The Dull Miss Archinard Part 18

"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda."

"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing.

"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you."

Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest.

"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?"

"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money.

Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to Hilda's face.

"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best."

"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress, dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I lend you anything?"

"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!"

"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she _did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it.

You really shouldn't indulge your pa.s.sion for _pet.i.tes couturieres_, child. It doesn't pay."

CHAPTER II

Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The concierge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the sourness common to her cla.s.s, as she stood s.p.a.ciously in her door. The gentleman had, evidently, definite intentions, for he had asked her no questions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as a slur upon her Cerberus qualifications.

Odd was putting into practice his brotherly principles. He had spent the morning with Katherine--the fifth morning since their engagement--and time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands this afternoon, a visit to Hilda seemed altogether desirable. It really behoved him to solve Hilda's dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more normal outlook; he felt the task far more feasible since that glimpse of gayety and confidence. Indeed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet's suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and the absorption in his pleasant duty held his mind while he wound up the interminable staircase.

His knock at Hilda's door--there was no mistaking it, for a card bearing her name was neatly nailed thereon--was promptly answered, and Odd found himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden of the artistic type with which Paris swarms; thin, gray-haired, energetic eyes behind eyegla.s.ses, and a huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd the impression of a misshapen table and blocked the distance out with its brave array of color. Over the lady's shoulder, Odd caught sight of a canvas of heroic proportions.

"Oh! I thought it was the concierge," said the artist, evidently disappointed; "have you come to the right door? I don't think I know you."

"No; I don't know you," Odd replied, smiling and casting a futile glance around the studio, now fully revealed by the s.h.i.+fting of the palette to a horizontal position.

"I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you working with her? Will she be back presently?"

The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and explanatory smile.

"Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the afternoon. She only uses it in the morning; she is never here in the afternoon."

Odd felt a huge astonishment.

"Never here?"

"No; can I give her any message? I shall probably see her tomorrow if I come early enough."

"Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much." He realized that to reveal his dismay would stamp Hilda with an unpleasantly mysterious character.

"I shall see her this evening--at her mother's. I am sorry to have interrupted you."

"Oh! Don't mention it!" The gray-haired lady still smiled kindly; Peter touched his hat and descended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large atelier in the afternoon; strange that she had never mentioned it.

Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to the foot of the staircase and had located his errand, now stood in her door and surveyed his retreat with a fine air of impartiality; people who consulted her need not mount staircases for nothing.

"Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle."

Odd paused; he certainly would ask no questions of the concierge, but she might, of her own accord, throw some light on Hilda's devious ways.

"No; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle was in when I last called with her sister. I did not know that she went out every afternoon."

Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that Miss Archinard's friends were not in ignorance of her habits.

"Every afternoon, monsieur; _elle et son chien_."

"Ah, indeed!" Odd wished her good day and walked off. He had stumbled upon a mystery only Hilda herself might divulge: it might be very simple, and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him.

At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty woman, an American, who lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. Pope's; if she were not there by five he need not wait for her. She was not there, and Mr.

Pope took possession of him on his entrance and led him into the library to show him some new acquisitions in bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a gra.s.s widow, and her husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evidence in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very tall, thin man, with white hair and a mild, almost timid manner, dashed with the collector's eagerness.

"Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here; really a perfect treasure. A genuine Grolier; I captured it at the La Hire sale. Just look here, please; come to the light. Isn't that a beauty?"

Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, and he was pa.s.sed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the cup of tea and put up his eyegla.s.ses to look at it. A woman in a dress of j.a.panese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground.

The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable.

He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing signature: "Hilda Archinard."

He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise.

"I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are very lucky. Did she give it to you?"

Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the work of his future sister.

"Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due.

Her work is certainly charming."

Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it.

Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first disappointment at the Emba.s.sy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at the atelier had sharpened, now became acute.

"I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs.

Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her."

"Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the comparison.

"She is such a brilliant girl," Mrs. Pope added, "such a splendid character. I can't tell you how it delighted me to hear that Katherine had at last found the rare some one who could really appreciate her. It strengthened my pet theory of the fundamental fitness of things."

"Yes," Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope hurriedly wondered if she had been guilty of bad taste, and changed the subject.