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

anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to assault 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 "God 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 encumber. 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 analytic 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 compass 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 circumstances 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 attitude 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 passing 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 spacious 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. Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden cut all its fronds sharply against the light.

"Well?" said Alicia, when the door was shut.

Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.

"I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone out. And the nurse was in the room; I couldn't get to her. There was nobody but the servants about."

"Objection to what?"

"To my being there. I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay."

"Did you make any noise?"

Miss Filbert looked professionally touched. "It was silent prayer, of course," she said.

Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet table, had an air of eagerness, of successful capture. The yellow sky in the window behind her made filmy lights round her hair and outlined her tall figure in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit. Laura Filbert thought she looked like a princess.

"I seem to hear of nothing but petitions," she said. "Isn't somebody praying for you?"

The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such a suggestion. Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the space between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.

"I hope so, miss," she said, and looked as if for calming over Alicia's shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky. The colour sank back out of her face, and the light from the window rested on it ethereally. The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to seek, and their blue seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old splendour of the uplifted golden gates rewarded them.

"Why do you use that odious word?" Alicia explained. "You are not my maid! Don't do it again--don't dream of doing it again!"

"I--I don't know." The girl was still plainly covered with confusion at being found in the house uninvited. "I suppose I forget. Well, good evening," and she turned to the door.

"Don't go," Alicia commanded. "Don't. You never come to see me now. Sit down." She dragged a chair forward and almost pushed Laura into it. "I will sit down, too--what am I thinking of?"

Laura reflected for a moment, looking at her folded hands. "I might