KATHERINE closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs.
Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter.
Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools—Peter and Hilda.
To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda’s own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter’s arms, unspotted and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine’s plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his love for Hilda—a brave, manlike part—to which she had looked forward as to an atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome standards of a higher nature—a rebellion that had carried her into such opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,—was that rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful?
Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda’s fall, had risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them.
She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her gloves.
“My return was inopportune.” The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her own sense of fitness. “Or opportune?” She directed her eyes upon Odd, and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt that Hilda’s look of frozen horror gave him the advantage.
“Opportune, Katherine,” he said; “now at least I shall not have to lie to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness.”
“Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?”
It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her.
“Katherine,” said Odd, “I can only beg you to believe that I have struggled—for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought that neither of you would ever know the truth.”
This bracketing of Hilda’s injury with hers stank in Katherine’s nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself—
“I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so chivalrously preparing for me,” she said. “Marriage with an unloving man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?” The white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter’s futile efforts to withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the retrospect grew lurid.
“Katherine,” said Odd gloomily, “I would not so have insulted you after this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult.”
“I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have waited, Peter.”
Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon her sister.
“So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda,” she said.
Hilda’s wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to cruelty.
“Katherine, say anything—anything you will to me,” and Odd’s voice broke a little as he spoke, “but not one word to her! Not one word! It comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life.” He held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight eyebrows, breathing quickly.
“Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life—you and your father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us.”
“Yes; as I see you.” Katharine’s very lips were white.
Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the extremity of self-control.
“Katherine,” she said, “he is trying to shield me. It did not happen like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always loved him.”
“Oh! did you?” said Katherine, with a withered little laugh.
“My child!” cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him—“my child, what are you saying? What madness!”
“I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you.”
“In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, so nobly, so purely, was the child’s love, the love of the loyal sister for her friend, the love of an angel.”
“I am not sure,” said Hilda.
“Oh!” cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, “this is unbearable.”
It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator.
But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation.
“Hilda,” he said appealingly and yet sternly, “at the very height of your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I who saw the truth, not you.”
“Katherine,” Hilda repeated, “he is trying to shield me. We are both base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, and when he took me in his arms, I was glad.”
“Good God!” cried Peter.
Katherine averted her eyes from her sister’s face.
“I must own, Peter,” she said, “that your position was difficult. Hilda evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching colors—she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of course those kisses she received as platonic pledges—from the man engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. Under such tempting circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took her in your arms—how often we repeat that phrase—the ‘truth’ at last flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such yielding unconventionality, and Hilda’s hidden love won the day.”
During these remarks, Odd felt............