"From him."
"Oh!"--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--"Really? Well, we can"t let that happen."
"Why not?"
"You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don"t you see anything?"
Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips. "I see only one thing that matters--he wants it," she said.
"And won"t be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an intolerably self-sacrificing s.e.x." Hilda felt about for pillows, and stretched her length along the bed. "They"ve taught us well, the men; it"s a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female line. You may be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated between the lady and the tiger. A civilised one would have introduced the lady and given her a dot, and retired to the nearest convent. Bah! It"s a deformity, like the dachshund"s legs."
Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not quite worth while, to follow.
"The happiness of his whole life is involved," she said simply.
"Oh dear yes--the old story! And what about the happiness of yours? Do you imagine it"s laudable, admirable, this att.i.tude? Do you see yourself in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?"
Contempt acc.u.mulated in Miss Howe"s voice, and sat in her eyes. To mark her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.
"It is idiotic--it"s disgusting," she said.
Alicia caught a flash from her. "My att.i.tude!" she cried. "What in the world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no att.i.tude. I care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he shall have what he wants--so far as I can help him to it. You have never cared for anybody--what do you know about it?"
Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling. "I a.s.sure you I"m not an angel," she cried. "Haven"t I cared! Several times."
"Not really--not lastingly."
"I don"t know about really; certainly not lastingly. I"ve never thought the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities. They entail the prettiest experiences."
"Of course, in your profession--"
"Don"t be nasty, sweet lady. My affections have never taken the opportunities of our profession. They haven"t even carried me into matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to the brink! We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay."
"You a.s.sume too much--a great deal too much. She must be beautiful--and good."
"Give me a figure. She"s a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty that lilies have from her personal chast.i.ty and her religious enthusiasm.
Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage would touch and bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of stale vegetation. You want him to clasp that to his bosom for the rest of his life?"
"I won"t believe you. You"re coa.r.s.e and you"re cruel."
Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone"s eyes with this. Hilda, still regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
"I"m sorry, dear," she said. "I forgot. You are usually so intelligent, one can be coa.r.s.e and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the bathroom and get my salts--they"re on the washhand-stand--will you? I"m quite faint with all I"m about to undergo."
Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring the third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside and laid her hand on Hilda"s head.
"Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry," she said. It was a cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a necessity.
"I am not very bad," Hilda improvised. "Hardly more than a headache."
"She makes light of everything," Miss Filbert said, smiling toward Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression. Discovering the blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from her hands.
"And what," said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss Livingstone, "might your name be?"
There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a conventionality of the other world, and before its a.s.surance Alicia stood helpless.
"Her name is Livingstone," called Hilda from the bed, "and she is as good as she is beautiful. You needn"t be troubled about HER soul--she takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral."
"Hallelujah!" said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious congratulation.
"Much better," said Hilda cheerfully, "to take it at the Cathedral, you know, than nowhere."
Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of the bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda"s hair.
"You don"t seem to have much fever," she said. "There was a poor fellow in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of one hundred and seven. I could hardly bear to touch him."
"What was the matter?" asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses about the third person in the room.
"Oh, I don"t know exactly. Some complication, I suppose, of Satan"s tribute--"
"Divinest Laura!" Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back. "Do take a chair. It will be even more soothing to see you comfortable."
Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed. "Miss Howe is more thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones," she said, with vast kindness. "I have often told her so. I have had a long day."
"It may improve me in that character," Hilda said, "to suggest that if you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is a good thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your bath. Do you use those things?"
Laura shook her head. "Faith is better than disinfectants. I never get any harm. My Master protects me."
"My goodness!" Hilda said. And in the silence that occurred, Captain Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid for was a decayed tooth. Presently Alicia made a great effort. She laid hands on Hilda"s previous reference as a tangibility that remained with her.
"Do you ever go to the Cathedral?" she said.
The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert"s features, as when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant from a flower. Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries of dogma it may have been some other obscurity, but that was the effect.
"No. I never go there. We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a tabernacle to ourselves."
"Isn"t it exquisite--her way of speaking!" cried Hilda from the bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus.
"Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cl.u.s.ter is sanctuary enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is Lord of our hosts."
"A kind of chant," murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism. Then that impression was carried away as it were on a puff of air, and it is hardly likely that she thought of it again.
"I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?" Laura said. The sanct.i.ty of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue of some other thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine, and narrowed her eyes.
"Dear me, yes," she said for Alicia. "His Excellency the Viceroy and all his beautiful A.D.C."s, no end of military and their ladies, Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under-Secretaries so thick they"re kept in the vestibule till the bells stop. "And make Thy chosen people joyful"!" she intoned. "Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit."
"You know already what a humbug she is," Alicia said, but Captain Filbert"s inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.