Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly’s stare and Alicia’s frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He took her first to the picture gallery—having noticed as they went through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw.
“All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!” she said; “almost everything would be beautiful, wouldn’t it, if one were great enough?”
The strawberry beds were visited, and—
“Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first acquaintance?” asked Peter; “we have plenty of time before tea.” But, seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda’s eyes, “Well, not there, then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our boating-house is a mile from yours, and I’ll give you a paddle in my Canadian canoe,—such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, or you’ll spill us both into the river.”
“I shouldn’t mind, as you would be there,” laughed Hilda; and so they went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the best and oldest of friends.
CHAPTER VII
ODD’S life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind.
The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence.
Mary’s wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone for two months’ cruising in a friend’s yacht about the North Sea, Peter set to work with vigor. “The Sonnet” was in a year’s time to make him famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were thoroughly irreproachable—a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty but very sensible wife.
Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd when the news reached him at his sister’s, was as unjust as it was poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd’s death had broken her husband’s heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia’s death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of the wisdom of the decision.