Hilda, Sara Jeannette Duncan [ebook reader 7 inch TXT] 📗

roughly?" There was that in her voice which cried put 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 defense 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 perturbations 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.


CHAPTER IX.

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 a messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace in Middleton street to No. 3, La 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 tusser 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 any one 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 said; "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 around 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 slipper 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. _Quelle escape!_ We must contrive one like it 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