ODD, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine—the morning spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda—excluded the hours of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity.
Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd’s face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine’s eye was very clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized thatthrough Allan Hope’s discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and Hilda’s drudgery as binding.
Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense ofmalaise.
One was that Allan Hope’s smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a Katherine.
Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter’s haggard looks.
She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over her, he kissed her with more tenderness than he always showed. Their engagement had left almost untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier days.
“Well,” he said, and Katherine understood and resented somewhat the quick attack of the absorbing subject. She shook her head.
“Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected.”
Odd stood upright and looked at her.
“Bad!” he repeated.
“She refused him,” Katherine said tersely, and her glance turned once more from the fire to Peter’s face. He looked at her silently.
“She is a foolish baby,” added Katherine.
“She refused him—definitely?”
“Quite. She had to face the music last night, of course. Mamma and papa were rather—shabby—let us say, in their disinterested disappointment.” Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Katherine’s tone. “She told me, when I removed her from the battlefield, that she doesn’t love himand never will. So, of course, from every high and mighty point of view she is right, quite right.”
Katherine’s eyes returned contemplatively to the fire. Odd was still silent.
“She ought to love him, of course; that is where she is so foolish. I am afraid she has ruined her life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit as good-looking as you are.” Katherine glanced at him with a sad and whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was looking rather dazed. He stooped once more and kissed her.
“Thank you for loving me, Katherine.”
“You are welcome. Itisa pity, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is”—Peter seated himself on the sofa, where Allan had sat the night before—“an awful pity,” he added. “I am astonished. I thought she cared for him.”
“So did I.”
“She cares for some one else, perhaps.” Odd locked his hands behind his head, and he too stared at the fire.
“There is no one else she could care for. I know Hilda’s outlook too well.”
“And she refused him,” he repeated musingly.
“Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull—not like you.” Katherine smiled at him.
“I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would have been so satisfactory. And what’s to be done now?”
“That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power over Hilda is very limited. You may have more influence.”
“She might come and live with us.”
“That would be very nice,” Katherine assented, “and it is very dear of you to suggest it.”
Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompted him to add with self-scorn—
“What would your mother do?”
“Without her? I don’t know.”
“Of course,” Peter hastened to add, “as far as money goes, you know; you understand, dear, that your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her of the companionship of both daughters?” Peter rose and walked to the window. It needed some heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of Hilda living with them; he tried to pride himself on the renunciation, while under the poor crust of self-approbation lurked jibing depths of consciousness. Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living with her. The cowardice of his own retreat left him horribly shaken.
Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly.
“But Hilda’s work must cease at once,” he said presently, finding a certain relief in decisive measures. “She won’t show any false pride, I hope, about allowing me to put an end to it.”
“It would be like her,” said Katherine, sliding a sympathetic gloom of voice over the hard reality of her conclusions; conclusions half angry, half sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt alarmed, humiliated, and amused, but she steeled herself inwardly to a calm contemplation of facts. She joined him at the window. “What a burden you have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter.” Peter immediately put his arm around her waist, and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation,she saw that alarm was needless; a proof of Peter’s superiority, a proof, too, of his stupidity; as her own most original and clever superiority was proved by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could she accept that humiliation as the bitter drop in the cup of good things Peter had to offer her? Katherine asked herself the question; it was answered by another. Just how far did the humiliation go? Peter’s infidelity might be mere shallow passion,passagère;the fine part might be to feign blindness and help him out of it.Attendonssummed up Katherine’s mental attitude at the moment.
“Don’t talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine,” said Peter. “Don’t try to spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, what more can I ask?” He looked at her with kind, tired eyes.
“I won’t thwart you, but Hilda will.”
“Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, Katherine.”
Katherine looked pensively out of the window.
“We will see,” she replied, with a pretty evasiveness.
It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the doorwayand the next corner, they were on his last few conversations with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were as delicately discriminative as Katherine’s, but lacked that metallic assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson’s sweet radiance.
Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was not sure that she was not a “foolish baby.”
“Let us walk,” she said, “it is such a lovely day.”
“We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to catch the sunset on the Seine.”
“Yes; what alovelyday! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a hoop, that I could run and roll.”
“You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow with Katherine and me.”
“I can’t. Don’t think me a prig, but my model is due and I am finishing my picture. Thanks so much; and this walk is almost as good.”
“If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda.”
“Oh, he isn’t tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is getting into his veins. What delicious air.”
“The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a little as you should look.”
Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original characteristic of Hilda’s that she did not seem at all anxious to talk about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile—
“That’s what you ought to have—sunlight. You are a little white flower that has grown in a shadow.” Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled rather distantly.
“What a sad simile!”
“Is it a true one, Hilda?”
“I don’t think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light. I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos.”
“No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight for even friendly eyes to poetize—to sentimentalize, as you rather unkindly said.”
“Sunlight is poetic, too.”
“Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy life, are not poetic.”
“That is rather morbid, you know—décadent.”
“I don’t imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to give others the sunshine.”
Hilda’s eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that implied no liking for thesepersonalities—personalities that glanced from her to others, as Odd realized.
He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, with all her gentle quiet—
“You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can’t claim the rather self-righteously heroicrôleyou give me. I think it is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people don’t care about.”
“A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn’t have told me to mind my own business more kindly.” Odd’s humorous look met her glance of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, “Will you try to find pleasure in a thing most girlsdocare for? Will you go to the Meltons’ dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and I said I would try to persuade you.”
“Ididn’tmean to snub you.”
“Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance.”
The girlish pleasure of her face was evident.
“Do you really want me to?”
“It would make me very happy.”
“It is against my rules, you know. I can’t get up at six and go out in the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show you I wasn’t snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to.” The gayety of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. “Only I am afraid I can’t. I remember I haven’t any dress.”
“Anydress will do, Hilda.”
“But I haven’t any dress. The gray silk is impossible.”
Peter’s mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position.
“But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had dresses.”
“Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well—a little too long and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would do, if it wasn’t cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it was only turned up. It is trimmed withmousseline de soie, and the flounce would hide the line.”
Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly touching. “It might do.”
“It must do. If it doesn’t, another of Katherine’s can be metamorphosized.”
“And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don’t know many people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I should like todependon you; and if I am left sitting alone in a corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?” Her smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look.
“Hilda, you are quite frivolous.” Terms of reckless endearment were on his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. “How shall I manœuvre that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no.”
ODD was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would see her at the Meltons’ on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety.
The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton’s apartment—one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne—and after greeting his hostess, he waited for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine’s smooth dark head, the Captain’s correctly impassive good looks, and Hilda’s loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility as acute as a fond mother’s, he saw—felt, even—the stir, the ripple of inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious of aim be the conqueror. ToOdd, the admiration, like the scent of a bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the very air with sudden perfume. “Her dear little head,” “Her lovely little head,” he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. Then, turning to Hilda—
“The white satindoes,” he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen people already.
“See that Hilda, in herembarras de choix, doesn’t become too much embarrassed,” she said to Peter. “Exercise for her a brotherly discretion.”
The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton—a pretty little woman with languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her exclusiveness, which she tookau grand serieux, highly amused Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton’s. She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as tolerant of a millionaireparvenuas might be a duchess with a politicalentourageto manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton’s anxious social self-satisfaction humorous—a fact of which Mrs. Melton was unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dulltoo, and a few grievances whispered behind her fan in Katherine’s earen passant—for subject, the unfortunate and eternalnouveau riche—made pleasant gravity difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her dull and funny.
Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes.
“I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, led by your father and Mrs. Melton.”
He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced it—charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else’s hair was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his felicity carry him too far into conjecture.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, as they joined the eddy circling around Mrs. Melton’s ballroom.
“So much; thanks to you.” Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at the joy of dancing. “I had almost forgotten how delicious it was.”
“More delicious than the studio, isn’t it?”
“You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche could do it—all light and movement and color. I should like to comeout of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls’ throats. There is the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly heads! Isn’t that worth while?”
Odd’s eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda’s throat.
“Everything you do is worth while—from painting to dancing. You dance very well.”
The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display of which he recognized the gown’s quondam possessor, gave him a little pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue—the long fatigue of a weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge of the aloofness—the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago.
“You dance well, too, Mr. Odd,” she said.
“I very seldom waltz.”
“Inmyhonor then?”
“Solely in your honor. I haven’t waltzed five times in one evening with one young woman—for ages!”
“You haven’t waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!”
“What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, Hilda?”
“No; I don’t think of you as old.”
“But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young.”
“Deliciously?” she repeated. “That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; doesn’t see things invalue; everything is blacker or whiter than reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time.”
“And you, Hilda?”
Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance.
“Don’t be personal.”
“But you were. And, after the other day—your declaration of contentment.”
“Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk about themselves,” Hilda added; “it’s the worst kind of immodesty. Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who go round telling about their souls.”
“Severe, rigid child!” Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed again. “You are horribly reserved, Hilda.”
“Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one isn’t dull,” said Hilda maliciously.
“You are dull and silent, then?”
“I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness.”
“It may be a very wide cleverness.”
“Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an ice.”
Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner of the ballroom. Katherinepassed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious of a painful effort in his answering smile.
Hilda’s eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond contemplation.
“Isn’t that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing rose.”
“Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely.”
“Do you notice dresses, care about them?”
“I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the blended effect of dress and wearer.”
“I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has visions of crushed ribs, don’t you think?”
Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile that he still felt to be painful. “And is not this lace gathered around the shoulders pretty too?” Hilda turned to him for inspection.
“You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, Hilda.” Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her gown.
“The lace is mamma’s. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has Meredith’s last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing all the talking.Youtalk now.”
“About Meredith, your dress, or you?”
“About yourself, if you please.”
“It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me than you were in yourself.”
Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers with a force which almost compelled her—
“No; I am very much interested in you.” Odd was silent, studying her face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown—the expression of painfully controlled emotion.
“There is nothing comparably interesting in me,” he said; “I have had my story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn’t.”
“And your books?”
“They are as negative as I am.”
“Yet they have helped me to live.” Hilda looked hard at him while she spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white.
“Helped you to live, Hilda!” he almost stammered; “my gropings!”
“You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and lit my path!” She smiled, adding: “I suppose you think you have failed because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success.”
“I didn’t even know you read my books.”
“I know your books very well; much better than I know you.”
“Don’t say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them.”
“One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. Perhaps youdoeven better than you write.”
“Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison.” His voice stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile—
“Shall we dance?”
In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the dance’s circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of desire; he must hear from Hilda’s lips why she had refused Allan Hope.
An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain.
Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his energy this evening was on Hilda’s account; he had claimed the responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there was some rather dislocated consolation in that.
Hilda was a little breathless when he came toclaim her for the second cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening.
“I have been dancingsteadily,” she announced, “and twice down to supper! Did you try any of the narrow little sandwiches? So good!”
“And you still don’t grudge me my waltzes?”
“I like yoursbest!” she said, smiling at him as she laid her hand on his shoulder. They took a few turns around the room and then Hilda owned that she was a little tired. They sat down again on the sofa.
“Hilda!” said Odd suddenly, “will you think me very rude if I ask you why you refused Allan Hope?”
Hilda turned a startled glance upon him.
“No; perhaps not,” she answered, though the voice was rather frigid.
“You don’t think I have a right to ask, do you?”
“Well, the answer is so evident.”
“Is it?” Hilda had looked away at the dancers; she turned her head now half unwillingly and glanced at him, smiling.
“I would not have refused him if I had loved him, would I? You know that. It doesn’t seem quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?”
“Not to me even? I have been interested in it for a long time. Katherine told me, and Mary.”
“I don’t know why they should have been so sure,” said Hilda, with some hardness of tone. “I never encouraged him. I avoided him.” She looked at Odd again. “But I am not angry with you; if any one has a right, you have.”
“Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, youknow my interest, my anxiety. It seemed so—happy for both. And you care for no one else?”
“No one else.” Hilda’s eyes rested on his with clear sincerity.
“Don’t you ever intend to marry, Hilda?” Odd was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and looking at the floor. There was certainly a tension in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning him with some wonder.
“Does a refusal to take one person imply that? I have made no vows.”
“I don’t see—“ Odd paused; “I don’t see why you shouldn’t care for Hope.”
“Are you going to plead his cause?” she asked lightly.
“Would it not be for your happiness?” Odd sat upright now, putting on his eyeglasses and looking at her with a certain air of resolution.
“I don’t love him.” Hilda returned the look sweetly and frankly.
“What do you know of love, you child? Why not have given him a chance, put him on trial? Nothing wins a woman like wooing.”
“How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I should really get to loathe poor Lord Allan if I had given him leave to woo me.”
“I suppose you think him too unindividual, too much of a pattern with other healthy and hearty young men. Don’t you know, foolish child, that a good man, a man who would love you as he would, make you the husband he would, is a rarity and very individual?”
Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own paternallyadmonishing attitude. Hilda’s lightly amused but touched look implied a confidence so charming that he found the attitude sublimely courageous.
“I suppose so,” she said, and she added, “I haven’t one word to say against Lord Allan, except—“ She paused meditatively.
“Except what?” Odd asked rather breathlessly.
“He doesn’t reallyneedme.”
“Doesn’tneedyou! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!”
“He needs a wife, but he doesn’t needme.”
“You are subtle, Hilda.”
“I don’t think I amthat.”
“You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to hisneedof you?”
“I shall only marry that person.”
Hilda jumped up. “But I’m not waiting at all, you know.Dansons maintenant!Your task is nearly over!”
It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her last partner, and joined Katherine in a small antechamber, where she was sitting among flowers, talking to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, with the ceremonious bow of his race, made away when Miss Archinard’sfiancéappeared, and Odd dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute, he felt meanly guilty. Katherine looked at him funnily—very good-humoredly.
“I didn’t know you had it in you to dance so well and so persistently, Peter. You have done honor to Hilda’s ball.”
“I hope I wasn’t too selfishly monopolizing.”
“Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, owing to you only, she came,” and Katherine added, smiling still more good-humoredly, “I amnotjealous, Peter.”
He turned to look at her. The words, the playful tone in which they were uttered, struck him like a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own feeling gave them a supreme nobility. She wasnotjealous. What a cur he would be if ever he gave her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause was there; his task must be to keep it hidden.
“But supposeIam?” he said; “you haven’t given me a single dance.”
Katherine’s smile was placid; she did not say that he had not asked for one. Indeed they had rarely danced together.
“I think of going to England in a day or two, Peter,” she observed. “The Devreuxs have asked me to spend a month with them.”
Peter sat very still.
“A sudden decision, Kathy?”
“No, not so sudden. Ourtête-à-têtecan’t be prolonged forever.”
“Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed before you go.”
“I yield. The first part of May.”
“Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy.”
“No, I am for May.”
“It’s an unlucky month.”
“Oh,wecan defy bad luck, can’t we?” Katherine smiled.
“If you go away, I shall,” said Odd, after a moment’s silence.
“Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma—and Hilda,” said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment of poor Peter’s folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his infidelity. That he should think she did not see it!
“I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little of your mother—and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after her lessons.”
“I am afraid that mamma can’t spare Taylor.”
Peter moved impatiently.
“Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you. Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately.”
“As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the donor. She would not take the money.”
“I could speak to your father; lend him a sum.”
Katherine flushed.
“It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent.”
“Oh dear!” sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine.
“When do you go to London, dear?” he asked.
“The day after to-morrow.” Katherine, above the waving of her fan, smiled slightly at his change of tone. “Will you miss me, Peter?”
“All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play truant like this.”
“It will be good for both of us.” Katherine’s voice was playful, and showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. “I might get tired of you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your perfection.”
“What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you very often?”
“As often as you feel like it; but don’t force feeling.”
“May I describe châteaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions if I do?”
“With pleasure—and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can I do anything for you at the British Museum?”
It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather anticipated the time when Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to withhold him.
“I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall I?” said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have divined.“Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don’t be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I shall set you no heavier task.”
“They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a butterfly under a glass case!” Odd laughed with more light-heartedness than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that affectionate admiration.
“I won’t even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many.”
“I can’t quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour.”
“Our usual hour? In the morning?”
“You will not see Hilda then.”
“Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss herau revoirfor me.”
Odd felt a certain triumph.
Katherine’s departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for makeshift flight. After a month ortwo of solitary wrestling and wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of Providence were willing to help one who helped himself.
His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more fearful shipwreck.
Hilda’s selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be dreaded than any hurt to himself.
And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again.
AN April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd’s return. A rather prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs.
He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard’s. Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the Captain’s projected jaunt. He surmised that her father’s absence would lighten Hilda’s load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain’s hands—on the understanding that most of it was to be given to Hilda—butfromher father, would relieve her from the necessity for teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed “toujours souffrante,” and “Mademoiselle ‘Ilda”—Odd hadhesitated uncomfortably before asking for her—was out. “Pas bien non plus, celle-là,” she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; “Elle s’éreinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle.” With a sick sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she might be found. All the morning, it seemed “Il faut bien qu’elle soigne madame, et puis elle m’aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop lourde,” and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that “Madame est très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une damê comme celle-là.”
Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her days he should probably find her in the Rue d’Assas, and, with the angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half dazed her evidently.
“You? I can hardly believe it!” she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized a biting poverty.
“Hilda! Hilda!” was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He was aghast.
“Iamglad to see you,” she said, and her voice had a forced gayety over its real weakness; “I haven’t seen any of my people for so long, except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn’t it? Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much,muchbetter. As for papa, the last time I heard from him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that he hasn’t been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking.”
Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control.
“If I had known I would have come sooner,” he said; “you would have let me help you, wouldn’t you?”
“I am afraid you couldn’t havehelpedme. That is the worst of illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up.”
“My poor child!” Odd inwardly cursed himself. “If I had known! What have you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look—“
“Fagged, don’t I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We’ll allgo to thevernissagetogether. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for mamma.”
“Taylor helped you, I suppose?”
“Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed her.” There was an explanatory note in Hilda’s voice; indeed Odd’s silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. “It made double duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not minded.”
“And Wilson?”
“He went with papa. I don’t think papa could live without Wilson.”
“Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. You have been housemaid,garde-malade, and bread-winner. Had you no money at all?” Hilda flushed—the quick flush of physical weakness.
“Yes, at first,” she replied; “papa gave me quite a lot before going, and that has paid part of the doctor’s bills, and my lessons brought in the usual amount.”
“Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?”
“I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those afternoons.” Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his thoughts stupefied Odd. “And mamma has thought it heartless,most naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three times a day and I can explain toyou”—Hilda hesitated—“the money papa gave me went almost immediately—some unpaid bills.”
“What bills?” Odd spoke sternly.
“Why, we owe bills right and left!” said Hilda.
“But what bills were these?”
“There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they threatened to seize the furniture.”
“Katherine’s dressmaker?”
“Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman became frightened.” Peter controlled himself to silence. The very fulness of Hilda’s confidence showed the strain that had been put upon her. “And then,” she went on, as he did not speak, “some of the money had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey.”
“Why did she not write to me? Considering all things—“
“Oh!” said Hilda—her tone needed no comment—“we have not quite come to that.” She added presently and gently, “I had money for her.”
Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it.
“And now,” said Hilda, leaning forward andsmiling at him, “you have heard mefiler mon chapelet. Tell me what you have been doing.”
“My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after your story.”
“Has my story sounded so dismal?Ihave been egotistic, then. I had hoped that perhaps you would write to me,” she added, and a delicately malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a half-dreamy stare.
“I thought of you,” he said; “I should have liked to write.”
“Well, in the future do, please, when you feel like it.”
Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the drawing-room when they reached the Rue Pierre Charron. The crisp daintiness of pseudo-invalidism had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. She was much faded, and her little air of melancholy affectation pitifully fretful.
“You come before my own daughter, Peter,” she said; “I don’tblameKatherine, since Hilda tells me that she did not let her know of my dangerous condition.”
“Notdangerous, mamma,” Hilda said, with a patient firmness not untouched by resentment, a touch to Odd most new and pleasing. “The doctor had perfect confidence in me, and would have told me. I should have sent for papa and Katherine the moment he thought it advisable. Under the circumstances they could have done nothing for you that I did not do.” Hilda had, indeed, rather distorted facts to shield Katherine. What would Mrs. Archinard have said had she known that Katherine,in answer to a letter begging her to return, had replied that shecouldnot? Even in Hilda’s charitable heart that “couldnot” had rankled. Odd’s despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, as he realized that the uncharacteristic self-justification was prompted by a rebellion against misinterpretation beforehim. Mrs. Archinard showed some nervous surprise.
“Very well, very well, Hilda,” she said, “I am sure I ask no sacrifices onmyaccount. One may die alone as one has lived—alone. My life has trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your face, Hilda. There is a great smudge of charcoal on your cheek,” and, as Hilda turned and walked out, “I have looked on the face of the King of Terrors, Peter. Peter! dear old homely name! the faithful ring in it! It is easy for Hilda to talk! I make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently well—as far as her nursing went. But she has ahardsoul! no tenderness! no sympathy! To leave her dying mother every afternoon! To sacrifice me to herpainting! At such a time! Ah me!” Large tears rolled down Mrs. Archinard’s cheeks, and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded the truth upon her; the tears arrested his impulse, and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. Mrs. Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and delicately touched away the tears.
“I have given my whole life, my whole life, Peter, for my girls! I have borne this long exile from my home for their sakes!” At Allersley Mrs. Archinard had never ceased complaining of her restrictedlot, and had characterized her neighbors as “yokels and Philistines.” Speaking with her handkerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, she continued, “I have asked nothing of them but sympathy;thatI have craved! And in my hour of need—“ Mrs. Archinard’spoint de Venisebosom heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the unwilling yet pitying kindness one would show towards a silly and unpleasant child.
“I don’t think you are quite fair,” he said; “Hilda looks as badly as you do. She has had a heavy load to carry.”
“I told her again and again to get agarde-malade, two if necessary.” Mrs. Archinard’s voice rose to a higher key. “She has chosen to ruin her appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, and by working all day in that futile studio.”
“Garde-maladesare expensive.” Odd could not restrain his voice’s edge.
“Expensive! For a dying mother! And with all that is lavished on her studio—canvases, paints, models!”
The depths of misconception were too hopelessly great, and, as Mrs. Archinard’s voice had now become shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his heart shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity for Hilda. She re-entered presently, wearing on her face too evident signs of contrition. She spoke to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea.
“You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda.”
“There are butteredbrioches, mamma, piping hot.”
“Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usuallyplaces a great clot in the centre, leaving the edges uneatable.”
“Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea through all the dozens of mattresses, isn’t she?” said Hilda, smiling at Odd. “ButIbuttered these with scientific exactitude.”
“Exactitude! Ah! the mirage of science! More milk, more milk!” Mrs. Archinard raised herself on one elbow to watch with expectant disapproval the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her cushions as the tea was brought to her, “I suppose itismilk, though I prefer cream.”
“No, it’s cream.” Hilda should know, as she had herself just darted round the corner to thecrêmerie. Odd sprang up to take his cup from her. He thought she looked in danger of falling to the ground.
“Do sit down,” he said in a low voice; “you look very, very badly.”
“Have you read Meredith’s last?” asked Mrs. Archinard from the sofa. “Hilda is reading it to me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, anintimité!It is so I feel, see things—super-subtly. Strange how coarsely objective some minds are! Did you order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice from Gagé’s—pistache?I hope you impressedpistache. You will dine with Hilda, of course, Peter; I have my dinner here; I am not yet strong enough to sit through a meal. And then you must talk to me about Meredith. I always find you most suggestive—such new lights on old things. And Verhaeren, too; do you care for Verhaeren? Morbid? Yes, perhaps, but that is a truism—not likeyou, Peter. ‘Les apparus dans mes chemins,’ poor, modern, broken, bleeding soul! We must talk of Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will excuse me if I simplysans gêneturn over and take a nap? I can often sleep at this hour. Hilda, show Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda doesn’t find him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for Chaucer; butnous sommes tous les enfants maladesnowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. Talk it over.”
Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side on the distant littlecanapébefore the Burne-Jones Chaucer. They went over the pages, not paying much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down favorite passages together. The description of “my swete” in “The Book of the Duchess,” the complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite’s death. The quiet room was very quiet, and they looked up from the pages now and then to smile, perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the dinner was announced Hilda said, as they went into the dining-room—
“If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. I have very childish tastes and childish fare.”
Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice constituted the repast. A bottle of claret stood by Odd’s place, and there was a white jar filled with buttercups on the table; but even Rosalie seemed depressed by the air of meagreness, and gave them a rathereffaréglance as they sat down. Odd suspected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He had come to the conclusion that Hilda was capable of dining off rice alone.
“Delightful!” he said. The chicken and rice were indeed very good, but Hilda saw that he ate very little.
“I make no further apologies,” she said, smiling at him over the buttercups; “your hunger be upon your own head.”
“I am not hungry, dear.”
Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they were both rather silent. It was a happy silence to Hilda, full of a loving trust.
When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same gentle fatigue that his eyes showed; but as the eyes rested upon her she felt that the past and the present had surely joined hands.
ODD went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he could hardly have told.
He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d’Assas and go home to tea and dinner with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that his late flight seemed degrading.
So loving her, he could not be base.
The Rue d’Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees.
It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her half-way with outstretched hands.
“O Peter!” It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd’s heart leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. “Come, come,” she said, taking his arm. “Let us go quickly.” Peter’s heart after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gavehim a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now streamed down her face.
He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his one, his only love.
“Let us walk here, dear,” he said; “you will be quieter.”
The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly.
“Now, what is it?”
“O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother.”
