"And--my dear--he didn't ask a single Sister!" Hilda turned upon her a face which appeared still to glow with the stimulus of the Archdiaconal function. "And--it was wicked considering the occasion--I dropped the character. I let myself out!"

"You didn't shock the Archdeacon?"

"Not in the least. But, my dear love, did you ever permit yourself the reflection that the Venerable Gambell is a bachelor?"

"Hilda, you shall not! We all love him--you shall not lead him astray!"

"You would not think of--the altar--?"

Miss Livingstone's pale small smile fell like a snow-flake upon Hilda's mood and was swallowed up. "You are very preposterous," she said. "Go on. You always amuse one." Then as if Hilda's going on were precisely the thing she could not quite endure, she said quickly, "The _Coromandel_ is telegraphed from Colombo to-day."

"Ah!", said Hilda.

"He leaves for Madras to-morrow. The thing is to take place there, you know."

"Then nothing but shipwreck can save him."

"Nothing but--what a horrible idea! Don't you think they may be happy? I really think they may."

"There is not one of the elements that give people, when they commit the paramount stupidity of marrying, reason to hope that they may not be miserable. Not one. If he were a strong man I should pity him less. But he's not. He's immensely dependent on his tastes, his friends, his circ.u.mstances."

Alicia looked at Hilda; her glance betrayed an attention caught upon an accidental phrase. She did not repeat it, she turned it over in her mind.

"You are thinking," Hilda said accusingly. "What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing. I saw Stephen yesterday, I thought him looking rather wretched."

A shadow of grave consideration winged itself across Hilda's eyes.

"He works so much too hard," she said. "It is an appalling waste. But he will offer himself up."

Alicia looked unsatisfied. "He brought Mr. Lappe to tea," Miss Howe said.

The shadow went. "Should you think Brother Lappe," she demanded, "specially fitted for the cure of souls? Never, never, could I allow the process of my regeneration to come through Brother Lappe. He has such a little nose, and such wide pink cheeks, and such fat, sloping shoulders.

Dear succulent Brother Lappe!"

A Sister pa.s.sed through the dormitory on a visit of inspection. Alicia bowed sweetly and the Sister inclined herself briefly with a cloistered smile. As she disappeared, Hilda threw a black skirt over her head, making a veil of it flowing backward, and rendered the visit, the noiseless measured, step, the little deprecating movements of inquiry, the benevolent recognition of a visitor from a world where people carried parasols and wore spotted muslins. She even effaced herself at the door on the track of the other to make it perfect, and came tack in the happy expansion of an artistic effort to find Alicia's regard penetrated with the light of a new conviction.

"Hilda," she said, "I should like to know what this last year has really been to you."

"It has been very valuable," Miss Howe replied. Then she turned quickly away to hang up the black petticoat, and stood like that, shaking out its folds, so that Alicia might not see anything curious in her face as she heard her own words and understood what they meant.

A probationer came rapidly along the dormitory to where Hilda stood. She had the olive cheeks and the liquid eyes of the country; her lips were parted in a smile.

"Miss Howe," she said in the quick, clicking syllables of her race, "Sister Margaret wishes you to come immediately to the surgical ward. A case has come in, and Miss Gonsalvez is there, but Sister Margaret will not be bothered with Miss Gonsalvez. She says you are due by right in five minutes"--the messenger's smile broadened irresponsibly, and she put a fondling touch upon Hilda's ap.r.o.n string--"so will you please to make haste?"

"What's the case?" asked Hilda, "I hope it isn't another ship's-hold accident." But Alicia, a shade paler than before, put up her hand. "Wait till I'm gone," she said, and went quickly. The girl had opened her lips, however, but to say that she didn't know, she had only been seized to take the message, though it must be something serious, since they had sent for both the resident surgeons.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

Doctor Livingstone's concern was personal, that was plain in the way he stood looking at the floor of the corridor with his hands in his pockets, before Hilda reached him. Regret was written all over the lines of his pausing figure, with the compressed irritation which saved that feeling, in the Englishman's way, from being too obvious.

"This is a bad business, Miss Howe."

"I've just come over--I haven't heard. Who is it?"

"It's my cousin, poor chap--Arnold, the padre. He's been badly knifed in the bazaar."

The news pa.s.sed over her and left her looking with a curious face at chance. It was lifted a little, with composed lips, and eyes which refused to be taken by surprise. There was inquiry in them, also a defence, a retreat. Chance looking back saw an invincible silent readiness and a pallor which might be that of any woman. But the doctor was also looking, so she said, "That is very sad," and moved near enough to the wall to put her hand against it. She was not faint, but the wall was a fact on which one could, for the moment, rely.

"They've got the man--one of those Cabuli moneylenders. The police had no trouble with him. He said it was the order of Allah--the brute. Stray case of fanaticism, I suppose. It seems Arnold was walking along as usual, without a notion, and the fellow sprang on him and in two seconds the thing was done. Hadn't a chance, poor beggar."

"Where is it?"

"Root of the left lung. About five inches deep. The artery pretty well cut through, I fancy."

"Then----"

"Oh no--we can't do anything. The haemorrhage must be tremendous. But he may live through the night. Are you going to Sister Margaret?"

His nod took it for granted and he went on. Hilda walked slowly forward, her head bent, with absorbed, uncertain steps. A bar of evening sunlight came before her, she looked up and stepped outside the open door. She was handling this thing that had happened, taking possession of it. It lay in her mind in the midst of a suddenly stricken and tenderly saddened consciousness. It lay there pa.s.sively; it did not rise and grapple with her, it was a thing that had happened--in Bura Bazaar. The pity of it a.s.sailed her. Tears came into her eyes, and an infinite grieved solicitude gathered about her heart. "So?" she said to herself, thinking that he was young and loved his work, and that now his hand would be stayed from the use it had found. One of the ugly outrages of life, leaving nothing on the mouth but that brief acceptance. It came to her with a note of the profound and of the supreme. "So," she said, and pressed her lips till they stopped trembling, and went into the hospital.

She asked a question or two, in search of Sister Margaret and the new case. It was "located," an a.s.sistant surgeon told her, in Private Ward Number 2. She went more and more slowly toward Private Ward Number 2.

The door was open. She stood in it for an instant with eyes nerved to receive the tragedy. The room seemed curiously empty of any such thing.

A door opposite was also open, with an arched verandah outside; the low sun streamed through this upon the floor with its usual tranquillity.

Beyond the arches, netted to keep the crows away, it made pictures with the tops of the trees. There was the small iron bed with the confused outline under the bedclothes, very quiet, and the Sister--the whitewashed wall rose sharp behind her black draperies--sitting with a book in her hands. Some sc.r.a.ps of lint were on the floor beside the bed and hardly anything else, except the silence, which had almost a presence, and a faint smell of carbolic acid, and a certain feeling of impotence and abandonment and waiting which seemed to be in the air.

Arnold moved on the pillow and saw her standing in the door. The bars of the bed's foot were in the way. He tried to lift his head to surmount the obstruction, and the Sister perceived her too.

"I think absolutely still was our order, wasn't it, Mr. Arnold?" she said, with her little pink smile. "And I'm afraid Miss Howe isn't in time to be of much use to us, is she?" It was the bedside pleasantry that expected no reply, that indeed forbade one.

"I'm sorry," Hilda said. As she moved into the room she detached her eyes from Arnold's, feeling as she did so that it was like tearing something.

"There was so little to do," Sister Margaret said. "Surgeon-Major Wills saw at once where the mischief lay. Nothing disagreeable was necessary, was it, Mr. Arnold? Perfect quiet, perfect rest--that's an easy prescription to take." She had rather prominent, very blue eyes, and an aquiline nose and a small firm mouth, and her pink cheeks were beginning to be a little pendulous with age. Hilda gazed at her silently, noting about her authority and her flowing draperies something cla.s.sical. Was she like one of the Fates? She approached the bed to do something to the pillow--Hilda had an impulse to push her away with the cry, "It is not time yet--Atropos!"

"I must go now for an hour or so," the Sister went on. "That poor creature in Number 6 needs me; they daren't give her any more morphia.

You don't need it--happy boy!" she said to Stephen, and at the look he sent her for answer she turned rather quickly to the door. Dear Sister, she was none of the Fates. She was obliged to give directions to Hilda, standing in the door with her back turned. Happily for a deserved reputation for self-command they were few. It was chief and absolute that no one should be admitted. A bulletin had been put up at the hospital door for the information of inquiries; later on, when the doctor came again, there would be another.

She went away and they were left alone. The sun on the floor had vanished; a yellowness stood in its place with a grey background, the background gaining, coming on. Always his eyes were upon her, she had given hers back to him and he seemed satisfied. She moved closer to the bed and stood beside him. Since there was nothing to do there was nothing to say. Stephen put out his hand and touched a fold of her dress.

The room filled itself with something that had not been there before. In obedience to it Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more to do. Then Arnold spoke.

"You dear woman!" he said. "You dear woman!"

She kept her head bowed like that and did not answer. It was his happiest moment. One might say he had lived for this. Her tears fell upon his hand, a kind of baptism for his heart. He spoke again.