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 Whiteaway 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 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 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 lips.
“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 daresay.”
“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 perception 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 toil
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 specially intolerable sort.
“Glory to His name!
Glory to His name!”
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.
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 out, 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 on 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 your
particular 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, dear creature, you are
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 daresay you think the Army very
common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great and holy
crusade, and I march with it. You would not ask me to give up my
life-work?”
“Only to take it into another sphere,” Duff said unreflectingly. He was
checked, but not discouraged; impatient, but in no wise cast down. She
had not flown, she walked beside him placidly. She had no intention
of flight. He tried to resign himself to the task of beating down her
trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse to leap over them.
“Another sphere,”--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation. “I
suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same.”
“Not quite the same. You would have to drive to see your sinners in a
carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them in--what
do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or pearls.
I think I would rather see you in pearls.” He was aware of the
inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped to laugh
inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn of her head.
“We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most of
them would be on Government House list, just as most of your present
ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the police
magistrates. But you would find just as much to do for them.”
“I should not even know how to act in such company.”
“You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some people I
know; delightful people, who will understand. A year! You will learn in
three months--what odds and ends there are to know. I couldn't spare you
for a year.”
Lindsay stopped. He had to. Captain Filbert was murmuring the cadences
of a hymn. She went through two stanzas, and covered her eyes for a
moment with her hand. When she spoke it was in a quiet, level, almost
mechanical way. “Yes,” she said. “The Cross and the Crown, the Crown and
the Cross. Father in heaven, I do not forget Thy will and Thy purpose,
that I should bring the word of Thy love to the poor and the lowly, the
outcast and those despised. And what I say to this man, who offers me
the gifts and the gladness of a world that had none for Thee, is the
answer Thou hast put in my heart--that the work is Thine and that I
am Thine, and he has no part or lot in me, nor can ever have. Here is
Crooked Lane. Good-night, Mr. Lindsay.” She had slipped into the devious
darkness of the place before he could find any reply, before he quite
realised, indeed, that they had reached her lodging. He could only utter
a vague “Goodnight,” after her, formulating more definite statements to
himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.