"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined himself to see.
"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not endure, you know."
"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim, and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river and left something chill and empty in the spaces about them. Things grew hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace, grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very near. "What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"
Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said with apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he kept her hand while he said, "You will always represent something in mine. I can depend upon you—I shall know that you are there."
"Yes," she said, sincerely, "Yes, indeed;" and it seemed to her that he looked thin and intense as he stood beside her—unless it was only another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever has taken a good deal out of you."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust. It gave a soothing wistulness to discontent to think this, which a discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter of fact, there were not very many days, and they were largely filled with millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they asserted themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency, by billows of spotted muslin, with which Céline, who felt the romance of the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Céline, indeed, was worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend" her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the source, and they stitched together while she, with careful reserves, watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her Bible—she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs. Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had several times felt, seated beside Céline, how grateful she ought to be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such pleasantness, though Céline herself seemed to stand rather far from their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their bright faces. Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made his tea for him with precision, and pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat. He found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant. She sat up straight and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of year up-country but nothing at all to complain of yet. He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the first time in secular dress. The stays insisted a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested. Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading birds, and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her sides. She had put on a hat that matched: it was the kind of pretty, disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant; its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased. She made no demand upon him for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time, when they were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.
"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.
The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been completed over night; indeed, she slept on board, and Duff had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh-swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her Army clothes—she had come on board in one of the muslins—and she was softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the overruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.