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. To Odd, 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 satin _does_," 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 her _embarras 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 took _au 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 millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a duchess with a
political _entourage_ to 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 dull too, and a few grievances
whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en passant_--for subject,
the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau 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 come
out 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."
"In _my_ honor 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 in _value_; 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. Katherine passed, 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. _You_ talk 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 you _do_ even 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 to claim her for the second
cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening.
"I have been dancing _steadily_," 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 yours _best_!" 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, you know 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 paternally admonishing
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 really _need_ me."
"Doesn't _need_ you! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!"
"He needs a wife, but he doesn't need _me_."
"You are subtle, Hilda."
"I don't think I am _that_."
"You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to his
_need_ of 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's _fiancé_
appeared, 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 am
_not_ jealous, 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 was _not_ jealous. 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 suppose _I_ am?" 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. Our _tête-à-tête_ can'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, _we_ can 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 her _au
revoir_ for me."
Odd felt a certain triumph.
Katherine's departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for
makeshift flight. After a month or two 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.