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

said. "I forgot. You are usually so intelligent, one can be coarse 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 assurance 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 appraisement 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 cluster 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 sanctity 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 God 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 assured, 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 sex 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, assuredly," 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?"

"Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me." She spoke carefully, after an instant's hesitation.

"Then do come and dine--at eight," Alicia said; and it was agreed.

She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and only turned when Hilda spoke.

"You are going to have him to meet her," she said. "May I come too?"

"Certainly not." Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door handle.

"Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!" Hilda cried.

"I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home," said Alicia, and went out swiftly.

"My goodness!" Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend Stephen Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College street. "Thanks immensely," it ran, "for your delightful offer to introduce me to Father Jordan and persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders he keeps in his tower at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an hour of milk and honey, and belonging to that charming Order he won't mind my coming on a Sunday evening--the first clear one."

Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her pen. Then she added: "If you have any influence with Duff Lindsay, it may be news to you that you can exert it with advantage to keep him from marrying a cheap, ethereal little _religieuse_ of the Salvation Army named Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you should expostulate with her, but I don't advise that."


CHAPTER X.

The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful air when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in any case it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand walked the floor, carrying a baby, a pale, sticky baby with blotches, which had inherited from its maternal parent a conspicuous lack of buttons. Mrs. Sand's room was also ornamented with texts, but they had apparently been selected at random, and they certainly hung that way. The piety of the place seemed at the control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with his father's regimental cap. On the other side of the curtain Captain Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.

"What kind of meetin' did you have?" asked Mrs. Sand. "There--there now; he shall have his bottle, so he shall!"

"A beautiful meeting. Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro, you know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss Rozario from Whiteway and Laidlaw's. We had such a happy time."

"What sort of collection?"

Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper coins.

"Only seven annas three pice! And you call that a good meeting! I don't believe you exhorted them to give!"

"Oh, I think I did!" Laura returned mechanically.

"Seven annas and three pice! And you know what the Commissioner wrote out about our last quarter's earnings! What did you say?"

"I said--I said the collection would now be taken up," Laura faltered.

"Oh dear! oh dear! Leopold, stop clawing me! Couldn't you think of anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that? Fever or no fever, it does not do for me to stay away from the regular meetin's. One thing is plain--_he_ wasn't there!"

"Who?"

"Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your reasons." Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful. "I mean the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind, under the window. A society man, I should say, to look at him, though the officers of this Army are no respecters of persons, and I don't suppose the Lord takes any notice of his clothes."

"His name is Mr. Lindsay. No, he wasn't there."

The girl's tone was distant and cold. The rebuke about the collection had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.

"I hope you haven't been discouraging him?"

Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.

"I have entreated him to come to the meetings. But he never attends a Believers' Rally. Why should he?"

"What's his state of mind? He came to see you, didn't he, the other night?"

"Yes, he did. I don't think he's altogether careless."

"Ain't he seeking?"

"He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself. The Lord has different ways of working. What else should bring him night after night?"

Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with