Hilda by Sara Jeannette Duncan (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

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"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 suede 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.


CHAPTER VIII.

"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