“I will walk too,” Hilda said readily. “I should prefer it, truly.” With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. “I really can't afford any more,” she said. “He can get his wheel mended with that, can't he?”
“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 was held in a frightened silence. 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 explained. 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, golden-tongued Kali, half visible through the door of a mud hut—where all the dealers in brass dishes and glass armlets 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.