"Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed before you go."
"I yield. The first part of May."
"Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy."
"No, I am for May."
"It"s an unlucky month."
"Oh, _we_ can defy bad luck, can"t we?" Katherine smiled.
"If you go away, I shall," said Odd, after a moment"s silence.
"Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma--and Hilda,"
said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment of poor Peter"s folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his infidelity. That he should think she did not see it!
"I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little of your mother--and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after her lessons."
"I am afraid that mamma can"t spare Taylor."
Peter moved impatiently.
"Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you.
Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately."
"As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the donor. She would not take the money."
"I could speak to your father; lend him a sum."
Katherine flushed.
"It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent."
"Oh dear!" sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine.
"When do you go to London, dear?" he asked.
"The day after to-morrow." Katherine, above the waving of her fan, smiled slightly at his change of tone. "Will you miss me, Peter?"
"All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play truant like this."
"It will be good for both of us." Katherine"s voice was playful, and showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. "I might get tired of you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your perfection."
"What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you very often?"
"As often as you feel like it; but don"t force feeling."
"May I describe chateaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions if I do?"
"With pleasure--and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can I do anything for you at the British Museum?"
It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather antic.i.p.ated the time when Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to withhold him.
"I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall I?" said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have divined. "Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don"t be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I shall set you no heavier task."
"They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a b.u.t.terfly under a gla.s.s case!" Odd laughed with more light-heartedness than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that affectionate admiration.
"I won"t even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many."
"I can"t quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour."
"Our usual hour? In the morning?"
"You will not see Hilda then."
"Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss her _au revoir_ for me."
Odd felt a certain triumph.
Katherine"s departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for makeshift flight. After a month or two of solitary wrestling and wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of Providence were willing to help one who helped himself.
His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him.
The disclosure of his pa.s.sion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too late? A love as far removed from the wrecking pa.s.sion of his youth as it was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more fearful shipwreck.
Hilda"s selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be dreaded than any hurt to himself.
And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again.
CHAPTER IX
An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd"s return. A rather prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs.
He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard"s.
Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the Captain"s projected jaunt. He surmised that her father"s absence would lighten Hilda"s load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain"s hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed "_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle "Ilda"--Odd had hesitated uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, celle-la_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle s"ereinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu"elle soigne madame, et puis elle m"aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est tres, mais tres exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une dame comme celle-la_."
Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her days he should probably find her in the Rue d"a.s.sas, and, with the angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner.
The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half dazed her evidently.
"You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized a biting poverty.
"Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He was aghast.
"I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety over its real weakness; "I haven"t seen any of my people for so long, except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn"t it?
Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that he hasn"t been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking."