CHAPTER XII
Hildegarde had acquired the habit of stepping softly as she went about her father’s house; of stopping to listen before she turned corners or entered rooms. Every activity of the house she scrutinized with suspicion. She felt that affairs went forward there under the surface which she could only guess at but could not detect. There was a sort of melodrama about her situation that keyed her up. She would never admit it, but, nevertheless, there were times when she really enjoyed herself. There was no air of mystery about the place, but she knew mystery was there. She knew there were servants waiting upon her who were set there to keep watchful eyes upon her father; perhaps they carried on at the same time other and more sinister occupations. Her father seemed to go about his usual pursuits without interruption, but she believed there were interruptions. Every time a fire worked its destruction, every time the papers reported the havoc of an explosion, she wondered if her father’s hand had been in it. But she saw nothing to evidence his guilt. Simply and baldly, she saw nothing. She only felt.
Ever since that night of climaxes she had hoped to discover the identity of the man who had forced her father, not against his honorable scruples, but against his fears, to assume a part in Germany’s secret war against the United States, but his identity was never hinted at by anything that came to her ears or eyes. Once, on some pretext, she had rummaged the basements of the house to see if she could find the explosives whose presence had been hinted at. She found nothing.
She listened for and searched for things she did not want to find. “If I should find something,” she asked herself, “what would I do about it?” There was a problem indeed. One may despise a parent, but, nevertheless, parenthood exists. She loved the memory of her mother, and Herman von Essen had dominated her mother’s life. Possibly her mother had loved him. Surely she had loved him for an interval. Considerations of this sort reared themselves; but perhaps the major consideration was her horror of disgrace—her horror of being shown to the world as the daughter of a man guilty of treachery toward his country. Perhaps she was not the only daughter of German parentage who faced such a problem in those days.
As a natural opposite of her father, she had felt loyalty where he exhibited disloyalty; his attitude toward the United States had compelled her to a love for her country which otherwise might have lain as dormant as it seemed to lie in the majority of men and women about her. But her father quickened it, and she nursed it. It was not in her to do things by halves, and inevitably she became fiercely, flamingly patriotic.... Perhaps girlishly patriotic; patriotic with immature enthusiasm.... She brooded and dreamed. She saw herself frustrating her father’s designs—but always without betraying him. She pictured herself discovering plots, and bringing them to futility with clever counter-plots. She pictured herself in possession of indisputable evidence of her father’s guilt, and would sit painting to herself scenes in which she confronted him with it, compelled him to grovel for mercy, and wrung from him promises to abandon his sinister enterprises. But though she spied with what cleverness for spying was in her, she hit upon nothing tangible. Almost she came to believe there was nothing tangible to discover.
The thing was never absent from her mind. How could it be? One cannot whistle away fear, shame, the sense of impending calamity which has its birth in such certain insecurity as was hers. When a nature, reckless, turbulent, headstrong—and feminine—is moved by such emotions as hatred, terror, black doubt, love of country, all conflicting, a dance, a game of cards, a novel, cannot bring forgetfulness nor ease of mind. It was wearing on her, chafing at those restraints which were naturally irksome to her. Hildegarde was being modified, as Potter had been modified, but the forces that acted upon her were far different from the forces which had worked upon him. To Potter, through enforced idleness, unavoidable thought, had come certainty and sureness of purpose, darkened and made saturnine through these last months by love that had come down about him in ruins. To Hildegarde came only more uncertainty, more anguish of mind. There was no light ahead; nothing was clear before her. The strain she underwent, the constant pressure of suspense, the tenseness of a most singular precariousness, all pulled her this way and that. How the thing would end with her none could say. It would change her; another woman would result, but what sort of woman? The answer depended upon the innate strength of her soul, the sturdiness of such virtues as resided in her.
For weeks after her brief encounter with Potter outside the dining-room of the Athletic Club he insisted upon obtruding himself into her thoughts and multiplying her perplexities. She herself, if she had been given to introspection, could not have told what were her sentiments toward him. She was very angry with him; that persisted. But the meeting with him had given her a shock she did not suspect it would give her. It had upset her. After she declined so sharply to sit at table with him it had seemed to her she had to get away from that spot; had to be alone, could not bear the presence of a human being. She did not want to hide away to think about him; that was the thing she least desired to do. She would have told you she never wanted to see him or be reminded of him again. But she reminded herself of him. There were times when she really believed he had assumed such importance in her considerations because she hated him. That, she fancied, would account for it, for she was forced to acknowledge that he was important. At other times she was not so certain of hatred; vivid recollections of pleasant, glowing moments spent with him would come to her. Again and again she saw the look that was in his eyes at their unexpected meeting. The memory of that look disturbed and accused her, but she would not admit the accusation. Against her will she lived over again her flight from the house; Potter’s offer of love and marriage, and her reception of it.... She would have married him that night—without love; it was not in her at that time to understand why he had acted as he had; why he should have declined to marry her without her love coming to him as a part of the transaction. She liked to fancy herself scorned and affronted, but in her heart she knew she had not been scorned nor affronted. She had accepted Cantor’s attentions because, with a sort of childish petulance, she imagined it would hurt Potter.
Her reason was a double one, perhaps a triple one. Potter was the first consideration; then, second in importance, she must get away from the house, be away from it frequently, be amused, excited. Cantor offered amusement and excitement. She was not so inexperienced that she failed to perceive early in their intimacy that Cantor was not the safest of escorts, that he might, perhaps, prove to be more exciting than amusing, and more dangerous than either. That feature of it rather egged her on. In her state of mind she courted the risks she saw, and dared them. It provided the element of contest her restlessness demanded. She took on Cantor as she would have taken on a game of chess, knowing or suspecting the chances of winning or losing.... And she found him fascinating, a skilled cavalier, a delightful companion—but a watchful, ready companion, not likely to pass over the opportunities of the game. It required all her wit, her ready impertinence, to hold the man at arm’s-length.
On the Fourth of July she drove with Cantor to the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, adjacent to the beautiful little lakes of Oakland County, distant some twenty-odd miles from Detroit. There they lunched and dined and played golf. In the evening there were to be dancing and fireworks, but a sudden mood seized Hildegarde, before the evening’s entertainment was well begun, to go home. She could not account for it herself. Simply she wanted to go home, and wanting to go, she insisted upon being taken. Cantor discovered that there was no arguing with her.
They drove along the country road to Woodward Avenue, and through Birmingham, rapidly spreading Royal Oak, Highland Park, that had grown from a distant country village to a considerable city perched upon Detroit’s very shoulder—on down the broad avenue which had, but a few years before, known neither pavement nor street-car. Through miles upon miles of the most convincing evidences of the city’s miraculous growth they drove—and for the most part in silence. Endless rows of fine residences where, as a little girl, she had seen meadows and wheat-fields, did not now interest her.... She wanted to be alone, alone in the dark. She wanted to crouch in her room and to endeavor to compel her brain to cease from thinking.