“Ah!—not before me, then! I love her,” Sir Arthur repeated. “Good-bye, Perior. I came to say good-bye. We are going, you know.”
“Yes—So am I.”
Sir Arthur’s eyes dwelt upon him for a compassionate, a magnanimous moment. “You are? Ah! I understand.”
“More or less?” said Perior, with a spiritless smile.
“Oh, more—more than you can say.”
Perior let him go on that supposition. Arthur understood that Camelia had hurt him. That, after all, was sufficient; left his friend’s mind without rancor for his galling truth-telling. And, as Perior walked back into the library, he heaved a long sigh of relief. The Rubicon was crossed. In so speaking to Arthur he had fortified himself. The truth, so spoken, was an eternal barrier between him and Camelia. The barrier was a plain necessity; for Perior was conscious that a possible thrill lurked for him in the contemplation of Camelia’s last move. Its reckless disregard of consequences proclaimed a sincerity to which he had done injustice yesterday. She believed she loved him; she gave up all for his subjection. Yes, the thrill required suppression.He must abide in the firm reality of the words spoken to Arthur—“hard, false, voraciously selfish;” yes, she might love him, but her love could be no more than a perplexing combination of these ineradicable qualities.
The short autumn day drew to a close. From the library window the evening grayness dimmed the nearest group of larches, golden through all their erect delicacy. The sad sunset made a mere whiteness in the west. Perior had been at his writing-table for over an hour, diligently strangling harassing thoughts, a pipe between his teeth, a consolatory cat at his elbow, when, in a tone of commonplace that rang oddly in his ears, “Miss Paton, sir,” was announced by the solemn old retainer.
Perior wheeled round, and stumbled to his feet; the papers he held fell in a sprawling heap upon the floor, and the dozing cat jumped down and took nervous refuge under a chair.
Camelia, following old Lane with dexterous determination, saw the astonished commotion and found it encouraging. She was determined but not desperate. Even without encouragement she fancied that she could have held her own, sustained as she was by her inner conviction, and while Lane went out and closed the door, she was even able to cast a reassuring smile at the cat, whose widened eyes shone at her from under the chair edge.
The door safely shut, she turned a steady look upon Perior’s rough head, silhouetted in monotone on the pale landscape outside. She herself faced the light. She had walked, and her face showed an exquisite freshness, an imperative youth and energy.In the austere room the sudden rose and white of cheeks and lips and brow, the lustre of her eyes, the pale gold of her hair, dazzled.
Fixing Perior with this steady look, she said: “He has been here.”
“Henge? yes,” said Perior. Even in the shock of his dismayed confusion he felt with thankfulness a strong throb of an unswerving energy quite fit to match hers. He could look at her, dazzled, but not wavering, and, stooping from the successful encounter of eyes, he picked up the fallen papers, pushed them into shape, and laid them on the table coolly enough.
“You have heard what has happened, then?” Camelia was in nowise disconcerted by these superficialities.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell him why I broke my engagement?”
Perior looked again, and very firmly, at the rose and white and gold.
“He gave me the reason you had given him. That was sufficient, wasn’t it?”
“Sufficient for him, yes. I gave him only half the truth—I should not have minded, you know, had you given him the whole.”
“I should have minded.”
“You? Why should you mind? It was my fault—the whole truth could tell him nothing less than that,” said Camelia quickly.
“I appreciate your generosity”—Perior laughed a little—“that really is generous.” It really was. He put another mark against himself; but a perceptionof his own past injustice did not weaken him.
“You know why,” she said, and her eyes were now solemn; “you know that I don’t care about myself any longer—so long as you care. That is all that makes any difference—now. So you might have told him had you wished.”
“I didn’t want to;” Perior leaned back against the writing-table, feeling a certain shrinking. Camelia’s power took on new attributes. He could but recognize a baleful nobility in her self-immolation. After all, the falseness of yesterday had held a great sincerity—though the sincerity might only be a morbid folly. He had hardly the excuse of blindness. With a renewed pang of self-disgust he saw that his more subtle falseness to her was a weapon in her hand. She had not turned it against him. Perhaps she did not realize her need. He was glad, by lowering himself, to lift her.
She had come forward into the fuller light, and her face, more clearly revealed, showed the stress that Arthur had seen as a resolute woe. In a pause at a little distance from him, in the very tension of her face, Perior saw that she stooped to no weak appeal; it was an intelligent demand, rather, that he should recognize and do her justice.
“I know how angry you are with me,” she said, after the slight pause in which they studied one another. “You believe that I have acted badly; and so I have. I see it too. I entrapped you, made you feel false to him, made you feel that you betrayed him. But if youunderstood. You have never really understood. You have takenthe shell of me—the merely external silliness—so seriously.”
Perior could wonder at his own firmness before her. He was filled with compunction for the pitiful certainty of success—once his stubborn disbelief were convinced—that spoke through her gravity. He loved her, and knew that he loved her, against his reason, against his will, against his heart even, yet heard himself saying, sure of the kindness of his cruelty—for any prolongation of her security was cruel—
“I hope never to take a merely external silliness seriously, Camelia. Let me think of this as one. You should not have come, it can only hurt you, and me. We had best not see each other again until you have outgrown, shall we say, your present shell?” Yes, he could rely on the decisive clear-sightedness that had made him speak the truth, once for all, to Arthur and to himself. He felt secure in his moral antagonism; the ascetic admonishment of his voice gratified even a sense of humor, quite at his own expense, which he perceived in the rigor of his righteousness. But Camelia made no retreat before that rigor, though the color left her face, as if he had struck her; her eyes betrayed no confusion, but a keenness, a steadiness, almost scornful.
“You think itthat?” Perior was not sorry to tell her and himself what he did think.
“I think it just that. A phase of your varied existence; a curious experience to sound. You have set your heart on being in love with me—since that was an experience most amusingly improbable.I am another toy to grasp since the last disappointed.”
“You are dull,” said Camelia. She looked down, clasping her hands behind her. “You are not sincere. It pleases you to blind yourself with your preconceived idea of me. Your self-righteousness would not like to own itself mistaken in believing anything but the worst of me.”
“Ah! hasn’t it for years been struggling to see only the best of you!” cried Perior; “I don’t deserve that, Camelia.”
“You see the best now; why won’t you believe in it?”
“I don’t say I see the worst—by no means; even there is something that surprises me, that makes me confess, gladly, that I have misjudged you; but I can only believe that yesterday, in the impulsive reaction against your false position—you did not love Arthur—the fact frightened you; I am glad of that, too; but in the melting illusion you thought of me as something solid to cling to, and now you are determined to keep on clinging, deceiving yourself with an impossible mirage of fidelity, devotion, and self-forgetting, which you’ll never reach, Camelia —never, never.” Camelia contemplated him.
