“Sweetest, noblest—dearest,” with an emotion only too contagious, for Hilda’s eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him.
“I understand, Hilda, I understand it all—all you have suffered; the loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know that you have been unhappy.”
“Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!” The tears rolled down her cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd’s hands clasping hers. “No one ever cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn’t it cruel, cruel?” This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless terror. “That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be my fault.” The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: “I have been so lonely.”
“My child! My poor, poor child!”
“Let me tell you everything. I must tell you now since you care for me. I have been so fond of you—always. You remember when I was a child?” Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling shipwreck. “Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It sounds morbid, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, for my loneliness was almost unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn’t you? Only I don’t think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to you.” Hilda’s tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled now at Odd, a quivering smile.
“And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can’t tell you what I suffered.”
Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his.
“But how could you have known?” said Hilda tenderly; “I was really very silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back because I needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that.” She paused a moment: “It all ended in Florence,” she went on sadly; “such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for something that could never come; that you had never really understood, and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know what that feeling is?” Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over his eyes he would not look at her.
“You are so sorry?” Odd nodded. “But you have had that feeling? Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,—and silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many friends, so many windows in your prison, you can’t know.”
“I know.”