The Dull Miss Archinard Part 23

"The pity of it! The pathos!" Odd pursued, not heeding her comment.

Hilda looked at him rather sadly.

"You mean that I should have lost my ignorance? Yes, that made me feel badly," she a.s.sented. "That is the worst of it. One becomes so suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a sentimental regret. I have not lost my self-respect. I am not ignorant of things I should like to ignore; but one may know a great many things, and be unharmed."

"My dear child, you are probably innocent of things familiar to many modern girls. No knowledge could harm you. You have a right to more than self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your unrewarded, unrecognized fight fills me with amazement and reverence. I did not know that such self-forgetful devotion existed."

"Oh, please don't talk like that! It is quite ridiculous! We must have money, and I can make it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat idly at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I merely do my duty."

Hilda spoke quite sharply and decisively.

"Merely!" Odd e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, kept him silent, otherwise he might have indulged in reckless invective. He still held her hand, and again he raised it to his lips.

"That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, I am afraid," Hilda said good-humoredly.

"May I come and get you now and then?" he asked.

"You think it would be wise?"

"How do you mean wise, Hilda?"

"I might be found out. I have given you my secret. You must help me to keep it."

"I may speak of it to Katharine--since she knows?"

"Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don't _egg_ her on to worry me!"

laughed Hilda; "and speak to her with _reservations_--there are things she must not know."

Peter wondered if the child-friends.h.i.+p, the brotherly relations, ent.i.tled him to seal the compact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at her with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly seen face was very beautiful. This realization of her beauty's attraction at that moment struck him with a sense of abas.e.m.e.nt before her. Surely no such poor tie held him to this lovely soul. And, at the turn of his own thoughts, Odd felt a vague stir of fear.

CHAPTER V

Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never failed in elegance, in well-groomed finish--her low-heeled little boots, her irreproachable snowy gloves, bore the same unmistakable stamp of the _cachet_ that costs, that is not to be procured ready made. Odd, as a rich man, had given very little thought to the power of money, and little thought to Katherine's garments except as charmingly characteristic symbols of good taste; but to-day his eye noted the black fur that fell about her shoulders and trailed l.u.s.trous ends to her very feet, more for its richness than its becomingness.

Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to restore him to his usual att.i.tude of _bon camaraderie_. He smiled and kissed her, but he was conscious of underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might lose his temper with Katherine; he had never lost it with Alicia. Katherine's very superiority made it imperative to have things out with her. Kindly resignation was an impossibility. He realized that not to admire Katherine would make life with her intolerable. She would immediately perceive reservations and she would revolt against them. He wondered whether he should be the one to broach the subject of Hilda's ill-treatment, and was amazed at a certain embarra.s.sed shrinking, as from a feeling too deep for words, that kept him silent as they walked along, taking a short cut to the Place de l'Etoile, where the Arc stood in almost cardboard clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine who spoke--

"Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It touched her very much."

In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear Katherine vouch for Hilda's feeling.

"And Hilda told you that I had been admitted into the mystery of the Archinard family?" His voice was even enough, but it held a certain keenness that Katherine was quick to recognize.

"You don't think their mystery creditable, do you? Nor do I, Peter. But mamma knows nothing of it, nor papa; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda from the first."

"My dear Katherine, the child has worked like a galley-slave for you all! Your necessities were more potent facts than your dissuasions, I fancy!"

Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the profile beside her.

She felt herself arraigned, and her impulse was towards rebellion.

However, her voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered him--

"I know it must look badly to you--cruel even. But, Peter, don't you know--you do know--how things _grow_ around one? One can hardly tell where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather the definite submission to a wrong situation." This was so true, that Katherine felt immediately the mollified quality of his voice as he answered--

"I know. I know submission was forced upon you, no doubt. But I had rather you had not submitted when once the situation grew definite. And I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in making the situation easier. Granting that you could give her no material aid--granting that her faculty is good luck--still the actual burden might have been lightened."

Odd paused; he could not say his thoughts outright--tell her that the comparative luxury of her life and her mother's was outrageous, shocking to him now that he understood its source.

"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly.

"She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring.

I, therefore, who a.s.sured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, and how can I interfere?"

"I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves."

Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness--

"You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!"

Odd walked on silently.

"And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of _excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening!

Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by the _entourage_ you have created for her?"

Katherine's flush deepened.

"Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to bed too early."

"And then," Odd continued, ignoring her comment in a way most irritating to Katherine's smarting susceptibility, "you might have gone with her now and again to these houses where she teaches. You would have stood for protection. You would have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, there lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of her extreme beauty is--exposed to insult."

Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment.

"Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant romancing of that sort! Things like that only happen in novels of the silliest sort--even to beauties!

And Hilda would have told _me_. She tells me _everything_. Really, Peter, she must have given you a wrong impression; she enjoys her life!"

"So she tried to convince me," said Odd, with a good deal of sharpness; "there was no hint of complaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda's recountal; don't imagine it, Katherine."

Katherine was telling herself that never in all her life had she experienced so many rebuffs. She contemplated her own good temper with some amazement; she also wondered how long it would last. By this time they were half-way down the Avenue du Bois; the day was fine and clear, and the wintry trees were sharply definite against the sky.

"I have never even seen her in a well-made gown," said Odd.

"Hilda scorns the fas.h.i.+on-plate garment, as I do. We are both original in that respect."

"Your originality takes different forms."

"Because it must adapt itself to different conditions, Peter. I won't be scolded about my dresses. Men like you imagine that, because a woman looks well, she must spend a lot. It isn't so with me. My dresses last forever, and, to go into details, Hilda by no means clothes me. Papa has money--now and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, and her money mainly goes for mamma's books and oysters and hot-house grapes. If she will not spend it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated."