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 with no 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 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 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 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, 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.
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 attitude 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 passionate 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-assertive speech he had ever heard her
utter.
"No; you could not have been so cruel to her," he repeated, "not even
loving me as you did and as she did not."
There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees
stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said
slowly--
"But that doesn't make what I did less wrong. I was as weak, as
disloyal, as though Katherine had loved us both as much as I thought she
did."
"And I as cruel, as weak, as mean?" Odd asked.
"Ah, don't!" she said, with a look of pain. "You have redeemed
yourself," she added, "and have made me more ashamed."
"Then I have made a miserable failure of my attempt."
"No, no; you have not."
The river was before them now, and the woods sloped down to its curving
band of silver. They both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at
the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow.
"Dear Peter," said Hilda gently. He looked down at her and she up at
him, putting her hand in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender
little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of the child of ten
years ago.
So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and again they looked at
the river, the meadows, and the blue distance of the hills. Palamon,
after running here and there, with rather assumed interest, his nose to
the ground, came and sat down before them with an air of dignified
acquiescence and appreciative contemplation. In the woods the sudden,
sad-sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the silence with
unconscious pathos.
"O Peter!" said Hilda suddenly, on a note as impulsive and as
inevitable as the bird's. He looked at her and put his arms around her,
saying nothing.
"Oh!" said Hilda, "I cannot help it. I love you too much, dear Peter.
Everything else may have been wrong, but it is right to love you."
He took her face between his hands and looked at her.
"Everything else would be wrong."
"Then kiss me, Peter."
He gave himself the joy of a delicious postponement.
"Not till you tell me that you see that everything else would be wrong."
But the kiss was given before her answer.
"I trust you, and you must know."
THE END.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
you remem-him=> you remember him {pg 19}
the coèncirge=> the concièrge {pg 139}
to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158}
unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181}