While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting for Duff Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a notable presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees crossed on the bench furthest back in the corner obscurest of the Salvation Army Headquarters in Bentinck street. It had become his accustomed place; sitting there he had begun to feel like the adventurer under Niagara, it was the only spot from which he could observe, try to understand, and cope with the torrential nature of his passion. Nearer to the fair charm of her presence in the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and the sound of the big drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away. His persistent refusal of a better place also profited him in that it brought to Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there, a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came round. After his first contribution Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the "amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they fell he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four hours he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her face, they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the manner of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour it is to be feared Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of emotional hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and there was no appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold for example could properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.
On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience, which he meditated mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he almost immediately began to read his life, and it was because he thought he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest, with her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see you. When may I? Any time that suits you. Have you half an hour to spare to-morrow?"
It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory. Not the frankness, though, or the touch of "Now we are getting to business," that stood somehow in her expression. She looked alert and pleased.
"You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?" she said. Her manner took Lindsay a trifle aback, it suggested that she conferred this privilege so freely. "To-morrow—let me see, we march in the morning, and I have an open-air at four in the afternoon—the Ensign takes the evening meeting. Yes, I could see you to-morrow about two or about seven, after I get back from the Square." It was not unlike a professional appointment.
Lindsay considered. "Thanks," he said, "I'll come at about seven—if you are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a day."
He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly reddened at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's road dust, and a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which she said matter-of-factly, "We are never too exhausted to attend to our Master's business."
Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation, he looked gravely the other way. "And the address?" he said.
"Almost next door—we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is in Crooked lane. Anybody will tell you."
At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Arnold said "Thanks" again and passed out—she seemed to be holding it for him—and picked his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance, to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that already there was one who guessed, who knew.
One gropes in Crooked lane after the lights of Bentinck street have done all that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid, washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems" [2] lived. There were three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold's trivial coin, and one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho—it was finished. Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss Filbert's whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar, disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events, he had the information. Lindsay was to keep straight on; it was the third story, "and a lovelie airie flat, too, sir, for this part of the town." Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution and just missed treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile pattern. Lindsay dared no further, but lifted up his voice in the Indian way to summon a servant. " Qui hai! " [3] he called; " Qui hai! "
He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door further down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture. "Good evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced. "Won't you come in?" She clung to the handle until he had passed into the room, then she closed the door after him. "I was expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris, let me make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."
Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cane-bottomed chairs. He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's garb of the Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a newspaper; he had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura's formula he looked up and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other side out and returned to it.
"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a demon of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt dumb. Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed his legs in greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible, looking at Laura, who sat down like a third stranger, curiously detached from any sense of hospitality.
"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said pleasantly. "I guess you can tell him what to do about it as well as I can."
"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. "Is he?" said Mr. Harris, without looking up from his paper. "Well, what I've got to say on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a proper an' a public place. He can hear it there any day of the week."
"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to say."
"Then that's all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon his newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to the other of them and fell upon an expedient.
"If you'll excuse me," she said, "I'll just get you that bicycle story you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take it with you. The Ensign's got it," and she left the room. Lindsay glanced round and promptly announced to himself that he could not come there again. It was taking too violent an advantage. The pursuit of an angel does not imply that you may trap her in her corner under the Throne. The place was divided by a calico curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a mosquito curtain—she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts about loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed with photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras, Ceylon, China. A little wooden table stood against the wall holding an album, a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an irrelevant Japanese doll which seemed to stretch its absurd arms straight out in a gay little ineffectual heathen protest. There was another more embarrassing table; it had a coarse cloth and was garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a plate of plantains and a tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal evidently impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its core in Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked up. "If you're here on private business," he said to Lindsay, fixing his eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him, "maybe you ain't aware that the Ensign"—he threw his head back in the direction of the next room—"is the person to apply to. She's in command here. Captain Filbert's only under her."
"Indeed?" said Lindsay. "Thanks."
"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered, still searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eye could permanently rest, "where, if you remember, ensigns are the smallest officer we have."
"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, trying to govern a deep and irritated frown.
"Maybe so. This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the other—not in discipline, anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity. "But you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can for you. She's a hard-working officer."
A sharp wail smote the air from a point suspiciously close to the lath and canvas partition on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mr. Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking sternly at an advertisement. The air was full of their mutual annoyance, although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively, under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he ought to find this person humourous. Then Laura came back and resolved the situation.
"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have all enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest mixture of the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the book, had no alternative.
"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went stumbling at the door.
"Mr. Harris," said Laura, equably, "found salvation about a month ago. He is a very steady young man—foreman in one of the carriage works here. He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in in the evening."
"He seems to be a—a member of the corps," said Lindsay.
"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign doesn't think there's any objection."
Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cane-bottomed chairs, her sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her to a wider view of him.
"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly, it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile. "Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"
"There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult"——he glanced at the lath and plaster partition, but she, to whom publicity was a condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no interpretation for that.
"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our tongues."
The misunderstanding was almost absurd, but he saw only its difficulties, knitting his brows.
"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said. "I cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."
"Oh," Laura said, simply, "do not be afraid! I have heard confessions! I work at home, you see, a good deal among the hospitals, and—we do not shrink, you know, in the Army from things like that."
"Good God!" he exclaimed, staring, "you don't think—you don't suppose——"
"Ah! don't say that! It's so like swearing."
As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something intelligible, the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl of eighteen, also in the dress of the Army, came through from the bedroom part. She smiled in a conscious, meaningless way, as she sidled past them. At the door her smile broadened, and as she closed it after her she gave them a little nod.
"That's my lieutenant," said Laura.
"The place is like a warren," Lindsay groaned. "How can we talk here?"
Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis. "Do you think," she said, "a word of prayer would help you?"
"No," said Lindsay. "No, thank you. What is making me miserable," he added, quietly, "is the knowledge that we are being overheard. If you go into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs. Sand listening by the wall."
"She's gone out! She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take the evening meeting. Nobody is in there except the two children, and they are asleep." Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of her. "Indeed, we are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now. So please don't be afraid, Mr. Lindsay! Say whatever is in your heart, and the mere saying——"
"Oh," Lindsay cried, "stop! Don't, for Heaven's sake, look at me in that light any longer. I'm not penitent. I'm not—what do you call it?—a soul under conviction. Nothing of the sort." He waited with considerateness for this to have its effect upon her; he could not go on until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the inundation of it. But she was not even staggered by it. She only looked down at her folded hands with an added seriousness and a touch of sorrow.
"Aren't you?" she said. "But at least you feel that you ought to be. I thought it had been accomplished. But I will go on praying."
"Shall you be very angry, if I tell you that I'd rather you didn't? I want to come into your life differently—sincerely."
She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution was swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.
"I won't tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-night except this—I find that you are influencing all my thoughts and all my days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way. You hear as much as that often, and from many people, don't you? So there is nothing in it that need startle you or make you uncomfortable." He paused, and she nodded in a visible effort to follow him.
"So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you just for my own pleasure—there must be some way of helping you, and being your friend——"
"As Mr. Harris is," she interrupted. "I do influence Mr. Harris for good, I know. He says so."
"Influence me," he begged, "in any way you like."
"I will pray for you," she said. "I promise that."
"And you will let me see you sometimes?" he asked, conceding the point.
"If I thought it would do you any good"—she looked at him doubtfully, clasping and unclasping her hands—"I will see; I will ask for guidance. Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways. If you have no objection, I will give you this little book, Almost Persuaded . I am sure you are almost persuaded. Above all, I hope, you will go on coming to the meetings."
And in the course of the next two or three moments Lindsay found himself, somewhat to his astonishment, again in the night of the staircase, dismissed exactly as Mr. Harris had been, by the agency of a printed volume. Only in his case, a figure of much angelic beauty stood at the top, holding a patent kerosene lamp high to illumine his way. He refrained from looking back lest she should see something too human in his face and vanish, leaving him in darkness which would be indeed impenetrable.
There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a "ticca-gharry"—the shabby oblong box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a hackney carriage—was running away. Coolie mothers dragged naked children up on the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts dug their lean beasts in the side and turned out of the way almost at a trot; only the tramcar held on its course in conscious invincibility. A pariah tore along beside the vehicle barking; crows flew up from the dung in the road by half-dozens, protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead necklaces just escaped being knocked down. Little groups of baboos [4] and bunnias [5] stood looking after, laughing and speculating; a native policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse, and they said to him, "Peace, brother." To each other they said, "Behold, the driver is a 'mut-wallah,'" (or drunken person); and presently, as the thing whirled further up the emptied perspective, "Lo! the syce has fallen." The driver was certainly very drunk; his whip circled perpetually above his head; the syce clinging behind was stiff with terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags. Inside, Hilda Howe, with a hand in the strap at each side and her feet against the opposite seat, swayed violently, and waited for what might happen, breathing short. Whenever the gharry thrashed over the tram-lines, she closed her eyes. There was a point near Cornwallis street where she saw the off front wheel make sickeningly queer revolutions; and another, electrically close, when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared in a gate to the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely right angles to her own derelict equipage. That was the juncture of the Reverend Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with Amiruddin Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and Mohammedan fasting. It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did in that interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to Amiruddin. The ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any resolute hand could have impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however, made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth-merchant's shop, and precipitating a clash while he still clung to the reins. The door flew open on the under side and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust of the road; while the driver, discovering that his seat was no longer horizontal, entered suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with tears that the cloth-merchant should restore his wheel—was he not a poor man? Hilda, struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by various lean hands of the bazaar, and observed herself the central figure in yet another situation. When she was in a condition to see, she saw Arnold soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the possibility of vague police complication, having slipped away. Stephen had believed the gharry empty. The sight of her, in her disordered draperies, was a revelation and a reproach.
"Is it possible?" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not hurt?"
"Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this." She held up her right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with anxiety so obviously deep and troubled that Hilda silently smiled. She who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it disproportionate.
"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his glance.
"Indeed, I fear not." The priest made a solicitous bandage with his handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. "It is quite unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the nearest chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a vast amount of trouble—but I am walking."
"I will walk, too," Hilda said, readily. "I should prefer it, truly." With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. "I really can't afford any more," she said. "He can get his wheel mended with that, can't he?"
"It is three times his fare," Arnold said, austerely, "and he deserved nothing—but a fine, perhaps." The man was suppliant before them, cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda lifted her head and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink kite. Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.
"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."
It was the merest echo and she had done it on purpose, but he could not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands and turned and walked away with him, he had nothing to say. There was nothing, perhaps, that he wanted to talk of more than of his experience at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and explained; yet in that space of her two words the impossibility of mentioning it had sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant fervour, that she would refrain from any allusion to The Offence of Galilee . And for the time being she did refrain. She said, instead, that her hand was smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would use a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look, said very possibly not but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to disagreeable necessities, covered a preposterous impulse to cry with another smile.
A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his arms full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery. "Oh, the good man!" Hilda exclaimed, "My parcels!" and looked on equably, while Arnold took them by their puckered ends. "I have been buying gold lace and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume," she exclaimed. The bags dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers; he looked very much aware of them. "Let me carry at least one," she begged. "I can perfectly with my parasol hand;" but he refused her even one. "If I may be permitted to take the responsibility," he said, happily, and she rejoined, "Oh, I would trust you with things more fragile." At which, such is the discipline of these orders, he looked steadily in front of him and seemed deaf with modesty.
"But are you sure," said Hilda, suddenly considerate, "that it looks well?"
"Is the gold lace, then, so very meretricious?"
"It goes doubtfully with your cloth," she laughed, and instantly looked stricken with the conviction that she might better have said something else. But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see no gibe in it, only a pleasant commonplace.
"It might look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a censorious public." Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, "They will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when it is plain that I might ride—and they see me doing that every day."
All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt did impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since humour goes so far to destroy the picturesque. Hilda without the paper bags would have been vastly enough for contrast. She walked—one is inclined to dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being unintelligible—in a wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk, rather frayed at the seams, a trifle spent in vulnerable places, surmounted by an extravagant collar and a Paris hat. The dress was of artistic intention, inexpensively carried out, the hat had an accomplished chic ; it had fallen to her in the wreck and ruin of a too ambitious draper of Coolgardie. As a matter of fact it was the only one she had. The wide sleeves ended a little below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long suède gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half visible through the door of a mud hut—where all the dealers in brass dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference. So they passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.
They talked of the accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?" Hilda said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal robes worn every day.
"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly to be persuaded."
"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know how to cope with it."
"I will claim to have saved your other hand," he smiled. "You will be quite grateful enough for that."
She noted that he did not hasten, behind pyramidal blushes, into the shelter of a general disavowal. The cassock seemed to cover an obligation to acknowledge things.
"I see," she said, veering round. "You are quite right to circumscribe me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out. It is only the absence of it, too plainly expressed, that is unpleasant. But you won't find that in me either." She gave him a smile as she lowered her parasol to turn into the shop of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell European drugs, that promised, infinite possibilities of friendship; and he, following, took pleased and careful possession of it.
An hour later, as they approached No. 3, Lal Behari's Lane, Miss Howe looked pale, which is not surprising, since they had walked and talked all the way. Their talk was a little strenuous too; it was as if they had fallen upon an opportunity, and mutually, consciously, made the most of it.
"You must have some tea immediately," Arnold said, before the battered urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.
"A little whiskey and soda, I think. And you will come up, please, and have some, too. You must."
"Thanks," he said, looking at his watch. "If I do—"
"You'll have the soda without the whiskey! All right!" she laughed, and led the way.
"This is vicious indulgence," Arnold said of his beverage, sitting under the inverted Japanese umbrellas. "I haven't been pitched out of a ticca-gharry."
It is doubtful whether the indulgence was altogether in the soda, which is, after all, ascetic in its quality, and only suitably effervescent, like ecclesiastical humour. It may very probably be that there was no indulgence; indeed one is convinced that the word, like so many words, says too much. The springs of Arnold's chair were bursting through the bottom, and there were stains on its faded chintz-arms, but it was comfortable, and he leaned back in it, looking up at the paper umbrellas. You know the room; I took you into it with Duff Lindsay, who did not come there from rigidities and rituals, and who had a qualified pleasure in it. But there were lines in the folds of the flowered window curtains dragging half a yard upon the floor which seemed to disband Arnold's spirit, and a twinkle in the blue bead of a bamboo screen where the light came through that released it altogether. The shabby, violent-coloured place encompassed him like an easy garment, and the lady, with her feet tucked up in a sofa and a cushion under her tumbled head, was an unembarrassing invitation to the kind of happy things he had not said for years. They sat in the coolness of the room for half an hour, and then, after a little pause, Hilda said suddenly,
"I am glad you saw me in The Offence of Galilee on Saturday night. We shall not play it again."
"It has been withdrawn?"
"Yes. The rights, you know, really belong to Mr. Bradley; and he can't endure his part."
"Is there no one else to—"
"He objects to anyone else. We generally play together." This was inadvertent, but Stephen had no reason to imagine that she contracted her eyebrows in any special irritation. "It is an atrocious piece," she added.
"Is it?" he said, absently, and then, "Yes, it is an atrocious piece. But I am glad, too, that I saw you." He looked away from her, reddening deeply, and stood up. His bands fell upon him again, he bade her a measured and precise farewell. It seemed as if he hurried. She only half rose to give him her unwounded hand, and when he was gone she sank back again thoughtfully.
"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 outsitting 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 am 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 tried to look at him, but her eyes would not carry above the violets in his button-hole.
"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 God'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 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 Céline 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 portière 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.