MICHAEL PERIOR was an unfortunate man; unfortunate in his temperament, which was enthusiastic, sensitive, and idealistic; unfortunate in the circumstances with which that temperament found itself called upon to do battle. To a man who had expected less of life the circumstances might have been more amenable and far more endurable, but Perior had the ill-luck to be born with an unmanageable instinct for the best, with an untamable scorn for the second-best. It is not necessary to go into the details of a life which had not spared these qualities nor improved while disillusionizing him. Two blinding buffets met him at its threshold. His father was ruined in a lawsuit, which by every ethical standard he should have won, and Perior was in consequence jilted by the girl whom he had enshrined in his heart as the perfect star of his existence. At twenty-three he found himself under a starless sky, with a heart stupefied at its own emptiness, and in a world of thieves and murderers—for his father died under the shock of disaster, and Perior did not pick his phrases.
The abject common-sense of his ex-fiancéecould be borne with perhaps more philosophy. He accepted the starlessness as in the nature of things, andhis own brief belief in stars as typifying the ignorance of youth; but his father’s death—the crushing out of life rather than its departure—was tragedy, and it was with the sense of inevitable and irretrievable tragedy that he began life. He had been thought clever at Oxford, and had considered himself destined for Parliament. With a huge load of debts upon his back, and an unresigned mother to support, all thoughts of the career for which he had fitted himself were out of the question. He turned to its only equivalent, and took up journalism. He was much in earnest; he believed in a right and in a wrong, and was intolerant of expediency. In a world of interested motives he bore himself with unflinching disapproval. He would limit his freedom by no party partiality, and in the laxity of public life his keen individuality made itself felt like a knife cutting through cheese. At the end of years of very bitter struggle he found himself in a position of some eminence, editor of a courteous, caustic review, whose chief characteristics were a stubborn isolation and a telling of truths that made both friends and foes blink. No half-measures, no half-truths. Conformity with the faintest taint upon it was intolerable to him. His idealism had not evaporated in the storm and stress, it had condensed, rather, into a steely resistance to ugly reality. Insincerity, injustice, meanness, hurt him as badly in middle-age as they had at twenty-five, but he now expected them, and by a stoical presage braced himself against disappointment. The stoicism was only a rather brittle crust, hastily improvised by Nature’s kindly adaptation; he was soured, but his heart was still soft; heexpected nothing, and yet he was hurt by everything. It was now some time since he had promised himself that Camelia should never hurt him. Camelia had occupied his thoughts for a good many years. The pretty child, with her face of subdued saint-like curves, and her smile of frank unsaintliness, had seemed to claim him from the very first home-coming. By a final irony of fate poor Mrs. Perior died only a few months before the Grange was freed from its last encumbrances. She had not made life easier for her son. She had always refused to believe in the necessity for letting the Grange, had always resented the lodgings in South Kensington, had always considered herself injured, and had not been chary in demonstrations of injury. Perior had looked forward with pride to the time when he should reinstate her in her own home, and her death made a mockery of his own home-coming.
It was in Camelia’s early girlhood that ill-health, overwork, and a violent row with the powers of political darkness, made this home-coming definite. The battered idealist sought rather sulkily a retreat from the intolerable contemplation of a wider world’s misdeeds. Young Camelia, so different from her dully worthy ancestors, so different even from her dashing but not intellectual papa, charmed him as the woods and flowers of spring charm eyes weary with city winter. She was too young to be taken seriously; that was a lifted weight, in the first place. The joyous receptivity of her mind afforded to his scholarly instincts just the foothold he required to excuse to himself an indulgent and thoughtless affection. As friend and adviser of Lady Paton, hedrifted easily into a paternal attitude towards the fatherless Camelia; he was over twenty years her senior, and her eagerness for knowledge appealed to him. As she had said, he taught her nearly everything she knew; she rebelled against other methods, and Perior himself would have felt robbed had governess or tutor supplanted him. During those quiet and pleasant years he felt that on a melancholy walk he had picked a handful of primroses—their pale young gold irradiated his solitude. He did not say to himself that Camelia would never disappoint him, nor own that the handful of primroses meant much in his life, but hopefulness seemed to emanate from her, and insensibly he lived in the sunny impression. Her very defects were charming, the mere superfluity of exuberant vitality, and with this conviction he observed her happy, youthful selfishness as one observes a kitten’s antics, and treated her claims for dominion with gentle ridicule. Camelia laughed with him at herself, and this gave them an irresistible sense of companionship; consoling too, since no defect so humorously recognized could be deep; his primroses still kept their dew. But as she grew older, Perior began to realize uncomfortably that Camelia could laugh at the deepest defect, recognize it, analyze it, and stick to it—a deft combination. This faculty for firm sticking despite obstacles gave the paternal Perior food for reflection, and, as he reflected, he felt with a sudden little turn of terror that he was in a fair way to take Camelia seriously after all. His terror struck him as very cowardly, a shrinking from responsibilities—his, of a truth, to a certain extent. That lightly assumed guardianshipmeant much in her life. Had he failed in some essential? Was she not the product of her training? He owned with a sigh that the note of true authority it had not been his right to emphasize; yet in defending himself from the probable pain of a deep affection, had he not weakened his claim to a moral influence? And had he defended himself? Perior turned from the question. Camelia respected him, he knew that; and yet his very frankness with her—he, too, had laughed at himself for her benefit—had given her a power over him. He was not at all afraid of seeming priggish, but he was shy before certain contingencies; he knew that he should blunder if he preached, and that Camelia would force him to smile at the blunder and to blur the sermon.
At the age of eighteen he caught her more than once managing, manipulating the plastic elements about her with a skill approaching deceit. The very absence of a necessity for deceit alarmed him; she had so few temptations, there was no way of testing her, yet, that once or twice, when circumstances by a little twist or turn opposed her, he had caught her—too dexterous. Perior had not controlled himself, nor taken the advantage he might have seized. He had immediately lost his balance, exaggerated what Camelia regarded as a quite permissible and pretty compromise into a fault worthy of biting denunciation, and in so doing had given her a point of vantage from which she laughed—not even angrily. Perior for many years had thought most goodness negative, and preferred to see it tested before admiring, but he had forgotten to apply his philosophy in thiscase. He lost his temper, and Camelia kept hers, kept hers to the extent of soothing him by a smiling confession of her misdoing, an affectionate declaration that she was wrong and he quite right—“But don’t be cross, dear Mr. Perior.” What was he to do? She did not care if she were wrong. Perior thought he would be wiser in the future; he would give Camelia no further opportunity for facile confession; but though the first sting of unexpected disappointment was over, many unmerited aches were still reserved to him—all the more painful from the fact that he had never intended to ache for Camelia. Mary Fairleigh had come to the Patons when Camelia was sixteen, and Camelia’s treatment of her cousin was another and more constant cause for growing discontent. Perior could not define the discomfort with which he watched Camelia’s indifferent kindness, or, worse still, an unkindness as unintentional. He assumed by degrees an attitude of compensatory gentleness towards poor Mary; it held, however, no sting for Camelia; she seemed to watch his doing of the things she left undone very complacently. It was by degrees that his dismay took refuge in a manner of unshocked indifference which he hoped would prove salutary. It did seem to irk and perplex her somewhat, and he had the consolation of thinking that many of her perversities might be intentionally engineered for his benefit. Perior, too, had learned to smile, and Camelia was baffled. He would not scold her. After all, he counted for very little, so Camelia assured herself as she entered upon her London life, and he should see that she could be indifferent with far moreeffectiveness. Perior saw little of her during those years. The little he saw on his rare visits to London confirmed his grim conviction. She was a pretty, clever, foolish, worthless creature; her frankness threw no dust into his eyes. She might own herself a self-seeking worldling, and she did not overshoot the mark. Many were the corns she danced over in her quest of power and happiness. Her sincerity was insincere—it adapted itself too cleverly. Perior had seen her flatter, when only he and she knew that she was flattering; had seen her make her effect by pliancy or by resistance; had watched her smile light for those who could serve her, or stiffen to a sweet blankness for the incompetent. He recognized in her his own scorn for the world without his ideal, which would not permit him to stoop and use it; but, so Perior thought, Camelia knew no ideals; reality did not hurt her—she met it with its own weapons. One did not conquer an immoral world by moral methods; and if one lived in it, not to conquer it would be intolerable. The scorn no doubt excused her to herself, but it hedged her round with a sort of stupidity from which Perior’s quick recognition of moral beauty preserved him. Ethical worth had come to be everything to him. Camelia simply did not see it. He himself had armed her with that scientific impartiality before which he felt himself rather helpless, before which good and bad resolved themselves into very evasive elements. She told him that her science was more logical than his, it had made her charitable to the whole world, herself included, whereas he was hard on the world and hard on himself. His very kindness lacked grace, whileher unkindness wore a flower-like color. He was sorry for people, not fond of them—but Camelia was neither fond nor sorry. They were shadows woven into the web of her experience, her business was to make that experience pleasant, to see it beautifully. It was this love of beauty—beauty in the pagan sense—that baffled him in her. She had put appreciation and an exquisite good taste in the place of morality. Life to her was a game, to him a tragic, insistent conundrum. These, at least, were Perior’s reluctant conclusions.
When he walked away from Enthorpe Lodge his mind was to a certain extent already reverting to the daily preoccupations of cottages, perverse protoplasm, and his weekly article for theFriday Review;but also dwelling with the dual peculiarity observable in our meditations, upon the people he had just left, Lady Paton, Mary, Camelia’s guests, and Camelia herself. It seemed really unnecessary to remind himself of that promise he had made himself some time ago; Camelia could not disappoint him; he knew just what to expect from her; she could not hurt him. Yet the promise had been made at a time when she was hurting him very badly, and even now, while he recalled it with some vehemence, he was feeling a most illogical smart.
The country road wound among dusty hedges and through the little village. About half a mile beyond it lay a remnant of the Perior estate, once large, second only in importance to the Haversham’s, now sadly shrunken and dislocated. By degrees, and during years of only meagre competence, he had built upon this pretty bit of land a cluster ofcottages, his playthings; to make them unnecessarily delightful was his perverse pleasure.
Perior was by no means a paternal landlord; the lucky occupants of the cottages were never reminded of the propriety of gratitude. Indeed Perior had enraged neighboring landowners by remarking that the cottages were none too good for the rent—a saying big with implications, and perhaps intentionally spiteful. Indeed intentional spite was attributed to many of his actions. It was a great fox-hunting country; and one of the finest coverts, rich in foxes lovingly preserved by Perior’s forefathers, lay on his estate. Now it was currently reported that Perior had had all the foxes shot! A murder would have made him less unpopular. Malicious insanity seemed the only explanation.
He did not scruple to proclaim his blasphemous heresies on the sacred sport. He grew angry, said he abominated it, would do all in his power to stamp it out, and at least would see that no animal should be “tortured” on his property. The foxes had certainly disappeared from Mandelly Woods, and good, honest sportsmen could hardly trust themselves to mention the criminal fanatic’s name. It must be owned that Perior’s love of animals approached the grotesque. He entertained at the Manor a retinue of battered cats and outcast dogs, many garnered from London streets. He could hardly bear to have surplus kittens drowned, and only by the firmness of the housekeeper was the necessary severity accomplished. He was exaggerated, peculiar, unpractical; the kindest said it of him. He had sent two clever village boys to the University, one the son of thevillage poacher and ne’er-do-weel, a handsome lad with a Burns-like streak of genius, who had distinguished himself at Oxford, and disappointed many pessimistic prophecies by turning out more than creditably. At the present moment the son of one of Perior’s field-laborers came every day to the Grange for a coaching in the humanities. Perior was a fine master, and Camelia was none too well pleased when she heard of her successor. These experiments in sociology aroused only less hostile comment than the black affair of the foxes.
Our misanthropic gentleman paused at an angle of the road to survey his cottages, each set in its own happy acres, stretching flower-beds and young orchards into the sunny country. His tenants all had a pleasant look of successful adaptation. One was a cobbler, and made most of Perior’s boots; a fact rather apparent.
It was evening by the time he reached the tall gates through which the roadway led up to the Grange, a high-standing, unpretentious, gray stone house, rather bleakly situated on its height, but backed by a further rise of wood, and, despite its vineless severity of outline, gravely cheerful in aspect. An immaculately-kept lawn stretched in a gradual slope before it, shaded by two yew trees, and the light grace of beeches. Under the windows of the ground floor were beds of white and purple pansies, and at one side, near the shrubberies, were long rows of irises, also purple and white. From the other side of the house the ground descended very abruptly, giving one the realization of height, and a long view over woods, hills, and valleys to the distant sunset.
The house within carried out consistently the first impression of pleasant bareness. The wainscotted walls were reflected in the gleaming floors. No tenderness of draperies, no futile ornament. In the drawing-room three old portraits of three dead Mrs. Periors looked quietly from the walls; some good porcelain was on shelves where there was no danger of its breaking; the faded brocade of the furniture was covered with white chintz sprigged with green. The library, where the light came serenely through high windows, was lined with books; here and there on the peaceful spaces a good engraving or etching; philosophical bronzes above the shelves. The writing-table was spacious; opposite it was Perior’s piano—he played well. This was the room he lived in. Now, when he entered, an old setter, glossily well-groomed, looked up with an emotional thudding of the tail, and of two cats curled exquisitely in the easy-chair, one only opened placid eyes, while the other, after arching itself in a yawn, advanced towards him with a soundless mew.
Perior was devoted to his cats, and adored his dogs. After stooping to pat these animals, he took up a letter from the table. Arthur Henge’s writing was familiar, though of late years Perior had rarely seen it. The old friendship had borne pretty sharp twinges—had survived even Perior’s ruthless handling of Henge’s pet measure some years ago: Henge had believed ardently in the bill, and thought Perior responsible to a certain extent for its failure. That Henge had not been embittered by this political antagonism had deeply touched Perior. He alwaysremembered the fact with a delightful, glowing comfort. His respect and fondness for Henge were a staff to him. The two men were intrinsically sympathetic, though they had hardly an opinion in common. Arthur Henge was an optimist, and deeply religious, his wide humanism going hand in hand with a fervent churchmanship. He was aided towards a happy view of things by happy circumstances. He was one of the richest men in England, and one of the most powerful; he held a high place in the present Government. No sword of Damocles in the shape of a peerage hung over his career in the Lower House, and at the same time the baronetcy, hoary with an honorable antiquity, had the consequence and standing of many greater but less significant titles. He was young, handsome, and serious. Above all small cynicisms and hardness, his experience of life seemed only to have taught him a wise, fine trust, and, perhaps in consequence of this attitude of mind, it was impossible not to trust him.
This was the man who had fallen in love with Camelia Paton. The fact was town talk, though it was surmised that despite his evident absorption he had not yet given her occasion to accept him. That he was courting her was not yet apparent, but his devotion remained gravely steady. Lady Henge was supposed to be the cause of this adjournment of decisive measures. Lady Henge was even more serious than her son, and her influence over him was paramount.
Now with all her ready qualities Camelia seldom pretended to seriousness. To Perior there wassomething highly distasteful in the whole matter. That Camelia should be the object of such comment, that her achievement of the “good match” should be canvassed, infuriated him. No blame could attach itself to Arthur’s reticence; if reticence there were it was on the highest grounds. It was the world’s base, materialistic chatter that jarred, its weighing of her charm and loveliness against his wealth and prominence merely. Perior weighed Camelia’s merits against Arthur’s. In his heart of hearts he did not consider Camelia fitted to make a high-minded man happy—and some dim foreboding of this fact no doubt chilled her lover’s resolution. Perior, however, was not logical. He might not approve of Camelia, but that Lady Henge should disapprove nettled him. Arthur no doubt was a fool in loving Camelia, but Perior wished to be alone in that knowledge. As for the world’s gross view of Henge as one of the greatest “catches” in England, of Camelia as lucky if she got him, Perior’s blood boiled when he thought of it,—and that Camelia, with all her reliance on her own attractions, was quite aware of the world’s opinion and was not angered by it.
She, too, thought Henge a great “catch,” no doubt; a great catch even for Camelia Paton.
Perior read the letter now, standing near the window and frowning very gloomily. It was natural that Henge should write to him in this strain of only thinly-veiled confidence.
Henge knew of the long paternal intimacy with Camelia, and relied perhaps too much on a paternal sympathy. Henge and his mother were comingdown to Clievesbury to spend some weeks at Enthorpe. He avowed no intention, but the whole note, its very restraint, was big with intention. He seemed, too, to emphasize his mother’s pleasure in coming, and Perior felt in the emphasis a touch of triumph. He hoped to see a great deal of Perior, there was in the concluding passages of the note quite a prophecy of future relationship, nearer than any they had known. But through it all Perior fancied just the hint of an appeal—a quite unconscious appeal, none the less significant for that.
Camelia was to be put on trial before Lady Henge, and to Arthur the process would be painful. The Henges had stately requirements; and although Perior imagined that, were these requirements not satisfied, Arthur had almost determined to overlook them, he felt the keenness of the hope that all would be satisfactory, the support that the hope found in Perior’s intimacy with Camelia.
Lady Henge shared her son’s respect for Perior, and to her Perior’s friendship could interpret many phases in Camelia’s charming character perplexing to the anxious mother’s unaided vision.
“I am glad my mother is to know her better; she has seen only the surface as yet,” wrote Arthur. Arthur’s love was a surety not quite trustworthy, but the lifelong friendship of a man like Perior must convince grave Lady Henge of many depths. Perior felt that his rigidity was to be made use of. His well-known earnestness was to vouch for Camelia’s. His brow was very black as he finished the letter. He was nearly angry with Arthur.
“Mrs. Jedsley is in the drawing-room,” Camelia announced, “so I ran away. I am really afraid of her.”
Mrs. Fox-Darriel laughed slightly; she put down the book with which she was solacing a lazy afternoon on the sofa, and, looking at Camelia’s cloth dress and sailor hat, asked her if she had been out again.
“Yes, just back. I only stayed in the drawing-room long enough to show Mrs. Jedsley that she scared me. It’s those eyebrows, you know, that lack of eyebrow rather, emphasized by an angry redness in the place where they should be. No, I cannot face her.”
“She is ratherépatante. I suppose you were walking with your brace of suitors.”
“No, I don’t know where they are. I was walking by myself. I think I must have walked eight miles,” Camelia added, stretching out her feet to look at her dusty shoes.
“You certainly are an unsociable hostess, but those boys are becoming bores. Whom do you expect next week? You must have something to leaven the lump of pining youthful masculinity.”
“That poet is coming—the one who writes the virile poems, you know, and whose article of faith isthejoie de vivre;and Lady Tramley, dear creature, Lord Tramley, and—would you specify Sir Arthur as leaven?”
“Do you mean to imply that heisn’tpining?”
“I imply nothing so evident.”
“Wriggling, then—that you must own.”
Camelia was sitting near the window, opened on its framing magnolia leaves, and said rather coolly as she took off her hat—
“No,Iam wriggling.Imust decide now.”
This was a masterly assurance. Mrs. Fox-Darriel reflecting that nothing succeeds like unruffled self-confidence, and that Camelia’s had never shown a ripple of doubt, owned to herself that her slightly stinging question was well answered.
“Don’t wriggle, my dear; decide,” she said, accepting the restatement very placidly, “you could not do better. To speak vulgarly—the man is rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
“Beautifully rich,” Camelia assented.
“Ah—indeed he is.”
“And he himself is wise and excellent,” Camelia added; “I like him very much.”
“He is coming alone?”
“No, Lady Henge comes too.”
Mrs. Fox-Darriel gave her friend a sharp glance.
“That’s very serious, you know, Camelia. I think you must have decided—to suit Lady Henge.”
Camelia smiled good-humoredly. “I will suit her—and then see if he suits me.”
Mrs. Fox-Darriel lay reflecting on the sofa. Camelia accepted frankness to a certain point, beyond that point she repulsed it. It was rather sly of her,Mrs. Fox-Darriel thought, to keep up these needless pretences. Camelia must be anxious for the match—anxious to a certain degree, and her careful preservation of the false dignity of her position was really rather mean. As for Mrs. Fox-Darriel, she desired the match with a really disinterested fervor. She felt a certain personal pride in Camelia’s success; she had resigned supremacy, and only asked Camelia to uphold her own. Camelia as Lady Henge would, from a very charming person, have become a very important personage, a truly momentous friend. Her fondness for the child would ensure the child’s loyalty. A near friend of the Prime Minister’s wife—who knew? The thought flitted pleasantly through Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s mind, and the thought, too, of all that Camelia, in an even less exalted position, could do for the impecunious Hon. Charlie, Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s husband. There was really no possibility of a doubt in Camelia’s mind. Mrs. Fox-Darriel simply did not believe her, and regretted her lack of candor; but at the same time she felt a little anxiety. There were certain phases in Camelia that had always baffled her investigations, an unexpectedness that Mrs. Fox-Darriel had encountered more than once.
“It is really the very best thing you could do,” she observed now, “and I wouldn’t play with him if I were you. I know that he is the image of fidelity, and yet the Duchess of Amshire is very anxious for him to marry her girl, that ugly Lady Elizabeth, and Lady Henge favors that match, and he really is under his mother’s thumb.”
“Decidedly I must waste no time,” said Camelia, laughing, “and decidedly it would be the best thing Icould do, since the Marquis was snapped up by the American girl—swarming with millions. I think I should have been a Marchioness, Frances, had not that strange look, between a squint and a goggle, in his eyes made me hesitate.”
“Oh, the Marquis! You know that this is far better. This man means a lot.”
“He swarms with millions too,” said Camelia. “Come, Frances, preach me a nice little worldly sermon on the supreme utility of riches—without the gloves now.”
“I usually remove them when I approach the subject,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel sighed with much sincerity. “My poor Charlie! How we keep our heads above water I really don’t know, and, as it is, the sharks are nibbling at our toes! Supreme! Money, my dear, is the only thing! Once you’ve that foundation you may begin to erect your sentiments, your moralities.”
“And how few people are honest enough to say so. You and I are honest, Frances; it buys everything, of course.”
“Well, almost everything. One must thank Nature for beauty and cleverness.”
“Beauty and cleverness in rags have a sorry time of it in this world. But money, of course, especially if not too new, buys friends, power, good taste, morality. Poverty makes people base and cringing—makes criminals. One is jumped on in this world, scrunched into the earth, into the dirt, if one hasn’t money, and yet the hypocrites talk of compensation! Of all the sloppy, canting optimism with which people try to make themselves comfortable that isthe sorriest! And while they talk they go on scrambling and scrunching for all they are worth; nasty beasts! They kick a man on the head, and say ‘the stupor compensates for the pain.’ That is the current theory about the lower classes.”
“Yet you enjoy the world, Camelia.”
“I am not jumped on.”
“You jump on other people, then?”
“Not in a sordid manner; I don’t have to soil my feet. Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?”
“And you think that Sir Arthur’s millions would emphasize the enjoyment?”
“Widen it, certainly. But don’t be gross, Frances. A great deal depends on him. I am not offering myself for sale, you know.”
“No, I don’t think you would. You have no need to.”
“He would really be glaringly golden, wouldn’t he, were he not draped with the mossy antiquity of his name?” said Camelia, drawing a white magnolia flower within the window frame, and bending her head to the scented cup.
“An ideal husband, from every point of view,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel resumed; “clever, very clever, and very good—rather overpoweringly good, Camelia.”
“I think goodness a most charming phenomenon, I shouldn’t mind studying it in a husband.”
“Mrs. Jedsley is good. Why don’t you study her?”
“There is nothing phenomenal in her goodness, it is a product of circumstance only. There is Mary,” Camelia added, tipping her chair a little towards the window for a clearer view of the lawn below. “Maryin a Liberty silk, of yellow-green, and smocked. Why, Mary, why wear a Liberty gown, especially smocked?”
“I have sometimes suspected that your colorless little cousin is here to play the part of a discord that resolves into and heightens your harmony,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel; “or is it the post of whipping-boy that she fills?”
Camelia continued to look from the window placidly, only raising her eyebrows a little.
“No, Mary never gets a whipping, not even when I deserve one. Mamma is very fond of Mary; so am I,” she added. Mrs. Fox-Darriel took up her book with a little yawn that Camelia for all her placidity resented.
“How can you read that garbage?” she inquired smilingly, glancing at the title.
“Thebête humainerather interests me.”
“Even interpreted by another? The man is far more insupportable than Zola, inasmuch as he is clever, and an artist.”
“That’s why I read him. You seem to know a good deal about garbage, my dear.”
“I know a good deal about everything, I fancy!” said Camelia, with her gayest laugh. “I took a course of garbage once, just enough to make up my mind that I did not care for the flavor. We have a right to choose the phases of life we want to see represented.”
“I like garbage,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel said stubbornly.
“Yes, you are very catholic, I know. I am more limited.” Camelia still eyed the lawn, sniffing atthe magnolia. Now she rose suddenly and went to the mirror.
“Mary puts on a sailor hat—so,” she said gravely, setting hers far back at a ludicrous angle. “Poor Mary!” She tilted the hat forward again, and briskly put the pin through it. “I am going down to harry Mrs. Jedsley. Good-bye, Frances.”
“Good-bye. I shall be down to tea presently.”
“Thebête humainewill spoil your appetite!” laughed Camelia as she went out.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel heard her running down the corridor and the light rhythm of her feet on the stairs.
“Pretty little minx!” she said good-humoredly; and her thoughts turned to Sir Arthur. What a lucky girl was Camelia! It was rather tiresome, perhaps, to sit by and watch her triumphs. Mrs. Fox-Darriel found the rôle of second-fiddle a little dull; still, it was well worth while to play it. She got up and went to the window, where the magnolia still swayed faintly from the suddenness of Camelia’s departure. Tapping the sill lightly with her finger-tips, Mrs. Fox-Darriel looked out, yawning once more, at the translucent blue of the sky, the still shining of the little lake beyond the trees, the sun-dappled lawn, and at Mary Fairleigh on the lawn in the funny Liberty dress. Mr. Perior was walking beside her, in riding costume, a whip in his hand. Mrs. Fox-Darriel surveyed them as they walked slowly away from the house. He had evidently just joined Mary; and as Camelia herself appeared on the lawn her departure took on an amusing aspect.
Now it really was too bad of Camelia, she couldhave no use for him herself. The sun flashed from her hair as she bounded gaily across the turf and caught Perior’s arm with a schoolgirl familiarity. Mrs. Fox-Darriel drew back sharply, but still observed from the screen of magnolia leaves Mary’s slow return to the house, and Camelia’s skipping step as she led Mr. Perior towards the garden. He held the whip clasped in his hand behind his back, and, as he walked, switched his calf in its leather gaiter. Mrs. Fox-Darriel fancied some temper in the action.
WHEN Mrs. Fox-Darriel descended to the drawing-room a quarter of an hour later, she found Lady Paton and Mary alone with Mrs. Jedsley, who as yet showed no intention of departing. Mrs. Jedsley was very stout, but of a vigorous bearing. Her firm, wide face was dashed with rather choleric notes of red on cheeks, chin, and eyebrows. Her eyes were witty and humorous. Mrs. Fox-Darriel, very indifferently, felt these quickly travelling eyes taking in every gleam and glitter of her tea-gown. Mrs. Fox-Darriel always jingled a little as she walked; she was one of those women who dangle lorgnettes at the ends of swaying neck-chains, and circle their wrists with a multitude of bangles, and now, as she sank into a chair beside Lady Paton, and smiled a languid acceptance of tea, the infinity of pendent jewels and the linked gold that draped her person, chimed out quite a harmonious clatter. Mrs. Fox-Darriel always gave Lady Paton a fluttered look, the look of a child shrinking from a too persistently obtrusive rattle, and she handed her the tea and bread and butter with gently scared glances.
“What delicious tea,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel affably, “and the pouring of tea is an art in its decadence. Really, dear Lady Paton, you have spoiled me for all cups poured by other hands. Your aunt’s hands add a distinct charm, do they not?” sheadded, looking at Mary,—“and her cap.” Indeed Lady Paton’s caps and hands resembled one another in blanched delicacy.
“Oh yes,” Mary replied hastily; she was not accustomed to this suave mode of address from Mrs. Fox-Darriel.
“I saw you walking in the garden just now,” pursued that glittering personage; “you made quite a picture in your pretty dress, I assure you.”
“Oh! do you like it?” Mary’s face was transfused by a blush of surprised pleasure.
“It is really charming,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel unblinkingly, while Mrs. Jedsley’s eyes travelled up and down poor Mary’s ungainliness.
“Against the deeper shades of green, you know, and with your golden hair, you looked quite—quite like an Albert Moore. Has your friend, Mr. Perior, gone? I saw him with you.” There was a subtly delightful intimation in this question that filled Mary with a half painful, half delicious embarrassment.
“Mr. Perior is with Camelia,” she said, the crude fact hardly jarring on the dulcet echo of Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s question. He was her friend, Mary knew, felt it with a wave of gratitude that quieted many aches, but was it then so evident—so noticeable?
“Ah yes! Camelia is rather fond of teasing him, I am afraid,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, observing Mary’s flush, and noting as an unkindness of nature that her hair, the only grace she possessed, should grow so thickly at the back and with such unbecoming scantiness around the high brow. Mary’s whole being had been quivering with the pain of her dispossession,but a grateful warmth now stole through the chill of bereavement.
Her flush had not died when Camelia came in, Perior following her. Camelia’s face was imperturbably gay, but from a certain severity and tension in Perior’s expression, Mrs. Fox-Darriel surmised that the pastoral promenade had not been altogether peaceful.
It was hardly possible, of course, that the indifference of this stiff provincial should pique Camelia into an attitude that might compromise real interests; no, hardly possible; yet Mrs. Fox-Darriel, with some acuteness, determined that all her efforts should tend to make such an absurdity impossible indeed.
Ugly Mary was evidently in love with the unattractive Diogenes; but Camelia need not know that. Mrs. Fox-Darriel almost laughed at herself while she meditated; Camelia could hardly intend more than the purposeless capturing of Diogenes; Camelia’s head was perfectly sound when it came to decisive extremes. Only—well—women, all women, were suchfoolssometimes. That bounding, pursuing step across the lawn had given Mrs. Fox-Darriel a new impression of Camelia.
“Look, Mamma, is not this beautiful? Look, Frances.” Camelia held out a branch of white roses, buds and leaves climbing on lovely curves to a heavy, swaying flower;—“it is such a perfect spray that I am going to attempt a Japanese arrangement with this bit of pine. Mary, will you fetch me that bronze vase out of the morning room—with its little stand, you know—and have it filledwith water; and, Mary,—” Mary was departing obediently, “a pair of scissors—don’t forget. If there is anything I dislike,” Camelia went on, hers was always a temperate manner of speech, “it is a heavy mass of flowers bunched together with all the individuality, all the form and vitality, of line quite lost.”
She smiled at Mrs. Jedsley as she spoke, skimming caressing finger-tips over her rose branch, and adding, “You may see me at your place to-morrow, Mrs. Jedsley. Mr. Perior has been giving me a dreadful scolding on my neighborly deficiencies. To-morrow I make a conscientious round of calls—and pour balm into all the wounded bosoms.” Mrs. Fox-Darriel glanced quickly at Perior to see how he relished this offensive obedience; Perior, as he stood before the fireplace, was looking at his boots. Mrs. Jedsley’s eyebrows grew very red.
“I won’t be at home to-morrow,” she said decidedly, “and if I were conscious of wounds I’d keep at a good distance from you, Camelia.” Lady Paton looked from her daughter to Perior, an alarmed appeal, but he did not raise his eyes nor seem to notice Camelia’s graceful promises.
“Mrs. Jedsley,whyare you always so unkind to me?” Camelia asked, laughing. “I assure you that you may trust my balms. Mrs. Jedsley, I will wager you—do you ever bet?—that by to-morrow night the whole county-side will be singing my praises. I like people to sing my praises—I like to feel affection and sympathy about me; now Mr. Perior has been telling me that there is a distinct absence of these elements in my atmosphere. Ibegin to feel the vacuum myself. Won’t you help me to fill it—help my regeneration?—No, Mary, that is the wrong vase—how could I arrange flowers in that? On the stand, was it? The house-maid’s stupidity, then; and I bought together the stand and the proper vase to go with it. No; don’t take thestandback with you, you goosie! put it here. Now, Mrs. Jedsley,” she added, when Mary had once more departed, Perior having relieved her of the stand and carried it, not at all graciously, to Camelia, “tell me how I can best please every one most? You know them all so well—their pet pursuits, their pet hobbies. Mrs. Harley has orchids, of course; I shall immediately ask her to take me to the conservatory. And Mrs. Grier—that pensive little woman with the long, long nose—has she not a son at Oxford, a boy she dotes on? Isn’t she very fond of music?”
Mrs. Jedsley was stirring her third cup of tea with an entirely recovered composure. “Yes, Mrs. Grier plays the violin, and has a son she dotes on; if you flatter her nicely enough, she will certainly join in the ‘Hallelujah.’”
“Well, that is nice to know.” Mary had now brought the correct Japanese vase, and Camelia neatly trimmed from her branch while she spoke a few superfluous leaves and twigs.
“Is not Mrs. Grier a dear friend of Lady Henge’s?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked in an aside to Lady Paton—to the latter a very welcome aside, as in murmured acquiescence she found a momentary refuge from the bewildered sensations her daughter’s projects gave her.
Yes, Lady Henge and Mrs. Grier were great friends, both musical, both deeply interested in charitable work. Mrs. Grier, a sweet woman,—“and you know,” said Lady Paton, bending gently towards her guest, “her nose is not so long. That is only Camelia’s droll way of putting things, you know.”
“Oh, yes,”—Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s smile was very reassuring—“you and I understand Camelia, Lady Paton. It doesn’t do to take herau grand sérieux.” Indeed, Mrs. Fox-Darriel smiled inwardly, feeling that all disquiet on Camelia’s account was very unnecessary, and convinced that she knew her very thoroughly.
“You won’t be at home to-morrow, then?” asked Camelia, looking around from her vase as Mrs. Jedsley rose to go.
“No, my dear; and I’m afraid you won’t find me of use at any time. I haven’t any particular foibles. You won’t discover a handle about me by which to wind me up to the required musical pitch.”
“You traduce yourself, Mrs. Jedsley; with your charitable heart, do you mean to tell me that, were I to wrap Clievesbury in red flannel, fill it with buns and broth, you wouldn’t think me charming, and make sweet music in my ears?”
“I never denied that you were charming, balefully charming, you naughty girl,” said Mrs. Jedsley with a good humor that implied no submission.
“Here is a rose for you. May it give you kind thoughts of me.” Camelia fastened one of the rejected buds in the lady’s portly bosom, and when she was gone, Lady Paton, leaving the room with her, she added, “Mary, is the piano tuned?”
Mary went to the Steinway. “Lady Henge is a composer, as you know.” She turned a face sparkling with mischief to Perior, who maintained his silence beside the mantelpiece.
“You have heard her? Yes? Well, you shall hear her again. That’s enough, Mary,” she added, lightly; “we hear that the piano needs tuning.”
Now Mary had a certain little pride in the neat execution of Beethoven’s Sonatas, that many hours of faithful practice had seemed to justify, and while Camelia stood back to admire her flower arrangement, both Perior and Mrs. Fox-Darriel noticed the flush that swept over Mary’s face.
BY the time Sir Arthur and Lady Henge arrived, Camelia had fulfilled her prophecy and become a popular person. Under the blighting indifference of her first appearance Clievesbury had naturally retaliated with severity, but that the first impression had been erroneous the most severe owned—after Camelia had called on them. Camelia found the process of winning the whole neighborhood great fun, and its success gave her a delicious sense of efficiency. She cared nothing, absolutely nothing, for her neighbors, but once she determined to be cared for by them she found the facility of the task highly flattering to self-esteem.
She drove from place to place, sweet, modest, adaptable. She dispensed pretty compliments with a grace that disarmed the grimmest suspicion. She showed a pretty interest in every one. Indeed why should they not like her? Camelia thought she really deserved liking; and though she laughed at herself a little for the complimentary conclusion, her kindness struck her as rather nice. It was motiveless, was it not? almost motiveless, a game that it pleased her to play. Certainly she did not care to appear before Lady Henge on a background of unpopularity; the background must harmonize, become her; she would see to that. At thebottom of her heart Camelia cared very little for Lady Henge’s approval or disapproval; Lady Henge was part of the game; but Camelia had determined that the game required Lady Henge, like everybody else, to find her charming; the game required Arthur Henge to propose—then she might accept him; but she must make quite secure the possibility of refusing him. So Camelia aimed steadily at one result, and was not at all sure of her own decision once the result was reached, and this indecision gave her a happy sense of freedom.
She must capture Sir Arthur; this visit was definite, the last test; but once captured, Camelia wondered if she would care to keep. Theoretically she owned to a hard common-sense ambition that would make rejection doubtful; but when the moment for decision finally arrived, Camelia felt that this trait in her character might fail her; she did not really believe in it, though she paraded it, flaunted it. Every one might think her a hard-headed, hard-hearted little worldling—as far as practice went they were right, no doubt, in all honesty she must own that she gave them no occasion to think anything else; but she reserved a warm corner of unrevealed ideals—ideals she never herself looked at, where a purring self-content sat cosily.
Lady Henge and her son arrived on a Monday. Lady Henge was nervous, though her massive personality concealed the tremor, and unhappy—for she felt Arthur’s fate to be a foregone conclusion. She was not a clever but an immensely conscientious woman. She lived up to all her principles, and she took only the highest view of everything. Herson’s love for the pretty Miss Paton, who meddled frivolously with politics (Lady Henge meddled ponderously), and made collections of Japanese pictures, had thrown her into a dismal perturbation. She could not like Miss Paton; her cleverness was not disinterested; her sense of duty was less than dubious, she lived for pleasure, for admiration; she was no fit wife for a Henge.
The most imperative of the Henges’ stately requirements was that solemn sense of duty which Lady Henge embodied so conclusively.
She felt the tremor quieted, the unhappiness soothed, however, on seeing Camelia in her home. Indeed, Camelia’s background was masterly. By the end of the first day Lady Henge was owning to herself that the glare of London had perhaps been responsible for her former unfavorable impression. Camelia’s manner was perfect; she was quiet and gentle; her wish to please was frank but very dignified. Lady Henge felt that in no way was her favor being courted, and she was quite clever enough to appreciate that. Lady Paton was left to take all the initiatives, and behind her mother Camelia smiled with an air of happy obscurity.
The following days emphasized the initial approval. The image of the excellent Lady Elizabeth faded by degrees from Lady Henge’s mind, and the ache of disappointment with it. She wonderingly expanded into confidence under Camelia’s gentle influence.
She was a shy woman; she had been afraid of Camelia; but with tender touches the shyness and the fear seemed to be pressed away. There wasnothing to be afraid of. Was it possible? She doubted sometimes, when alone and deeply thoughtful; but with Camelia quiet satisfaction was irresistible.
Perior watched the little comedy, convinced of its artificiality. That doubt of her final choice which preserved for Camelia her sense of independent pride free from all tarnish of self-interested scheming, he could not have believed in. Her motives were, he thought, very clear to him—as they must be to everybody else. He could not credit her with love; a girl so dexterously managing her hand was held by no compulsory force of real feeling. She was going to marry Arthur Henge, because he was a good match, not because she loved him; any girl might have loved him certainly, but Camelia was capable of loving no one. He was very sore, very angry, very moody. Lady Henge’s transparent bids to him for sympathy in irritating his scorn for Camelia irritated him, too, against her, against Arthur even. Why couldn’t they let him alone? They should get neither yea or nay from him, for, after all, Perior was inconsistent; the scorn did not shake his rather negative loyalty to his pupil, and beneath that there lay another and a deeper feeling, the feeling that made it possible for Camelia to hurt him.
“I was talking to her—to Miss Paton—about Woman’s Suffrage to-day,” so Lady Henge would start a conversation, “she seems to have thought rather deeply on the subject of a widened life for women—the development of character by responsibility—the democratic ideal, is it not?” LadyHenge combined staunch conservatism with a devout belief in Humanity.
Perior answered “Yes, I suppose so,” to the question.
“She has, I see, a great deal of influence down here in the country—more than I could have expected in such a gay young creature. Mrs. Grier spoke to me of her good-heartedness, her generous help in charitable matters. Mrs. Grier, as you know, is deeply interested in the improvement of the condition of the laboring classes. I shall count upon Miss Paton next year; her aid would be very effective; she could help me with some of my clubs—a pretty face, a witty tongue, popularize one; she has promised to address the Shirt Makers’ Union. She takes so much interest in all these absorbing social problems,—interest so unassuming, so free from all self-reference.”
They were in the drawing-room after dinner. Perior seemed, in watching Camelia fulfil herself, to find a searing fascination, for he was often at Enthorpe Lodge of late. The faint flavor of inquiry in Lady Henge’s assertions only elicitated, “I’m sure she’d be popular.” No; he would not be held responsible for Camelia; and again he determined that Lady Henge should on the subject of Camelia’s full fitness get from him neither a yea or a nay.
Lady Henge’s clear brown eyes had turned contemplatively upon her son and Camelia, who were sitting on an isolated sofa in a franktête-à-tête.
Perior’s glance followed hers, and while she read in Arthur’s absorbed attitude and expression the wisdom of submissive partisanship—the utter futilityof further resistance, Perior studied the half grave, half playful smile with which Camelia received her lover’s utterances. She seemed to feel Perior’s scrutiny, for her eyes swerved suddenly and met his, and the smile hardened a little as she looked at him.
“She is very lovely,” Lady Henge said with an irrepressible sigh. “It is a very unusual type of loveliness,” at which Perior looked away from Camelia and back at his companion. “He is very fond of her,” Lady Henge added—a little tearfully, Perior suspected.
“He has taken it seriously for quite a while, I believe.”
“Oh yes, yes indeed,” Lady Henge, conscious of having herself made the only barrier to an earlier declaration, spoke a little vaguely. “Arthur’s wife will have many responsibilities,” she went on; “I think that—if she accepts Arthur—Miss Paton will prove equal to them.” The “if she accepts Arthur” Perior thought rather noble, “and her gaiety will be good for him, he needs such sunshine. I must not be so selfish as to think thatIcould give it him. And then—with all her gaiety,” here a recrudescence of the vein of urgency crept once more into Lady Henge’s voice, “she has depths, Mr. Perior—great depths, has she not? Neither Arthur nor I take life lightly, you know,” and Lady Henge held him with a waiting pause of silence.
“Yes, I know you don’t,” he said, and then found himself forced to add, “there are many possibilities in Camelia.”
At all events, he might have said much more.Again he looked across at Camelia as he spoke, and again her eyes met his. She rose abruptly, and crossed the room.
“Lady Henge,” she said, standing before her guest in an attitude of delicate request, “won’t you play for us? We all want to hear you—and not as mere interpreter, you know—one of your own compositions, please.”
If there were a vulnerable spot in Lady Henge’s indisputable array of virtues it was a touching egotism in regard to her musical capabilities. She fancied herself the pioneer of a new school, and hoped for a rather shallow smattering of form and polyphony to more than atone by an immense amount of feeling. She smiled now, drawing off her gloves immediately, even while saying, with the diffidence of a master—
“I am afraid mypoèmes symphoniquesare not quite on the after-dinner level, my dear. You know I can’t promise a comfortable accompaniment to conversation.”
“Don’t degrade us by the implication,” smiled Camelia; “we are at least appreciative.”
“My music is emotionally exhaustive,” said Lady Henge, shaking her head and rising massively. “In my humbler way I have tried to do for the abstract what Wagner did for the concrete. I do not depict the sea, but the psychological sensations the sea arouses in us.” Lady Henge was moving towards the piano, her very back, with its serene, brocaded breadth, imposing by its air of large self-confidence a hush upon the babble of drawing-room flippancy.
“Oh, good gracious!” Gwendolen Holt ejaculated in an alarmed whisper to her neighbor Mr. Merriman.
“Poor dear Lady Henge,” murmured Lady Tramley, leaning back in her delicate thinness, and fixing sad eyes upon her musical friend.
“Awfully bad, is it?” Mr. Merriman inquired.
“Awfully,” said Gwendolen.
“Well, it’s all one to me,” said Mr. Merriman jocosely.
“I paint the soul of man, as influenced by the forces of nature,” still delivering explanatory comments, Lady Henge had seated herself at the piano. “My symphonic poem—‘Thalassa,’ shall I give you that?” and from a careful adjustment of the piano-stool, she looked up at Camelia, who had followed her.
Sir Arthur, on his solitary sofa, showed some dismay at the imminence of his mother’s performance. Perior, who had heard Lady Henge play, fixed enduring eyes on the cornice. Camelia dropped into the vacant seat beside him.
“Hold your breath, Alceste,” she murmured, her smiling eyes still gently observant of Lady Henge, who, after a majestic turn up and down the key-board, had paused in a menacing attitude, one hand lifted in a heavily pouncing position.
“She’ll have our heads under water in a minute. Ah! here comes the splash!” The very walls quivered as that fierce hand fell. A volcanic, incoherent volume of sound hurtled forth upon the stillness. From thenceforward they might have been sitting amidst the clamorous concussions of athunder-storm, Lady Henge, high priestess of terrified humanity, making valiant warfare with the angry gods. The wind, or rather the effect of the wind upon the shrinking mind of man, shrieked in long sweeps down the key-board—Lady Henge’s execution with the flat of her hand being boldly impressionistic; the waves beat out their stormy rhythm in crashing chords of very feeble construction, but in noisiness immensely effective, leaping, bounding, shouldering, swallowing one another with a splendid inconsequence as to time or key. A chaos of stammering phrases cried out fitfully above the steady bellowing of the bass.
Physically the composition was most certainly exhausting. Lady Henge’s fine, flushed profile, bent with brooding intensity above the key-board, evinced a panting effort to cope with the mighty requirements of her creation.
“It sounds as if she were being tossed in her cabin, doesn’t it?” Camelia’s soft voice murmured under the safe cover of the tumult, her face keeping the expression of grave attention, “and horribly seasick. One hears the bottles breaking, and the basins clashing, and the boots being hurled from side to side. Anything but abstract. Intimately descriptive rather—don’t you think?” A side glint of her eye evidently twinkled for sympathy; but Perior solemnly stared at the ceiling.
“The construction too,” Camelia said more soberly, “she plunged us into the free fantasia—and perhaps at the end she may fish us out with the dominant phrase—but I haven’t caught it yet; ah, this thudding finale announces the journey’s end.” And she jumped up as Lady Henge, with a fine, tense look of soul-experience, rose from the piano. The dazed and wilted listeners chimed out the polite chorus usual on such occasions. Camelia led Lady Henge to her chair. “Thank you—so much,” she said. Lady Henge smiled dimly, her eyes fixed on vacancy.
“It was like a glorious wind blowing about one. It made me think of Wordsworth’s sonnets—of the soul in nature,” said Camelia. Perior still looked stolidly at the ceiling, and she felt his silence to be ominous.
“Such music,” she added, “gives one courage for life.” She was angry with Perior. Lady Henge pressed her hand.
“Thanks, my dear. Yes—youfelt. One must hear, of course, a composition many times before entering into the sanctuary of the artist’s meaning.” Camelia’s mouth retained its sympathetic gravity. Perior said nothing; and faint, relieved little groups of talk twittered like birds after a storm.
“And you, Mr. Perior,” Lady Henge, fanning herself largely turned to this silent critic. “You, too, are a musician as I know, a musician at least in appreciation. What do you think of my ‘Thalassa’? Frankly now—as one artist to another.” Perior moved his eyes slowly from the ceiling, and dropped them to Camelia’s face. He grew very red.
“Frankly now,” Lady Henge reiterated with genial urgency.
“I think it is very bad,” said Perior. The sentence fell with a thud, like a stone.
Lady Henge flushed, and her fan fluttered to stillness; Camelia, her eyebrows lightly lifted, met Perior’s square look.
“Bad,” Lady Henge repeated, with a pathetic mingling of deprecating pride and pain, “really bad, Mr. Perior?”
“Very bad,” said Perior.
The unmitigated sentence reduced her to feeble plaintiveness.
“But why? This is really savage, you know.”
“Excuse me, I know I seem rude,” he looked at her now with something of an effort. “You see I tell you the uncompromising truth. Your piece is weak, and crude, and incoherent!”
Now that she met his eyes, Lady Henge saw that it gave him pain to speak so. Camelia standing over them smiled unruffled.
“It is a case of Berlioz and the Conservatoire, Schumann and the Philistines, Lady Henge. Mr. Perior is an old classicist—understands nothing outside strictest adherence to form. Your more modern march of theDavidsbündlercould say nothing to him.” Perior did not look at her.
“If you will allow me, Lady Henge, I will come some day and go over a lot of Schumann with you. I think you will recognize the difference. His power and genuineness are apparent. And Schumann has a great deal to say.”
He smiled at her as he spoke, a very sweet smile—asking tolerance for the friend in spite of the critic’s unwilling arrogance. Lady Henge was soothed, though decidedly shaken.
“You are severe, you know.”
“But you prefer severity to silly fibs.”
“I may be silly,” Camelia here put in with a touch of coldness, “if so, I stand convicted with you, Lady Henge, for I found your ‘Thalassa’ neither crude, nor weak, nor incoherent; but I can’t be accused of fibbing. You will play your symphonic poem to me again, won’t you? and we will leave Mr. Perior to the pleasures of iconoclastic conservatism.” After so speaking, Camelia went back to her seat beside Sir Arthur.
He had a book in his hand, and was turning the leaves vaguely, he put it down as he looked up at her. For a man well over thirty, Sir Arthur had certain boyish traits, as a frank nervousness of glance now revealed.
“Well?” Camelia smiled, feeling a something in the silence.
“It was bad, wasn’t it?” said Sir Arthur.
“Bad?”
“Yes, poor mother.”
“I don’t think it bad.”
Sir Arthur surveyed her with pained hesitation.
“Why do you say that?” he demanded, with an abruptness of wounded tenderness that put Camelia alertly on her guard.
“Why do you saythat?” she asked, rounding innocent eyes at him.
“I saw you laughing at it, with Perior—not that he laughed. I heard what he said too, I prefer that, you know.”
Camelia herself was feeling wounded, was smarting under a sense of angry humiliation. This added and unexpected blow brought the blood vividly toher face, and the sincerity of her discomfort seemed even to herself to warrant the sincerity of her quick question.
“You suspect me of lying?”
Camelia hardly thought that she had lied; neither the flush nor the tone of voice was acted.
Sir Arthur looked away. “I saw you laughing,” he repeated.
“Iwaslaughing,” Camelia declared. “Not at Lady Henge,” she added.
Sir Arthur kept a silence in which doubt and a longing to believe evidently struggled.
“I said to Mr. Perior that the rocking passage with the chord accompaniment made me feel seasick—from its realism; that touch of levity doesn’t imply insincerity in my admiration—I always smile at the birds in the ‘Pastoral.’ Why should I be insincere? If I had not liked it, I would have said so.”
Sir Arthur’s long breath escaped with the relief of recovered joy.
“Don’t be insincere;—dearest,” he added, looking at her; and seeing the surprise with which she received the grave, impulsive word, he went on quickly, yet gently.
