Hilda Part 10

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 att.i.tude? Do you see yourself in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?"

Contempt acc.u.mulated 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 att.i.tude!" she cried. "What in the world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no att.i.tude. 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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sume 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 chast.i.ty 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 coa.r.s.e 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 coa.r.s.e and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the bath-room 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, "might your name be?"

There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a conventionality of the other world, and before its a.s.surance 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 107. 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 the wages the body pays to sin."

"Divinest Laura!" Hilda exclaimed, 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 references 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 my apprais.e.m.e.nt fails.

"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 cl.u.s.ter 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 sanct.i.ty 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 bell stops.

'_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 would not 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 G.o.d bless you--in the way you most need,"

she said, and turned to Alicia, for whose ears Hilda's protests against the girl's going broke meaninglessly about the room. "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 a.s.sured, 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!' Good-bye."

She drew her head-covering further 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, disclosing, confessing, insisting upon her s.e.x 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, a.s.suredly," 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 No. 10, 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?"