"No, no; all she says may be true!" moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: "And how can you be so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!"
Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by quick reflection--
"You need not allow for a woman"s jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don"t, no indeed you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don"t like humiliation for myself or for others. I don"t like to scorn my sister whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for charity. But I give you back your word without one regret for myself.
You have killed my love very effectually."
"Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?"
"That is ign.o.ble, quite as ign.o.ble as I could predict of you. Hilda"s lesson must necessarily make the past look pale."
"I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base speeches, Katherine."
"Your example has been contagious."
"Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your sister"s forgiveness--as I ask yours--humbly. She has not feared humiliation."
"I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her." Katherine took up her wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda.
"And I have done this," said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her body and her soul.
"Hilda!" said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, not daring to touch the still figure. "Hilda!" he repeated; "if only you will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that she should have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!" Odd added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no hint of sympathy.
"Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?" he asked; "you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never realized that you loved me." He bent above her and kissed her hand.
"Precious one! Dearest, dearest child."
"Oh, don"t!" said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head.
"Her heart is broken. I am all that she said."
"Her heart is not broken!" cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. "I could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!"
"What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her."
"I am glad of it." And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he stooped to her again, imploring: "Will you not look at me? Look up, dearest; tell me again that you love me."
"I am already in the dust," said Hilda, after a pause.
"You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!" cried Odd; he took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. "Sit up. Listen to me," he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken face, his hands on her shoulders. "I have loved you pa.s.sionately for months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!" Odd added, sitting down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda repeated--
"Don"t."
"You felt my pity, my sympathy," Odd went on, holding her hands. "You felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation--for love--you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too high for the hearer."
"Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I _loved_ you!" Hilda wailed suddenly.
"Thank G.o.d that you own to that!" Odd e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.
"That does not clear me," she retorted. "No, no; I was a fool. You, the man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to you--it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all!
I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!" she sobbed, bending again her face upon her hands.
"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from between clenched teeth.
"Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low note of pa.s.sionate self-scorn.
"An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, Hilda," he added, "don"t be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I say, I haven"t yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but Hilda"s swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision.
"You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together."
"I say there will be, Hilda."
"You think that I could ever forget my sister"s misery; my shame and yours?"
"You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the day."
"That is a placid term for such degradation."
"I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake."
"You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can"t mend a broken heart by marching over it."
"One may avoid breaking another."
"You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean."
"You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly.
"I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; you have robbed me of self-respect."
"Shall I leave you, Hilda?"
"You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me."
"Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to the heart, and half-unconscious.
"Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed and dilated eyes.
"What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently.
"Kiss me good-bye!"
He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another.
"Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice.
"Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me."
He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, he said--
"I will wait."