Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Annie Haynes
her duty to go to mother at once.”
“I see,” Hilda said, leaning her head on her hand and drawing herself a little away from Mavis. “And I see too that everybody will say that it was in discreditable circumstances that she saw me—that there is something against me. The worst of it is that it may be true, Mavis. I don’t know what I may have been. Have you ever realized it? I may have done anything. You would all be much wiser not to have anything to do with me.”
Mavis laughed.
“Should we? I think I can guarantee that you will not turn out to be anything very dreadful. What do you say, Arthur?”
“I could stake my life on it,” replied the young man with unusual fervour.
“Well, at any rate you have obtained one backer, Hilda,” said Mavis.
The girl hardly seemed to heed her words; she was wrinkling up her brows, her mouth was twitching nervously.
“If I could only remember one little thing, anything, however slight, that happened to me before that night. But, do what I can, try my very hardest, as I may, it is no use. I cannot even remember my own name, my own surname, and though I suppose I must have been called Hilda it does not seem a bit familiar to me.”
“Now don’t get morbid,” Mavis reproved brightly. “Surely you can’t see to paint by this light, Arthur,” as her brother took up his palette again.
He fidgeted about restlessly.
“Oh, the light is good for half an hour yet! Here is Davenant coming up the drive, Mavis.”
“Oh!” His sister’s cheeks flushed rosily, a new light shone in her brown eyes. “I didn’t think he would be back so soon; he went up to town yesterday. He—he promised to do some commissions for me.”
Arthur laughed.
“No excuse is needed, Mavis. We quite understand that you wish to have a few words quietly with your young man before introducing him to the family circle,” he said with brotherly candour. “Run along, we will make all due allowances for you.”
“How absurd you are, Arthur! It is only that I asked him—”
“Don’t trouble to particularize,” Arthur said, with a flourish of his paint-brush, “or you may miss your opportunity—
Garth’s voice became audible in the hall.
“I will be back in a minute,” his sister said with a vengeful glance in his direction as she gave Hilda a hasty kiss. “You are better, now, aren’t you, Hilda? I will tell Dorothy to come to you. She is playing to mother in the drawing-room.”
There was a silence when she had left the room—one of those silences which seem to be pregnant with electric meaning. Sir Arthur was mixing a colour; mechanically he squeezed the tube until almost the whole contents lay on the palette; then with a guilty feeling he glanced at Hilda.
She was half leaning, half lying on the wide couch on which she had posed for Elaine, but evidently her thoughts were far away from the picture.
She looked up at the same moment. As her eyes met his gaze, she started violently, her colour deepened, and she put up her hand to her hair with a gesture at once confused and conscious. Sir Arthur threw down his palette and crossed to her.
“Hilda, I—you must know what I want to say,” he cried in a low voice of intense feeling, “that I love you —that I have loved you ever since I first saw you. Dear, tell me, is there any hope for me?”
“No, no!” Hilda cried pushing him from her as he would have knelt beside her. “No, no! I cannot! Don’t you see that I cannot—” covering her face with her hands.
Sir Arthur’s forehead flushed a dull crimson; his eyes dwelt eagerly on the loveliness of the girl’s half-averted face.
“I see my own unworthiness plainly enough, Hilda,” he answered simply. “Is that what you mean, dear?”
Hilda turned her face farther towards the cushions.
“No, no, you know it is not that,” she said in a muffled voice.
Something in her accent seemed to raise Sir Arthur’s hopes. He dropped on one knee and ventured to take the hand that was hanging limply by her side.
“What then, Hilda? Will you not let me try to teach you to care for me?”
The girl sat up and threw the cushions behind her.
“Don’t you see that that is not the question—that it is beside it altogether—that such things are not for me”—her delicate hands pulling the lace on her bodice to pieces—“a nameless nobody?”
Sir Arthur did not move away.
“Ah, how can you? But let me give you a name, Hilda—my name—be my wife, dear?” he urged.
The girl gave a little moan, her white teeth bit her under-lip.
“You do not know what you are saying, you do not in the least realize how things would be. What would the world say if Sir Arthur Hargreave married a waif—a piece of flotsam and jetsam that fate had cast up at his doors? What would—”
Sir Arthur captured one of the fluttering, trembling hands once more.
“All that is beside the question, as you said just now, Hilda; the real crux of the matter lies between you and me. Tell me the truth, dear, is it that you do not—cannot care for me?”
Hilda caught her breath quickly.
“Ah, no. How could it be that, when you have been so kind, so more than kind to me? When yours was the first face I saw smiling at me out of that dreadful darkness and chaos—”
Sir Arthur laid his lips softly to the hand he held in his.
“Then that is all that matters, Hilda—the rest is nothing to us.”
The girl snatched her hand away.
“Ah, no, no! I must not forget. There are others to whom this would mean misery—Lady Laura, and Sir Arthur, your cousin—”
As the last word left her lips two little straight lines came between Hargreave’s level brows.
“My cousin!” he repeated, and a slight nuance in his tone might have told a keen listener that the reference had grated upon him. “My cousin Dorothy is almost my sister, Hilda; she will soon be prepared to give a sister’s love to you, I hope.”
In spite of the confident words, however, there was an element of doubt apparent in his manner. The mutual antagonism between the two girls could hardly have failed to make itself felt, especially by him; and he was uncomfortably conscious that, though no binding words had been spoken between them, Dorothy could hardly hold him blameless.
“As for my mother,” he went on, “she will—she does—love you. But what does all that matter now?” his eyes softening and growing more eager as they rested on her bent golden head. “I cannot think of that now. For these few golden minutes there is no one in the world but just ourselves, Hilda. Ah”—his arms stealing round her, his lips seeking hers—“tell me you care for me just a little, darling!”
With a passionate gesture of self-surrender Hilda yielded herself to his embrace, and as he took his first kisses from her red lips she murmured brokenly as she turned her face a little away:
“How could I help it when you have been so good—so good to me? How could I help it?”
“Thank Heaven you could not help it, my darling!” Sir Arthur said reverently as he drew her head again to its resting-place on his shoulder. “Hilda, Hilda, I can scarcely believe that such happiness can be real!”
“Perhaps it is not,” the girl whispered unsteadily. “Because do you not see that first”—with a shy hesitating glance—“we must find out who I am?”
“No,