The Dull Miss Archinard Part 27

"Oh, he isn't tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is getting into his veins. What delicious air."

"The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a little as you should look."

Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original characteristic of Hilda's that she did not seem at all anxious to talk about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile--

"That's what you ought to have--sunlight. You are a little white flower that has grown in a shadow." Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled rather distantly.

"What a sad simile!"

"Is it a true one, Hilda?"

"I don't think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light.

I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos."

"No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight for even friendly eyes to poetize--to sentimentalize, as you rather unkindly said."

"Sunlight is poetic, too."

"Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy life, are not poetic."

"That is rather morbid, you know--_decadent_."

"I don't imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to give others the sunshine."

Hilda's eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that implied no liking for these personalities--personalities that glanced from her to others, as Odd realized.

He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, with all her gentle quiet--

"You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can't claim the rather self-righteously heroic _role_ you give me. I think it is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people don't care about."

"A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn't have told me to mind my own business more kindly." Odd's humorous look met her glance of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, "Will you try to find pleasure in a thing most girls _do_ care for? Will you go to the Meltons' dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and I said I would try to persuade you."

"I _didn't_ mean to snub you."

"Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance."

The girlish pleasure of her face was evident.

"Do you really want me to?"

"It would make me very happy."

"It is against my rules, you know. I can't get up at six and go out in the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show you I wasn't snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to." The gayety of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. "Only I am afraid I can't. I remember I haven't any dress."

"_Any_ dress will do, Hilda."

"But I haven't any dress. The gray silk is impossible."

Peter's mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position.

"But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had dresses."

"Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well--a little too long and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would do, if it wasn't cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it was only turned up. It is trimmed with _mousseline de soie_, and the flounce would hide the line."

Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly touching. "It might do."

"It must do. If it doesn't, another of Katherine's can be metamorphosized."

"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look.

"Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no."

CHAPTER VIII

Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that might, Odd felt, have held an embarra.s.sing consciousness for Katherine had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety.

The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impa.s.sive good looks, and Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of a concourse of people certainly const.i.tutes homage, however unconscious of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of.

Then, turning to Hilda--

"The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen people already.

"See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much embarra.s.sed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly discretion."

The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton--a pretty little woman with languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her exclusiveness, which she took _au grand serieux_, highly amused Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton's.

She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as tolerant of a millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a d.u.c.h.ess with a political _entourage_ to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton's anxious social self-satisfaction humorous--a fact of which Mrs. Melton was unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en pa.s.sant_--for subject, the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau riche_--made pleasant gravity difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her dull and funny.

Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes.

"I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, led by your father and Mrs. Melton."

He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced it--charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else's hair was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his felicity carry him too far into conjecture.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, as they joined the eddy circling around Mrs. Melton's ballroom.

"So much; thanks to you." Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at the joy of dancing. "I had almost forgotten how delicious it was."

"More delicious than the studio, isn't it?"

"You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche could do it--all light and movement and color. I should like to come out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls' throats. There is the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly heads! Isn't that worth while?"

Odd's eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda's throat.

"Everything you do is worth while--from painting to dancing. You dance very well."

The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display of which he recognized the gown's quondam possessor, gave him a little pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue--the long fatigue of a weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge of the aloofness--the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago.