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

lifted eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly disciplined smile behind her baby's head. When she looked back again Laura had flushed all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which she felt was absurd.

"My!" she said--scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have been expected of her--"you do look nice when you've got a little colour. But if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the meetin's you must be blind, that's all."

Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a wand.

"Then I hope I may go on bringing him," she said. "He couldn't come to a better place."

"Well, you'll have to be careful," said Mrs. Sand, as if with severe intent. "But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say that. You may be an influence for good. It may be His will that you should be pleasant to the young man. But don't make free with him. Don't, on any account, have him put his arm round your waist."

"Nobody has done that to me," Laura replied, austerely, "since I left Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will. Not that Mr. Lindsay" (she blushed again) "would ever want to. The class he belongs to look down on it."

"The class he belongs to do worse things. The Army doesn't look down on it. It's only nature, and the Army believes in working with nature. If it was Mr. Harris that wanted such a thing, I wouldn't say a word--he marches under the Lord's banner."

Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even slightly complacent.

"Well," she said, "I told Mr. Harris last evening that the Lieutenant and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and he seemed to think he'd been keeping company with me. I had to tell him I hadn't any such idea."

"Did he seem much disappointed?"

"He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging to the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have to learn to walk alone."

Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lip. Some faint reflection of the interview with Mr. Harris made her, as far as possible, button up her dressing-gown.

"I don't know but what you did right," she said. "By the grace of God you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you. But I have a kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay'll be harder to convince."

"I dare say."

"It would be splendid, though, to garner him in. He might be willing to march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor Captain Corby, of the Queen's Army, did in Rangoon."

"He might be proud to."

"We must all try and bring sin home to him," Mrs. Sand remarked with rising energy; "and don't you go saying anything to him hastily. If he's gone on you----"

"Oh, Ensign; let us hope he is thinking of higher things! Let us both pray for him. Let Captain Sand pray for him, too, and I'll ask the Lieutenant. Now that she's got Miss Rozario safe into the Kingdom, I don't think she has any special object."

"Oh, yes, we'll pray for him," Ensign Sand returned, as if that might have gone without saying, "but you----"

"And give me that precious baby. You must be completely worn out. I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should."

"It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin' child out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.

The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of his reception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young lady friends away, and these also, doubtless, operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not attend a Believers' Rally unless one's personal faith extends beyond the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one's spiritual condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley square, later in the evening, the conditions were different. It would not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment. The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone, and tram-drivers whistled bullock carts off the lines, and street pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the group of exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the buttons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to the people in their own language; the "open air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!" (Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd. He looked down at a coolie woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the bricks of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not delay until to-morrow!" Laura besought them. "_Kul-ka dari mut karo!_" A sensation of disgust assailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse of atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back and dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap. But he grew more miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench at a distance, where he could not hear her voice. Only the hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn. In the chorus the words were distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand--


"_Us ki ho tarif,
Us ki ho tarif!_"


The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle, a discordance of a special intolerable sort.

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

"Glory to His name!" "Glory to His name!"

His "Good evening!" when the meeting was over was a cheerful, general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate appeal, as they moved off.

"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called put, and they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer, the East Indian paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and slipped away.

"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said. Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed and seemed perturbed.

"What she said was quite true," he ventured.

"But--anybody would think----"

"What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road? It's quieter. What would anybody think?"

"Oh, silly things." Laura threw up her head with a half-laugh. "Things I needn't mention."

Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then "Between us?" he asked, and she nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.

"I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay." Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed to be a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation. Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.

"Dear," he said, "you can't know--there is no way of telling you--what I mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves; but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you. I can't explain to you how poor it was, and I won't try; but I fancy God sends every one of us, if we know it, some one blessed chance, and He did more for me--He lifted the veil of my stupidity and let me see it, passing by in its halo, trailing clouds of glory. I don't want to make you understand, though--I want to make you promise. I want to be absolutely sure from to-night that you'll marry me. Say that you'll marry me--say it before we get to the crossing. Say it, Laura." She listened to his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then made as if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and she heard him through, walking beside him formally in her bare feet, and looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in Putney.

"I don't object to your calling me by my given name," she said when he had done, "but it can't go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay, and you ought not to bring God into it--indeed you ought not. You are no son or servant of His--you are among those whose very light is darkness, and how great is your darkness!"

"Don't," he said shortly, "never mind about that--now. You needn't be afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know, outside the Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants you to marry him, that's how it is. Will you?"

"I don't wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I'm very much obliged, but I couldn't dream of it."

"Don't dream of it; consider it, accept it. Why, darling, you are half mine already--don't you feel that?"

Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of his eyes in her. Her tired body even clung to him. "Are you quite sure you haven't begun to think of loving me?" he demanded.

"It isn't a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it's a question of the Army. You don't seem to think the Army counts for anything."

One is convinced that it wasn't a question of love, the least in the world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and the flame in him leaped up.

"Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question."

"Is that a quotation?" she asked. She spoke coldly, and this time she succeeded in withdrawing her hand. "I dare say you think the Army very