“So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda,” she said.
Hilda’s wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to cruelty.
“Katherine, say anything—anything you will to me,” and Odd’s voice broke a little as he spoke, “but not one word to her! Not one word! It comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life.” He held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight eyebrows, breathing quickly.
“Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life—you and your father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us.”
“Yes; as I see you.” Katharine’s very lips were white.
Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the extremity of self-control.
“Katherine,” she said, “he is trying to shield me. It did not happen like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always loved him.”
“Oh! did you?” said Katherine, with a withered little laugh.
“My child!” cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him—“my child, what are you saying? What madness!”
“I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you.”