“You know you often want to please people—to make every one like you;—even I have fancied it—forgive me, won’t you, at the price of a little falseness. When one feels as I do, the least flaw cuts into one like a knife.” With Camelia’s triumph there now mingled a bitter distaste; she could hardly bring herself to look into his honest, adoring eyes; the quickness of her breath and wavering of herglance were, again, quite spontaneous, and that she knew them to be effective, deepened her humiliation.
“To see you laugh at mother—and then praise her—I thought it; and I can’t tell you how it pained me. You forgive me?”
Her self-disgust now seemed to lend her a certain sense of atoning self-respect. “How good you are!” she said, looking at him very gravely, and this recognition of his goodness restoring still more fully that sick self-respect, she was able to smile at him, to think that she must not exaggerate the littlecontretemps, and to ask herself whether she might not fall in love with Sir Arthur—simply and naturally. Dear man! The words were almost on her lips—her eyes at least caressed him with the implication.
He looked embarrassed, but very happy. “No—no! Please don’t say that! How divinely kind you are. I have been insufferable. It is noble of you to understand—. Can’t we get away from all these people—if only for a moment. Let us go into the garden—it is very warm.” She would rather not have gone into the garden, but she could not refuse him, she felt that to some extent she would like to justify his faith in her, and to shake from her that snake-like imputation of baseness. She glanced at Perior as she went out; he was talking most affably with Lady Henge, and did not look at her. His lack of faith stung perhaps more than Sir Arthur’s faith. It was unmerited too, more unmerited than Sir Arthur’s trust, so she told herself, stepping down from the terrace on to the gravel-path, and the senseof unmerited scorn sharpened that wish to justify herself—as far as might be—to the kinder judge.
“No, Sir Arthur, you are good,” she went on, pausing before him, her hands clasped behind her after a little-girl fashion habitual with her; “and I am horrid—it’s quite true—but not as horrid as you thought me. I do like to please people. I am often pettily, impulsively false; it’s quite, quite true. I do like your mother’s piece, but probably not as much as I implied to her by my praise—not as much as greater things: and Mr. Perior’s silence made me angry too; but I probably was a little insincere, and that every one is the same is no excuse for me. I don’t want to be like every one, and you don’t want me to be, do you? But if I hadnotliked it, you would not have wished me to express myself with the bludgeon-like directness of our rugged friend, would you?” Camelia asked the question with real anxiety, conscious though she was that she had thought the composition quite as ridiculous as Perior had declared it. After all, his ugly sincerity justified her kindly fibbing; and as for the laughing, she was sorry she had laughed, since Sir Arthur had seen her. His erectness of moral vision would so distort that unintentional meanness that she could not be asked to confess it; but her partial confession, all the same, left her confused by the stinging of small, uncomfortable compunctions. These, however, did not show themselves in her eyes, nor in the pure lines of her face. Her silvered garments and exquisite whiteness gave her in the moonlight an angelic look that might well humble modest manhood before her. SirArthur had never felt himself so near to the girl he loved, nor his love so well justified.
“No, I don’t think it’s necessary to give a person the truth like a box on the ear,” he said, and he would have taken her hands, but Camelia again put them behind her back, and stood smiling at him.
“Poor old Perior,” he added, and they walked slowly for a little way down the path. “You can understand it, though, can’t you? He thought you were fibbing, and that made him give mother the ruthlesscoup de dent.”
This was very true, and so Camelia knew, knowing, too, that shehadbeen fibbing. “But that didn’t justify thecoup de dent,” she declared, “and why should he think I was fibbing?” The bit of audacity was so inevitable that she hardly felt a qualm over its enunciation. On Perior’s loyalty she relied as she relied on the ground beneath her feet.
“Well, he knows that you are clever, and that your taste has not been distorted—as mother’s has—by fancied talent.” Sir Arthur was all candid confidence.
“He wasverynasty,” said Camelia, “and I shall tell him so. And now that I have made my little confession, and that you have absolved me—for I am absolved, am I not?—shall we go in?” Camelia drew back from the proposal she saw looming in the moonlight; there was time, ample time, for that, now that she was sure of him, quite sure. A warm little thrill of pleasure went over her at the thought that it was she who was not ready, was not sure, though she had never liked him more.
“Must we go in?” Sir Arthur looked up at heras she stood on the step above him. He was very handsome Camelia thought with some complacency.
“I think we must,” she said prettily, adding, “I promised to do my skirt dancing for them, you know. You must tell me it is delightful when I have done, even if you laugh at me while I am dancing.” Sir Arthur had held out his hand, and she put hers in it.
“You absolve me, don’t you?” he said. “You forgive me? You are not angry?”
“Angry? Have I seemed angry?”
“You had the right to be.”
“Not with you,” said Camelia, and at that he kissed her hand, and they went back into the drawing-room.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Camelia as she undressed that night decided that Perior was responsible for her still smarting irritation. It was too tiresome. Of course, apparently she had not behaved nicely; but, in neatly analyzing the whole affair, she could find herself guilty of nothing worse than a little humorous gaiety—that took an old friend’s sympathy for granted—(could one not think things one did not say? she had only thought aloud—to him), and a little kindly hypocrisy practised every day by models of uprightness. Perior’s rudeness set a standard by which social conventions were guilty of black falseness. It was too bad of him, and her anger put him aside with a sense of relief. The only really serious part was the stinging sequel. How closely Arthur Henge must have watched her to catch that irrepressibleglint of the eye. He had caught it, though, and she had lied about it—well, yes—lied, deliberately lied to a man she respected.
Of course it made her feel uncomfortable—of course it did. “I am not the vain puppethethinks me,” she said, leaning on her dressing-table, and looking gravely at her illuminated reflection—thehebeing Perior—“the very fact of my worrying over such a trifling incident proves that I am not. It ishisfault that I should feel so.” She paused for a further turn of silent meditation before adding, “My only fault was in having trusted to his sense of fun, in having been amused. The rest followed inevitably. I could not have told Arthur Henge that I found his mother ridiculous, nowcouldI, you foolish creature?” and irrepressibly Camelia smiled at her lenient accuser in the glass. At this point of the colloquy a gentle tap at the door ushered in Mary. Mary, in a dressing-gown of just the wrong shade, was not an interesting object, and Camelia glanced over her reflection in the mirror without turning. She continued her own train of thought, hardly listening to Mary, though vaguely conscious that the awkward inquiries after her comfort were rather pointless.
“I thought you might want something, Camelia. I thought you looked rather pale,” said Mary, drawing near with some timidity.
“No, thanks. I should have asked Grant, you know,” replied Camelia, her elbows still on the dressing-table. She absently watched Mary lift her discarded gown from the floor, fold it, and lay it neatly over the back of a chair. “Don’t mind aboutpicking up those things, Mary,” she added, yawning a little, and wishing rather that Mary would go. “Grant can do all that.”
“I like to tidy up after you.” Mary’s smile was slightly forced. “See, Camelia, you need me to look after you—your pearl necklace under a chair.”
“It must have caught in my bodice,” said Camelia, glancing at the necklace as Mary laid it on the dressing-table. “That certainly was stupid of me. Thanks, dear.” Mary still lingered.
“You don’t want anything, you are sure? You feel quite well—and—happy, Camelia?” The question was so odd that Camelia turned her head and looked up, surprised, at Mary’s rather embarrassed countenance.
“Happy?” she repeated.
“Yes; I fancied you might have something to tell me.” This initiative was certainly amazing in the reserved Mary, and Camelia stared.
“Something to tell you?” Then her deliberate departure for the moonlittête-à-têtewith Sir Arthur coming luminously to her mind, she began to laugh. “Why, Mary, did you come in a congratulatory mood?”