“And when I came at last, what did you think?”
The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him.
“When you came?” she repeated. “Then I saw at once that you were Katherine’s friend, and that your books were the nearest I should ever get to you.” Hilda’s voice hesitated a little; a doubt of the exactitude of her perceptions from this point showed itself in a certain perplexity of tone. “And—I don’t quite understand myself, for I didn’t plan anything—but just because I felt so much I was afraid that you would imagine I made claims on you. I was resolved that you should see that I had reached your standpoint—that I had forgotten—that the present had no connection with the past.”
“But I had not forgotten,” Odd groaned.
“No?” Hilda smiled rather lightly; “it would have been very strange if you hadn’t. Besides, as I say, I saw at once that you were Katherine’s, and that it was right and natural. Your books taught me, too, the true peace of renunciation, you see! Not that this called for renunciation exactly,” and again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. “There was nothing to renounce since you werehers, except I must have felt a certain disappointment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull egotism!” She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into the dusky room. “But even on that first day I meant that you should see, and that she should see, that I knew that the past made no bond: in my heart it might, not in yours, I knew, for all your kindness.”
“Go on, Hilda,” said Odd, as she paused.
“Well, you know all the rest. When you were engaged and she more than friend, I had hoped for it, and I saw that my turn might come; that I might step into Kathy’s vacated shoes, so to speak; that we might be friends, and all my dreams be fulfilled after all. I began then to let myself know that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before by pretending that I didn’t. I wouldn’t do anything to make you like me. If you were to like me, you would of yourself; all the joy of having you care for me would be in having made no effort. And the dream did come true. I saw more and more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like sunshine.” Odd still stared at her, and again through sudden tears she smiled at him. “Only—isn’t it strange?—things are always so; it must be, too, that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as though I were at the bottom of the sea, and looking up through it at the sun.”
“Great heavens!” muttered Odd. He looked at her for a silent moment, then suddenly putting his arm around her neck, he drew her to him.
He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head against hers—
“And I—so unworthy!”
“No, no,” said Hilda, and with a little sigh, “not unworthy, dear Peter.”
“I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul,” Peter went on, pressing her head more closely to his. “Ah, Hilda! Hilda!”
“What, dear friend?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Unkind; I tell you everything.”
“You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell you how infinitely dear you are to me.” He had spoken, her face hidden from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she clasped them together and said gravely—
“You may tell me. You are infinitely dear tome.”
Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless baseness.
“I may tell you how much I love you?” and he too rose and stood before her.
“I have always loved you,” said Hilda, with her grave look. “I love you now as much as I did when I was a child.”
The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd’s head swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her eyes, and looking into them he came close to her.
“My angel! My angel!” he hardly breathed.
“Dear Peter,” and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from impossibility, the crash of the inevitable.
One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at it—divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and defied the future.
The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands pushing him away.
“Dearest—dearest—dearest.”
Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness.
Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had all the sad passivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle sternness of the lips.
She loved him, but how cruel he was.
“Oh, my precious,” he said, “look at me. Forgive me; I love you.”
He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them.
“You don’t hate me for telling you the truth?” And as she made no sign: “No, no, you don’t hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you did not care? Look at me, dearest.”
“What have I done?” said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her hands.
“You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!”
“I never could have believed it of you,” she said, and he felt it to be the simple statement of a fact.
“O Hilda—I have only told you the truth, that is my crime.”
“You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I said?”
“Good God! I have been madly in love with you for months!”
“For months?” she repeated dully.
“For years, perhaps, who knows!”
“I did not know that I—that you—“
“You knew nothing, my poor angel.”
He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love enchanted him.
“How base! how base!” she moaned.
“Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself.”
“No—you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so.”
“You did not meanthis.”
“I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am wicked.” The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was indeed wicked, a terrible revelation.
Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder.
“O Peter, Peter!”
“What, my darling child?”
“That we should be so base!”
“Notwe, Hilda. Notyou!”
“Yes, I—for I am happy—think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much.” She wept, her head upon his shoulder. “Keep me for a moment, only a moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad that you love me. No; don’t kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved me for a long time.”
“From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but I felt—ah! I felt—that I could have made you love me!”
“And yet—you loved Katherine!”
The anguish of the broken words pierced him.
“Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love her.”
“Peter! Peter!”
“Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only one—my only love!”
“O Peter!”
“I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon me. Friendly comradeship on the one hand, and on the other—O Hilda!—a passion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but you see—be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,—be brave enough to own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, mistakes may be put aside without dishonor.”
“Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!”
“O Hilda!”
“Yes,” she said wildly, “yes, yes, Peter; and I am wicked—wicked, for I love you. Yes—kiss me; there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me go.”
Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms about her.
“I was base if you will, too base for your loveliness; but you, my darling, have not a shadow on you; you were impossibly noble. Remember, that if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you; remember thatIhave done this!”
As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door opened and Katherine entered.
KATHERINE closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs.
Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter.
Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools—Peter and Hilda.
To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda’s own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter’s arms, unspotted and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine’s plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his love for Hilda—a brave, manlike part—to which she had looked forward as to anatonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome standards of a higher nature—a rebellion that had carried her into such opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,—was that rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful?
Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda’s fall, had risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them.
She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her gloves.
“My return was inopportune.” The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her own sense of fitness. “Or opportune?” She directed her eyes upon Odd, and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept hisarm around Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt that Hilda’s look of frozen horror gave him the advantage.
“Opportune, Katherine,” he said; “now at least I shall not have to lie to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness.”
“Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?”
It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her.
“Katherine,” said Odd, “I can only beg you to believe that I have struggled—for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought that neither of you would ever know the truth.”
This bracketing of Hilda’s injury with hers stank in Katherine’s nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself—
“I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so chivalrously preparing for me,” she said. “Marriage with an unloving man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?” The white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter’s futile efforts to withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the retrospect grew lurid.
“Katherine,” said Odd gloomily, “I would not sohave insulted you after this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult.”
“I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have waited, Peter.”
Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon her sister.
“So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda,” she said.
Hilda’s wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to cruelty.
“Katherine, say anything—anything you will to me,” and Odd’s voice broke a little as he spoke, “but not one word to her! Not one word! It comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life.” He held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight eyebrows, breathing quickly.
“Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult!She nursed your mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life—you and your father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us.”
“Yes; as I see you.” Katharine’s very lips were white.
Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the extremity of self-control.
“Katherine,” she said, “he is trying to shield me. It did not happen like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always loved him.”
“Oh! did you?” said Katherine, with a withered little laugh.
“My child!” cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him—“my child, what are you saying? What madness!”
“I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you.”
“In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, so nobly, so purely, was the child’s love, the love of the loyal sister for her friend, the love of an angel.”
“I am not sure,” said Hilda.
“Oh!” cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, “this is unbearable.”
It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator.
But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation.
“Hilda,” he said appealingly and yet sternly, “at the very height of your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I who saw the truth, not you.”
“Katherine,” Hilda repeated, “he is trying to shield me. We are both base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, and when he took me in his arms, I was glad.”
“Good God!” cried Peter.
Katherine averted her eyes from her sister’s face.
“I must own, Peter,” she said, “that your position was difficult. Hilda evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching colors—she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of course those kisses she received as platonic pledges—from the man engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. Under such temptingcircumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took her in your arms—how often we repeat that phrase—the ‘truth’ at last flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such yielding unconventionality, and Hilda’s hidden love won the day.”
During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking with rage. If Katherine had been a man he would have knocked her down; as it was, his voice was the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his hand on the back of a chair—
“You despicable creature!”
He and Katherine glared at one another.
“Only the higher nature can put itself so hideously in the power of the lower,” Odd went on; “and you dare!”
“No, no; all she says may be true!” moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: “And how can you be so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!”
Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by quick reflection—
“You need not allow for a woman’s jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don’t, no indeed you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don’t like humiliation for myself or for others. I don’t like to scorn my sister whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for charity. But I give you back your wordwithout one regret for myself. You have killed my love very effectually.”
“Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?”
“That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could predict of you. Hilda’s lesson must necessarily make the past look pale.”
“I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base speeches, Katherine.”
“Your example has been contagious.”
“Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your sister’s forgiveness—as I ask yours—humbly. She has not feared humiliation.”
“I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her.” Katherine took up her wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda.
“And I have done this,” said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her body and her soul.
“Hilda!” said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, not daring to touch the still figure. “Hilda!” he repeated; “if only you will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that sheshould have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!” Odd added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no hint of sympathy.
“Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?” he asked; “you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never realized that you loved me.” He bent above her and kissed her hand. “Precious one! Dearest, dearest child.”
“Oh, don’t!” said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head. “Her heart is broken. I am all that she said.”
“Her heart is not broken!” cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. “I could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!”
“What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her.”
“I am glad of it.” And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he stooped to her again, imploring: “Will you not look at me? Look up, dearest; tell me again that you love me.”
“I am already in the dust,” said Hilda, after a pause.
“You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!” cried Odd; he took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. “Sit up. Listen to me,” he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken face, his hands on her shoulders. “I have loved you passionately for months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have fumbled with that fatallymisplaced idea of honor. You may have loved me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!” Odd added, sitting down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda repeated—
“Don’t.”
“You felt my pity, my sympathy,” Odd went on, holding her hands. “You felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation—for love—you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too high for the hearer.”
“Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that Ilovedyou!” Hilda wailed suddenly.
“Thank God that you own to that!” Odd ejaculated.
“That does not clear me,” she retorted. “No, no; I was a fool. You, the man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to you—it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are crimes, and I am wicked. Ihate myself!” she sobbed, bending again her face upon her hands.
“Hilda,” said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, “you could not have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step—you retreating before me—to the final realizations; and final they are not, I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all that you have suffered.” Hilda interrupted him with an “Oh!” from between clenched teeth.
“Katherine was right,” she said, “I have painted myself in pathetic colors. What a prig! What an egotist!” Her voice trembled on its low note of passionate self-scorn.
“An egotist!” Odd burst into a loud laugh. “That caps the climax. Come, Hilda,” he added, “don’t be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I say, I haven’t yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, unconscious little child.” Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but Hilda’s swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision.
“You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to speak of some day? There will never be any day for us—together.”
“I say there will be, Hilda.”
“You think that I could ever forget my sister’s misery; my shame and yours?”
“You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the day.”
“That is a placid term for such degradation.”
“I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake.”
“You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can’t mend a broken heart by marching over it.”
“One may avoid breaking another.”
“You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean.”
“You, Hilda, are only cruel—unutterably cruel,” said Odd brokenly.
“I never wish to see you again.” Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his eyes of pitiful appeal. “You have robbed my life of the little it had; you have robbed me of self-respect.”
“Shall I leave you, Hilda?”
“You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me.”
“Good-bye,” said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to the heart, and half-unconscious.
“Peter!” cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed and dilated eyes.
“What is it, my child?” Odd asked gently.
“Kiss me good-bye!”
He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another.
“Must I leave you?” he asked, in a stammering voice.
“Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me.”
He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, he said—
“I will wait.”
And turning away, he walked out of the room.
FOR two whole weeks—strange cataclysm in the Archinard household—Hilda stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine had returned to England, she added with emphasis—
“But I don’t go this time, Miss Hilda. It’s your turn to have a maid now.”
The news took a weight of dread from Hilda’s heart. She shrank from again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine’s tragic eyes. She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, of everlasting responsibility for her sister’s misery. With all the capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: “I love you, too!” Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such momentsin life are difficult of analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine’s ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness.
Hilda’s love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been growing from the child’s devotion, and, with the new torture of a hopeless longing upon her—for which she despised herself—she saw in the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart.
Only a few days after Katherine’s departure, the Captain returned.
Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her behalf.
He hardly mentioned Katherine’s broken engagement, and, for once in her life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit plaintively beside her daughter’s bed; and it was from her that Hilda learned that they were going back to Allersley.
Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities and to probabilities. The Captain’s good fortune showed to her in a dismal light of material dependence,and she could guess miserably at its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, and who it was that shielded her from even a feather’s weight of gratitude—for the Captain made no mention of his good luck.
“Yes, we are going back to the Priory,” Mrs. Archinard said, her melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter’s wasted face. “It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I predicted it rather. You have killed yourselftout simplement; I consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, ‘Docteur, elle s’est tuée.’ I said it frankly.”
Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones of pathos and pity on Hilda’s behalf, hardly realizing their objective nature.
By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood.
Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had beento that sofa existence; without the background of Hilda’s quiet servitude, it became flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in pensive contemplation of tenants’ havoc. She sighed over the Priory and said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a little—the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as fishing—and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at political follies.
When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a sudden sense of method underlying the Captain’s manœuvres.
“Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will be glad of a respite. Isn’t it a little sunny to-day for first-class fishing?” Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up to her with shy alacrity.
“Even first-class fishing is a bore,Ithink,” heobserved, not taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his daughter and then at the river.
“Feeling better to-day, aren’t you? You might take a stroll with me, perhaps; but no, you’re not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, isn’t it?”
Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and the absent-minded smile on her face reassured him as to immediate issues.
“How areyoufeeling?” she asked; “I have been looking at the trees and grass for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human beings in the world.”
“Oh, I’m very well; very well indeed.” The Captain was again feeling uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: “You know, I know about it now. That is to say, I wasn’t exactly to speak of it, if it might pain you; but I don’t see why it should dothat. Upon my word,” said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was broken, “it’s more likely to pain me, isn’t it? Rather to my discredit, you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for yourteaching—wearing yourself out—well, I don’t know which I was angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never entered into my head. And then,mydaughter and low French cads! Well,hesaw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn’t have my weight and authority. I was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told me. Odd told me—“
The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarrassing, after all, this recognition of his daughter’s life.
“Now your mother doesn’t know,” he pursued; “Odd seemed rather anxious that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn’t it? Quite.”
“You need neither of you have known.” All she was wondering about, trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. “It came about most naturally; and, if mamma’s illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me down, my modest business might have come to an end—no one the wiser for it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt.”
“Well, I don’t know.” The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh of some relief. “It’s off my mind at all events. I wanted to express my—pain, you know, and my gratitude—and to say what a jolly trump I thought you; that kind of thing.”
“Dear papa, I don’t deserve it.”
“Ah, well, Odd isn’t the man to makemisstatements, you know. A bit of dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the truth. Of course he’s very fond of you; that’s natural. This sad affair of Katherine’s; if it hadn’t been for that, you and he would be brother and sister by this time.”
It was Hilda’s turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be incapable.
“Where is he—Mr. Odd?” she asked, steeling herself to the question.
The look of gloom which touched the Captain’s face anew, confirmed Hilda in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation.
“Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can’t sit down quietly under a blow like that.”
A flush came over Hilda’s face. Part of her punishment was evident. She must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with praises. Yet Katherine herself—any woman—would choose the part Odd had given her—the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was helpless.
“Papa,” she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt—she could at least punish herself, if no one else could punish her—“where is Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?” The Captain swung one leg over the other with impatience.
“I’ve hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly.”
“I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be happy with him.”
“Pshaw! That’s all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn’t the girl to throw over a man like Odd for a whim.”
Hilda’s flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling—
“Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I know it is not true. I know it!”
“Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well though, and it’s not unimaginable. I don’t imply anything vulgar.” The Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; “that’s not conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine’s ambitious, very ambitious. As for you, Hilda—and all that, you know—I am awfully sorry, you understand.” The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, and the Captain’s conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible.
Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery that her father’s cool suppositions on Katherine’s conducthad seemed to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned her head away from the river and closed her eyes.
“Allone, withouten any companye,” that was the fated motto of her life.
BY the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something—with anything—and experienced the odd sensation of a person upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms.
Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an activerôlein life most confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a littlecôterieof callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard’s littleCauseries de Mardi, her society for little weekly dinners—only six chosen members—les Élites—stirred Allersley to the quick with æsthetic thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations.
Hilda was not one ofles Élites. “Just for us old people, trying to amuse ourselves,” Mrs. Archinard said, and at theCauseriesHilda was an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed theCauserieswere quite Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinardcausantand Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both theélitesand themardis, and devoted himself to more commonplace individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn’t required to strain one’s temper by listening to fine talk.
Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on her arm. Mary’s mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture since Peter’s flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary was generous, and the sight of Hilda’s white sunlit face completed Peter’s work. She found that she had kissed Hilda—she, so undemonstrative—and standing with her arms around the girl’s slight shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter—
“You will seeme, won’t you?”
Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut—palest pink and palest purple, “on tiptoe for a flight.”
“How kind of you to come,” she said.
“Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy’s camp. That reckless brother of mine!”
“Did he send you?” Hilda asked, fright in her eyes.
“Send me? Oh no, he didn’t send me; but after what he has told me, I came naturally of my own free will.” Hilda smiled faintly in reply to Mary’s smile.
“What has he told you?”
“Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving him!”
Hilda winced at the humorous tone.
“That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel—natural, though, wasn’t it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and—oh, a great many things.”
“Did he tell you that I loved him?” Hilda asked, looking down at her sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if it was demanded of her that she should humiliateherself before Peter’s sister—tell her that she had made love to him.
“My dear child,” Mary’s voice dropped to a graver key, “Peter trusts me, you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to you, you and he together found out that fact.”
Even Hilda’s morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of this point of view.
“And now you won’t marry him,” Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that conclusive statement.
“Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the backgroundrôle? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn’t been for Peter I shouldn’t have known you now. He made me see things very clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding up a whole edifice on its shoulders.”
“How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable.”
“Well, well; perhaps Peter’s point of view would seem to you exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of you?”
“I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work.”
“Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches.” Mary gave her a gravely gay glance.“When you did emerge from your shadows, why did you never talk—make an effect, like Katherine?”
“Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I stayed there.”
“No, my dear, one can’t explain the injustices of fortune by that comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get oddly jumped on in this world,” Mary added reflectively. “The tragedy, of course, lies in being too noble for one’s milieu, for then, not only does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face it. It’s a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one’s corner.”
“Peter found me,” said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the “coarse” frankness.
They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning.
“Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter did find you.” Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda’s. “Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then.”
“He always will keep—what he found,” said Hilda, trembling. “I love him. I shall always love him.”
“My dear Hilda!”
“But I cannot marry him. I cannot.”
“You are a foolish little Hilda.”
“We made Katherine miserable.”
“And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith with Katherine—loving you—might have called down a far worse tragedy.”
Hilda gazed widely at her—
“Yes; I deserve that suspicion.”
“Oh, you foolish, foolish child!” cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed her. “Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?”
“I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong.”
“Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that that was ample expiation.”
ONE October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note was dated from Amalfi.
“Why don’t you marry Peter, you little goose?” was all it said.
Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine’s scorn and Katherine’s nobility seemed to breathe from it.
“I am not as base as you think,” was her answer.
Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She had come in from a walk with Allan Hope along the road that runs above the sea between Amalfi and Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who much admired Katherine, was waiting for her before the hotel holding the letter, an excuse for the excited whisper with which she gave it to her.
“Dear Miss Archinard,heis here!”
“What ‘he,’ Nelly?” asked Katherine; she looked down at the writing on the envelope of her letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded a little.
Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and Nelly’s excited eyes followed him till he was safely out of sight.
“Mr. Odd,” she said with dramatic emphasis. “Of course he didn’t know.”
“Oh, he is here!” Katherine’s eyes were still on the writing. “No, of course he didn’t know.”
“You aren’t afraid of his meeting Allan?” Nelly was Allan Hope’s cousin. “Is there no danger, Miss Archinard? He must be feeling so—dreadfully!”
“What a romantic little pate it is! I really believe you were looking forward to a duel. No, no, Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature to hope for!”
“But won’t it be terrible for you to meet him? The first time, you know! And engaged to Allan!” said Nelly.
“We are not at all afraid of one another. Don’t tremble, Nelly.”
Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace before the hotel. The dying evening seemed to throb softly in the southern sky, arching solemnly to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the sea—it was characteristic of her deeply set eyes to look straight out and seldom up. She stood still, holding the letter quietly; Katherine had none of the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of resolution in nervous gesture. She did not even walk up and down; indeed the resolution was made and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, she went into the hotel and asked at the office whether Mr. Odd were to be found.
“Yes, he was in his room; he had only arrived an hour ago.”
Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd thatMiss Archinard was on the terrace and would like to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking out to meet her.
Peter’s eyes, as they shook hands, were rather sternly steady; Katherine’s steady, but more humorous.
“Sans rancune?” she inquired, with some lightness, and then, sparing him the necessity for a reply that might be embarrassing for both of them—
“I want to ask you a question; pardon abruptness; why don’t you marry Hilda? Won’t she? There are two questions!”
“I don’t marry her because she won’t. And there is the evident reply, Katherine.”
“Do you despair?” she asked.
“I can’t say that. Time may wear out her resistance.”
“I know Hilda better than you do—perhaps. You see I have got over my jealousy.” Katherine’s smile had all its charm. “She won’t if she said she wouldn’t; if she has ideals on the subject.”
“Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretchedness.”
“No; you must not.Iam going to help you. Don’t look so gloomily unimpressed. I am going to help you. I am going to do penance, and I don’t believe you will consider it an expiation either! Just encourage me by a little appreciation of my dubious nobility.” Odd looked questioningly at her.
“Peter, when I came back that night I was engaged to Allan Hope.”
“Oh!” said Peter. They looked at one another through the almost palpable dusk of the evening.
“I’ll give you the facts—draw your own conclusions. I’ll give you facts, but don’t ask self-abasement put into words. You really haven’t the right, have you, Peter?”
“No; I suppose not. No,Ihaven’t the right.”
“You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You must allow me to flaunt that ragged superiority. Peter, very soon after our engagement you began to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should never satisfy you. The more you knew me the more you would disapprove, and your nature could never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. Once I’d seen that, everything was up. It wouldn’t do; and the knowledge grew upon me that the impossibility was emphasized by the fact that Hildawoulddo.Isaw that you loved her, Peter; stupid, stupid Peter! And poor little Hilda! She was ground between two stones, wasn’t she? your ignorance and my knowledge. I give you leave to offer me up as a burnt sacrifice at her altar, only don’t let me hear myself crackling. Yes; I saw that you were in love with her, and that she would be in love with you if it could come—as it should have come—as I intended it to come—foolish, hasty Peter! No; no comments, please! I know everything you can say. I took precious good care of myself, no doubt; my generosity wasn’t very spontaneous; perhaps I thought you’d get over it; perhaps I wanted you to get over it; perhaps even while seeing that Allan Hope would do—for I satisfy him most thoroughly—I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my motives for possible reactions; I give you leave to draw your inferences, but don’t ask me to dot my i’s and crossmy t’s too cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope on the understanding that the engagement was to be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that you did not love me; that I did not love you; that our engagement was broken. I told him that when I saw his love for me struggling with his loyalty to you. It was the truth from my point of view; but from his, from yours, it was a lie—and own that at least I am generous in telling you! Too generous perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I had discovered it wouldn’t do, and to make you and Hilda happy. And, when I saw you together, both as bad as I was—at least I thought so at the time—both disloyal—I forgot my own self-scorn; I felt a right to a position I had repudiated. Ihadto be cruel, for, Peter, I was jealous; I hated her for being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly and forever.”
There was silence between them. If she had satisfied him as only Hilda could satisfy him, she would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with a quick throb of sympathy understood the intimation, understood both her courage and her reticence. He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was much not touched upon, far from noble.
The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her loyalty to Allan. Such love deserved disappointment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter respected her frankness but was not deceived by it. His manliness was touched by the possibility she had hinted at. He understood Katherine and he forgave her—with reservations.
There seemed to be nothing to say, and he didnot seek words. He and Katherine walked slowly to the end of the terrace.
Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and handed him Hilda’s reply.
“I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine,” said Odd, when he had read it.
“You will have to fight, you know. She will say that my wrong did not excuse hers. She will say that nothing excused you. Sheisa little goose.”
“I’ll fight.”
They had walked back to the entrance of the hotel and here they paused; there was a fitness in farewell.
“Katherine,” said Odd, “it would have been very base in you to have kept silence, and yet, in spite of that, you have been very courageous this evening.”
“You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. Why put in that damaging clause? Have I merely escaped baseness?”
“No, for you have never been finer.”
“That is true. I’ll never reach the same heights again,” and Katherine laughed.
“Understand thatIunderstand. Your story has not absolvedme.”
“There is the danger with Hilda. You must make my holocaust avail.”
“I hope that a good thing is never lost,” Peter replied.
THE October day was deliciously warm at Allersley, a fragrant autumnal warmth, limpid with sunshine, and the woods all golden.
Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a touch of trembling.
