The Dull Miss Archinard Part 10

"I don't admire them."

"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't it? Why didn't you keep on?"

"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure."

"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't 'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring."

"Were you? And I was in j.a.pan. I only got back three weeks ago."

"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since getting back?"

"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London."

"We were with Lady Mainwaring."

"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?"

"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us."

"And Hilda enjoyed herself?"

Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed herself after a fas.h.i.+on, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't care much for that sort of thing really."

Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's season, and brought her back to the little room in the little _appartement, 3ieme au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's lace-frilled rec.u.mbency, nor in the air of pa.s.sive long-suffering that went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's deficiencies.

"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope."

Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt its concealment.

"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!"

"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly.

"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a child."

Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine.

"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is."

"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is ready."

Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might not const.i.tute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all.

There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look of middle age.

"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful, he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she could make up her mind--to contemplate that role for herself. Miss Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friends.h.i.+p; but Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation.

Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking.

Indeed his next words showed as much.

"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find myself an uncle with a vengeance."

"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages ago, that wedding."

"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently.

"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, at Allersley?"

"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is rather lonely."

"Why don't you fill it with people?"

"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd.

"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty as landowner and country gentleman."

"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness."

"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I think I prefer Paris to the Priory."

"What do you do with yourself in Paris?"

"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago.

He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him.

"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you fight?"

"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the pity."

"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral crusade?"

"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the people I liked."

"And all the others would be in cages!"

"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very tolerant."

"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all marching and caging."

"I shall live in it after my own fas.h.i.+on. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but not meanly so, I a.s.sure you."

"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing, as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyegla.s.ses and looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic.

"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?"

"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _melange_; I read a bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!"

"You rode so well, too, Mary told me."