The Dull Miss Archinard Part 40

"My child! How ill you look!"

The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across her face, but Odd, seeing only its 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, I am 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 a.s.sent. "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 a.s.sert 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 mind dwelt 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, ign.o.ble. 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 ign.o.ble self-interest in showing the ugly fact with no softening circ.u.mstances; circ.u.mstances might indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of the circ.u.mstances 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 subst.i.tute; 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.

To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine's loomed a black probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy of Hilda's love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked together he told Katherine's story, lending to it every charitable possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it.

When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine's selfishness had made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned.

Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed the pale gold background, its att.i.tude of intense quiet unchanged.

The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish look, her own look broke suddenly into pa.s.sionate sympathy and emotion.

"Peter," she said, standing still before him, "she didn't love you."

"I don't think she did." Odd's voice was shaken but non-committal.

"Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else," said Hilda.

"Yes; perhaps."

Hilda's hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness--

"I don't believe she ever loved anybody."

Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception.

"She was very cruel to me," said Hilda, after a little pause, and her eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a lost illusion.

"I don't think she ever cared much for me either," she added.

"Not much; not as you interpret caring."

Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that indignant realization of Katherine's intrinsic selfishness.

"No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed me of you." It was the most self-a.s.sertive speech he had ever heard her utter.