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

sound of brushing silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a long breath, as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner, obtained, assimilated.

"Oh, yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile, "I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling. There's rather a good man here just now."

"Yes," Hilda assented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh, my dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady, my dear."

"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do me!" she cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"

"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What more simple, honest opportunity do you want than a sick room in your own house?"

Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. "Oh, hush!" she cried. "Go on!"

"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come between him and the twilight with a scent of violets."

"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.

"It _is_ a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot. If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us. 'Without our aid He did us make,' you know."

"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I could."

Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang in the King's garden of wine and death and roses.

"I would go further," she said, and looked as if some other thing charged with sweetness had come before her.

"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success," Alicia faltered.

"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came upon her lips. As if she knew her betrayal already complete, "I wish I had such a chance," she said.

Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the Promised Land.

"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.

"Who?"

"Hamilton Bradley."

Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it beautiful.

"How you will hold me to my _metier_," she said. "Hamilton Bradley has given up trying."

"Then----"

"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their astonishment.

"Well?" said Hilda.

"I can think of no one--there _is_ no one--except--oh, it's too absurd! Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.

"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems," she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--like a thing born. But it is that--a thing born."

"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.

"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with its feet in a trap. The insane, _insane_ improbability of it!" She laughed again. It was delicious to hear her.

"But--he is a priest!"

"Much more difficult. He is a saint."

Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.

"Are you quite certain?" she said. "You told me once that--that there had been other times."

"They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the difference." The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost ranged her hostile. She hurried out of that position.

"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarrassment. "I see nothing--nothing _really_--against it."

"I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"

"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.

"I don't think I can let you ask me that."

"There are such strange things to consider! Would he withdraw from the Church? Would you retire from the stage? I don't know which seems the more impossible!"

Hilda got up.

"It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?" she said. "I haven't made it out. And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls for redemption, never of me at all."

A servant of the house, with the air of a messenger, brought Alicia a scrap of paper. She glanced at it, and then, with hands that trembled, began folding it together.

"He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair," she murmured, "and he wants me to come and talk to him."

"Well," said Hilda, "come."

She put her arm about Alicia and drew her out of the room to the foot of the stairs. They went in silence, saying nothing even when they parted, and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend. Half way up she paused and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her glance, and something of primitive puissance passed, conscious, comprehended, between the eyes of the two women.


CHAPTER XVI.

For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign of anything but convalescence. An appetite to cry out upon, a chartered tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands; such indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for other betrayals. There had been opportunities--even the day nurse had gone and Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he seemed to prefer to talk about the pattern in the carpet, or the corpulence of the khansamah, or things in the newspapers. Alicia once, at a suggestive point, put almost a visible question into a silent glance, and Lindsay asked her for some more sugar. Surgeon-Major Livingstone, coming into his office unexpectedly one morning, found his sister in the act of replacing a volume upon its professional shelf. It was somebody on the pathology of Indian fevers. Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve it--only technical corroboration. It might also be considered that, although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again. They may have heard in Crooked lane that Duff was better. We may freely imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken advantage of. Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified repentance; they might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought, smiling, to the Archdeacon.

As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay, still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make was perhaps lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it might very probably work, out in shades. So much would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda's theory might very well be lost in contingencies. Nevertheless, Alicia postponed her story from day to day and from hour to hour. If her ideas about it--she kept them carefully in solution--could have been precipitated they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her brother, the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.

She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the carriage at a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven o'clock, and the morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river. There was a white light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and delicately purple to the west. The dust slept on the broad roads of the Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel of a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the streets that knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country people with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest freedom in the wide, tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that might rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must have been aware of it, though, as a matter of fact, when she told Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden Gardens, where the yellow dome of the Post Office swelled against the morning sky, and so lost it.

He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterward? The yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless going round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke the silence afterward, she started as if in apprehension, but it was only to say something that anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged. Her assent was little and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it. The Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton, without a suggestive bone.