For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign of
anything but convalescence. An appetite to cry out upon, a chartered
tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands; such
indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for other
betrayals. There had been opportunities--even the day nurse had gone,
and Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he seemed to prefer
to talk about the pattern in the carpet, or the corpulence of the
khansamah, or things in the newspapers. Alicia, once, at a suggestive
point, put almost a visible question into a silent glance, and Lindsay
asked her for some more sugar. Surgeon-Major Livingstone, coming into
his office, unexpectedly one morning, found his sister in the act of
replacing a volume upon its professional shelf. It was somebody on the
pathology of Indian fevers. Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve
it--only technical corroboration. It might also be considered that,
although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for
intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again. They may
have heard in Crooked Lane that Duff was better. We may freely
imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to
disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken advantage
of. Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified repentance; they
might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought, smiling, to the
Archdeacon.
As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay still
in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make, was perhaps
lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it
might very probably work out in shades. So much would infallibly have to
be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without
any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda's
theory might very well be lost in contingencies. Nevertheless, Alicia
postponed her story, from day to day and from hour to hour. If her
ideas about it--she kept them carefully in solution--could have been
precipitated, they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her
brother the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.
She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went
together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the carriage
at a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven o'clock, and the
morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river. There was a white
light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and
delicately purple to the west. The dust slept on the broad roads of the
Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel
of a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the
streets that knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving
past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country
people with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the
profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest
freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered her
shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any heaviness
that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that might
rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for
purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must
have been aware of it, though as a matter of fact when she finally told
Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden
Gardens, where the yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the
morning sky; and so lost it.
He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterwards? The
yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road
trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless
going round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a
tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke
the silence afterwards she started as if in apprehension, but it
was only to say something that anybody might have said, about the
self-sacrificing energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert
belonged. Her assent was little and meagre; nothing would help her to
expand it. The Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton,
without a suggestive bone.
Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
thought, “I had so little to make me think she cared.” There was in it
that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under
pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his
invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay extended beside her
among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far
as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.
“She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only that if
you died you might be saved first.” Her eyes were still on his hand, and
she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse. Then they
relaxed again, and he said, “Oh, well,” and smiled at the balancings of
a crow drinking at a city conduit.
That was all. Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to
postpone her impressions, even her emotions. In the meantime it was
something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to talk about
the commonplaces of the roadside. In her escape from this oppression,
she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent pleasure in what they
saw; everything had in some way the likeness of the leafing teak-trees,
tender and curative. In the broad early light that lay over the tanks
there was a vague allurement, almost a presage, and the wide spaces of
the Maidan made room for hope. She asked Lindsay presently if he would
mind driving to the market; she wanted some flowers for that night. I
think she wanted some flowers for that hour. Her thought broke so easily
into the symbol of a rose.
They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink and
crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared houses
servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches in the
sun and were shaved. Where the street ran into shops there was still
a shuttered blankness, but here and there a doorkeeper yawned and
stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of
dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first hoarding in a side street
announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady
Macbeth, under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy;
with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy,
advertising five complete novelties for the same evening. It made
a cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial
combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was
something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the
crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their
shoes. Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had,
a testimony to the difference of her. In Alicia's smile there was a
satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of things.
The life of the market, the bazar, was all awake and moving. They
rolled up through a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the moment and
abandoned, where the leisurely crowd with calculation under its turbans,
swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a palm-dealer ran out of
bounds and made a little grove before the stall of the man who sold pith
helmets. The warm air held the smell of all sorts of commodities; there
was a great hum of small transactions, clink of small profits. “It makes
one feel immensely practical and acquisitive,” Duff said, looking at the
loaded baskets on the coolies' heads; and he insisted on getting out. “I
am dying to buy an enormous number of desirable things very cheap. But
not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you, nor any ribbons or lace--is
that good lace, Miss Livingstone? Nor even a live duck--really I am
difficult. We might inquire the price of the duck though.”
The sense of being contributive to his holiday satisfaction reigned
in her. She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that played
steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him without her sanction,
how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being. They made their
way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so many things he wanted
to stop before as they went, leaning on his stick to examine them and
delighting in opportunities for making himself quite ridiculous. The
country tobacco-dealer laughed too, squatting behind his basket--it
was a mad sahib, but not madder than the rest; and there was no hurry.
Alicia saw the pink glow of the roses beyond, where the sun struck
across them over the shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach
them by degrees. They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of
climax to the hour's experience, and after that she was not entirely
sure that the day would be as grey as other days.
This was the flood-time of roses, and it was exquisite in the
flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and
squares of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones. Some of the
stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was room only
for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the velvety Jacks, the
rest over-ran the tables and the floor in anything that would hold them.
The place rioted with the joy and the passion of roses, for buying and
selling. There were other flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette,
but they had a diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches
beside the triumph of the roses. Farther on, beyond the cage of
the money-changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their
vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling crowd
divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates. In this part
there were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table-servants, and
fat Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses, Armenian women with
embroidered shawls drawn over their heads, sailors of the port. They
came to pass that way, through the sweetness of it, and this made a
coign of vantage for the men with trays who were very persecuting there.
Lindsay and Alicia stood together beside the roses, her hands were deep
in them, he perceived with pleasure that their glow was reflected in
her face. “No,” she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man who sat
cross-legged in muslin draperies on the table. “These are certainly of
yesterday. There is no scent left in them--and look!” she held up the
bunch and shook it, a shower of pink petals and drops of water fell
upon the round of her arm above the wrist where the laces of her sleeve
slipped back. Lindsay had something like a poetic appreciation of her,
observing her put the bunch down tenderly as if she would not, if she
could help it, find fault with any rose. The dealer drew out another,
and handed it to her; a long-stemmed, wide-open, perfect thing, and it
was then that her glance of delight, wandering, fell upon Laura Filbert.
Lindsay looked instantly, curiously in the same direction, and Alicia
was aware that he also saw. There ensued a terse moment with a burden of
silence and the strangest misgivings, in which he may have imagined that
he had his part alone but which was the heavier for her because of
him. These two had seen the girl before only under circumstances that
suggested protection, that made excuse, on a platform receiving
the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common
conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the
crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet
and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its
violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen
her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She
had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she
offered them right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a
sailor, who refused the paper. When he rejoined his companions there was
a hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads to look after her.
The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the “mem”
passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good. He, too,
looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan,
a man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard.
With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then
Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled;
he raised his arm, and Laura in white astonishment darted from under it.
They seldom did that.
Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made his
stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and
fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that
it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the
manner of Duff's coming back to the girl and the way in which, with a
look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He
was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and
final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he
wanted to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being
forgotten, stepping up to them. “Take her home in the carriage,” she
said to Duff, “and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time
still--quite a long time.” She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke,
but made no answer to the “Good-morning! God bless you!” with which the
girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down
at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep
into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to
suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not
aware that she still held it, but that was the only rose she brought
away.