“I have outstayed all the rest,” Lindsay said, with his hat and stick in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, “because I want particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time,” he added, glancing at his watch.
She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour for men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries—it did not in the least obscure what she found to say—and in the midst of it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke of out-sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and open it. “You might stay to lunch,” she said, addressing a pair of crows in altercation on the verandah.
“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said. “Can I convince you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute fool?”
Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of the need of support. “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take so long.” She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.
“I've had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely. I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly, watching her face; “so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it roughly.”
She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. “Why should you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it. He knew her so well.
“A great many people will,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of their fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you.”
She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.
“I believe you know already,” Lindsay cried.
“I have heard something. Don't be alarmed—not from people, from Miss Howe.”
“Wonderful woman! I haven't told her.”
“Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case,” Alicia went on, with immense courage, “I didn't believe them.”
“Why?” he asked enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight—he would even submit it to analysis.
She hesitated—her business was in great waters, the next instant might engulf her. “It's so curiously unlike you,” she faltered. “If she had been a duchess—a very exquisite person, or somebody very clever—remember I haven't seen her.”
“You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons.” Lindsay visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.
Alicia raised her eyebrows.
“What do you expect one to imagine?” she asked, with quietness.
“A miracle,” he said sombrely.
“Ah, that's difficult!”
There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely—
“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”
Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.
“Don't make a mistake,” she said. “Don't.” She thrust her hand for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. “That's what everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand.” He tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down and counted them too.
“Then you won't help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.
“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring. “Ask somebody else.”
“Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of the lost.”
The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.
“No,” she said. “It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become involved—I might do harm.” She had surmounted her emotion; she was able to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. “I should do harm,” she repeated.
“You don't count with her effect on you.”
“You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man.”
“But won't you take anything—about her—from me? You know I'm really not a fool—not even very impressionable?”
“Oh no!” she said impatiently. “No—of course not.”
“Pray why?”
“There are other things to reckon with.” She looked coldly beyond him out of the window. “A man's intelligence when he is in love—how far can one count on it?”
There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured, “Oh, I don't agree,” with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a simple appeal. “Then after all,” he said, “you're not my friend.”
It goaded her into something like an impertinence. “After you have married her,” she said, “you'll see.”
“You will be hers then,” he declared.
“I will be yours.” Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
“And I thought you broad in these views,” Lindsay said, glancing at her curiously. Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon Major Livingstone, looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbation away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence on the other side of the door.
That same Sunday, Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about Hilda Howe, “We have not stood still—we know each other well now,” and when he commented with some reserve upon this to follow it up. “But these things have so little to do with mere length of time or number of opportunities,” she declared. “One springs at some people.”
A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance; and they talked about something else. But perhaps this is enough to explain a note which went by messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace in Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, on Monday morning. It was a short note, making a definite demand with an absence of colour and softness and emotion which was almost elaborate. Hilda, at breakfast, tore off the blank half sheet, and wrote in pencil—
“I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon. No rehearsal—they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the theatre, so you will find me, anyway. And I'll be delighted to see you.”
She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-office stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went back to an extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the reflection—“Can she possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?”
Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in order apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing. Hilda was agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about anything, tipped on the edge of her bed—Alicia had surmounted that degree of intimacy at a bound by the declaration that she could no longer endure the blue umbrellas—and clasping one knee, with an uncertain tenure of a chipped bronze slipper deprived of its heel. Wonderful silk draperies fell about her, with ink-spots on the sleeves; her hair was magnificent.
“It's so curious to me,” she was saying of the novel, “that anyone should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book. It's like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass.”
“I fancy that the most desirable way,” said Alicia, glancing at the door.
“Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow out of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the value of contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You, poor dear, were born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But you couldn't help it.”
“Everybody doesn't grow out of it.” The concentration in Alicia's eyes returned again with vacillating wings.
“She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet.” The slipper dropped at this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She kept her foot in her hands, and regarded it pensively.
“Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter,” she continued; “at all events, ready-made.”
“You have an audacity—” Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.
“Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?”
“I know it.”
“From him?”
“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 sex.” 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 attitude? Do you see yourself in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?”
Contempt accumulated 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 attitude!” she cried. “What in the world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no attitude. 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 assure 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 assume 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 chastity 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 coarse 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 coarse 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 assurance 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 cluster 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 sanctity 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.
“Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me,” she said, rising to go through the little accustomed function of her departure. “I'll be going now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to take her place at the Believers' Meeting.” She took Hilda's hand in hers and held it for an instant. “Good-bye, and God bless you—in the way you most need,” she said, and turned to Alicia, “Good-bye. I am glad to know that we will be one in the glad hereafter though our paths may diverge”—her eye rested with acknowledgment upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves—“in this world. To look at you I should have thought you were of the bowed down ones, not yet fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little more oxygen in the blood of your religion. Remember the word of the Lord—'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!' Goodbye.”
She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door. It sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes clung about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way. Miss Howe looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as uncontrollable as it was unreasonable. “A saved soul, perhaps. A woman—oh, assuredly,” she said in the depths of her hair.
The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made something like a dash at an object about to elude her. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “wait a minute. Will you come and see me? I think—I think you might do me good. I live at Number Ten, Middleton Street. Will you come?”
Laura came back into the room. There was a little stiffness in her air, as if she repressed something.
“I have no objection,” she said.
“To-morrow afternoon—at five? Or—my brother is dining at the club—would you rather come to dinner?”
“Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me.” She spoke carefully, after an instant's hesitation.
“Then do come and dine—at eight,” Alicia said; and it was agreed.
She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and only turned when Hilda spoke.
“You are going to have him to meet her,” she said. “May I come too?”
“Certainly not.” Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door handle.
“Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!” Hilda cried.
“I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home,” said Alicia, and went out swiftly.
“My goodness!” Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend Stephen Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street. “Thanks immensely,” it ran, “for your delightful offer to introduce me to Father Jordan and persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders he keeps in his tower at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an hour of milk and honey, and belonging to that charming Order, he won't mind my coming on a Sunday evening—the first clear one.”
Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her pen. Then she added: “If you have any influence with Duff Lindsay, it may be news to you that you can exert it with advantage to keep him from marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the Salvation Army named Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you should expostulate with her, but I don't advise that.”
The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful air when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in any case it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand walked the floor, carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with blotches, which had inherited from its maternal parent a conspicuous lack of buttons. Mrs. Sand's room was also ornamented with texts, but they had apparently been selected at random, and they certainly hung that way. The piety of the place seemed at the control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with his father's regimental cap. On the other side of the curtain Captain Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.
“What kind of meetin' did you have?” asked Mrs. Sand. “There—there now; he shall have his bottle, so he shall!”
“A beautiful meeting. Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro, you know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss Rozario from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's. We had such a happy time.”
“What sort of collection?”
Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper coins.
“Only seven annas three pice! And you call that a good meeting! I don't believe you exhorted them to give!”
“Oh, I think I did!” Laura returned mechanically.
“Seven annas and three pice! And you know what the Commissioner wrote out about our last quarter's earnings! What did you say?”
“I said—I said the collection would now be taken up,” Laura faltered.
“Oh dear! oh dear! Leopold, stop clawing me! Couldn't you think of anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that? Fever or no fever, it does not do for me to stay away from the regular meetin's. One thing is plain—HE wasn't there!”
“Who?”
“Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your reasons.” Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful. “I mean the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind, under the window. A society man, I should say, to look at him, though the officers of this Army are no respecters of persons, and I don't suppose the Lord takes any notice of his clothes.”
“His name is Mr. Lindsay. No, he wasn't there.”
The girl's tone was distant and cold. The rebuke about the collection had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.
“I hope you haven't been discouraging him?”
Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.
“I have entreated him to come to the meetings. But he never attends a Believers' Rally. Why should he?”
“What's his state of mind? He came to see you, didn't he, the other night?”
“Yes, he did. I don't think he's altogether careless.”
“Ain't he seeking?”
“He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself. The Lord has different ways of working. What else should bring him, night after night?”
Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with lifted eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly-disciplined smile behind her baby's head. When she looked back again Laura had flushed all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which she felt was absurd.
“My!” she said,—scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have been expected of her,—“you do look nice when you've got a little colour. But if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the meetin's, you must be blind, that's all.”
Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a wand.
“Then I hope I may go on bringing him,” she said. “He couldn't come to a better place.”
“Well, you'll have to be careful,” said Mrs. Sand, as if with severe intent. “But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say that. You may be an influence for good. It may be His will that you should be pleasant to the young man. But don't make free with him. Don't, on any account, have him put his arm round your waist.”
“Nobody has done that to me,” Laura replied austerely, “since I left Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will. Not that Mr. Lindsay” (she blushed again) “would ever want to. The class he belongs to look down on it.”
“The class he belongs to do worse things. The Army doesn't look down on it. It's only nature, and the Army believes in working with nature. If it was Mr. Harris I wouldn't say a word—he marches under the Lord's banner.”
Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even slightly complacent.
“Well,” she said, “I told Mr. Harris last evening that the Lieutenant and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and he seemed to think he'd been keeping company with me. I had to tell him I hadn't any such idea.”
“Did he seem much disappointed?”
“He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging to the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have to learn to walk alone.”
Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lips.
“I don't know but what you did right,” she said. “By the grace of God you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you. But I have a kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay 'll be harder to convince.”
“I daresay.”
“It would be splendid, though, to garner him in. He might be willing to march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor Captain Corby, of the Queen's army, did in Rangoon.”
“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 perception 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 buttons 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 breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil 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 assailed 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 specially intolerable sort.
“Glory to His name!Glory to His name!”
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.
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 out, 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 passion 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 circumstance 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 God 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, passing 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 on 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 God 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 your particular 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, dear creature, you are 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 daresay 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 unreflectingly. 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 police 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 “Goodnight,” after her, formulating more definite statements to himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.