Edie’s tender eyes filled at once with swimming tears. That one word ‘dear,’ said so naturally and simply, touched her heart at once with its genuine half unspoken sympathy. ‘Oh, Lady Hilda,’ she answered falteringly, ‘please don’t make me talk about that. We are so very, very, very poor. I can’t bear to talk about it to you. Please, please don’t make me.’
Hilda looked at her with the moisture welling up in her own eyes too, and said softly, ‘I’m SO sorry: dear, dear little Mrs. Le Breton, I’m so very, very, very sorry for you! from the bottom of my heart I’m sorry for you.’
‘It isn’t for myself, you know,’ Edie answered quickly: ‘for myself, of course, I could stand anything; but it’s the trouble and privations for darling Ernest. Oh, Lady Hilda, I can’t bear to say it, but he’s dying, he’s dying.’
Hilda took the pretty small hand affectionately in hers. ‘Don’t, dear, don’t,’ she said, brushing away a tear from her own eyes at the same time. ‘He isn’t, believe me, he isn’t. And don’t call me by that horrid stiff name, dear, please don’t. Call me Hilda. I should be so pleased and flattered if you would call me Hilda. And may I call you Edie? I know your husband calls you Edie, because Mr. Ronald Le Breton told me so. I want to be a friend of yours; and I feel sure, if only you will let me, that we might be very good and helpful friends indeed together.’
Edie pressed her hand softly. How very different from the imaginary Lady Hilda she had pictured to herself in her timid, girlish fancy! How much even dear Ernest had been mistaken as to what there was of womanly really in her. ‘Oh, don’t speak so kindly to me,’ she said imploringly; ‘don’t speak so kindly, or else you’ll make me cry. I can’t bear to hear you speak so kindly.’
‘Cry, dear,’ Lady Hilda whispered in a gentle tone, kissing her forehead delicately as she spoke: ‘cry and relieve yourself. There’s nothing gives one so much comfort when one’s heart is bursting as a regular good downright cry.’ And, suiting the action to the word, forthwith Lady Hilda laid her own statuesque head down beside Edie’s, and so those two weeping women, rivals once in a vague way, and now bound to one another by a new-found tie, mingled their tears silently together for ten minutes in unuttered sympathy.
As they sat there, both tearful and speechless, with Lady Hilda soothing Edie’s wan hand tenderly in hers, and leaning above her, and stroking her hair softly with a sister’s fondness, the door opened very quietly, and Arthur Berkeley stood for a moment pausing in the passage, and looking in without a word upon the unexpected sight that greeted his wondering vision. He had come to call upon Ernest about some possible opening for a new writer on a paper lately started; and hearing the sound of sobs within had opened the door quietly and tentatively. He could hardly believe his own eyes when he actually saw Lady Hilda Tregellis sitting there side by side with Edie Le Breton, kissing her pale forehead a dozen times in a minute, and crying over her like a child with unwonted tears of unmistakable sympathy. For ten seconds Arthur held the door ajar in his hands, and gazed silently with the awe of chivalrous respect upon the tearful, beautiful picture. Then he shut the door again noiselessly and unperceived, and stole softly out into the street to wait alone for Ernest’s return. It was not for him to intrude his unbidden presence upon the sacred sorrow of those two weeping sister-women.
He lighted a cigar outside, and walked up and down a neighbouring street feverishly till he thought it likely the call would be finished. ‘Dear little Mrs. Le Breton,’ he said to himself softly, ‘dear little Miss Butterfly of the days that are dead; softened and sweetened still more by suffering, with the beauty of holiness glowing in your face, how I wish some good for you could unexpectedly come out of this curious visit. Though I don’t see how it’s possible: I don’t see how it’s possible. The stream carries us all down unresistingly before its senseless flood, and sweeps us at last, sooner or later, like helpless logs, into the unknown sea. Poor Ernest is drifting fast thitherwards before the current, and nothing on earth, it seems to me, can conceivably stop him!’
He paced up and down a little, with a quick, unsteady tread, and took a puff or two again at his cigar abstractedly. Then he held it thoughtfully between his fingers for a while and began to hum a few bars from his own new opera then in course of composition—a stately long-drawn air, it was something like the rustle of Hilda Tregellis’s satin train as she swept queenlike down the broad marble staircase of some great Elizabethan country palace. ‘And dear Lady Hilda too,’ he went on, musingly: ‘dear, kind, sympathising Lady Hilda. Who on earth would ever have thought she had it in her to comfort that poor, weeping, sorrowing girl as I just now saw her doing? Dear Lady Hilda! Kind Lady Hilda! I have undervalued you and overlooked you, because of the mere accident of your titled birth, but I could have kissed you myself, for pure gratitude, that very minute, Hilda Tregellis, when I saw you stooping down and kissing that dear white forehead that looked so pale and womanly and beautiful. Yes, Hilda, I could have kissed you. I could have kissed your own grand, smooth, white marble forehead. And no very great trial of endurance, either, Arthur Berkeley, if it comes to that; for say what you will of her, she’s a beautiful, stately, queenlike woman indeed; and it somehow strikes me she’s a truer and better woman, too, than you have ever yet in your shallow superficiality imagined. Not like little Miss Butterfly! Oh, no, not like little Miss Butterfly! But still, there are keys and keys in music; and if every tune was pitched to the self-same key, even the tenderest, what a monotonous, dreary world it would be to live and sing in after all. Perhaps a man might make himself a little shrine not wholly without sweet savour of pure incense for beautiful, stately, queenlike Hilda Tregellis too! But no; I mustn’t think of it. I have no other duty or prospect in life possible as yet while dear little Miss Butterfly still remains practically unprovided for!’