“Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well though, and it’s not unimaginable. I don’t imply anything vulgar.” The Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; “that’s not conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine’s ambitious, very ambitious. As for you, Hilda—and all that, you know—I am awfully sorry, you understand.” The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, and the Captain’s conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible.
Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery that her father’s cool suppositions on Katherine’s conduct had seemed to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned her head away from the river and closed her eyes.
“Allone, withouten any companye,” that was the fated motto of her life.
CHAPTER XIII
BY the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something—with anything—and experienced the odd sensation of a person upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms.
Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active rôle in life most confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little côterie of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard’s little Causeries de Mardi, her society for little weekly dinners—only six chosen members—les Élites—stirred Allersley to the quick with æsthetic thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations.
Hilda was not one of les Élites. “Just for us old people, trying to amuse ourselves,” Mrs. Archinard said, and at the Causeries Hilda was an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the Causeries were quite Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard causant and Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the élites and the mardis, and devoted himself to more commonplace individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn’t required to strain one’s temper by listening to fine talk.
Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on her arm. Mary’s mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture since Peter’s flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary was generous, and the sight of Hilda’s white sunlit face completed Peter’s work. She found that she had kissed Hilda—she, so undemonstrative—and standing with her arms around the girl’s slight shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter—
“You will see me, won’t you?”
Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut—palest pink and palest purple, “on tiptoe for a flight.”