Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

“So you have come at last!” she murmured, with a glow on her face, half nestling towards me, half withdrawing, as if two wills tore her in different directions. “I have been expecting you for some days; and, somehow, to-day, I was almost certain you were coming!”

“Then you are not angry with me?” I cried. “You remember, you forbade me!”

“Angry with you? Dear Hubert, could I ever be angry with you, especially for thus showing me your devotion and your trust? I am never angry with you. When one knows, one understands. I have thought of you so often; sometimes, alone here in this raw new land, I have longed for you to come. It is inconsistent of me, of course; but I am so solitary, so lonely!”

“And yet you begged me not to follow you!”

She looked up at me shyly—I was not accustomed to see Hilda shy. Her eyes gazed deep into mine beneath the long, soft lashes. “I begged you not to follow me,” she repeated, a strange gladness in her tone. “Yes, dear Hubert, I begged you—and I meant it. Cannot you understand that sometimes one hopes a thing may never happen—and is supremely happy because it happens, in spite of one? I have a purpose in life for which I live: I live for it still. For its sake I told you you must not come to me. Yet you HAVE come, against my orders; and—” she paused, and drew a deep sigh—“oh, Hubert, I thank you for daring to disobey me!”

I clasped her to my bosom. She allowed me, half resisting. “I am too weak,” she murmured. “Only this morning, I made up my mind that when I saw you I would implore you to return at once. And now that you are here—” she laid her little hand confidingly in mine—“see how foolish I am!—I cannot dismiss you.”

“Which means to say, Hilda, that, after all, you are still a woman!”

“A woman; oh, yes; very much a woman! Hubert, I love you; I half wish I did not.”

“Why, darling?” I drew her to me.

“Because—if I did not, I could send you away—so easily! As it is—I cannot let you stop—and… I cannot dismiss you.”

“Then divide it,” I cried gaily; “do neither; come away with me!”

“No, no; nor that, either. I will not stultify my whole past life. I will not dishonour my dear father’s memory.”

I looked around for something to which to tether my horse. A bridle is in one’s way—when one has to discuss important business. There was really nothing about that seemed fit for the purpose. Hilda saw what I sought, and pointed mutely to a stunted bush beside a big granite boulder which rose abruptly from the dead level of the grass, affording a little shade from that sweltering sunlight. I tied my mare to the gnarled root—it was the only part big enough—and sat down by Hilda’s side, under the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. I realised at that moment the force and appropriateness of the Psalmist’s simile. The sun beat fiercely on the seeding grasses. Away on the southern horizon we could faintly perceive the floating yellow haze of the prairie fires lit by the Mashonas.

“Then you knew I would come?” I began, as she seated herself on the burnt-up herbage, while my hand stole into hers, to nestle there naturally.

She pressed it in return. “Oh, yes; I knew you would come,” she answered, with that strange ring of confidence in her voice. “Of course you got my letter at Cape Town?”

“I did, Hilda—and I wondered at you more than ever as I read it. But if you KNEW I would come, why write to prevent me?”

Her eyes had their mysterious far-away air. She looked out upon infinity. “Well, I wanted to do my best to turn you aside,” she said, slowly. “One must always do one’s best, even when one feels and believes it is useless. That surely is the first clause in a doctor’s or a nurse’s rubric.”

“But WHY didn’t you want me to come?” I persisted. “Why fight against your own heart? Hilda, I am sure—I KNOW you love me.”

Her bosom rose and fell. Her eyes dilated. “Love you?” she cried, looking away over the bushy ridges, as if afraid to trust herself. “Oh, yes, Hubert, I love you! It is not for that that I wish to avoid you. Or, rather, it is just because of that. I cannot endure to spoil your life—by a fruitless affection.”

“Why fruitless?” I asked, leaning forward.

She crossed her hands resignedly. “You know all by this time,” she answered. “Sebastian would tell you, of course, when you went to announce that you were leaving Nathaniel’s. He could not do otherwise; it is the outcome of his temperament—an integral part of his nature.”

“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a witch! How COULD you know that? I can’t imagine.”

She smiled her restrained, Chaldean smile. “Because I KNOW Sebastian,” she answered, quietly. “I can read that man to the core. He is simple as a book. His composition is plain, straightforward, quite natural, uniform. There are no twists and turns in him. Once learn the key, and it discloses everything, like an open sesame. He has a gigantic intellect, a burning thirst for knowledge; one love, one hobby—science; and no moral instincts. He goes straight for his ends; and whatever comes in his way,” she dug her little heel in the brown soil, “he tramples on it as ruthlessly as a child will trample on a worm or a beetle.”

“And yet,” I said, “he is so great.”

“Yes, great, I grant you; but the easiest character to unravel that I have ever met. It is calm, austere, unbending, yet not in the least degree complex. He has the impassioned temperament, pushed to its highest pitch; the temperament that runs deep, with irresistible force; but the passion that inspires him, that carries him away headlong, as love carries some men, is a rare and abstract one—the passion of science.”

