The Dull Miss Archinard Part 37

And turning away, he walked out of the room.

CHAPTER XII

For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine had returned to England, she added with emphasis--

"But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid now."

The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes.

She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of a.n.a.lysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness.

Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart.

Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned.

Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her behalf.

He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs.

Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda learned that they were going back to Allersley.

Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at its source. She could guess who encompa.s.sed her feeble life with care, and who it was that s.h.i.+elded her from even a feather's weight of grat.i.tude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck.

"Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr.

Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, '_Docteur, elle s'est tuee._' I said it frankly."

Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective nature.

By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood.

Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as fis.h.i.+ng--and read the newspapers with e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of disgust at political follies.

When Hilda sat in the suns.h.i.+ne near the river, her father often walked aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarra.s.sed glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted pa.s.sively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his fis.h.i.+ng-rod, looking hastily into his fis.h.i.+ng-basket, and showing evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a sudden sense of method underlying the Captain's manoeuvres.

"Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will be glad of a respite. Isn't it a little sunny to-day for first-cla.s.s fis.h.i.+ng?" Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up to her with shy alacrity.

"Even first-cla.s.s fis.h.i.+ng is a bore, _I_ think," he observed, not taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his daughter and then at the river.

"Feeling better to-day, aren't you? You might take a stroll with me, perhaps; but no, you're not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, isn't it?"

Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and the absent-minded smile on her face rea.s.sured him as to immediate issues.

"How are _you_ feeling?" she asked; "I have been looking at the trees and gra.s.s for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human beings in the world."

"Oh, I'm very well; very well indeed." The Captain was again feeling uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: "You know, I know about it now. That is to say, I wasn't exactly to speak of it, if it might pain you; but I don't see why it should do _that_. Upon my word,"

said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was broken, "it's more likely to pain me, isn't it? Rather to my discredit, you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for your teaching--wearing yourself out--well, I don't know which I was angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never entered into my head. And then, _my_ daughter and low French cads! Well, _he_ saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn't have my weight and authority. I was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told me. Odd told me--"

The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarra.s.sing, after all, this recognition of his daughter's life.

"Now your mother doesn't know," he pursued; "Odd seemed rather anxious that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn't it? Quite."

"You need neither of you have known." All she was wondering about, trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. "It came about most naturally; and, if mamma's illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me down, my modest business might have come to an end--no one the wiser for it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt."

"Well, I don't know." The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh of some relief. "It's off my mind at all events. I wanted to express my--pain, you know, and my grat.i.tude--and to say what a jolly trump I thought you; that kind of thing."

"Dear papa, I don't deserve it."

"Ah, well, Odd isn't the man to make misstatements, you know. A bit of dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the truth. Of course he's very fond of you; that's natural. This sad affair of Katherine's; if it hadn't been for that, you and he would be brother and sister by this time."

It was Hilda's turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be incapable.

"Where is he--Mr. Odd?" she asked, steeling herself to the question.

The look of gloom which touched the Captain's face anew, confirmed Hilda in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation.

"Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can't sit down quietly under a blow like that."

A flush came over Hilda's face. Part of her punishment was evident. She must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with praises. Yet Katherine herself--any woman--would choose the part Odd had given her--the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was helpless.

"Papa," she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt--she could at least punish herself, if no one else could punish her--"where is Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?" The Captain swung one leg over the other with impatience.

"I've hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly."

"I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be happy with him."

"Pshaw! That's all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn't the girl to throw over a man like Odd for a whim."

Hilda's flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling--

"Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I know it is not true. I know it!"

"Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well though, and it's not unimaginable. I don't imply anything vulgar." The Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; "that's not conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine's ambitious, very ambitious.

As for you, Hilda--and all that, you know--I am awfully sorry, you understand." The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, and the Captain's conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible.

Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery that her father's cool suppositions on Katherine's conduct had seemed to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned her head away from the river and closed her eyes.

"Allone, withouten any companye," that was the fated motto of her life.

CHAPTER XIII

By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something--with anything--and experienced the odd sensation of a person upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission to circ.u.mstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms.