“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 passion 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 passion 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-là,” she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; “Elle s’éreinte, 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 très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une damê comme celle-là.”
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’Assas, 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.