SHE did not see Mary again until the next morning, and then Camelia gave herself the satisfaction of fulfilling an uncompulsory duty. Mary’s mask-like look of endurance met her apology with a dumb confusion that Camelia must assume as accepting it, since she could not imagine Mary as unforgiving.
Holding Mary’s hand she repeated with some insistence, “I was devilish, indeed I was. I don’t know what evil spirit entered me.”
Mary was acute enough to see the apology as a mere poultice on Camelia’s bruised conscience, but she did not divine the stir of real pity that had prompted it, nor the embarrassment that concealed itself, half ashamed, under Camelia’s bright smile, a smile like the flourishing finality at the end of a conventional letter.
Mary only shrank more coweringly from the circling advance of pain. In her solitude Camelia’s whip-like words and Camelia’s smile blended to the same scorching; words, Mary thought, so true, that no apology, no smile, could efface them. That Camelia had felt them true was a nightmare suspicion; the instinct for the truth had at least been there, and, like the wounded animal, Mary quaked in her warren, conscious of insecurity. Camelia soon forgot both cruelty and apology.
The news of the defeat of the bill brought her no shock, when it came late in January. She had regretted keenly her own interference for a long time, and found herself prepared to meet the blow with the quiet of exhausted feeling. Camelia was not given in these days to finding excuses for her faults, but she could see that this one had been venial, and escape an unjust self-reproach. It was certainly irritating to have Mrs. Jedsley rub in the undeserved sting.
Coming from the library one afternoon Camelia found this lady ensconced before the drawing-room fire, her muddy boots outstretched to the blaze—Mrs. Jedsley’s boots were chronically muddy—a muffin in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, her expression divided among the triple pleasure of warmth, tea, and interesting news.
“Well, my dear, you’ve all had your brushes cut off, it seems,” was her consolatory greeting.
Camelia sank into a chair, languidly detesting Mrs. Jedsley’s bad taste.
“You did so much for the cause, too, didn’t you?” said Mrs. Jedsley, deterred by no delicate scruples. “Come, Camelia, confess that it has been a tumble for you all!”
“Too evident a tumble I think to require confession.”
“And Mr. Rodrigg here for such a time! You are less clever than I thought you—don’t be offended—I mean it in a complimentary sense. Then, after all, it isn’t a brush you need mind losing. I never thought much of the bill myself.”
Camelia sat coldly unresponsive, and Lady Patontried to smile at Mrs. Jedsley’s remarks and to believe them purely humorous.
“I am sorry for poor Michael,” she said, “I fear he has taken it to heart.” This unconscious opening was only too gratefully seized upon by Mrs. Jedsley, who, after a meaning glance at Mary, fixed, over her tea-cup, sharp eyes on Camelia.
“Ah!” she said, “he is a man cut out for misfortunes—they all fit him. He is bound to fail in everything he undertakes.”
“I can’t agree with you there,” Camelia spoke acidly. “I think he succeeds at a great many things.”
“Things he doesn’t care about, then, you may be sure of that. Fortune follows such men like a stray dog they have no use for, while they are looking for their own lost pet.”
Camelia drank her tea in silence, priding herself somewhat on her forbearance, pondering, too, on the pathos of Mrs. Jedsley’s simile in which she could only see a purely personal applicability. It was not him the stray dog followed, but any number followed her—and it was she who had lost her all.
But would he not come back? Might she not see him again? To be with him—brave, self-controlled, and reticent, how well worth the fuller pain! Pain was so far preferable to these dragging mists where she waited. She might be—she must be—developing, but she must measure herself beside him to know just how much she had grown. It pleased her to see herself smiling sadly upon his unwitting kindness—for since he had thought it a folly he should think it now a folly outgrown. It pleasedher to think that now exterior things mattered less to her than to him; he, for all his self-defence of calm, still winced under the whips of material circumstance; no doubt he was now tearing his heart out over the defeat of the bill, and trying to persuade himself that he had always expected it! She saw all material circumstance with Buddhistic indifference. This thought dwelt pleasantly while she drank her tea. Looking from the window she saw the winter afternoon not yet gray, and her contemplative mood impatient of the chiming sharp and mild which her mother and Mrs. Jedsley made, she left them to go out. First, though, she bent over her mother and kissed her. It gave her content to find tender demonstration becoming more and more an unforced habit.
“Nice, pretty little mamma,” she whispered.
In her long coat, Siegfried trotting in front of her, Camelia breasted the tonic January wind. There was just a crispness of snow on the ground; in the lanes thin patches of ice made walking wary. She emerged from the shelter of the hedges on to the fine billowy stretch of common, where the wind sang, and the sunset in the west made a wide red bar. Siegfried’s adventurous spirit soon warmed him to an energetic gallop through the dead fern and heather, and Camelia followed his lead, intending to cut across to the highroad, and by its long curve return home. It was in lifting her eyes to this road that she saw suddenly a distant figure walking along it at a quick pace that would bring them together at the very point she aimed for. It needed only the very first brush of a glance to tell her that itwas Perior. For a moment joy and fear, courage and cowardice, pride and shame, struggled within her. Her step faltered, stopped even, and Siegfried stopping too, looked round at her, interrogation in the prick of his ears.
Camelia walked on slowly. Perior had seen and recognized her—that was evident. Whatever might be his own press of feeling he did not hesitate. He took off his cap and hailed her gaily, and Camelia felt that her answering hand-wave helped to prepare the way for a meeting most creditable to them both.
He did not fear the meeting, or would not show he did, for he advanced over the heather at a pace resolutely unembarrassed. In another moment they were face to face, and then she could see that his repressed a tremor, and was conscious that her own was, with the same attempt, a little rigid in its smile. Partly to recover from this shock of seeing her again, partly to give her time to recover from her own emotion, Perior raised her outstretched hand to his lips. He was so determined in his entrenched resistance to the lover he knew himself to be (the lover whose complaints had brought him rebelliously back again, his coming a sop angrily thrown at the uncontrollable gentleman on condition, that satisfied so far, he would keep still), so sure was Perior, the friend, of the bargain, that the kiss was most successfully friendly. It sealed delicately the bond he insisted on recognizing between himself and Camelia. His relief was great, in looking at her again, to see that she, too, fully recognized it, and that perhaps her couragewas helped by the fact that the mood—the astonishing mood—had passed. It would much simplify matters if it had. He longed to be with her again, a longing her tacit acquiescence in the old friendship could alone justify him in satisfying. That his coming had not been indelicately ill-judged the directness of her eyes seemed to assure him; but however much the friend might rejoice in believing that he alone had anything to conceal, the repressed lover, most inconsistently, felt a pang. Perior only consented to recognize his own contentment with the safe footing upon which he found himself.
Camelia smiled at him, and he smiled at her, smiles that might have been children kissing and “making up”; frank, and bravely light.
“I thought you were in London,” said Camelia. “No; come back, Siegfried, we are going no farther; for you were coming to us, I suppose, Alceste?” She could look at him quite directly. She was not ashamed, no, mercifully she was not ashamed, that was her jubilant thought. After the pang of the first moment she felt the strong conviction, borne in upon her by her own calmness, that her love for him could never shame her, nor her confession of it. The warm power of his friendship kept her from petty terrors. She felt, in a moment, that on her courage depended their future relationship. To ignore the past, to make him ignore it, would be to regain, to keep her friend.
“Yes, I was going to you—of course,” said Perior, smiling, as they went towards the road together.
“I have been to Italy, you know, but I came back some time ago. I thought I might be of use.”
“Ah! I should have liked to have been of use! but I had been too badly bitten to dare put out a finger!”
“I wouldn’t put out fingers, if I were you; it isn’t safe—when, they are so pretty.” The intimacy was almost caressing; she leaned against it thankfully. Proud to show him that of the crying child there was not a trace, she determined on a swift glance at the past that would put him quite at ease.
“And you are coming back? Since this dreary business of the worsted right is over you won’t exile yourself any longer—and rob us? All your friends will be glad to have you again!”
“Will they indeed?” his eyes sought hers for a moment, seemed to see in them the past’s triumphant mausoleum, presented for inspection quite magnificently.
“Thanks, Camelia.” The boldness delighted him, delighted all of him except that grumbling prisoner who, in his dungeon, felt foolishly aggrieved. “Yes, I am coming back—since I am welcome,” he said, adding while they went along the road, “As for the worsted right, the right usually is worsted, in the first place. One must try to keep one’s faith in eventual winning.”
“Tell me,” said Camelia, feeling foundations quite secure, since each had helped the other, “Mr. Rodrigg’s opposition, that last speech of his—the satanic eloquence of it!—you don’t think—ah! say you don’t think me altogether responsible?”
“Would it please you—a little—to think you were?” The old rallying smile pained her.
“Ah, don’t! That has been knocked out of me—really! Don’t imply such a monstrous perversion of vanity.”
“I retract. No, Camelia, I don’t think youaltogetherresponsible. The eloquence would always have been against us, its satanic quality was, I fear, your doing.”
“Yet, I meant for the best—indeed I did. Say you believe that.”
“Indeed, I do believe it, Camelia.”
They were nearing home when he said, “You were in London—I heard from Lady Tramley.”
“Yes, I went up on business.”
“Did you? How are Lady Paton and Mary?”
“Very well. You don’t ask about my business,”—Camelia smiled round at him.
“Very blunt in me. What was the business, Camelia?” His answering smile made amends.
Camelia placed herself against her background.
“I am building model cottages! You should see how economical we have become!Yourglory is diminished!”
“With all my heart!” cried Perior, with a laugh of real surprise and pleasure. “Lady Tramley did not tell me. Good for you, Célimène!”
It was delightful to bring him into the drawing-room that she had left only an hour before. Camelia almost fancied herself perfectly happy as she flung open the door with the announcement—
“Here is Alceste, Mamma!” No nervousness was possible before her mother and Mary; it requiredno effort to act for them since she had so successfully performed her part to him. Mrs. Jedsley was gone, but Mary and Lady Paton sat before the fire, Mary reading aloud. She dropped the book; Camelia’s voice, in her ears, sounded with a brazen clang of victory, and Perior seemed to her conquered, brought captive in an old bondage. She could hardly speak, hardly welcome him; his return crushed every hope of his liberation, the joy of seeing him was a mere desolation. With a settled dulness she listened to them—all three talking and exclaiming.
Perior had taken her hand, had shaken it warmly, looking at her with kindest eyes; but now he listened to Lady Paton, and Lady Paton, of course, after the first flood of rejoicing, condolences, and questionings, was talking of Camelia.
The resentment that had smouldered in Mary for many months seemed now to leap, and lick her heart with little flames of hatred. How she hated Camelia; she turned the black thought quite calmly in her mind—it was not unfamiliar.
Lady Paton was telling Perior about the cottages; she was rather proud of Camelia’s beneficent schemes, though gently teasing her about some of their phases: “And, Michael, she is going to make them into veritable palaces of art. Specially designed furniture—and Japanese prints on the walls! Now they won’t care about prints, will they?”
“They ought to, Camelia thinks,” laughed Perior, looking at Camelia, who, hat and coat thrown aside, leaned forward in the lamplight, smiling and radiant,the pathos that her thinner face had gained emphasizing its enchanting loveliness.
Mary looked at her too, at the curves of the figure in the perfect black dress, at the narrow white hands, one lying on her knee, like a flower, with the almost exaggerated length and delicacy of the fingers; at the profile, the frank upraised eyes, the smiling mouth, the flashing white and gold that rose from the nun-like white and black of the dress, and the wide cambric collar falling about her shoulders and clasping her throat. Beautiful! Mary felt the beauty with a sort of sickening. Of course he looked at her, had no eyes but for her. Of course he had come back.
“They must like them,” said Camelia, “I don’t see why such people should not grow into good taste; and taste is often such a negative thing—a mere leaving out of all ugliness. I have a lot of these prints; I picked them up in Paris—the arcade of the Odion, Alceste—cheap things, but excellent in their way; then a few good photographs. The rooms are to be very bare. I should ask for all decoration a vase of flowers on the table—I think I shall offer prizes to my cottagers for the best arrangement of flowers.”
“A very civilizing system!” Perior still laughed, for he found the prints and the flower-arrangements highly amusing, and he still looked at Camelia.
So that first meeting was over. It had passed so easily, with an inevitable ease, based on long years that would not be disowned. Yet when he had gone, Camelia was conscious of a sinking of the heart. The exhilarating moment could not last.Her friend had come back, fond, gently mocking, tender, yet unimpressed, blind to the change in herself she passionately clung to as consummated. As her love was noble, she thought that she had grown to match it. Her self-complacency, though on a higher plane, circled her more completely, and as the days went on, his blindness gave her a new sense of defeat. The ease remained, a tacit agreement to shut their eyes on a certain incident; it was done most successfully; they were quite prepared to meettête-à-tête, and the inner wonder of each as to the other’s unconsciousness betrayed itself only in a certain gentle formality that grew between them. That he should come—and so often—fulfilled the only hope left her, and yet her heart was darkened at moments by the thought that in these visits there was an effort. She missed something of the old intimacy; it was not quite the same—how could it be? that, after all, would have been too big a feat of forgetfulness. He did not laugh at her, nor grow angry and rage at her, as he had used to do, yet she could not feel that he approved of her the more. He was fond of her—that was evident, even though he might find this rebuilding difficult, and undertake it from a sense of duty; but the fondness was graver than before, at least, it made no pretence of hiding its gravity.
MARY came for Camelia one morning while Perior was with her, to tell her that Jane Hicks was dying and asking for her. Mary saw that Camelia’s promptitude, where compunction blushed, gratified Perior, as did Jane’s devotion; she knew that he supposed the devotion based upon some new blossoming of thoughtful kindness in Camelia, and the ironic bitterness of this reflection was in no way made easier to Mary as she heard Camelia, while they all three walked to the farm, confess dejectedly to the one visit.
“I should have gone again!” Camelia repeated with sincerest self-reproach, and Mary could see that though he assented to the reproach her contrition lifted her in his estimation. Perior waited below while Camelia and Mary went up together. Camelia came down weeping; Mary’s face was quite impassive.
The poor girl had died with her hand in Camelia’s, her eyes fixed on the lovely Madonna head that bent over her with a beautiful piteousness, like a vision at the gates of heaven. Jane closed her eyes on that vision. She had not had one look for Mary, though her perfunctory thanks—the winding up of the trifling duties remaining to her on earth—had been feebly breathed out to her some hours before. Marysaw that she had been very unnecessary to Jane, and that the unknown Camelia, Camelia’s one smile, the one golden hour Camelia’s beauty had given her, made the brightness, the poetry, the symbolized radiance of things unseen and hoped for that had remained with the dying girl during the last months of her life. Mary was very still in walking back with the others. Camelia sobbed, and stumbled in the heavy road, so that Perior gave her his arm and held her, looking pityingly, more than pityingly, at the bent head and shaking shoulders. Mary felt her own lack of emotion to be unbecoming, but, indeed, she had none, was conscious instead of a dislike for poor, dead Jane.
For Mary was a most unhappy creature. Outside the inner circle, where Perior and Camelia wondered about, and evaded, one another, the very closeness of constant intercourse making blindness easy, Mary saw the truth, that Camelia did not see, very clearly. With her preconceived and half-mistaken ideas as to that truth, it remained one-sided. Perior loved Camelia; loved, and had weakly crawled back to her, craving at least the crumbs of friendship,—and that she was lavish with her crumbs who could deny?—since all else had been refused to him. Mary spent her days in a quivering contemplation of this fact. The bitter, sweet consolation of the whole truth never entered her mind. Camelia loving, and Camelia repulsed, was an imagining too monstrous for vaguest embodiment. Camelia’s own naïve vanity would not have surpassed in stupefaction Mary’s sensations, had such a possibility been suggested to her. Camelia, who could have anybody, love Mr.Perior? She would have voiced her astonishment even more baldly. Not that Mary thought Mr. Perior nobody. To her he was everybody; but that knowledge was her painful joy, a perception lifting her above Camelia. Camelia judged by the world’s gross standards, and, by those standards, she must stoop in loving Perior.
That Camelia should stoop in the world’s eyes, that Camelia should do anything but soar, were unimaginable things. So her ignorance made her knowledge more bitter. The man she loved, adored,—her bleached, starved nature spreading every flower, stretching every tendril, her ideal and her rapture towards him,—that man did not see her, even. She was no one; a dusty little moth beating dying wings near the ground, and his eyes were fixed on the exquisite butterfly tilting its white loveliness in the sunshine. Under her stolid silence Mary was burning, panting. His misery, her doom, and Camelia’s indifference,—at the thought of all these a madness of helpless rebellion swam about her; and with a growing sense of weakness came a growing terror of self-betrayal. For she was dying, that was Mary’s second secret; there was even a savage pleasure in the thought of absolute and consummated wretchedness hidden so carefully. Hysterical sobs rose in her throat when she thought of it, and of their blindness. The sobs were nearly choking her one day as she sat alone in the morning-room casting up accounts.
Perior had been with Camelia in the library for two hours, and he had not come into the morning-room, though over two hours ago poor Mary hadstationed herself there in the sorry hope of seeing him. The little touch of abandonment stabbed more deeply than ever on this morning, when her head was so heavy, her chest so hollow, breathing so difficult, all her sick self so in need of pitying gentleness and sympathy; and though no tears fell, that rising, strangling sob was in her throat. There was shame, too; her very rectitude was crumbling in her weakness and wretchedness; the wretchedness had seemed to exonerate her when, exasperated by envy and long waiting, she had gone to the library door and put her ear to the key-hole, like a base thing, to listen.
Since everything had abandoned her she might as well abandon herself, so she told herself recklessly; but she had only heard Camelia’s clear, sweet voice; and Camelia was reading Greek! Mary could only feel the irony as cruel, and on regaining her place at the writing-table she found herself shaking, and overwhelmed with self-disgust and a sort of desperation.
When Perior came in very shortly afterwards she could almost have risen to meet him with a scream of reproach. The mere imagining of such a strange revelation made her dizzy as he approached her.
“I had not seen you. I am just off. How are you, Mary?” he asked. In spite of the mad imaginings Mary’s mask was on in one moment, the white, stolid mask, as she turned her face to him.
“Very well, thanks.”
“You don’t look very well.”
“Oh, I am, thanks.” Mary averted her eyes.
Perior’s brow had an added look of gloom this morning. His eyes followed hers. The drizzlingrain half blotted out the first faint purpling of the trees. “What a dreary day!” he ejaculated, with a long, involuntary sigh. He was not thinking of Mary; she saw that very plainly, though her eyes were fixed on the blurred tree-tops.
“Very dreary,” she echoed. He looked down at her again, this time with a certain pain and interest that Mary did not see. On his own thoughts, the perplexing juggling of “If she still loves me as I love her, why resist?” the ensuing fear of yielding, and yielding for no better reason than that he could not resist, broke the thought of Mary. It could not be a very big thought. Mary was a quiet, uneventful little person, spending a contented existence under her aunt’s wings, useful often as a whip wherewith to lash Camelia, but pitiful mainly from his sense of the contrast of which he really believed Mary quite unconscious. Something, now, in her still face, in the lax weariness of her thin hand, lying on the account book, roused in him a groping instinct. He looked at the hand with a certain surprise. Its thinness was remarkable.
“You do look badly, Mary,” he said. “Tell me, are you dreary, too? Can I do anything for you? We must have some rides when it grows finer.” His thoughts, as usual, gave Camelia an accusing blow.
“You are bored, tired, unhappy like the rest of us, Mary. Is that any consolation?” He smiled at her. She felt the smile in his voice, but did not dare to meet it, bending her head over the account books.
“Don’t do those stupid sums!”
“Oh, I like them!” Indeed, the scrupulousduties were her one frail barrier against the black sea of engulfing thought. And then, her heart just rising in the false but delicious joy of his kind presence, came a call, a call not dreary like the day, but fatally sweet and clear, the sound of it as if a flower had suddenly flung open rosy petals on the grayness.
“Alceste, come here! I want you.”
“Our imperious Camelia,” said Perior with a slight laugh. “Well, good-bye, Mary. Don’t do any more sums, and don’t look at the rain. Get a nice, cheerful book and sit down at the fire. Amuse yourself, won’t you?” He clasped her hand and was gone.
Mary sat quite still, moving her pen in slow curves, waves, meaningless figures over the paper. The arrested sob seemed frozen, and no tears came. She looked dully at the black zigzags on the paper while she listened to the distant sound of voices in the hall, Camelia’s laugh, a lower tone from Perior, Camelia’s cheerful good-bye.
A sudden fit of coughing seized her, and while she shook with it Camelia came in. Mary’s coughing irritated Camelia, but she did not want to hurt her feelings by departing before it after getting the newspaper she had come for, so, walking to the table, she said, taking up and opening theTimeswith a large rustling—
“All alone, Mary?”
“Yes,” Mary replied. The coughing left her, and she clenched her handkerchief in her hand. The madness rose again, lit by a keener sense of horror.
“But Mr. Perior came in, did he not?” Camelia scanned the columns, her back to the light.
“Yes,” Mary repeated.
“Well, what did he have to say?” Camelia felt her tone to be satisfactorily detached. She wanted to know. That sense of something lacking, something even awkward, had become almost acute this morning; only her quiet gaiety had bridged it over. Mary was again looking out of the window. An inner impulsion made her say in a tone as dull as her look—
“He said he was dreary.”
TheTimesrustled with a somewhat aggressive effect of absorption, and then Camelia laid it down. Something in Mary’s voice angered her; it implied a sympathy from which she was to be shut out; he had not said toherthat he was dreary. But she still kept her tone very light as she walked to the fire.
“Well, he is always that—is he not?” she commented, holding out a foot to the blaze; “a very glum person indeed is my good Alceste.”
Mary did not reply, and Camelia, with a quick turn of conjecture that seemed to cut her, wondered if there had been further confidences. She paused for a moment, swallowed on a rising tremor of apprehension, before saying, as she turned her back to the fire and faced the figure at the table—the figure’s heavy uncouthness of attitude making her a little angrier—“What further moans did my melancholy friend pour into your sympathetic bosom, Mary?” Mary, looking steadily out of the window, felt the flame rising.
“He said that he was bored, tired, unhappy.”
After a morning spent withher!Camelia claspedher hands behind her back, and tried to still her quick breathing. She eyed Mary, but she did not think much of Mary.
“Really!” she said.
“Yes. Really.” Suddenly Mary rose from her chair; she clutched the chair-back. “Oh, you cruel creature! you bad creature!” she cried hoarsely.
Camelia stared, open-mouthed.
“Oh, you bad creature,” Mary repeated. Camelia never forgot the look of her—the ghastly white, stricken out of sharp shadows, the splash of garish color on either cheek, the pale intensity of her eyes. She noticed, too, the sharp prominence of Mary’s knuckles as she clutched the chair-back, and in her amazement stirred a certain, quite different discomfort. She could find no words, and stared speechlessly at the apparition.
“You are cruel to every one,” said Mary. “You don’t care about any one. You don’t care about your mother—or abouthim, though you like to have him there—loving you; you don’t care about me—you never did—nor thought of me. Well, listen, Camelia. I am dying; in a month I will be dead; andIlove him. There! Now do you see what you have done?”
A fierce joy filled her as she spoke the words out. To tear the bleeding tragedy from its hiding-place, and make Camelia shudder, scream at it—it brought relief, lightness; she breathed deeply, with a sense of bodily dissolution; and Camelia’s look was better than screams or shudders. Let the truths go like knives to the heart that deserved them. As she spoke Mary felt her wrongs gather around her likean army. She had no fear. She straightened herself to send to her cousin a solemn look of power.
“You did not know I was dying; of course you would not know it—for you think of nothing but yourself. There, do you see that handkerchief? I have been coughing blood for a long time. Nothing can be done for me. You know how my father died. And when I am dead, Camelia, you may say to yourself, ‘I helped to make the last year of her life black and terrible—quite hideous and awful.’ Yes; say it. Perhaps it will make you feel a little badly.” With the words all the anguish of those baffled, suffering months came upon her. The sobs rose, panting; the tears gushed forth. Staggering, she came round the chair and dropped into it, and her sobs filled the silence.
Camelia stood rooted in terror. She expected to see the sudden horror fulfil itself, to see Mary die before her eyes, Mary’s curse upon her, and all her misdeeds one vague, menacing blackness. To clutch at any doubt was impossible. From the first moment of her uprising Mary’s body had been like a shattered casket from which streamed a relentless light. Camelia’s eyes were unsealed; she saw that the casket was shattered—the light convicted her.
“What have I done?” she gasped. “Tell me, Mary, what is it?”
She found a difficulty in speaking. She did not dare approach her cousin.
“I will tell you what you have done,” said Mary, raising her head, and again Camelia felt the hoarse intentness of her voice, like a steady aiming of daggers. “You have taken from me the one thing—the only thing—I had. I love him! He is nothing to you; and you took him from me.”
“Oh, Mary! Took him from you!”
“Yes, yes; you did not know. He did not know.Isaw it all. He might have loved me had you not come back. He must have loved me, when I loved him so much! oh, so much!” and, sobbing again, she pressed to her eyes the blood-stained handkerchief, careless now of its revelations.
“Oh, Mary!” cried Camelia, shuddering.
“I was so happy last winter. He would come and read, and ride. He was so kind. Auntie, and he, and I—it was the happiest time of my life. But you came, and he never looked at me again! Oh, how horrible! how unjust! Why should you have everything?—I nothing! nothing! I suppose you thought me contented, since I was ugly, and poor, and stupid. And you, because you are beautiful, and rich, and clever, you have everything! That is all that counts! I am not selfish and cruel; at least, I used not to be. I have thought about other people always! I have tried to do right, and what have I got for it? My life has been a cheat! and I hate it! And I am glad to die, because I see that you, who are bad, get all the love, and that I will never have anything! And I see that I am bad—that I have been made bad through having had nothing!”
“Oh, Mary! forgive me! oh, forgive me!” Camelia found her knees failing beneath her. She stretched her clasped hands towards her cousin.
“I did not know; indeed, I did not! Indeed, Ilove you, Mary!—oh, I do love you! We all love you!” She felt herself struggling, with weak, desperate hands, against Mary’s awful fate and her own guilt. “How can you say that, when we all love you? know how good you are!—how sweet and good—love you for it!” She buried her face in her hands, sobbing. Mary, who herself no longer sobbed, observed her.
“Oh, you are a little sorry now,” she said, in a voice of cold impassiveness that froze Camelia’s sobs to instant silence. “I make you uncomfortable—a little more uncomfortable than when I cough. It is strange that when I never did you any harm—always tried to please you—you should have found pleasure in hurting me. Do you remember all the little jeers at me before him? You mocked my dulness, my ugliness. He did not laugh. It made him sad, because he did not like to see you unbeautiful in anything; but he must have seen me more stupid, more ugly than before. And when he was with me for one moment you would take him away. And you lied to keep him to yourself, like that day we were to have ridden together; and if you had known that I loved him you would have been all the more anxious to have him—to hurt me.”
“No, no, Mary!” Camelia’s helpless sobs burst out again.
“Yes; why can I speak to you like this? because I am dying, you see that I am dying—that gives me my only advantage; I can tell you what I think of you, and you don’t dare reply. You would not dare say to me now that I am a spy—that I have sneakingeyes. I hate you, Camelia! I hate you! Oh! oh!” She rose to her feet suddenly, and at the change of tone—the wail—Camelia uncovered her eyes.
“I am going to die! I am going to die! And I love him, and he does not care.” Mary groped blindly to a sofa, fell upon it, buried her head in the cushions.
Camelia rose to her feet, for she had been kneeling, and stood listening to the dreadful sobs.
Her life had never known a comparable terror. The blackness of Mary’s point of view encompassed her. She felt like a murderer in the night. She crept towards the sofa. “Oh, forgive me, say a word to me.”
“Leave me; go away. I hate you.”
“Won’t you forgive me?” The tears streamed down Camelia’s cheeks.
“Go away. I hate you,” Mary repeated. There was a compulsion in the voice Camelia could not disobey. Trembling and weeping she went out of the room.
Mary lay there sobbing. She had never so realized to the full the extent and depth of her woe, yet there was relief in the realization, relief in the flinging off of secrecy and shame. That Camelia should suffer, however slightly, restored a little the balance of justice, satisfied a little the outraged sense of solitary suffering, atoned a very little for fate’s shameful unfairness. To poor Mary, sobbing over her one triumph, the morality of the universe seemed a little vindicated now that she had taken into her own hand the long-delayed lash of vengeance.
Her weakened religious formalities and conventionalities withered under this devouring, pagan flame. It was good to hate, and to revenge one’s self, good to see the smooth and smiling favorite of the cruel gods, weeping and helpless. She was tired of rightness—tired of swallowing her tears.
The best thing in her life had been turned against her; everything was at war with her. Well, she would crouch no longer, she would die fighting, giving blow for blow. She threw her hands up wildly in thinking of it all—beat them down into the cushions. To have had nothing, nothing, and Camelia to have everything! Oh, monstrous iniquity! Camelia, who had done no good, happy; she, who had done no wrong, unutterably miserable.
For a long time she lay sobbing, still beating her hands into the cushion, a mechanical symbolizing of her rebellion and wretchedness. So lying, all the blackness of the past and future surging over her, engulfing her, she heard outside the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the wet gravel. A moment afterwards running footsteps came down the stairs and crossed the hall. Mary pulled herself up from the sofa, and, with the outer curiosity of utter indifference, walked to the window. Camelia’s horse stood before the door, a groom at his head. The drizzling mist shut out all but the nearest trees, flat, pale silhouettes on the white background, against which the horse’s coat gleamed, a warm, beautiful chestnut. Mary’s indifference grew wondering. Her sobs ceased as she gazed. The gaze became a stare, hard, fixed, as Camelia, in a flash, sprang to the saddle. Mary saw her profile, bent impatiently,the underlip caught between her teeth, the brows frowning, while the groom adjusted her skirt. In a moment she was off at a quick trot, and soon a sound of galloping died down the avenue.
Mary stood rigidly looking after the sound. A supposition, too horrible, too hideous, had come to her, too hideous, too horrible not to be true. Its truth knocked, fiercely insistent, at her heart. Her knowledge of Camelia, acute yet narrow, and confused by this latter suffering, sprang at a bound to the logical deduction.
Camelia could not bear suffering, revolted against it, snatched at any shield. She had gone now to Perior, that he might lift from her this dreadful load of responsibility, cast upon her so cruelly by Mary. He must tell her that he had never thought of Mary, and that the idea of robbery was a wild figment of Mary’s sick brain. Mary’s brain, though sick, was clear, clear with the feverish lucidity that sees all with a distinctness glaring and magnified. She saw all now. The meanness, the cowardice of Camelia’s proceeding only gave a deepened certainty.
Then indeed shame came upon Mary. She saw herself gibbeted between them, knew too well what he would think. He would himself hang her up, since truth demanded it, and since Camelia must be comforted. The glaring lucidity dazzled Mary a little at times, and now the awful justice of Perior’s character assumed in her eyes a Jove-like cruelty, that more than matched Camelia’s dastardliness. The past hour seemed painless in comparison with the present moment; its blackness, in looking backat it, was gray. To be debased, utterly debased, in his eyes—that was to drink the very dregs of her cup of agony. Her hatred of Camelia was her only guide in the night. She went into the hall and took down her hat and cloak. She could not wait for Camelia’s return. She must herself see the actuality of her betrayal. Camelia might lie unless she could hold the truth before her face; might say that she had not ridden to Perior’s. Mary would see for herself, and then—oh then! confronting Camelia, she would find words, if she died in speaking them.
She ran down the avenue and turned off into the woods by a short cut that led more directly than the curving high road to the Grange. Her weakness was braced by the fierceness of her purpose. She felt herself a flame, hastening relentlessly through the smoke-like mist.
The woods were cold and wet. She pushed past dripping branches, splashed through muddy pools; the inner fire ignored its panting frame. When she arrived at the foot of the hill on which stood the Grange, she knew that Camelia must have been with him there for an hour or more. She could not see the house through the heavy atmosphere, but, hidden by the trees and fog, she could see the road and be herself unseen. On the edge of the wood was a little stile; she shuddered with wet and cold as she sat down on it to wait. She would wait for Camelia to pass, and then, by the same hidden path, she could go home and confront her. Beyond that crash Mary did not look. It seemed final.
BUT Mary was quite mistaken—as absolute logic is apt to be when dealing with human beings. Camelia, indeed, had gone to Perior, but on a very different errand from the one Mary’s imagination painted for her. Camelia was not thinking of herself, nor of throwing off the iron chains of that responsibility with which she felt herself manacled for life. Mary’s story had crushed every thought of self, beyond that consciousness of riveted guilt. It was of Mary alone she thought as she galloped through the mist. With terror and pity infinite she looked upon Mary’s love and the approaching death that was to end it; their tragedy filled everything, and at the feet of the majestic presences her own personality only felt itself as a cowering criminal. It was as though the ocean of another’s suffering had flooded the complacent rivers of her life. They overflowed their narrow channels; they were engulfed, effaced in the mighty desolation; never again could they find their flowering banks, their sunny horizons.
This moan of a suffering universe, heard before only in vaguest whispers, the minor key of the happy melody that she had known, making the melody all the sweeter for its half-realized web of sadness—this moan was now like the tumult of great waters aboveher head, and a loud outcrying of her awakened soul answered it. She was guilty—yes, as guilty as Mary knew her to be, for all the mistaken deductions of Mary’s ignorance. She loved Perior, and he didnotlove her; but those facts in no way touched the other unalterable facts—a cruelty, a selfishness, a blindness, hideous beyond words.
Yet now she did not think of this guilt, irrevocable as it was.
Mary—Mary—Mary. The horse’s hoofs seemed to beat out the cry! Mary and her fate. Camelia stood with Mary against that fate; but her attitude of rebellion was even fiercer, more determined than poor Mary’s flickering light could have sustained. Mary good—with nothing. Virtuenotits own reward. Suffering, crushing, unmerited suffering, eating away the poor empty life. She herself bad, and the world at her feet. Camelia felt herself capable of taking the immoral universe by the throat and shaking it to death—herself along with it.
She was galloping for help, yes, to Perior. He must help her, he alone could help her, to clutch the malignant cruelty, tear it off Mary, and then give her some gleam of happiness before she died. Camelia straightened herself in the saddle at the thought. “She shall not die,” clenched her teeth on the determination. She might be saved. Who could tell? One heard of wonderful cures. And at least, at least, she should not die unhappy. Camelia would wrench happiness for her out of despair itself. She would fight the injustice of the gods until her last breath left her.
All the pitiful humanity in Camelia clung to thehuman hope of retribution and reward. Her mind fixed in this desperate hope, she could take no thought of the coming interview; that would have implied a retrospective glance at her last visit to the Grange, and Camelia could not think of herself, nor even of Perior.
The Grange was desolate on its background of leafless trees. Camelia, as she dismounted at the door, looked down at the whiteness which brimmed the valley; the tree-tops emerged from it as from a flood; but where she stood there was no mist—a clear, sad air, and a few faint patches of blue in a colorless sky above. She rang, holding the horse’s reins over her arm. Her habit was heavy with the wet, and her loosened hair clung damply about her throat and forehead. Old Lane, when he appeared, showed some alarm. She could infer from his expression what her own must be.
“Mr. Perior? Yes, Miss; in the laboratory with Job Masters. Just go up, Miss, and I’ll take the horse round to the stables.”
The laboratory was at the top of the house. Camelia found herself panting from the swiftness of her ascension when she reached the door. Entering, she faced the white light from the wide expanse of window, which overlooked on bright days miles of wooded, rolling country, to-day the sea of mist. Perior’s back was to her, and he was bending with an intent interest over a microscope; a collection of glass jars was on the table, and Job Masters, his elementary features lit by the intelligent gravity of close attention, was standing beside him. Perior was saying—
“Now, Job, take a look at it.” His gray head did not turn.
“It’s Miss Paton, sir,” Job volunteered. At that Perior rose hastily, and Camelia advancing, looked vaguely at Job, at the microscope, at the jars of infusoria.
A thought of the last visit had shot painfully through Perior on hearing her name, but, after one stare at her white face, his fear, freed from any selfish terror, took on a sympathetic acuteness.
“I must speak to you,” she said.
“Very well. You may go, Job,” and as Job’s heavy footsteps passed beyond the door, “What is it, Camelia?” he asked, holding her hands, his anxiety questioning her eyes.
For a moment, the press of all that must be said crowding upon her, of all that must be said with a self-control that must not waver or misinterpret through weakness, Camelia could not speak. She looked at him with a certain helplessness.
“Sit down, you are faint,” said Perior, greatly alarmed, but, shaking her head, she only put her hand on the back of a chair he brought forward.
“I have something terrible to tell you, Michael.” That she should use his name impressed him even more than her announcement, emphasized the gravity of the situation in which he was to find himself with her. In the ensuing pause their eyes met with a preparatory solemnity.
“Michael, Mary is dying.” He saw then that her eyes seized him with a deep severity of demand. The shock, though not unexpected, found him unprepared.
“She knows it?” he asked.
“Yes, she knows it. Listen. She told me everything. It was more horrible than you can imagine. She told me how cruel I had been to her—how I had neglected her—how I had cut again and again into her very soul. She hates me, she hates her life, but she is afraid of death. She is not going to die happily, hopefully, as one would have thought Mary would die. She is dying desperately and miserably, for she sees that being good means merely being trodden on by the bad. She has had nothing, and she regrets everything.” Perior dropped again into the chair by the table. He covered his eyes with his hands.
“Poor child! Unhappy child!” he said.
The shuddering horror of the morning came over Camelia. She clasped her hands, pressing them against her lips. It seemed to her suddenly that she must scream.
“What does it mean? What does a life like that mean?” Her eyes, in all their helpless guilt and terror, met his look of non-absolving pity.
“It means that if one is good one is often trodden upon. We must accept the responsibility for Mary’s unhappiness. My poor Camelia,” Perior added, in tones of saddest comprehension, and he stretched out his hand to her. But Camelia stood still.
“Accept it!” she cried, and her voice was sharp with the repressed scream. “Do you think I am trying to shirk it? Do you think that I do not see that it is I—I, who trod upon her? Don’t say ‘We’; say ‘You,’ as you think it. You need haveno compunctions. I could have made her happy—happier, at least, and I have made her miserable. I have done—said—looked the cruellest things—confiding in her stupid insensibility. I have crushed her year after year. I am worse than a murderer. Don’t talk of me—even to accuse me; don’t think of me, but think ofher. Oh, Michael! let us think of her! Help me to mend—a little—the end of it all!”
“Mend it?” He looked at her, taken aback by her words, the strange insistence of her eyes. “One can’t, Camelia—one can’t atone for those things.”
“Then you mean to say that lifeisthe horror she sees it to be? She sees it! There is the pity—the awful pity of it! Not even a merciful blindness, not even the indifference of weakness! Morality is a gibe then? Goodness goes for nothing—is trampled in the mud by the herd of apes snatching for themselves! That is the world, then!” The fierce scorn of her voice claimed him as umpire. Perior put his hand to his head with a gesture of discouragement.
“That is the world—as far as we can see it.”
“And there is no hope? no redemption?”
“Not unless we make it ourselves—not unless the ape loses his characteristics.” He paused, and a deepened pity entered his voice as he added, “You have lost them, Camelia.”
“Yes; I can hear the canting moralist now, with his noisome explanation of vice and misery. Mary has been sacrificed to savemysoul, forsooth!Mysoul!”
“Yes.” Perior’s monosyllable held neither assent nor repudiation.
“Yes? And what does my miserable soul count for against her starved and broken life?”
“I don’t know. That is for you to say.”
“I say that if virtue is to give a reward to vice, life is a nightmare.” Perior again put his hands over his eyes. The thought of poor Mary, conscious of injustice, the sight of Camelia writhing in retributory flames, made him feel shattered.
“But I didn’t come to talk about my problematic soul,” said Camelia in an altered voice; “I came to tell you about Mary.” She approached him, and stood over him as she spoke, so that he looked up quickly.
“She will probably be dead in a month. She knows it; and, Michael, she loves you.” Perior flushed a deep red, but Camelia whitened to the lips. He would have risen; she put her hand on his shoulder.
“Impossible!” he said.
“No, listen. She told me. She lashed me with it this morning—that hopeless love—for she thinks that you love me—thinks that I am playing with you. She loves you. She has loved you for years.”
“Don’t say it, Camelia!” Perior cried brokenly. “Mary’s disease explains hysteria—melancholia—a pitiful fancy—that will pass—that should never have been told to me.”
“Ah, don’t shirk it!” her hand pressed heavily on his shoulder. “Her disease made her tell me, I grant you, but you could not have doubted had you heard her!—as I did! You understand that she must never know—that I have told you.”
“I understand that, necessarily, and I must askyou from what motive you think your revelation justified; it must be a strong one, for I confess that the revelation seems to me unjustifiable—cruelly so.”
“I have a strong motive.”
“You did not come to pour out to me the full extent of poor Mary’s misfortune for the selfish sake of relieving, by confession, your self-reproach? And, indeed, in this matter I cannot see that you are responsible. It is a cruelty of fate, not yours.”
Camelia looked away from him for a moment, looked at the microscope. A swift flicker of shame went through her, one thought of self, then, resolutely raising her eyes, she said, “Am I not at all responsible? Are you sure of that?”
“Responsible for Mary loving me?” Perior stared, losing for a moment, in amazement, his deep and painful confusion.
“No; that is fate, if you will. But had I not come back last summer, had I not claimed you, monopolized you, absorbed you. Ah! you are flushing; don’t be ashamed for me! I swear to you, Michael, that I am not giving myself a thought, had I not set myself to work to make love to you—there is the fact;—don’t look away, I can bear it—can you tell me that Mary might not have had the chance she so deserved, of slipping sweetly and naturally into your heart—becoming your wife?”
“Camelia!” Perior turned white. “I never loved Mary, never could have loved her. Does that relieve you?” He keenly eyed her.
“Don’t accuse me of seeking relief! That is a cruelty I don’t deserve. If you never could have loved Mary, it is even more dreadful for me—for itis still crueller for Mary. That she should love you. That you should not care! could never have cared!”
At this Perior rose and walked up and down the room. “Don’t!” he repeated several times. His wonder at Camelia interfused intolerably his sorrow for Mary.
Camelia followed him with steady eyes. The eagerness of decisive appeal seemed to burn her lips as she said slowly—
“Ah, had you seen her! Had you heard her crying out that she was dying—that she loved you—that you did not care!”
“You must not say that.” Perior stopped and looked at her sternly, “I am not near enough. It is a desecration.”
“Ah! but how can I help her if I don’t? How canyouhelp her? For it is you, Michael,you. Can’t you see it? You are noble enough. Michael—you will marry Mary! Oh!”—at his start, his white look of stupefaction, she flew to him, grasped his hands—“Oh, you must—youmust. You can make her happy—you only! And you will—say you will. You cannot let her die in this misery! Say you cannot, Michael—oh, say it!” And, suddenly breathless, panting, her look flashed out the full significance of her demand. In all its stupefaction Perior’s face still retained something of its sternness, but he drew her hands to his breast. “Camelia, you are mad,” he said.
“Mad?” she repeated. Her eyes scorned him; then, rapidly resuming their appealing dignity, “You can’t hesitate before such a chance for making your whole life worth while.”
“Quitemad, Camelia,” he repeated with emphasis. “I could not act such a lie,” he added.
“A lie! To love, cherish that dying child! A better lie than most truths, then! You are not a coward—surely. You will not let her die so.”
“Indeed I must. Any pretence would be an insult. As it is, if Mary could see you here, she would want to kill us both.”
“Not if she understood,” said Camelia, curbing the vehemence of her terrified supplication, the very terror warning her to calm. “And what more would there be in it to hurt her?”
“ThatIshould know—and should refuse. Good God!”
“Where is the disgrace?” Camelia’s eyes gazed at him fixedly. “Then we are both disgraced—Mary and I.” Her smile, bitterly impersonal, offered itself to no interpretations, yet before it he steadied his face with an effort. He could not silence her by the truth—that he loved her, her alone; loved now her high, frowning look, her passionate espousal of another’s cause. Mary’s tragic presence sealed his lips. He said nothing, and Camelia’s eyes, as they searched this chilling silence, incredulous of its cruel resolve, filled suddenly and piteously with tears.
“Oh, Michael,” she faltered. Scorn and defiance dropped from her face; he saw only the human soul trembling with pity and hope. He did not dare trust himself to speak—he could not answer her. Holding her hands against his breast, he looked at her very sorrowfully.
“Listen to me, Michael. I mustn’t expect you tofeel it yet as I do—must I? That would be impossible. I only ask you tothink. You see the pathos, the beauty of Mary’s love for you! for years—growing in her narrow life. Think how a smile from you must have warmed her heart—a look, a little kindness. She adores you. And this consciousness of death, this nearing parting from you—you who do not care—leaving even the dear sight of you. Think of her going out alone, unloved, into the darkness—the everlasting darkness and silence—with never one word, one touch, one smile, to hold in her heart as hers, meant for her, with love. Oh, I see it hurts you!—you are sorry; oh, blessed tears! You cannot bear it, can you? Michael, you will not let her go uncomforted? She is not strong, or brave, or confident. She is sick, weak, terrified—a screaming, shuddering child carried away in the night. Michael!”—it was a cry; she clasped his hands in hers—“you will walk beside her. You will kiss her, love her, and she will die happy—with her hand in yours!” Her eyes sought his wildly. He had never loved her as he loved her now, and though his tears were for Mary, the power, the freedom of his love for Camelia was a joy to him even in the midst of a great sadness. He could not have kissed her or put his arms around her; the dignity of her abasement was part of the new, the sacred loveliness, and it was more in pity than in love that he took the poor, distraught, beautiful face between his hands and looked at her a negation, pitiful and inarticulate. She closed her eyes. He saw that she would not accept the bitterness.
“I will do all I can,” he then said; “but,dear Camelia, dearest Camelia, I cannot marry her.”
It was a strange echo. Camelia drew away from him.
“What can youdo? She knows you are her friend; that only hurts.”
“Does it?” He saw now, through the unconscious revelation, the greatness of her love for him, and saw that in the past he had not understood. She loved him so much that there was left her not a thought of self. Her whole nature was merged in the passionate wish that he should fulfil her highest ideal of him. He saw that she would have laid down her life for him—or for Mary, as she stood there, and, for Mary, she expected an equal willingness on his side.
“It would only be an agony to her,” Camelia said; “she would fear every moment that she would betray herself to you, as she betrayed herself to me. Can’t you see that? Understand that?” Desperately she reiterated: “You must pretend! You must lie! You must tell her that you love her! You must marry her, take her away to some beautiful country—there are places where they live for years; make a paradise about her. Youmust.” She looked sternly at him.
“No, Camelia, no.”
“You mean that basest no?” She was trembling, holding herself erect as she confronted him; her white face, narrowly framed by the curves of loosened hair, tragic with its look of reprobation.
“I mean it. I will not. You will see that I am right. It would be a cruel folly, a dastardly kindness,a final insult from fate. And I do not think only of Mary—I think of myself; I could not lie like that.”
Her silent woe and scorn, frozen now to a bleak despair, dwelt on him for a long moment, then, without another word, she turned from him and left him, making, by the majesty of her defeated wrong, his victorious right look ugly.
CAMELIA galloped home furiously. The tragedy was then to be consummated. He would not put out a finger to avert it. Mary would go down into the pit of nothingness, and her love, her agony, her strivings after good, would be as though they had never been.
“AndIlive,” thought Camelia, as she galloped, and her thoughts seemed to gallop beside her; they were like phantom shapes pressing on her from without, for she did not want to think. “I, thick-skinned, dull-souled I. Yes, materialism wins the day. Morality is a lie, evolved for the carpeting of lives like mine, for the preservation of the fittest!—Ibeing fittest! To those that have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away—the law of evolution. Oh! hideous, hideous! Oh, horror!—not even the ethical straw of development to grasp at; Mary’s suffering has warped her, lowered her. She has been tortured into rebellion against her own sweet rectitude; she, who only asked to love—hates; she, who lived in a peaceful renunciation, now struggles, thinks only of herself.”
It was this last thought that seemed to lean beside her, look into her eyes with the most intolerable look. Mary—inevitably lowered. The blackness shuddered through her. Camelia on that ride tastedthe very dregs of doubt and despair, and knew the helplessness of man before them. She could have killed herself, had not a sullen spark, the last smouldering from the fire of resolution that had burned in her as she rode to Perior, still lit one path through the darkness. She must throw herself at Mary’s feet, seek and give comfort through her own extreme abasement. She must cling to Mary, supplicating her to believe in her infinite love and pity. Could not that love, when all errors were explained, reach and hold her? Camelia felt her defiance of eternity clasp Mary forever. But when she reached home Mary was not there. Camelia panted as she ran from room to room; her desire, thrown back, rose stiflingly. She was afraid of seeing her mother, for at a look, a question, she felt that her suspense of hard self-control would break down; she might scream and rave. She sent a few words to Lady Paton by a servant; she was tired and was going to rest—must not be disturbed—then she locked herself into her own room.
Some hours passed before she heard Mary’s voice outside demanding entrance, hours that Camelia was to look back on as the blackest of her life, so black that all in them, every thought and impulse, made an indistinguishable chaos, where only her suffering, a trembling leaf tossing on deepest waters, knew itself. In looking back, she remembered that she had not once moved until the knock came, and that, on going to open the door, her hand had so shaken that it fumbled for some moments with the key.
Mary stood on the threshold. She was splashed with mud. Beside the whiteness of her face, Camelia’s was passive in its pain. Mary closed the door, and, as Camelia retreated a little before her, leaned back against it. Her eyes went at once over Camelia’s wet habit and dishevelled hair; she had expected a careful effacement of all signs of the guilty errand; Camelia could not now deny the ride. The thought of a brazen avowal made Mary close her eyes for a moment. She had to struggle with a sick faintness, as she leaned against the door, before she could put that monstrous thought aside and say, returning to her first impulse, and opening her eyes as she spoke—
“I know where you have been.”
Camelia stood still. This unexpected blow confused the direct vision of appeal and abasement that upheld her. She must face an unlooked-for contingency, and her mind seemed to reel a little as she faced it.
“You followed me, Mary?” she asked, with a gentleness bewildered.
“Yes, I followed you.”
Camelia was now becoming conscious of the definiteness of Mary’s heavy stare. It was like a stone, and under the weight of it she groped, staggering, in a wilderness of formless conjectures. Mary could not know why she had gone. A pang of terror shot through her. Mary’s next words riveted the terror.
“I saw you. I know why you went. I know everything,” said Mary. Camelia’s horror kept silence, though the room seemed to whirl round with her. Had Mary by some unknown means reached the Grange before she did? Had she been hidden near the laboratory? Had she heard?Were all merciful lies impossible? She felt her very lips freeze in a rigid powerlessness.
“You went to tell him that I loved him?” Mary’s eyes opened widely as she spoke, and she walked up to her cousin, close to her.
“You told him that I loved him,” she repeated, and Camelia in her nightmare horror felt the hatred of the pale eyes.
“You don’t dare deny that you told him.” No, Camelia did not dare deny. She looked down spellbound at Mary. She was afraid of her, horribly afraid of her. It was like the approach of a nightmare animal, its familiar seeming making its strangeness the more awful. She did not dare deny. She could not move away from her; she was paralyzed in her dread. Mary looked at her as though conscious of her own power.
“You told him, so that he might comfort you, tell you he had never loved me, never could have loved me. You betrayed me to save yourself from that reproach of robbing me.” It was like awakening with a gasp that Camelia now cried—
“No, no, Mary! Oh no.”
She could speak. She could clasp her hands. “No, no, no,” she repeated almost with joy.
“You lie. You are lying. What is the good of lying to me now? It is easy for you to lie. You went to ask him the truth, and he gave it to you. For he would never have loved me, whatever I may have hoped—even believed at moments.”
“No, Mary; no, no!” Mary’s dreadful supposition made Camelia feel the reality as a peace, a refuge. That world of black cruelty where Marywandered, that at least was untrue, an illusion. Not hatred, not deceit surrounded her, but love, and pity, and tenderness.
“I did not go for that, Mary,” she cried. “Listen, Mary, you are wrong; thank God, you are wrong. I did not go because I was sorry for myself; I did not go basely. I was so sorry for you,” said Camelia, sobbing and speaking brokenly, while Mary looked at her in a stern tearless silence, “I knew he would be sorry. I knew we both loved you, and I wanted him to marry you, Mary.”
“What!” Mary’s voice was terrible; yet Camelia clung to the courage of her love, confident that the truth alone could now reveal it—all the truth.
“Yes, dearest Mary, yes. There was no hatred, only a longing to make you happy—to help atone; only love, not hatred.”
“You are telling me the truth?”
They were standing still before each other. Camelia could not interpret the pale eyes.
“Mary, I swear it before God.”
“And he will not marry me!”
“He loves you, as I do.”
“He will not marry me!”
“Let me only tell you—everything; it is not you only——”
“You tossed me to him—and he refused me! How dare you! How dare you! How dare you!” And Mary, a revelation of rage and detestation flaming up in her eyes, distorting her face, struck her cousin violently on the cheek.
Camelia stood dazed. The blow interpreted, toowell, Mary’s attitude. She could not resent, nor even wonder, could only accept the retribution of cruel misunderstanding and bow her head. She covered her face with her hands and wept. Except for this sound of weeping the room was still. In the darkness of her humiliation—shut in behind her hands—Camelia felt, at last, the silence. She looked up. Mary was once more leaning against the door. Her eyes were closed. Camelia went to her, took her hand, and Mary made no motion. Raising the hand to her lips Camelia kissed it; its coldness chilled the smarting of the blow. Mastering her terror Camelia put her arms around her, and, Mary sinking forward into them, she gathered up the piteously light figure and carried it to the bed.
“Mary—Mary—Mary,” she murmured, staring at the head which lay so still, so solemnly. Was she dead? Camelia struck aside the thought of a so cruel finality. Strengthened by her rebellion she sprang to open the door, and the house resounded with her cries for help.