The Dull Miss Archinard Part 7

she remarked.

"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily.

"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt."

"Don't, don't, Alicia."

"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared.

Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia could disappoint him no longer.

In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He was carefully just to Alicia.

Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs.

Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and supposed to be clever.

"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and thoroughly _bete_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table as yet."

Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a charitable point of view.

"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially hated the big man with the good manners and the coa.r.s.e laugh. His cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's good-humor might fail.

The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter _dans cette galere_.

Peter, however, did not much mind the _galere_. His duties as host lay lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter.

Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less gayety than when Mary was there.

She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight effects in the drawing-room.

Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked to bring his girls to tea.

Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their dogs--

"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day."

"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully."

That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen.

"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard the faint e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n; "what is your dog called?"

"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, she was sure of it.

"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him that?"

"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite."

Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's, hugely amused him.

"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added, looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant vagueness.

"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently."

Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as "improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face.

"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?"

He shook hands, smiling at them.

"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring,"

called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an escort."

"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious and hesitating.

Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-m.u.f.fled utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well in her journal.

"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she likes best."

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 pa.s.sive 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.

At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she heard that her friend was going away.

The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession.

"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its heavy beating.