“Allone, withouten any companye,”
“Allone, withouten any companye,”
“As for Mrs. Odd,” Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her psychology, “she has no heart to make a hole in.”
“Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!”
“She is a thorough egotist. She doesn’t know much either, Hilda, for when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn’t be paid to read him—the real Darwin.”
“Perhaps she likes other things best.”
“Herself,” said Katherine decisively. “Miss Odd of course we have had time to make up our minds about.”
“I like her; don’t you? She has such a clear, trustful face.”
“She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on herself. She could never do anything wrong.”
“I don’t quite likethat; being hard on other people, I mean. One could be quite sure about one’s own wrongness, but how can one about other people’s? It is rather uncharitable, isn’t it, Katherine?”
“She isn’t very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining.”
“A type of what?”
“Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good, with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger son—more interest.”
Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence. She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did.
She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda.
“What is the matter, Hilda?” She spoke crossly. “How you startled me.”
“Oh, such a horrid dream!” Hilda half sobbed. “How glad I am that it isn’t so!”
“What was it?” Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the best attitude towards Hilda’s fright.
“About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms were all tangled in roots.”
“Well, go to sleep now,” Katherine advised.
Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice was heard.
“Katherine—I’m so sorry—don’t be angry—might I come to you? I’m so frightened.”
“Come along,” said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed her.
“Silly little Hilda,” she said.
THREE days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia’s invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother.
She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was there, writing.
“Peter,” she said, “last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr. Apswith and accepted him.”
Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in amazement.
“Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?”
“Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had come.”
Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith’s patience, perseverance, and fidelity were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith’s ardor.
Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father’s lifetime, when muchresponsibility and many duties had claimed her, she had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith’s ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great deal of the Minerva. But, since her father’s death, since Peter’s bridal home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another. Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary’s letters had called forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter. Mary had yielded to it—gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her.
“Mary, my dear girl”—he could hardly find words—“may you be very, very happy. You deserve it; so does he.”
Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge.
“We must ask Apswith down at once,” said Odd. “It’s a busy session, but he can manage a few days.”
“Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. Shestops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks’ time. Delay would be rather silly—he has waited so long.”
“You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don’t like to lose you.”
“It isn’t losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the Mainwarings.”
When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to himself that Mary’s prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia’s influence was a very air-pump. Poor Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two months ago, just after the baby’s death and just before Alicia’s departure for the Riviera.
Alicia was lying on the sofa—Peter staring at the distant trees, did not see them but that scene—her magnificent health had made lying on sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin white cheek. His heartwas very heavy. The paternal instincts are not said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers about it, was that of his child—dead.
On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover’s tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all tenderness out of it.
“My dear girl, my poor, dear girl,” he said, kissing her; and he sat down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up at him with those wonderful eyes—looked up with a smile.
“Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter.”
Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her—her beauty entranced him as it had done from the beginning.
“Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?” His earnestness pleased her; she felt in it her own power.
“What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn’t?”
“Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?”
“Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you, too, losing your heir.”
Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope, love even.
“My heir?” Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone.“That has nothing to do with it. I wasn’t thinking of that.”
“Weren’t you?” said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered—
“Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and for nothing.” She saw the pain setting her husband’s lips sternly. “I suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby,” she remarked.
“I hope I am not a brute,” said Peter gloomily.
“You hopeI’mnot, too, no doubt.”
“Don’t, don’t, Alicia.”
“I felt awfully about it; simply awfully,” Alicia declared.
Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia could disappoint him no longer.
In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia’s perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He was carefully just to Alicia.
Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia’s guests had arrived. Mrs. Marchant, an ugly, “smart,” vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and goodsinger; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and supposed to be clever.
“Clever, I suppose,” Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, “because she has the reputation of doing foolish things badly—dancing on dinner-tables and thoroughlybêtethings like that. She has not danced on Peter’s table as yet.”
Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, and Peter’s placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le Breton’s coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a charitable point of view.
“Poor little girl,” said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with some severity; “it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is to make a fool of herself,” and with this rather unexpected piece of opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of protecting partisanship in Mary’s breast, and his looks at Alicia made her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter’s good-humor might fail.
The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peterdans cette galère.
Peter, however, did not much mind thegalère. His duties as host lay lightly on him. He did notmind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter.
Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less gayety than when Mary was there.
She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard—who had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight effects in the drawing-room.
Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked to bring his girls to tea.
Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two children.Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their dogs—
“I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day.”
“We didn’t know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to bring them,” said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like effect: “Weshouldhave liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully.”
That Palamon’s despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen.
“Hey! What’s that?” Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard the faint ejaculation; “what is your dog called?”
“Palamon.” Hilda’s voice was reserved; she had already thought that she did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, she was sure of it.
“What funny names you give your dogs,” said Alicia. “The other is called Darwin,” she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; “but Palamon is pretty—prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him that?”
“It is out of ‘The Knight’s Tale,’” said Katherine; “Hilda is very fond of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite.”
Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda bythe open admiration of his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby’s, hugely amused him.
“So you like Chaucer?” Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very uncomfortable. “Strong meat that for babes,” Lord Calverly added, looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant vagueness.
“Never read it,” she replied briskly; “not to remember. If I had had literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently.”
Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as “improper” showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm and wonder. Alicia’s expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly’s appreciative monocle—the monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a child’s quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda’s glad face.
“I’m sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?”
He shook hands, smiling at them.
“Don’t, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring,” called the Captain; “they can find their way to the garden without an escort.”
“But it won’t put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if I couldn’t,” and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious and hesitating.
Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not interest her, but she found Alicia’s low, musical laughter, and the enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly’s half-muffled utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well in her journal.
“He is probably flattering her,” thought Katherine; “that is what she likes best.”
Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly’s stare and Alicia’s frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He took her first to the picture gallery—having noticed as they went through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle smile, so that, after the half-hourin the fine gallery, he felt sure that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw.
“All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!” she said; “almost everything would be beautiful, wouldn’t it, if one were great enough?”
The strawberry beds were visited, and—
“Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first acquaintance?” asked Peter; “we have plenty of time before tea.” But, seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda’s eyes, “Well, not there, then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our boating-house is a mile from yours, and I’ll give you a paddle in my Canadian canoe,—such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, or you’ll spill us both into the river.”
“I shouldn’t mind, as you would be there,” laughed Hilda; and so they went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the best and oldest of friends.
ODD’S life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind.
The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence.
Mary’s wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone for two months’ cruising in a friend’s yacht about the North Sea, Peter set to work with vigor. “The Sonnet” was in a year’s time to make him famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were thoroughly irreproachable—a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty but very sensible wife.
Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after herown fashion, felt no weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd when the news reached him at his sister’s, was as unjust as it was poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd’s death had broken her husband’s heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia’s death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of the wisdom of the decision.
At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way—the dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she heard that her friend was going away.
The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Oddhad widened her capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession.
“Odd goes to-morrow,” the Captain announced one evening in the drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she was not reading, and her father’s words seemed to stop her heart in its heavy beating.
“I met Thompson”—Mr. Thompson was Peter’s land-agent—“and everything is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he’s badly broken up.”
“How futile to mourn over death,” Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. “Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great illusion?” Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking “rot” before the children.
“Move this lamp away, Hilda,” said Mrs. Archinard. “I think I can take a nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal.”
It was a warm autumn night, and the windowswere open. Hilda slipped out when she had moved the lamp away.
She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda’s heart stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her breath. Yes,hewas there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and Hilda pushed it open and went in.
At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half incredulous stupefaction. Hilda’s white face, tossed hair, the lamentable condition ofher muslin frock, made of her indeed a startling apparition.
“My dear Hilda!” he exclaimed.
Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd’s face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him, tears brimming to her eyes.
“My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me.”
“I came to say ‘Good-bye,’” said Hilda brokenly.
