The Dull Miss Archinard Part 34

"I cannot tell you."

"Unkind; I tell you everything."

"You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell you how infinitely dear you are to me." He had spoken, her face hidden from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she clasped them together and said gravely--

"You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to _me_."

Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless baseness.

"I may tell you how much I love you?" and he too rose and stood before her.

"I have always loved you," said Hilda, with her grave look. "I love you now as much as I did when I was a child."

The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd's head swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her eyes, and looking into them he came close to her.

"My angel! My angel!" he hardly breathed.

"Dear Peter," and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from impossibility, the crash of the inevitable.

One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at it--divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and defied the future.

The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands pus.h.i.+ng him away.

"Dearest--dearest--dearest."

Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness.

Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had all the sad pa.s.sivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle sternness of the lips.

She loved him, but how cruel he was.

"Oh, my precious," he said, "look at me. Forgive me; I love you."

He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them.

"You don't hate me for telling you the truth?" And as she made no sign: "No, no, you don't hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you did not care? Look at me, dearest."

"What have I done?" said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her hands.

"You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!"

"I never could have believed it of you," she said, and he felt it to be the simple statement of a fact.

"O Hilda--I have only told you the truth, that is my crime."

"You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I said?"

"Good G.o.d! I have been madly in love with you for months!"

"For months?" she repeated dully.

"For years, perhaps, who knows!"

"I did not know that I--that you--"

"You knew nothing, my poor angel."

He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love enchanted him.

"How base! how base!" she moaned.

"Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself."

"No--you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so."

"You did not mean _this_."

"I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am wicked." The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was indeed wicked, a terrible revelation.

Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder.

"O Peter, Peter!"

"What, my darling child?"

"That we should be so base!"

"Not _we_, Hilda. Not _you_!"

"Yes, I--for I am happy--think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much."

She wept, her head upon his shoulder. "Keep me for a moment, only a moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad that you love me. No; don't kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved me for a long time."

"From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but I felt--ah! I felt--that I could have made you love me!"

"And yet--you loved Katherine!"

The anguish of the broken words pierced him.

"Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love her."

"Peter! Peter!"

"Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only one--my only love!"

"O Peter!"

"I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon me. Friendly comrades.h.i.+p on the one hand, and on the other--O Hilda!--a pa.s.sion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but you see--be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,--be brave enough to own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, mistakes may be put aside without dishonor."

"Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!"