I gazed at her as she spoke, with a feeling akin to awe. “It must destroy the plot-interest of life for you, Hilda,” I cried—out there in the vast void of that wild African plateau—“to foresee so well what each person will do—how each will act under such given circumstances.”

She pulled a bent of grass and plucked off its dry spikelets one by one. “Perhaps so,” she answered, after a meditative pause; “though, of course, all natures are not equally simple. Only with great souls can you be sure beforehand like that, for good or for evil. It is essential to anything worth calling character that one should be able to predict in what way it will act under given circumstances—to feel certain, ‘This man will do nothing small or mean,’ ‘That one could never act dishonestly, or speak deceitfully.’ But smaller natures are more complex. They defy analysis, because their motives are not consistent.”

“Most people think to be complex is to be great,” I objected.

She shook her head. “That is quite a mistake,” she answered. “Great natures are simple, and relatively predictable, since their motives balance one another justly. Small natures are complex, and hard to predict, because small passions, small jealousies, small discords and perturbations come in at all moments, and override for a time the permanent underlying factors of character. Great natures, good or bad, are equably poised; small natures let petty motives intervene to upset their balance.”

“Then you knew I would come,” I exclaimed, half pleased to find I belonged inferentially to her higher category.

Her eyes beamed on me with a beautiful light. “Knew you would come? Oh, yes. I begged you not to come; but I felt sure you were too deeply in earnest to obey me. I asked a friend in Cape Town to telegraph your arrival; and almost ever since the telegram reached me I have been expecting you and awaiting you.”

“So you believed in me?”

“Implicitly—as you in me. That is the worst of it, Hubert. If you did NOT believe in me, I could have told you all—and then, you would have left me. But, as it is, you KNOW all—and yet, you want to cling to me.”

“You know I know all—because Sebastian told me?”

“Yes; and I think I even know how you answered him.”

“How?”

She paused. The calm smile lighted up her face once more. Then she drew out a pencil. “You think life must lack plot-interest for me,” she began, slowly, “because, with certain natures, I can partially guess beforehand what is coming. But have you not observed that, in reading a novel, part of the pleasure you feel arises from your conscious anticipation of the end, and your satisfaction in seeing that you anticipated correctly? Or part, sometimes, from the occasional unexpectedness of the real denouement? Well, life is like that. I enjoy observing my successes, and, in a way, my failures. Let me show you what I mean. I think I know what you said to Sebastian—not the words, of course, but the purport; and I will write it down now for you. Set down YOUR version, too. And then we will compare them.”

It was a crucial test. We both wrote for a minute or two. Somehow, in Hilda’s presence, I forgot at once the strangeness of the scene, the weird oddity of the moment. That sombre plain disappeared for me. I was only aware that I was with Hilda once more—and therefore in Paradise. Pison and Gihon watered the desolate land. Whatever she did seemed to me supremely right. If she had proposed to me to begin a ponderous work on Medical Jurisprudence, under the shadow of the big rock, I should have begun it incontinently.

She handed me her slip of paper; I took it and read: “Sebastian told you I was Dr. Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter. And you answered, ‘If so, Yorke-Bannerman was innocent, and YOU are the poisoner.’ Is not that correct?”

I handed her in answer my own paper. She read it with a faint flush. When she came to the words: “Either she is not Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter; or else, Yorke-Bannerman was not a poisoner, and someone else was—I might put a name to him,” she rose to her feet with a great rush of long-suppressed feeling, and clasped me passionately. “My Hubert!” she cried, “I read you aright. I knew it! I was sure of you!”

I folded her in my arms, there, on the rusty-red South African desert. “Then, Hilda dear,” I murmured, “you will consent to marry me?”

The words brought her back to herself. She unfolded my arms with slow reluctance. “No, dearest,” she said, earnestly, with a face where pride fought hard against love. “That is WHY, above all things, I did not want you to follow me. I love you; I trust you: you love me; you trust me. But I never will marry anyone till I have succeeded in clearing my father’s memory. I KNOW he did not do it; I KNOW Sebastian did. But that is not enough. I must prove it, I must prove it!”

“I believe it already,” I answered. “What need, then, to prove it?”

“To you, Hubert? Oh, no; not to you. There I am safe. But to the world that condemned him—condemned him untried. I must vindicate him; I must clear him!”

I bent my face close to hers. “But may I not marry you first?” I asked—“and after that, I can help you to clear him.”

She gazed at me fearlessly. “No, no!” she cried, clasping her hands; “much as I love you, dear Hubert, I cannot consent to it. I am too proud!—too proud! I will not allow the world to say—not even to say falsely”—her face flushed crimson; her voice dropped low—“I will not allow them to say those hateful words, ‘He married a murderer’s daughter.’”

I bowed my head. “As you will, my darling,” I answered. “I am content to wait. I trust you in this, too. Some day, we will prove it.”

And all this time, preoccupied as I was with these deeper concerns, I had not even asked where Hilda lived, or what she was doing!

CHAPTER VII

THE EPISODE OF THE STONE THAT LOOKED ABOUT IT