Peter’s gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness.
“Come here, you dear child,” he said, holding out his arms to her; “you came to say ‘Good-bye?’ I am very grateful to you.”
Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying. Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed touched him deeply.
“Did you come alone?” he asked.
Hilda nodded.
“That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can’t you smile at me? Don’t cry.”
“Oh, I love yousomuch, I can hardly bear it.” Peter felt uncomfortable. The capacity for sufferingrevealed in these words gave him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to cry over people who were not worth it?
“I shall come back some day, Hilda.” Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was relieved by the sobs’ cessation. “I have a wandering fit on me just now; you understand that, don’t you?”
She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at his tone of mutual understanding.
“I am going to see my sister. I haven’t seen her for five years; but long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little face.”
“But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be changed.” Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child’s apprehension of the world’s deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be unchanged—he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts wandered for a moment with Hilda’s words far away from Hilda herself. Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured her small face—had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled at her.
“Cheer up, little one!” She evidently tried to smile back.
“I am afraid you have idealized me, my child—it’s a dangerous faculty. I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine things about me nor care so much. I’m not worth one of those tears, poor little girl!”
It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes.
“You’re not worth it?” she repeated.
“No, really.”
“I don’t imagine things about you.”
“Well, I am glad of that,” said Peter, feeling rather at a loss.
“I love you dearly,” said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity; “you are you. I don’t have to imagine anything.”
Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently.
“Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don’t have to imagine anything.”
Hilda’s eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion, rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss.
“I must go now; they don’t know that I am here.”
“They didn’t know that you were coming, I suppose?”
“No; they wouldn’t have let me come if I had told them before, but I will tell them now.”
“Well, we will tell them together.”
“Are you going to take me home?”
“Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?”
“You are very kind.”
“And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around you. There! and put on this hat.”
Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat, took her hand, and they sallied forth.
“You came across, I suppose?”
“Yes, by the woods.”
“And you weren’t frightened?”
He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied—
“You know already that I am a coward.”
“I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?”
“Yes,” said Hilda vaguely.
They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the wind had risen.
Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard’s little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the Priory shrubberyand were nearing the house, Hilda’s step beside him paused.
“Will you kiss me ‘Good-bye’ here, not before them all?”
“What beastly things ‘Good-byes’ are,” Odd said, looking down at the glimmering oval of her uplifted face; “what thoroughly beastly things.” He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: “Good-bye, dear little Hilda.”
“Thank you so much—for everything,” she said.
“Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you.”
“Don’t be different.Trynot to change.”
“Ah, Hilda! Hilda!”
That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and kissed again the child beside him.
ODD knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysées in a rattling, closedfiacre. He and Besseint had talked so late into the evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the Marbœuf quarter and dress.
Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable.
Lady—— welcomed him unresentfully—
“Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss Archinard—over there talking to my husband—she is such a clever girl.”
Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that Lady—— saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness.
“Evidently you know her; and evidently youweregoing to be bored and arenotgoing to be now! Your change of expression is really unflattering!” Lady—— laughed good humoredly.
“I haven’t seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it isn’t Hilda, then!” Odd caught sight of the young lady.
“I amverysorry it isn’t ‘Hilda.’ Hilda is thebeauty; she is, unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her own account.”
Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room.
“Miss Archinard—an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for ten years.”
“Mr. Odd!” cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him.
“It is astonishing, isn’t it?” said Peter. “Ten years does mean something, doesn’t it?”
“So much and yet so little. It hasn’t changed you a bit,” said Katherine. “And here is papa. Papa, isn’t this nice? Mr. Odd, do you remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her romantic farewell escapade?”
Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old friendship.
“And Hilda?” Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the dining-room together. “Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?”
“Well, and as lovely as ever,” Katherine assured him. “She is not here because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art.” Peter had a good look at her as they sat side by side.
Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was distinctly interesting and—yes—distinctly charming. Her black eyes, deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominantsignificance; humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure—the thick deeply rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck; and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive—the long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the moulded conventionality of the other women’s bodices. This glowing gown was cut off the shoulders; Katherine’s shoulders were beautiful, and they were triumphantly displayed.
“And now, please tell me,” said Peter, “how it comes that I haven’t seen you for ten years?”
“How comes it that we have not seenyou? You have been everywhere, and so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?”
Peter nodded.
“I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared.”
“We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor.”
Katherine’s smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as to an old friend who had a right to know.
“Then we had a year or two at Dinard—loathsome place I think it! Then Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda’s painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as such exiles can hope for.”
“But you don’t mean to say that your exile is indefinite?”
Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the creamy expanse of shoulder.
“And Hilda paints? Well?”
“Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that’s the rare thing, you know. Over four years of atelier work didn’t scotch Hilda’s originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out of it.”
“What kind of work does she go in for?” Peter was conscious of a vague uneasiness about Hilda. “Portraits?”
“No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very decorative—not Japanese either—except in their air of choice and selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit like baby Whistlers—not that I intimate any real resemblance—but the sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them,” Katherine repeated.
“And Mrs. Archinard?” Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that rather effaced personality.
“Mamma is just the same, only stronger thanshe used to be in England. I think the Continent suits her better. And nowyou, Mr. Odd. The idea of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven’t you? As a child you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your ‘Dialogues’ did. I think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to me of arapportbetween your ‘Dialogues’ and his ‘Dialogues Philosophiques.’ I don’t imply that, except that you are both sceptical and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less frivolous.”
“I’m sceptical as to people, not as to principles,” said Peter, smiling not bitterly.
“Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people.”
“I don’t admire them.”
“You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn’t it? Why didn’t you keep on?”
“Because I didn’t keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure.”
“I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren’t ‘practical,’ and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring.”
“Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago.”
“How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since getting back?”
“Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London.”
“We were with Lady Mainwaring.”
“Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?”
“Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us.”
“And Hilda enjoyed herself?”
Katherine smiled: “How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn’t care much for that sort of thing really.”
Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful complaint of Mrs. Archinard’s weekly letter had cut short Hilda’s season, and brought her back to the little room in the littleappartement, 3ième au dessus de l’entresol, where Mrs. Archinard spent her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard’s lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people’s deficiencies.
“But Hilda’s month meant more than other girls’ years,” Katherine went on; “you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old friend,” and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, “Allan Hope.”
Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt its concealment.
“Allan Hope?” he repeated. “It is impossible for me to imagine little Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!”
“Allan Hope is very nice,” Katherine said lightly.
“Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a child.”
Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine.
“And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is.”
“That depends.” Katherine laughed. “But regrets of that kind are unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don’t think little Hilda is much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn’t imply that one is ready for them, and I don’t think that Hilda is ready.”
Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine’s black eyes rested on him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all.
There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look of middle age.
“His Parliamentary experience probably knockedthe remaining illusions out of him,” Katherine reflected. “He was certainly very unsuccessful, he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a woman who would be nice to him.” And it was characteristic of Katherine that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether it would be feasible, or rather desirable—for Katherine intended to please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she could make up her mind—to contemplate that rôle for herself. Miss Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was excellent—not glittering—Katherine would have liked glitter, and the more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fitonly to impress ignorance or vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy memory of such slight importance as Hilda’s child friendship; but Katherine’s certainty of the slightness—and this man of forty looked anything but sentimental—left her very tolerant of his preoccupation.
Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. Indeed his next words showed as much.
“How many changes—forgive the truism, of course—in ten years! Did you know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find myself an uncle with a vengeance.”
“I haven’t seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages ago, that wedding.”
“Mary has drawn a lucky number in life,” said Odd absently.
“She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, at Allersley?”
“Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is rather lonely.”
“Why don’t you fill it with people?”
“You forget that I don’t like people,” said Odd.
“You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be something of martyrdom,then, when you at last settle down to your duty as landowner and country gentleman.”
“Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness.”