“Yes, you believed that, or something even less pathetic; that accounts for your cruelty—the cruelty of your last words yesterday—so false as I knew them; but I understood them, saw all you thought, though your wrath, your injury, your impatience to punish—how fond you are of punishing!—wouldn’t let me explain. You did not believe that I loved you—lovedyou. You do not believe it now. Youcan’t believe that I, who could have anybody, should choose you. It looks to you like an aberration. You are afraid of being hurt by believing, afraid I’ll treat you as I treated him, afraid that you will be another toy—that was what cut yesterday. You were being played with—I saw you thought it. But I do love you; you will have to believe it. I do—choose you.” Her head raised, she was looking at him with the clear command of this inflexible choice. The sublimity of confidence was touching. Perior, grimly conscious of its illusory foothold over chasms, could afford a certain chivalry, could at least restrain the brutality of a push into the void. He didn’t like the idea of Camelia, his smiling Camelia, really scared, tumbling from her pinnacles into the abyss where rocky facts awaited her.
“I am sensible to the compliment”—the mild irony of his tone was a warning of insecurity—“though you will own that it is, in some senses, a dubious one; but it’s very kind in you, who could have anybody, to stoop to a nobody. My obscurity is gilded by the preference; it will console, illuminate my solitude.” She flushed, interrupting him with a quick, sharp—
“I didn’t intend that! You know it! You are cruel, yes, and mean; for only my sincerity gives you the power to wound me. Youarea somebody; though the whole world were blind, I can see; that is why I love you. Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?” Camelia did not come closer as she asked it, but her poised expectancy of look seemed to claim him. Perior folded his arms and stared at her. “I would rather not,” he said.
“Why?”—her voice at last showed a tremor. “You debase me by your incredulity. If I do not love you—what did yesterday mean?—what doesthismean? It is my only excuse.”
“Excuse?”—in this nearing antagonism his voice flamed up at the sudden outlet—“Excuse? There was no excuse—for yesterday.” Saved from the direct brutality of refusing her love, the memory of Arthur’s betrayed trust rose hot within him. Arthur’s sincerity shone in its noble unconsciousness of the falseness of friend and sweetheart, one falseness forced, one willing and frivolous; his grief was mocked by her indifference.
“Nothing can excuse that,” he said. “What right had you to accept him? What right had you to keep me in ignorance? Why did you not break with him before turning to me? By Heaven, Camelia! even knowing you as I do I cannot understand how you did it! I could hardly look him in the face when he was here, the thought of it sickened me so.”
“Yes, that was horrible,” said Camelia.
“Horrible?” Perior repeated. Her judicial tone exasperated him. He walked away to the window repeating, “Horrible!” as though exclaiming at inadequacy.
“But have I not atoned?” Camelia asked.
“Atoned?” he stared round at her.
“I have set him free. I have owned myself unworthy. I did not know you cared for me when I accepted him, or, at least, I did not know I cared for you—so much.”
Perior continued to look at her for a silentmoment, contemplating the monstrousness, yet strangely intuitive truth of her amendment. He let it pass, feeling rather helpless before it.
“So that is the way you pave the way to penitence? You atone to the broken toys by walking over them? No, Camelia, no, nothing atones, either to him or to me, for that unspoken lie.” He came back to her, feeling the need to face her for the solemn moment of the contest.
Camelia was speaking hurriedly at last, losing a little her sustaining calm—“And had I told you?—Had I said at once that I was engaged to him?—Would that have helped us?—Could you have said, then, that you loved me? You would have been too angry—for his sake—to say it, when I had told you that in one day I had accepted and meant to reject him”—the questions came eagerly.
He looked at her face, strong with its still unshaken certainty, white, delicate, insistent. Loving it and her, his eyes held hers intently, and he asked, “Did I say I loved you?”
A serene dignity rose to meet his look. “You did notsayit, perhaps. You said you didnotlove me,” she added, with a little smile.
“I was base—and I spoke basely. I said that I loved you enough to kiss you. You may scorn me for it.”
“Ah!” she said quickly, “that was because you did not believe that I loved you! You are exonerated.”
“Not even then. But if you do love me—choose me, as you say; if I do love you—which I have not said—and will not say, will not say even to exculpatemy folly of last night—even then, Camelia! I would not marry a woman whom I despise.”
“Despise?” she repeated. Her voice was a toneless echo of his. She weighed the word, and found it heavy, as he saw. Her eyes dwelt on his mutely, and there dawned slowly in them the terror of the eternal negative that rose between her and him.
“You are not good enough for me, Camelia,” said Perior.
“Because of yesterday!” she gasped. “You can’t forgive that!”
“Not only that, Camelia—I do not love you.”
She stood silent, gazing. His heart bled for her. To tell the saving lie, he had faced a jibing self-scorn; yet he continued to face it inflexibly.
“I could not live with you. I think you would kill me. I said to poor Arthur this afternoon what I believe of you—that you are selfish, and false, and hard as a stone. I could not love a woman of whom I could think—of whom I had been forced to say—that.”
Compunctions rained upon him—sharp arrows. Her mute, white face appealed—if only to the long devotion, the long tenderness of years.
The crucial moment was past, and the upwelling tenderness, devotion, called to him to hurry her away from it, and support her under his own most necessary cruelty.
His voice broke in a stammer as he said, taking her hands—“How can I tell you how I hate myself for saying this?—it is hideous—it is mean to say.”
And Camelia said nothing, seemed merely toawait, in a frozen stupor, another blow. He could not see in her now the lying jilt of yesterday.
“Don’t think of me again as I’ve been this afternoon. Forget it, won’t you?” he urged; “I am going away to-morrow—and—you will get over it, be able to see me again—some day, as the good old friend who never wanted to be cruel—no, I swear it, Camelia. You must go now; you will let me order the trap? You will let me drive you home?”
She had drawn her hands away; in the dim room her eyes met his—bereft, astonished.
“You will let me drive you?” Perior repeated with some confusion.
“No, I will walk,” she said, hardly audibly.
“The five miles back? It is too far—too late.” He looked away from her, too much touched by those astonished eyes.
“No—I will walk.” Then, as he stood still, rather at a loss—
“You are going to-morrow?”
“Yes.”
“Because of me?”
“Ah—that pleases you!” he said, with a smile a little forced.
“Pleases me!” The sharpness of her voice cut him, made him feel gross in his unkindness.
“It does not please me, but it is the best thing under the circumstances. Now, Camelia, you must go. I will walk with you. We won’t speak of this at all—will pretend it never happened. You must forgive my folly of last night, and get over this touching folly of yours. Come, we won’t talk of it any more,” he repeated, drawing her hand throughhis arm, holding it with a clasp consolatory and entreating.
She did not follow him. “No! no!” she said, half-choked, drawing away the hand. Then, suddenly, with a great sob, turning to him, she flung herself upon his breast, clung to him, her hands clutching his shoulders—
“Oh! don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! I can’t bear it!” she cried, shuddering. “I will be good! Oh, Iwillbe good! Give me time, just wait—and see—” The words were half lost, as with hidden face she wept. “You are so cruel, so unjust—give me time and see how I will please you—how you will love me. You must love me—you must—you must.”
“Camelia! Camelia!” Perior was shocked, shaken as well. The deep note of his own voice warned him in its pity, and amazement, and distress, of the dangerous emotion that seized him. To yield again to an emotion, even though a higher one than last night’s—to yield with those thoughts of hers—those spoken thoughts—never, never.
He tried to hold her off; her sobs made her helpless, but with arms outstretched—blindly, as he remembered to have seen a crying, stumbling child, she turned to him—it was too pitiful—as she might have turned to her mother. How repulse the broken creature? He could but take the outstretched hands, let her come to him again; she did not put her arms around him; there was no claim; only a clinging, her face hidden, as she sobbed, “Don’t leave me! Don’t! I love you! I adore you!”
“My poor child!”
“Yes, yes, your poor child! Be sorry for me, be kind—only a child. I did not mean to deserve that—torture, you—despising! I nevermeantanything—so wrong. Only a silly, a selfish, a frivolous child—won’t you see it?—never caring for the toys I played with—never caring for anything but you,really. Can’t you see it now, as I do? I have grown up, I have put away those things. Can’t you forgive me?”
“Yes, yes. Great heavens! I am not such a prig, such a fool! I have always hoped——”
“That you could allow yourself to love me! Ah, say it! say it!” She looked up, lifting her face to his.
“To be fond of you, Camelia,” said Perior. “I can’t say more than that!”
“Because you won’t believe in me! Can’t believe in me! And I can’t live without you to help me! Haven’t you seen, all along, that you were the only one I cared about? Half my little naughtinesses were only to provoke you, to make you angry, to see that you cared enough to be angry. All the rest—the worldliness—the using of people—yes, yes, I own to it!—but no one was better than I! Why should I have been good when no one else is? When all are playing the same game, and most people only fit to play with? Why should I have been better than they?”
“I don’t know, Camelia, but—my wife would have to be.”
“Shewillbe.”
“Don’t make me hurt you—don’t be so cruel to yourself.”
“She will be,” Camelia repeated.
“I beg of you—I implore you, Camelia.” He hardened his face to meet her look, searching, eager, pitiful.
“How could I say this unless I believed you loved me—had always loved me? Don’t speak; don’t say no; don’t send me away. You are angry. You have the right to be; but, ah! if you only knew what I feel for you.”
“Don’t tell me, Camelia.”
“But I must. I love everything about you—I always have. When you were near me I saw every gesture you made, heard every word you spoke, knew every thought you had about me. I love your little ways—I know them all; that wag of your foot when you are angry, the look of your teeth when you smile, your hands, your face, your dear rough hair——”
Perior had turned from red to white, and still looking at him, shaking her head a little, she finished very simply on a long sigh—
“I can’t live without you. Ican’t.”
“Camelia, I can’t marry you,” he said; and then, taking breath in the ensuing silence, “You are mistaken. I don’t love you. I have your welfare at my heart; I wish you all happiness, all good. I am sorry, terribly sorry for you; but I do not love you. You must believe me. I do not love you. I will not marry you.—God forgive me for the lie,” he said to himself; “but no, no, no, I cannotmarry her, poor impulsive, wilful, half noble, half pitiful child, a thousand times no.” The strong rebellion of his very soul steadied him. He couldyield without a tremor to his pity, could take her hands and hold them in a clasp convincingly paternal and pitying.
Camelia closed her eyes, drawing in a long breath, too sharp in its accepted bitterness for the break of a sob. Her face, with this tragedy of still woe upon it, was almost unrecognizable. Until now it had been a face of triumph. Defeat—and that at last she recognized defeat he saw—changed its very lines; the iron entered her soul, and something left her face for ever. For a long time she did not speak, and her voice seemed dimmed, as though spoken from a great distance, when she said, her eyes still closed, “Then you never loved me!”
“Never,” said Perior, who, encompassed by the saving lie, could freely breathe in the tonic atmosphere of his resolute pain.
“But—you are fond of me?” said Camelia; and as she spoke, from under the solemn pressure of her eyelids, pressed down as on a dead hope, great tears came slowly.
“Great Heaven! Fond of you?Fondof you? Yes—yes, my dear Camelia.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead above the closed eyes.
“Ah!” she murmured, “I was so sure you loved me!” More than its rigid misery, the humble bewilderment on her face, as of a creature stricken helpless, and not comprehending its pain, hurt him, warned him that every moment made it more difficult to keep down the fluttering of a longing he would not, must never satisfy. He seemed to crush a harsh hand on its delicate wings as he said—
“And now you will go. You will let me walk home with you?”
She shook her head. “No, no.”
She went towards the door, her hand still in his.
“You should not go alone. I beg of you, dear, to let me come.”
“I would rather go alone.”
They were in the hall, and she had not looked at him again. She put her hand out to the door and then she paused. Perior had also paused.
“Will you kiss me good-bye?” she said.
“Will I? O Camelia!” At that moment he felt himself to be more false than he had been during all the scene with her, for as he kissed her the fluttering wings beat upward with the exultant throb of a released desire. And she did not know. She believed him. All her hope was stricken in the dust. And yet they clung together—lovers; he ashamed of his knowledge; she pathetic, tragic, in her chastened, her humiliated, trust and ignorance.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel was walking across the hall on her way to the staircase when Camelia entered. She had not seen Camelia since the morning’s catastrophe, a catastrophe as yet unannounced, but plainly discernible in the departure of the Henges, in Lady Paton’s retirement, Camelia’s disappearance, and Mary’s heavy silence. Mary herself hardly knew as yet, could only suspect, with a sickening droop of disappointment following a hope, unreasonable perhaps, but delicious while it so briefly lasted.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel plied her with profitless questions during tea-time; she only knew that Sir Arthur had ridden away, that Lady Henge had followed with the boxes, that Aunt Angelica was in her room, and that Camelia had gone out. Mrs. Fox-Darriel was not disposed to let Camelia off easily; and now, undeterred by the almost vacant stare her young hostess bent upon her, she rushed at her imperatively.
“You look quite half mad, Camelia! What is the matter? The Henges are gone, she as gloomy as a hearse. I have not seen your mother since breakfast. Has a thunderbolt struck the house? You accepted Arthur Henge yesterday, and to-day you give him hiscongé. Is it possible?”
Camelia’s hand waved her aside. What did this chattering, rattling creature want of her? She belonged to a dim primeval age, the age of yesterday, before the cataclysm had changed everything.
“No; you are not going to get rid of me like that!” Mrs. Fox-Darriel followed her swiftly up the stairs. “That would be a little too bad, to leave me, all curiosity, frying in my own ignorance. Now, Camelia, let me have the whole truth of it. What has happened?” She confronted her in her room.
“Yes, I have broken my engagement.”
“Why? great heavens, why?”
“I don’t love him. Please go, Frances.”
Mrs. Fox-Darriel crossed her arms and surveyed her friend in an exasperated silence.
“Was that so necessary?” she asked presently, while Camelia, sitting in a low chair half turned from her, unbuttoned her muddy boots and gaiters.
“Yes, it was. I wish you would go away.”
“You know what every one will think—you know whatIthink!—that you accepted him to prove you could throw him over. You try him on to show that you can fit him, and then kick him away, precisely as you kick away that muddy boot. It is an unheard-of thing. It is distinctly nasty.”
Camelia leaned back with closed eyes, hardly hearing, certainly not caring for the words, though their sound was an importunate jangling at her ears, wearisome, irritating.
“As for the egregious folly of it! well, my dear, you may have plans into which I am not initiated, but the day will come, I think, in which you willown that you have behaved like a horrid little fool.” Mrs. Fox-Darriel moved towards the door, not caring to outstay her climax, yet urged to an addenda by the exasperating, almost slumbering indifference of Camelia’s face. “I will go. You want to finish your cry. Have you been walking about the lanes crying? I am off to the Dormers to-morrow; I only stayed on here because of you; my occupation now is decidedly gone.”
“Good-bye,” said Camelia.
When she was alone she rose and bolted the door. Her ten miles had tired her physically, and she sank back into her chair, her stockinged feet stretched out, her muddy skirts clinging damply about her ankles.
Yes, let the whole truth surge over her, and find her unresisting.
He did not love her; had never loved her. He despised her. The remembrance of his scorn crept over her like a gnawing flame. The shame of last night’s dancing, of his reluctant embrace, that she had courted, came upon her in an awful revelation; and the wilful, desperate passion of to-day, sure of the hidden treasure he withheld from her in punishment only—a child pounding at a locked door. And the room was empty; there had been no treasure. She had forced him to open to her the dreadful vacancy. His sad friendship, smarting still from its momentary debasement, had sheltered her from the keenest pang; it was as if he had held her hand as, together, they went into that vacant room; now, alone, the realization of her own abasement stunned her. But she loved him. It had notbeen for her love that he had scorned her, though misinterpreting it so cruelly. She had made it impossible that she should ever retrieve herself, or that he should ever see the truth; her falseness had blinded him to her only worth, yet even now the consciousness of that worth held her from utter loss of self-respect, the consciousness of the intrinsic nobility of her devotion, rejected alas! seen with darkest disfigurements, but standing upright and unashamed at the centre of her life. This great love was like an over-soul, a nobler self looking with sad eyes at the prostrate, the utterly confounded Camelia.
Then came throbs of loneliness and terror. He was going away! She sprang up under the knife-like thrust of the thought. Oh! if at least he had believed her! If at least he had seen tragedy, not a poor, silly farce, the only noble thing in her life distorted to a wretched folly. Only outwardly had she been a child screaming for an unattainable toy. She walked up and down the room, her hands wrung together, until a quivering weakness of fatigue came over her, and she flung herself face downwards on the bed.
Sobs came with the despairing posture. Her whole body shook with them.
A tiny, timid knock at the door broke in on the miserable satisfaction of woe expressed.
Camelia held back her weeping and listened silently.
“Camelia,” said her mother’s voice, a voice tremulous with tears, “may I not see you, my darling?”
In her agonizing self-absorption Camelia heard thewords with a resentment made fierce by sympathy crushed down.
“No,” she said, steadying her voice, for her mother must not think her weeping in regret over her act of repudiation, “you can’t.”
“Please, my child ”—Lady Paton evidently began to sob, and Camelia, wrapping herself in a sense of necessary and therefore justified brutality, again buried her head in the pillow. Yes, she was a brute, of course, but—how silly of her mother to stand there crying! How tactless, at least; for Camelia at once hated herself for the other word. What did she expect? She seemed nearly as remote as Frances—not quite, for she could see Frances and repulse her with complete indifference, and she could not meet her mother indifferently. There would be the pain, the irritation of feigning.
“Don’t be cruel, dear.” The words reached her dimly through the pillow. Cruel! Camelia smiled bitterly.Shedid not know. The apparent cause for grief was slight indeed; the real one was locked forever in her heart, so let them think her cruel.
The hopeless little click of the door-knob showed that her mother’s hand had been appealingly laid upon it. Her slow footstep passed along the hall. Camelia lay in her damp, hot pillow, her eyes closed. “Yes I am a brute,” she said to herself; and then, thinking of Perior, her tears flowed again.
MRS. JEDSLEY’S visit of curiosity and condolence was of a surprisingly consolatory nature. As an old friend, Mrs. Jedsley permitted herself the curiosity; but even from an old friend Lady Paton had not expected a true-ringing generosity of judgment.
“I came, my dear—yes, because I wanted to know. My ears are buzzing with the talk of it—true or false, who can tell? Not even you, I fancy; but I have my own opinion,” said Mrs. Jedsley. “I understand Camelia pretty well; but vulgarly, schemingly cruel—rubbish! rubbish!—so I say!”
That the saying had been at all necessary made poor Lady Paton more white, yet Mrs. Jedsley’s denunciation was so sincere that she took her hands, saying, “How can they! It was a mistake. She found she did not love him.Heunderstands.” Sir Arthur’s parting words had haloed her daughter for her during these difficult days.
“Yes, yes, he is a very fine fellow, and idealizes her tremendously,” said Mrs. Jedsley, with strict justice. “It was, of course, a great shame for her not to have made up her mind long ago—a great shame to have accepted him”—Mrs. Jedsley shore off Camelia’s beams relentlessly—“and a great pity, my dear, that the engagement should have beenannounced, since a few hours of silence might have shifted the matter, and no one the wiser. But of course we were all as ready as dry kindling for the match—it spread like wildfire—a fine crackling! and then, in a day, a fine cackling! Lady Haversham came running down to me post-haste to say it was off—to wonder, to exult. Of course she is an adherent of the Duchess’s, and Lady Elizabeth has her chance again. But yes, yes, I know the child—a vain child, a selfish child; ah! it pains you; one must face that truth to see beyond it—to others; but not vulgarly cruel. She would not play with the man for months to give herself the feline fun of crunching him at the end of it all. She was playing with herself rather, only half in earnest. The engagement brought her to her senses—held her still; she couldn’t dance, so she thought. Indeed, it’s the first time I’ve respected Camelia. I do respect a person who has the courage to retrieve a false step. It is quite a good enough match to turn a girl into a schemer. At least she has proved she’s not that.”
“No! no! My daughter!”
“Quite true; your daughter; that does count, after all. No, she can’t be accused of husband-hunting.” Mrs. Jedsley laughed dryly. “Now, the question of course remains, whoisshe in love with?” and she fixed on her friend a gaze so keenly interrogative that it certainly suggested tinder ready to flash alight of itself. “Not our Parliamentary big-wig, Mr. Rodrigg? Oh no!”
“No, indeed.” Lady Paton’s head-shake might have damped the most arduous conjecture. “Hewent away, you know—very angrily, it seems, and most discourteously, for I did not even see him. He behaved very badly, Michael told me. Michael himself is gone; you knew that too? He just stopped to see me on his way to the station.”
“Mr. Perior—yes.” Mrs. Jedsley looked ruminative; even to her quickly jumping mind that long leap of inference did not suggest itself except in one connection.
Poor Mr. Perior! Had Camelia been giving the mitten right and left? Buffeting back into hopelessness each suitor who advanced, encouraged by another’s failure? Had Mr. Perior really been foolish enough to run his head into that trap?
“Now that the comedy is over, the chief confidant packs up—he quite filled that rôle, didn’t he?” she said. “And our fine jingling lady, Mrs. Fox-Darriel? Has she, too, folded her tents and stolen away?—not silently, I’ll be bound. She had staked something on the match.”
“She is gone. She spoke unkindly to me of Camelia. I do not like her. I could say nothing, it was so——”
“So neatly done. She implied, merely; you would have accepted inferences by recognizing them. I can hear her!”
“She felt for me. Camelia had gone too far—it didn’t look well; a girl must not overstep certain limits; one could make too much of a reputation for audacity; Camelia’s charm had been to be audacious, without seeming so. And the sad affair of Mr. Rodrigg—Camelia should not have stooped, and to no purpose; people turned on one so horridly.Poor Sir Arthur would lose his bill as well as his sweetheart, now that Camelia had meddled so disastrously. Oh! she was most unkind.” Lady Paton evidently remembered the unkindness—her voice was a curious echo.
Mrs. Jedsley ruminated energetically all the way back to the village, as, her skirts raised in either hand, she marched with heavy-booted splashes through the mud. Near the village she overtook Mary, bending as she walked, an umbrella uncomfortably wedged under one arm, several parcels encumbering her.
“My dear, why walk in this weather?” Mrs. Jedsley herself walked in all weathers, but for Mary, with a pleasant equine background, the necessity was not obvious; she joined her with the ejaculation.
“Oh! I like walking, Mrs. Jedsley,” said Mary. “Aunt Angelica always tells me to have the pony-cart, but it seems hardly worth while for this little distance.”
“A good mile. Where are you bound for?”
“I want to see Mrs. Brown; Kitty was rather troublesome in Sunday-school last Sunday.”
“And how nicely you manage that class. It is a credit to you. Camelia now laughs at it.” Mary said nothing to this, and Mrs. Jedsley added, “Not that she has much heart for laughing at anything just now from what I hear. That is the very encouraging feature of the whole case. It is ridiculous to speak of her as setting feathers in her cap with a light heart. She really feels this sad affair.”
“Yes,” said Mary, looking ahead with a rather rigid settling of her features.
“One might perhaps say affairs,” Mrs. Jedsley added, for she could not keep those restless conjectures to herself; out they galloped. “It has been a generaldébâcle. Mr. Rodrigg gone in a fury—breathing flame; Sir Arthur flung from his triumph—and, poor Mr. Perior. Now I really did not expect it of Mr. Perior; I thought he knew her so well—yet, for eyes that can see it’s very evident, isn’t it?”
Mary looked down, making no reply.
“Evidently she has a charm the most metallic male heart can’t withstand; a case of molten iron with Mr. Perior—in that condition I can imagine him irresistible to some women. But such a reasonable man; well-seasoned, and her friend for years. Oh! it’s a great pity that he let her melt him; no one knows now what shape his despair will cool to?”
Mary, her head bent persistently downward, stared at the muddy road.
“That she was very fond of him there is no denying,” Mrs. Jedsley pursued, “but I should have seen that as the most hopeless part of the matter. A girl like Camelia doesn’t marry the middle-aged mentor of her youth. But fond of him she is. I have watched her. Her eyes were always sliding round to him. He made a standard to her; she might jibe at it, but she liked to see it standing there—and to hang a wreath on it now and then. Upon my word, Mary!” and Mrs. Jedsley, stopping short in a mud-puddle, turned triumphant eyes on Mary’s impassive face, “I shouldn’t be surprised ifthatwere the real matter with her. She is reallyfond of him; his tumble hurts her more than the other’s. She misses her sign-post pointing steadily at friendship. She is sorry to lose her friend.”
Mary after a little pause said, “Yes.”
“Yes! You think so too!” cried Mrs. Jedsley delightedly. “You have opportunities, of course——”
“Oh no! No, indeed, Mrs. Jedsley—I only think, only imagine——”
“You have thought and imagined what I have. And that we are right I don’t doubt. The double catastrophe accounts very fully for her low spirits—and I really respect her for them, though that the catastrophe should have occurred makes it only just that she should suffer. But Mr. Perior was foolish. Ah yes! in her defence I must say that!”
Mary was saying nothing, standing mutely at the parting of the roads until her companion should have done. She was well prepared for Mrs. Jedsley’s unconscious darts.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s parting look and parting words still rankled in her heavy heart; the look, one of pity; the words: “She has refused the other too! And him she would have liked to keep dangling! She enjoys an interminable sense of drama when he is by; her life is bereft without it. But the man was mad to think that she would take him,” and the look had added that the man was a fool not to see and be contented with the minor fact Mary would have been so willing to supply. Mary had felt withered; her nerves scorched to apathy, since that look.
“You must come in and have tea with me, my dear,” said Mrs. Jedsley, “it will put strength intoyou for your talk with Mrs. Brown. Come and have a cup with me—and you know my hot scones; we will talk this over. Your aunt doesn’t suspect it, poor dear!”
“No, Mrs. Jedsley, thanks—I can’t come, and no, aunt does not know—must not know; it would make her feel very unhappy! she is so fond of Mr. Perior; she doesn’t suspect it,” Mary spoke with sudden insistence—“and then, it may be pure imagination on my part,” she added, flushing before Mrs. Jedsley’s smiling and complacent head-shake. “It would be unfair tothem—would it not?—to Camelia I mean—and——”
“And Mr. Perior; quite true, my dear. We must be as quiet as mice about it. Unfair, as you say. We must not hang out his heart for the daws to peck at. Poor man! You won’t come in to tea?”
“Thanks, no. I must be home early.” Mary hurried away. She bit her lips hard, staring before her at the wet browns and grays of the lane, dingy, drab, like her life; narrow, dull, chill with on-coming winter, and leading—the lane led to the churchyard. Mary’s thoughts followed it to that destination, and suddenly the hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and hard sobs shook her as she walked.
THESE days were very lonely for Lady Paton. The house was empty, and one could not call companionship Camelia’s mute, white presence.
Camelia read all day in the library, where only Siegfried was made welcome, or rode for hours about the wintry country. To all timid questions, as to future plans, she only answered by a coldly decisive, “I don’t know.” When her mother put her arms around her, Camelia stood impassive in their circling love, locked in her own frozen mood of despairing humiliation.
One day when in her room she had broken down her outward endurance by an impulsive cry of woe, and stood sobbing, her face in her hands, her mother came in, made courageous by pity.
“My dearest child, tell me—what is it? You are breaking your heart and mine. Do you love him? Tell me, darling. Is it some hidden scruple? some fancy? Let me send for him,” poor Lady Paton’s thoughts dwelt longingly on amorous remedies.
“Love him? Sir Arthur? Are you mad, mother?” Camelia lifted a stern face. “He doesn’t enter my mind. He is nothing to me—simply nothing.”
“But, Camelia—you are miserable——”
“Ah! I have a right to that dreary liberty.”
“And—Oh don’t be angry, dearest—is there no one else?”
“No one else?” Camelia repeated it angrily indeed;—that her mother should give this stupid wrench to her heart was intolerable. “Of course there is no one else! How can you be so tiresome, mother. There—don’t cry. I am simply sick of everything—myself included, that is all that is the matter with me. Please don’t cry!” for sympathetic tears were coming into her own eyes, and above all things, she dreaded a breaking down of reserves, a weakened dignity that might bring her to a sobbing, maudlin confession, that would burn her afterwards, and follow her everywhere in the larger pity of her mother’s eyes.
Lady Paton, her handkerchief at her lips, pressed back her grief, saying in a broken entreaty, “But, Camelia—why? How long will it last? You were always such a happy creature.”
“How can I tell?” Camelia gave a little laugh that carried her over the vanquished sob to a certain calmness; leaning back against the mantelpiece she added, smiling drearily, “Don’t worry, mother; don’tyoube miserable.”
Lady Paton looked at her with eyes in which Camelia felt the unconscious dignity of an inarticulate reproof.
“Oh, my child!” she said, “my child! Am I not your mother? Is not your happiness my only happiness?—your sorrow my last and greatest sorrow? You forget me, dear, in your own grief. You shut me out—because you don’t love me—as I love you;—it is that that hurts the most.”
Camelia stood looking at her. Her artistic sensibility was decidedly impressed by this unexpected revelation of character. How well her mother’s white hair and cap looked on the pale greens of the room; the exquisite face, and the more exquisite soul looking from it. How well she had spoken; how truly too. Yes, her own worthlessness clung to her; she, so far inferior in moral worth, made this sweet, fragile creature unhappy; she was everything to her mother, the light that shone through and sustained the white petals of her flower-like being; and her mother was to her only a pretty detail. Camelia analyzed it all very completely, and resting on an achieved self-disgust she said, gravely contemplating her, “It is a great shame, mother. That is the way of this wretched world. The good people are always making beauty for the bad ones. You shouldn’t let that lovely, but most irrational maternal instinct dominate you; see me as I am, a horrid creature.” She paused, and all thoughts of artistic effects, all poetical and scientific appreciations, were blotted out in a flame-like leap of memory—“false, selfish, hard as a stone,” she said.
“Don’t say it, dear—you could not say it if it were so.”
“Oh, yes!—one can, if one has a devilish clearness of perception about everything. I am horrid—and I know that I am horrid. And you are very lovely. There.” And kissing her, Camelia pushed her gently to the door.
Perhaps, however, more than artistic sensibilities had been touched. Camelia shrank as quickly as before from any demonstration that seemed to looktoo closely at her heart, but she herself would make advances. She was only gentle, now, towards her mother; she never failed to kiss or caress her when they met. A cheerful coldness seemed at once her surest refuge and most becoming medium for an affection that could allow itself no warmer and more dangerous avowals. It was a colorless, still affection, held, as it were, from development, only felt by Lady Paton as a more careful kindness, and by Camelia as a new necessity for incurring no further self-reproach.
Poor Lady Paton, devouring her heart in sorrowful conjecture and helpless sympathy, had no thought but of her child; but by her side, Mary, the silent witness of her grief and anxiety, might have claimed, from disengaged eyes, a foreboding attention. Since the day of her stolen ride Mary had effaced herself in a shadowy taciturnity. She watched Camelia, and avoided her. Her absorption in every household duty became minutely forced. She slipped early to bed after a day of self-imposed labor. Work and its ensuing weariness, were the only sedatives for intolerable pain; she deadened herself with the drug. The weather was bad, and Lady Paton too depressed to rouse herself to her usual benignant activity. Mary took upon herself her Aunt’s abandoned occupations. She went every day to read to the paralyzed girl at the Manor Farm. She made the weekly round of visits through the wet village streets; consulted with the well-worked rector; kept an eye upon the school and almshouses. Mary was not particularly popular in the village. Her kindness was rather flat and flavorless; JaneHicks at the farm complained to her mother that Miss Fairleigh’s reading was “so dull like; one didn’t seem to get anything from it.”
Jane never forgot the one visit Miss Paton made her, nor how Camelia had sat beside her and kept her laughing the whole hour. Camelia, seeing the effect she made, had promised to return some day, but events had interfered, she now was in no mood for laughing, and Jane was always eager to question Mary about Camelia’s doings, and to sigh with the pleasant reminiscence of her “pretty ways.” Mary’s virtues were all peculiarly unremunerative, they sought, and obtained, no reward.
Towards the beginning of December Camelia’s despair threw itself into action. The rankling sense of Perior’s scorn at first stupefied, and at last roused her. Before him she had felt her powerlessness. His rocky negative had broken her. He would not change—not a thought of his changing stirred her deep hopelessness; but she herself might change—merit at least a friendship unflawed—cast off crueller accusations.
She must be good, she must struggle from the shell; she must realize, however feebly, his ideal. He would never love her—that delusion of her vanity he had killed forever; but he might be fond of her without a compunction.
Towards this comparatively humble attainment Camelia strove. How to be good was the question. Of course she would never tell lies any more—unless necessary lies of self-defence, in protection of her dear, her dreadful secret—Camelia could address it by both names; the love that sustained and mustlift her life, even he should never see again. After all, it was easy enough to tell the truth when one cared no more for any of the things gained by falseness. That was hardly a step upward. Some other mode of development must be found; Camelia pondered this necessity, and one day during a walk past Perior’s model cottages the thought came. She, too, would build cottages, beautiful cottages, more beautiful than his! She almost laughed at the delicious, teasing, old friendliness of that addenda.
The Patons’ estate boasted only very commonplace residences for its laborers, and delightful visions of co-operative farming, of idealized laboring conditions flashed joyously through Camelia’s mind. Vast fields of study opened alluringly, and, immediately in the foreground, these idyllic cottages. They bloomed with trellised flowers on the gray December landscape as she walked. The wall-papers were chosen by the time she reached home. She burst upon her mother in the firelit drawing-room at tea-time with an enthusiasm that made Lady Paton’s heart jump.
“Mother! Such an idea! I am going to build.”
Mary, who was toasting a muffin to hotter crispness before the fire, turned a thin, flushed face at the announcement.
“Build what, dear?” asked Lady Paton; while Mary, certain in one moment of what Camelia was going to build, and why, silently put the ameliorated muffin on the little plate by her aunt’s side.
“Cottages. Model cottages. Beautiful cottages—really beautiful, you know—Elizabethan; beams,white plaster, latticed windows, deep window-seats, and the latest modernity in drains and bath-tubs.”
“Like Michael’s, you mean,” said Lady Paton, a little bewildered; “his are not Elizabethan, but the drains and bath-tubs are very good, I believe.”
Camelia’s face changed when her mother spoke of “Michael;” and Mary, watching as usual, compressed her lips tightly. The cottages were to be built for him—with him! Ah! he would come back. Camelia would keep him—for building cottages, for adoring her; while she, Mary, would be thrust further and further away.
“Yes, like his, only better than his. My tenants shall be the best housed of the county.” Camelia threw herself into an easy-chair, and fixed her eyes thoughtfully upon the fire.
“It will be very expensive, dear.”
“Never mind; we’ll economize.”
Camelia had not so looked or spoken for weeks, and Lady Paton smiled a happy acquiescence.
Camelia took the cup of tea her cousin offered her without looking away from the fire, where she saw the cottages charmingly pictured, and she and Perior looking at them—friends.
“Your boots are wet, dear, are they not?” asked Lady Paton; “it has been raining.”
“They are wet, I think. Mary, just ring, will you? Grant must take them off down here. I am too tired, too comfortable, to go upstairs.”
Camelia sighed as though the fundamental heaviness of her mood rose through the seeming light-heartedness of tone; sighed, and yet the relief ofgetting outside herself was filling her with an exhilarating energy.
As she drank her tea, ate a muffin, Mary browning it nicely for her—“How cosy to have tea by ourselves,” said Camelia, “and toast our own muffins!”—she talked as she had not talked for a long time. Her mind ran quickly, escaping its miserable thraldom, from point to point of the project.
She pushed aside the tea-things to make with spoons and saucers a plan of the new scheme.
“That high bit of land, you know, with the beech woods behind it; I’ll have six of the cottages, with big gardens; and what a view from the front windows. I will furnish them, too. I must see an architect at once: I’ll go up to town for that, and talk it over with Lady Tramley. Where is her last letter, I wonder? I remember her asking me for some date; but that doesn’t matter. She wanted me to go out, and of course I won’t.” Camelia sprang up to rumple over the leaves of the blotter, the drawers of the writing-desk. “Where is the letter? In the library, I wonder?”
“There is a whole pile, dear, in the small cabinet. You did not care to look at them. I think they had better be gone over.”
“No; here is hers. I don’t care about the others. I don’t want to hear anything about any one,” Camelia added with some bitterness, as she dropped into her chair again and held out her foot to Grant, who had come in with the shoes. “Yes; she asks me for next week.”
“If you won’t go out, dear, it may be rather annoying for her.”
“Oh! she can get out of things herself while I am with her,” said Camelia easily, as her eyes skimmed over the letter.
The new impulse was too strong to be thwarted by the slightest delay. That evening Camelia sent off a bulky letter to Lady Tramley, much astonishing that good friend by her absolute ignoring of important facts in recent history. Sir Arthur was not so much as hinted at. The whole letter bristled with cottages, and Camelia’s earnestness panted on every page.
“She is going in for philanthropy, I suppose,” Lady Tramley conjectured, shaking her head with a patient smile over the small, flowing handwriting—Camelia hated untidy scrawls. “Let us help her. Camelia is sure to do something interesting in the way of cottages. She’ll carry them through like a London season.”
Lady Tramley, as may be gathered from these remarks, was one of Camelia’s admirers, though not a blind or bigoted one. She shook her head on many occasions, but Camelia’s defects were not serious matters to her gay philosophy, and Camelia’s qualities in this frivolous world, where nothing should be peered at too closely, were attractively sparkling. As a successful hostess Lady Tramley prized the charming Miss Paton.
“Now mind,” Camelia said on arriving at her friend’s house, “I am not going to be shown to any one. I am in a monastic frame of mind, and must be kept unspotted from the world. No dances or dinners, if you please,” and she fixed her with eyes really grave.
“Very well.” Lady Tramley acquiesced as to a humorous and pretty whim. “My doors are closed while you are here—as on a retreat. But when will the season of penance be over? We are all expiating with you, remember.”
“Do I imply penance? Is that the habit my retirement wears?”
“People give you credit for all sorts of niceties of feeling.” Lady Tramley smiled her significant little smile, a smile not lavished on the nothings of intercourse, and Camelia, taking her by the shoulders, shook her softly.
“No; sly as you are you get nothing out of me, and give me credit for nothing, please, not even for curiosity as to what peopledosay of me.”
“You know, dear, he is to meet, I fear, a second disaster as unmerited——”
Camelia had sat down to the tea-tray brought to refresh her after her journey. She looked up from the filling of her cup to meet in a glance the delicate directness of Lady Tramley’s look.
“Jack knows the ropes, of course, and I thought you ought to know too—and be sorry.” In her heart Lady Tramley hoped for an expansion of sorrow that would carry Camelia past her moment of inexplicable folly.
“I am sorry. The bill, you mean.” Camelia folded a slice of bread and butter, adding “Idiots.”
“Idiots indeed. It won’t be carried, I am afraid. There is a split in the Government, and Mr. Rodrigg has developed a really spiteful acrimony. I always hated that man.”
“Ah! I loathe him!” said Camelia. She thought with a pang of self-reproach of an unopened letter among the rejected pile—a letter for Mr. Rodrigg. She had not cared to read his shuffling excuses. His vanity, bulwarked by the strangely apt events succeeding his discomfiture, might well renew hope. He might imagine these events the result of remorse, and that, brought to a timely realization of her folly, his fair one would consent to bury the hatchet and allow his firm hand to tame her finally. All this Camelia had conjectured very rightly on looking at the fat envelope. She had restrained the direct rebuff of returning the unopened letter, but she had neither answered nor cared to read it, and could well imagine that Mr. Rodrigg’s cumulative humiliation would urge him to his only possible vengeance. The “I loathe him” was spoken with a most feeling intensity of tone.
“Yes.” Lady Tramley’s affirmative was meaning, and Camelia looked up alertly. “Lady Henge told me.”
“You know everything, I believe,” cried Camelia. “Well, I am in good hands.”
“I understand—your idea in it. But how unwise. How you mistook the man.”
“Rather! Ass that I am!”
“You looked for superlative chivalry, if you come to think of it.”
“No, for sincerity; common honesty. I thought I could convince him. I didn’t want chivalry without conviction. What did Lady Henge say of me?” Camelia added bluntly.
Lady Tramley replied very frankly, “She saidyou were a shallow jilt. I quite agreed with her inwardly—though I shamelessly defended you.”
“If I say that I agree with you both it will only savor of ostentatious humility—so I refrain. But, Lady Tramley, it was not the breaking of our engagement that was shallow—that I will say. And so the bill is doomed. Can we do nothing? Shear no Samson in the lobbies? Mr. Rodrigg, of course, offers no hirsute possibilities.”
“Not a hair. Your Mr. Perior will be disappointed. He came back from the Continent, you know, and put his shoulder to the wheel.”
Camelia stirred her tea evenly. Her nerves, as she felt with pride, were very reliable.
“OurMr. Perior then, is he not?” she asked, while her thoughts flew past Sir Arthur to nestle pityingly to Perior. His useless valiancy embittered her against the world of unconvinced opponents. Idiots indeed! But she could not see him yet; even her nerves were not yet tempered to a meeting. She had no comfortable background against which to present herself; when she did, the background must be so unfamiliar that for neither of them could there be the confusion of a hinted memory.
“Ours, by all means,” said Lady Tramley. “I only effaced myself before the paramount claim.—Not quite doomed. There is still the final fight, and it is to be heralded by a thunderous article in theFriday. Mr. Perior only goes down sword in hand.”
SO he was in London. Camelia, sitting at home in the library, could think of the nearness with a new calm. She was preparing herself to meet its closer approach. She was not leaving herself defenceless. She plunged into her reading—architecture, agriculture, decoration, and sociology. The books came down from London in heavy boxes, and she sat encompassed by the encouraging perfume of freshly-cut leaves.
“Are you happy, dear?” her mother asked her. She would come in with her usual air of deprecatory gentleness, and bend over the absorbed golden head that did not turn at her entrance. On this day the absorption wore a look of eager interest that seemed to justify the question.
Camelia finished her sentence, smiling, however, as she put her hand on her mother’s without looking up. Her mind, indeed, was soothed, comparatively comfortable.
“No rude questions, Mamma!”
“You understand all these solemn books?” Over her daughter’s shoulder, where she leaned, Lady Paton looked respectfully at the heavy volume.
“I am beginning to understand that whatever one does in philanthropy is wrong from the pointof view of some authority!” Camelia said, stretching herself on a long yawn, and then gently pinching her mother’s chin, while the smile dwelt upon her appreciatively, “As usual I find that the only thing to do in this world is to do just as one likes.”
“If one can,” said Lady Paton, with a half sad playfulness.
“If one can;” the words woke in Camelia a painfully personal affirmative, and with the wave of self-pity that swept through her mingled a sense of her mother’s unconscious pathos. Still holding her chin she looked up at her, “It has often beencan’twith you, hasn’t it?”
Lady Paton’s glance fluttered to a shy alarm and surprise at this application.
“With me, dear?”
“Yes—you have had to give up lots of things, haven’t you? to put up with any amount of disagreeable inevitables.”
“I have had many blessings.”
“Oh! of course! You would say that over your last crust! But it has been can’t with you, decidedly. I wonder if it was because you weren’t strong enough to have your own way!”
“That would be a bad way, surely.”
“Ah!—not yours!”
“And perhaps I have no way at all,” Lady Paton added, and Camelia was obliged to laugh at the subtle simplicity.
“That is being too submissive. Yet—it is comfortable, no doubt. Absolute non-resistance isn’t a bad idea. And yet, why shouldn’t one make one’s struggle?—survive if one is fittest? Why isnot having one’s own way as good as submitting to somebody else’s? Oh dear!” she cried.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, nothing; I am unfittest, that is all!” Camelia stared out of the window.
“What do you mean, dear?”
“I mean that I can’t have my own way—I, too, can’t. And it wasn’t a bad way either. There is the cruelty of it, the irony, the jeer! All the bad ways are given to me, and when I turn from them, don’t want them, and try for thebest—I don’t get it! Isn’t it intolerable?”
To Lady Paton this was wild, bewildering, pitiful, yet she grasped enough to say, “That would be the punishment, would it not, dear, for the bad ways?”
“Yes, the punishment. Like damnation. One has made one’s self too ugly—the best can’t recognize one at all.”
That evening the last number of theFriday Reviewlay on the drawing-room table. Perior had not written in it for some time, but with the quiver of the heart any association with him now gave her, Camelia picked up the paper and carried it to the fireside. Mary, sewing in the lamp’s soft circle of light, looked up quickly, and her hand paused with an outstretched thread as she saw Camelia’s literary fare.
Camelia turned the pages in a half fretful search for what she felt sure of not finding; then, abruptly, the rustling leaves came to a standstill. There was the article, at last! a long one, on the Factory Bill. Impossible to question the concise, laconic style;no one else wrote with such absolute directness, such exquisite choice, free from all hint of phrasing.
Camelia’s gray eyes kindled as she read, and her lips parted involuntarily; she drew quick, shallow little breaths. Oh! through it all went that fervor, that cold, bracing fervor she knew and loved.
Perior’s strong feeling was at times like a clear, indignant wind, sweeping before it cowering littlenesses. Her mind half forgot him as she read, conscious as was her heart. For the first time the intrinsic right of the bill was borne in upon her. She had glibly dressed its merits, laughing at her own theatrical dexterity. She had never really cared for any bill. Now it became the greatest, the only bill in the world. Her ardor rushed past the unfortunate initiator, to fall at the propagator’s feet. Ah! if she could but help now, and for his sake! Poor Sir Arthur!
Mary, who from her seat could just see, beyond the sharply held review, the lovely line of Camelia’s cheek, the little ear, set in its delicate closeness against the shining hair, Mary, intent on the rising color in this bit of cheek, had quite stopped sewing. Her pale eyes widened in a devouring significance, her lips set tightly on repressed pain. Mary, too, had read the article.
Coming to the end of it, Camelia slanted the paper downwards, and vaguely, over the top of it, looked at the fire. Then suddenly her eyes met Mary’s. A violent shock of self-consciousness shook her through and through. She felt herself snatch back her secret from a precipice edge ofrevelation—revelation to dull Mary, of all people. Mary, against whom, in regard to Perior, she had long felt—not knowing that she felt it—a strong, reasonless antagonism. She could not shake and slap her secret, as a frightened mother slaps and shakes her rescued child; but she could turn the terrified anger on its cause, and, in a strangely pitched voice, she said, “What are you staring at? You look like a spy!”
Mary gave a great start. If indeed she had been slapped outright her guilty amazement could not have been more cruel.
She stammered at a repetition of “staring”; but no words came. Her face was scarlet. Camelia was immediately sorry, but not one whit less angry, more so, perhaps, since pity is often an irritating ingredient; and, too, she felt that to any one less stupid her very outburst might have betrayed her. She was angry with herself as well as with Mary. Mary’s very helplessness was repulsive, and she hated to see her light blue eyes set in that scarlet confusion.
“Yes, staring;” she helped the stammering. “Is there anything you want to find out? Do ask, then. Don’t let your eyes skulk about in that sneaking fashion. It makes me quite sick to see you.”
Mary stood up, looking from side to side in a half-dazed way that Camelia observed with a pitying disgust that indeed sickened her. It reminded her of the gestures of an ugly animal wounded by a stone flung by some cruel boy. The simile came in a flash that it did not at the moment give her timeto complete it and see herself as stone-thrower. She felt relief, as well as an added dismay, when Mary broke suddenly into sobs, and stumbled out of the room, her sewing, caught in her skirt, following her with ungainly leaps. Only then Camelia realized that it was her own cruelty that sickened her; her irrational terror, breaking in upon a tender, thrilling absorption, had urged her to it, almost irresistibly; but now, the terror past, its foundationless folly apparent, she really felt quite sick as she still sat looking at the fire.
TheFriday Reviewsliding suddenly from her knees gave her a nervous pang that tingled to her finger-tips, and when she stooped to pick it up Perior’s personality seemed to confront her. She cowered before it. The hot blood beat in her head. Only by degrees, as her mind faltered over extenuations, did she quiet herself. Her hidden unhappiness—her love, it had been like a blundering hand thrust among her heart-strings; how could she have helped the sharp anger in which her naked anguish clothed itself? Lastly, but with a kind of shame, Mary’s displeasing personality made a subtle condonation; her inarticulate stupidity was almost infuriating. Not for one moment did her secret suspect Mary’s. Her own pain seemed already an expiation, and, in analyzing it, she could put Mary aside, promising herself that she would atone by a “Forgive me, Mary, I did not mean it,” the next time they met. She would even add, “I was a devil.” Her sigh of decision left her only half comforted.