Chapter 10

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 Whiteway 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 that wanted such a thing, 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 lip. Some faint reflection of the interview with Mr. Harris made her, as far as possible, button up her dressing-gown.

"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 dare say."

"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 reception 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 bricks 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—