In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and there beyond the tree trunks; the little landing-wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no doubt still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some later day, but now he must take the most direct way to the Priory; he had only arrived an hour before, but a minute’s further delay would be unbearable. This day must atone for all the past failure of his life, and make his autumn golden. He walked quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone by that night, ten years ago; the memory emphasized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her dearness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall wound among the woods, Peter caught sight of it, and, at the same moment, of the fluttering white of a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still.
He could not have hoped to find Hilda here withno teasing preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky father to mar the fine rush of his onslaught.
Such good luck augured well, for—yes, it was Hilda walking slowly among the trees—and at the clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the breathing space of a conventional preliminary would not have been better, and felt that he had exaggerated his own courage in picturing that conquering impetuosity.
She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a colorless silhouette.
Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension conceded, Katherine’s confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda’s face was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips.
“My child! How ill you look!”
The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across her face, but Odd, seeing onlyits frozen pain, remembered those stabbing words: “You are cruel and weak and mean,” which she had spoken with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was nipped in the bud.
“I may speak to you?” he asked.
Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave her such joy that everything was already half forgotten—even Katherine; even Katherine—she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold faintness—
“Oh, yes;” adding, “you startled me.”
“So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!” He stood staring at her.
“You—don’t look well either,” she said, still in the soft cold voice.
“I should be very sorry to look well.”
Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could smile a little at her.
“Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods are looking.”
“Beautiful. I walk here a great deal.” She looked away from him and into the golden distance.
“And you will walk here now with me?” he asked, adding, as the pale hesitation of her face again turned to him, “Don’t be frightened, dear, Iam not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to make you think well of me in spite of your conscience.”
Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves.
“And here is Palamon,” said Peter, as that delightful beast came at a sort of abrupt and ploughing gallop, necessitated by the extreme shortness of his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen foliage. “He remembers me, too, the dear old boy,” and Palamon, whose very absorbed and business-like manner gave way to sudden and smiling demonstration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer to his cordial welcome.
“It must seem strange to you being here again after such a time,” said Odd, when he and Hilda turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was invisible, a good half-mile away, and the whispering hush of the woods surrounded them.
“It doesn’t seem strange, no,” Hilda replied; “it seems very peaceful.”
“And are you peaceful with it?” All the implied reserves of her tone made Peter wonder, as he had often wondered, at the strength of this fragile creature; for, although that conviction of having wronged another was accountable for her haggard young face, the crushed anguish of her love for him was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her glance.
“I feel merely very useless,” she said with a vague smile.
“I have seen Katherine, Hilda.” Odd waited during a few moments of silent walking before making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short and turned wondering eyes on him.
“It was at Amalfi. She had just received your letter, and she sent for me; she had something to say to me.” Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, “You knew that she was on a yachting trip?” Hilda bowed assent. “And that Allan Hope is of the party?”
“I heard that; yes.”
“And that he and Katherine are to be married?”
Here Hilda gave a little gasp.
“She doesn’t love him,” she cried. Odd considered her with a disturbed look.
“You mustn’t say that, you know. I fancy she does—love him.”
“She did it desperately after you had failed her; after I had robbed her.”
Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a subtle half-truth in this to assert the bold unvarnished whole truth of a negative.
Hilda’s loyalty lent a dignity to Katharine’s most doubtful motives, a dignity that Katherine would probably contemplate with surprise, but accept with philosophic pleasure.
Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly? Had he failed her long before her deliberate breach of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan’s more facile contentment had she been sure of Peter’s?
Delicate problem, without doubt. His minddwelt on its vexatious tragic-comic aspect, while he stared almost absently at Hilda.
Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, guiltless of plot or falsehood; and Katherine’s was intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would be possible to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the bold announcement that Katherine had been engaged when she came to Paris, and that her cruel triumph had been won under a lying standard.
And that shock might shatter forever, not the sense of personal wrong-doing, but all responsibility towards one so base, all that brooding consciousness of having spoiled another’s life. Katherine had abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely stumbled on its vacant lie.
Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous surmises, and prepared to give Katherine’s story from a most delicate and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine’s words, and yet such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find her sacrifice at Hilda’s altar painless.
“You shall have her own words,” he said, after a long pause. He felt that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity.