arnold? Perfect quiet, perfect rest--that"s an easy prescription to take." She had rather prominent very blue eyes, and an aquiline nose, and a small firm mouth, and her pink cheeks were beginning to be a little pendulous with age. Hilda gazed at her silently, noting about her authority and her flowing draperies something cla.s.sical. Was she like one of the Fates? She approached the bed to do something to the pillow--Hilda had an impulse to push her away with the cry, "It is not time yet--Atropos!"
"I must go now for an hour or so," the Sister went on. "That poor creature in Number Six needs me; they daren"t give her any more morphia.
You don"t need it--happy boy!" she said to Stephen, and at the look he sent her for answer she turned rather quickly to the door. Dear Sister, she was none of the Fates, she was obliged to give directions to Hilda standing in the door with her back turned. Happily for a deserved reputation for self-command they were few. It was chief and absolute that no one should be admitted. A bulletin had been put up at the hospital door for the information of inquiries; later on when the doctor came again there would be another.
She went away and they were left alone. The sun on the floor had vanished; a yellowness stood in its place with a grey background, the background gaining, coming on. Always his eyes were upon her, she had given hers back to him and he seemed satisfied. She moved closer to the bed and stood beside him. Since there was nothing to do there was nothing to say. Stephen put out his hand and touched a fold of her dress.
The room filled itself with something that had not been there before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more to do. Then Arnold spoke.
"You dear woman!" he said. "You dear woman!" She kept her head bowed like that and did not answer. It was his happiest moment. One might say he had lived for this. Her tears fell upon his hand, a kind of baptism for his heart. He spoke again.
"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 a regret--for you."
"Ah!" Hilda cried, with a vivid note of pain. "Would you? I am sorry for that! 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--the price of the year that had been very valuable.
"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--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 Mother 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 the 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. Suddenly, then, a harsh quarrelling of dogs--Christian dogs--arose in the distance and died away, and again there was night and silence. Night for hours. Time for reflection, alone with death and the lamp, upon the year that had been very valuable. "I would have married you," she whispered. "Yes, I would." Later her lips moved again. "I would have taken the consequence;" and again, "I would have paid any penalty." There he lay, a burden that she would never bear, a burden that would be gone in the morning. There were moments when she cried out on Fate for doing her this kindness.
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 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 charge 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. "I would have married you," she whispered pa.s.sionately as if that could stay him. "Yes, I would."
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 her reference to their joint indebtedness.
"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!"