“Yes?” Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize “the brother.”
“He made love to me, said awful things!” Odd whitened to the lips.
“Tell me all you can.”
“I wish I were dead!” sobbed Hilda, “I am so unhappy.”
Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to his lips.
“Yes; you care,” said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. “I never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a good deal into the studio where we workedand, behind his sister’s back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he came in. I went on painting. I did not dream—! When, suddenly he put his arms around me—and tried to kiss me!” Hilda gave an hysterical laugh. “Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!” Hilda sobbed again, even while she laughed. “He was very angry and horrible. I said I would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and then—and then”—Hilda dropped her face into her hands—“he jeered at me; ‘You mustn’t play the prude,’ he said.”
Odd clenched his teeth.
“Hilda, dear,” he said, in a voice cold to severity, “you must go home; I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished that dog.”
“Peter, don’t! I beg of you to comewithme. You can do nothing. I must bury it, forget it.” She had risen as he rose.
“Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it.”
Odd’s fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless silence.
“Peter,please!” she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing at him as he hailed afiacre.
“I will come to you soon. Good-bye.”
And so Hilda was driven away.
It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is lying down. She seemed ill. “Et bien malade même,” and had said that she wanted no dinner.
“I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I think,” said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost immediately.
She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, beyond all wish for it. The afternoon’s unpleasantness had been merely the last straw. The long endurance of the past month—the past months indeed—that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on pity—was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes.
He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden horrible weakness almost overcame him.
“Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the fieryjeune premierto such an extent this afternoon that dramatic restlessness is in keeping.”
Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns up and down the room.
“You look so badly,” he said, pausing before her; “how do you feel?”
“Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself.” Hilda tried to smile, stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. “I feel weak and foolish,” she added, clasping her hands on her knee.
“It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely.”
“How did you make him do that?”
“I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness.”
“And he believed it?”
“I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing.”
“Oh!” cried Hilda.
“He deserved it, dear.”
“But—I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified.”
“I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the suggestion—insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to have a shot at him—the bourgeoisstrain came out. He fairly whined. I was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires.”
“Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don’t speak of such horrors. You know I am hysterical.”
Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand.
“How can I thank you?” He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like look that gave him a shudder. Hilda’s life seemed shroud-like, shutting her out from all brightness, from all love—love hers by right, and only hers.
“You know, you know that I would do anything for you,” he said.
The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his own.
“I never thought it would come true—in this way,” she said.
“What come true?”
“That you would really care for me.”
Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of weakness in himmade it impossible for him to warn and protect her ignorance.
He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of which alone she was aware.
“My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly.” But with the words, his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, said, hardly conscious of his words—
“Sweetest, noblest—dearest,” with an emotion only too contagious, for Hilda’s eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him.
“I understand, Hilda, I understand it all—all you have suffered; the loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know that you have been unhappy.”
“Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!” The tears rolled down her cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd’s hands clasping hers. “No one ever cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn’t it cruel, cruel?” This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless terror. “That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be my fault.” The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: “I have been so lonely.”
“My child! My poor, poor child!”
“Let me tell you everything. Imusttell younow since you care for me. I have been so fond of you—always. You remember when I was a child?” Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling shipwreck. “Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It sounds morbid, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, for my loneliness was almost unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn’t you? Only I don’t think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to you.” Hilda’s tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled now at Odd, a quivering smile.
“And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can’t tell you what I suffered.”
Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his.
“But how could you have known?” said Hilda tenderly; “I was really very silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come backbecauseI needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that.” She paused a moment: “It all ended in Florence,” she went on sadly; “such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. Isee the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for something that could never come; that you had never really understood, and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know what that feeling is?” Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over his eyes he would not look at her.
“You are so sorry?” Odd nodded. “But you have had that feeling? Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,—and silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many friends, so many windows in your prison, you can’t know.”
“I know.”
“Really?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And you call out for help and no one hears. Oh, I can’t explain properly; do you understand?”
“I understand, dear.”
“Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny of my prison seemed walled up. And—oh, then our troubles came, worse and worse. Responsibilitiesbraced me up—far healthier, of course. And your books! Their strength; their philosophy—don’t tell me I might find it all in Marcus Aurelius; your way of saying it went more deeply in me. Just to do one’s duty; to love people and be sorry for them, and not snivel over oneself. Ah! if you knew all your books had been to me! Would you like it, I wonder?” Again the tenderness, almost playful, in her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at her.