“The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn’t care to see us! No, I think I prefer Paris to the Priory.”
“What do you do with yourself in Paris?”
“Very little that amounts to anything,” Katherine owned; “one can’t very well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn’t born with them, one must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good fighter if I had my weapons!” and Katherine’s dark eye, as it flashed round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him.
“Yes,” he said, “I think you would be a good fighter. What would you fight?”
“The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more’s the pity.”
“And the flesh and the devil,” Odd suggested; “is this to be a moral crusade?”
“I’m afraid I can’t claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of conquering; ‘to ride in triumph through Persepolis,’ like Tamburlaine, chain up people I don’t like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the people I liked.”
“And all the others would be in cages!”
“They would deserve it if I put them there! I’m very kind-hearted, very tolerant.”
“And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all marching and caging.”
“I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but not meanly so, I assure you.”
“No; not meanly so, I am sure.” Odd’s eyes were quietly scrutinizing, as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic.
“And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?”
“Meanwhile I study mymilieu. I go out a good deal, if one can call it going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-Americanmélange; I read a bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!”
“You rode so well, too, Mary told me.”
“Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn’t regret it.” Katherine smiled with even more assurance under the added intensity of thepince-nez.
“You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling.”
“That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn’t feel pleasure if I were conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody.”
“A very vain young lady,” Odd’s smile was quite alertly interested, “and a self-conscious young lady, too.”
“Yes, rather, I think,” Katherine owned; frankness became her, “but I am very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all.”
“And you are clever,” Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile becoming definitely humorous as he added: “And I am very impudent.”
Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness.
It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon.
“After five,” Katherine said; “Hilda doesn’t get in till so late; and I know that Hilda is theclouof the occasion.”
“Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?”
“She doesn’t care about anything,anythingelse,” Katherine said gravely, adding, still gravely, “Hilda is very, very lovely.”
“I hope you weren’t too much disappointed,” Lady—— said to Odd, just before he was going; “is she not a charming girl?”
“She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl.”
“I have not seen much of her,” Lady—— said, with some vagueness of tone. “I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, too;but the other girl was never there. I don’t fancy she is much help to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings people to see her mother, makes amilieufor her; such a sad invalid she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather a pity, don’t you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that, you know.”
“What goes into that?” Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory and very mysterious background.
“Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it.”
Katherine’s friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ——’s remarks now produced in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed. Katherine’s cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took down to dinner, rathervoulu, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was unjust, also that he was a little cross.
“There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people. After all, success isn’t the test, is it?”
Lady—— smiled, an unconvinced smile—
“You should be the last person to say that.”
“I?” Odd made no attempt to contradict theevident flattery of his hostess’ tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure.
He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped him.
“I have hardly had one word with you, Odd,” said the Captain, whose high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its fundamental look of peevish pettiness. “Mrs. Brooke is going to take Katherine home. It’s a fine night, won’t you walk?”
Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré together.
“We are not far from you, you know,” the Captain said—“Rue Pierre Charron; you said you were in the Marbœuf quarter, didn’t you? We are rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I’ll leave you at the door of your hotel.”
They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysées, as they turned into it, almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights.
“Ten years is a jolly long time,” remarked Captain Archinard, “and a jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we’d left the Priory, of course?”
“I was very sorry to hear it.”
“Devilish hard luck. It wasn’t a choice of evils,though, if that is any consolation; it was that or starvation.”
“As bad as that?”
“Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations—safe enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I simply can’t go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the interest; and hard luck it is altogether,” the Captain repeated. “Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep all worry from her; she doesn’t know anything about my troubles; she lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself rather than deprive her of one luxury.” The tone in which the Captain alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. “And the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have of it. But what is my life, I ask you?” The Captain’s voice was very resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good gentleman’s unhappy situation. “What is my life, I ask you? I go dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and five o’clock tea in grass widows’ drawing-rooms for all distraction. Paris is full of grass widows,” he added, with an even deepened resentment of tone; “and I never cared much about the play, and French actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared about that sort of thing, which I never did—much,” and the Captain drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the tip as they passed beneath a lamp.
“I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer,” he declared, “smokable tobacco. Thought I’d economize on these, and they’re beastly, like all economical things!” And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of disgust.
Peter offered him a substitute.
“You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts,” the Captain paused to shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; “I don’t see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born with a silver spoon in his mouth—and you’ve got a turn for writing, too; once one’s popular, that’s the best paying thing going, I suppose—and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn’t need money should be born with a talent for making it.”
“It certainly isn’t just.”
“Damned unjust.”
Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic, especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain’s diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request. But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehensionmight make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a devilish tight place, positively couldn’t afford a pair of boots (Peter’s eyes involuntarily sought the Captain’s feet, neatly shod in social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc.
Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000 francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter’s readiness.
IT rained next day, and Peter took afiacrefrom the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to be ascended before one reached the Archinards’ apartment; four steep and rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether Wilson’s wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of compensation.
The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste. The pale gray-greens of the room werecharming. Peter noticed appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard’s sofa, for no one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband’s monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything, plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her.
“This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!” Mrs. Archinard’s slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate warmth. “Katherine told us this morning about therencontre. I was expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really impossible!” Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad and pretty smile. “I could hardly realize it, were it not that your books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years.”
Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar bindings.
“I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!” Mrs. Archinard laid her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the “Dialogues,” which was uppermost. “Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art productions of our age.Pater is moreétincellant—a style too jewelled perhaps—one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life—a chain of flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic.”
Peter was conscious of being sorry for it.
“I think we are both of us tired.” Mrs. Archinard’s smile grew even more sadly sweet; “both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, do they not? Everything crumbles.” Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter found nothing to say (“How dull a man who writes quite clever books can be!” thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone—
“And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much.” The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard’s voice irritated Odd to such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own pleasant as he replied—
“Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl.”
“Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term isflung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical woman of the world.”
Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass—very unjustly—Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made uponce type là. She welcomed Katherine’s entrance as a diversion from looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and shadows.
“Iamglad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there—a big bit!”
“And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything delightfully Parisian.”
“The heart is British. True oak!” laughed Katherine; “don’t judge me by the foliage.”
“Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage.”
“No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks, very much. I am glad you are appreciative.” Katherine smiled so gayly, and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget.
“I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she comes, poor dear! ‘Them’ is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn’t mind having no servants in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paidallthe calls, and only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda will hurry.” Mrs. Archinard’s face took on a look of ill-used resignation.
“We all pay dearly for Hilda’s egotism,” she remarked, and for a moment there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation and a queerer melancholy rising within him.
The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. Archinard’s presence was damping, and even Katherine’s smile was like a flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the quarter.
“Almost six!” exclaimed Katherine; “we must have tea.”
“Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd,” said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself, surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian? His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate design.
“Hilda designed it in Florence,” said Katherine, seeing him looking at it; “an Italian friend had itmade for her after her own model and drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see.”
“It’s a lovely thing,” said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him; “the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief”—he bent his head to look more closely—“exquisite.” And he thought it rather rough on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her.
Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six, that he might have been asking for too much patience.
“There she is,” said Katherine; “I must go and tell her that you are here.” Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in.
“I don’t believe I shall ever see Hilda!” he exclaimed, with an assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine laughed.
“Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands. Artists are untidy people, you know,” and Odd, with that same strange acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon, felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and that Katherine had seen to a more respectableentrée.
It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann’s Sonatas thatsighed and pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of Schumann especially, not to listen to her.
In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized till the moment came how much it would excite him.
Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and conscious that she was not.
Her eyes were “big and vague,” but they were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek.
“Bravo!” said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano, “Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting, you have a right to that!” And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she was a trifle displeased.
“Yes, I have, haven’t I?” said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda’s hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed her was gone, and she looked very white.