The Confounding of Camelia Part 1

The Confounding of Camelia.

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.

CHAPTER I

When Camelia came down into the country after her second London season, descended lightly upon the home of her forefathers, her coming unannounced, and as much a matter of caprice as had been her long absence, a slowly growing opinion, an opinion that had begun to form itself during Camelia's most irresponsible girlhood, became clearly defined, a judgment fixed and apparently irrevocable. The Patons had always been good, quiet people; absolutely undistinguished, were it not that the superlative quality of their tranquil excellence gave a certain distinction. There were no black sheep in their annals, and a black sheep gives, by contrast, a brilliancy lacking to unaccented bucolic groupings, strikes a note of interest at any rate; but none of the Paton sheep were even gray. They fed in pleasant, plenteous pastures, for it was a wealthy, though not noticeably wealthy family, and perhaps a rather sheep-like dulness, an unimaginative contentment not conducive to adventurous strayings, accounted for the spotless fleeces.

Their cupboards had never held a skeleton--nor so much as the bone of one. The family portraits, none even pretending to be Sir Joshuas or Vandycks, only presented a respectable number of generations, so that the mellow perspective of old ancestry, remarkable at least for a lengthy retrogression into antiquity, made no background to their commonplace. Sir Charles, Camelia's father, was the first Paton weighted with an individuality that entailed nonconformity, and since Sir Charles's individuality had confused all antic.i.p.ations, further developments of the wild streak could not be unexpected. Many of the quiet, conservative people, who had known Camelia, her father and mother, and Patons of an earlier epoch, p.r.o.nounced with emphasis that Camelia was spoiled; there was a tenderness in the term, an implication of might-have-beens; and other people, more bitter and perhaps more sensitive, remarked that not her head-turning London successes, of which big echoes had rolled down to Clievesbury, but the inherent, the no doubt inherited defects of Miss Paton's character were responsible for her noticeable variation from family traditions. Did not that portion of Blankshire, which lay about the dim old village of Clievesbury, send up to the capital every year its native offerings of maidenhood? A London season had never induced in these well-balanced young ladies the merry arrogance so provokingly apparent in Miss Paton. Old Mrs. Jedsley it was, the last rector's widow, who most openly denounced Camelia, and that, despite her long friendship for the Patons; denounced her frivolity, her insincerity, her egotism, and her wonderful gowns--their simplicity did not deceive Mrs. Jedsley's keen eye; the price of one would keep the parish in flannel for a year she declared, and, no doubt, include the school feast. Mrs. Jedsley prided herself on her impartial faculty for seeing disagreeable truths clearly and for announcing them unflinchingly. Her fondness for Lady Paton--"poor Lady Paton"--could not blind or silence her. Poor Lady Paton was more than ever effaced, Mrs.

Jedsley said; one might have thought that Sir Charles had required as much submission as a woman's life could well yield, but the daughter had called forth further capabilities.

"The very way in which she says 'Oh, Camelia!' is flattering to the girl. Her mother's half-shocked admiration encourages her in the belief that she is very naughty and very clever; and really while Camelia talks Lady Paton looks like a hare under a bramble."

The simile hit the mark so nicely that the alarmed retirement of Lady Paton's att.i.tude was pictorially apparent forthwith. And, "Ah, well!"

Mrs. Jedsley added, "What can one expect in the child of such a father!

The most gracefully selfish man who ever lived. Charles Paton would have smiled you out of house and home, and left you to sit in the snow, while he warmed himself at your fireplace."

Indeed this application of the laws of heredity might have induced a certain charitable philosophy on Camelia's behalf. The love of adventure, of prowess, of power, had shown itself in Charles Paton; but much had been forgiven--even admired--with a sense of breathlessness, in a cloud-compelling younger son (his good looks had been altogether supreme), which, when seen flaunting indecorously in the daughter, was highly unpopular. Charles Paton at a very early age had found the family traditions "devilish dull" (and, indeed, it could not be denied that dull they were); he entered the army, kicked over the traces, and was "wild" with all his might and main. Clievesbury disapproved, but at the same time Clievesbury was dazzled.

Surrounded by this naughty atmosphere, reverberating with racing and betting, dare-devil big-game shooting, and the extreme fashion that is supposed to reverse the "devilish dull" morality of tradition, Charles Paton--like his daughter--returned to Clievesbury, and there fell most magnanimously and becomingly in love with little Miss Fairleigh, the eighth daughter of a country baronet--a softly pink and white maiden--wooed and married her and settled down, after a fashion, to carve out an army career for himself. He carved to good purpose, luck giving him the opportunity. He carried his life as lightly and gallantly as a flag; sought peril, and the tingling excitement of the strangest feats. His reckless bravery won him a knighthood; his fame, his happy good-nature, and extreme good looks, made him a hero wherever he went.

Charles Paton's yellow curls, his smile, the Apollo-like line of his lips, were as well known as his martial exploits.

He was vastly popular, and his little wife in the shadow by his side, looked up, like the others, and adored where they admired. Sir Charles liked a sunny atmosphere, and though the hearthstone flame in its steady commonplace did not count for so much as the wider outdoor effulgence, it was very cosy to come back to, when domesticity was a momentary necessity. He would not have liked a change of temperature, and tolerated the wifely worship very graciously. He was fond of her too; she was very pretty, not clever--(an undesirable quality in a wife)--far more of a help than a hindrance, though how much of a help he perhaps never realized. That broad triumphal road down which the hero marched was swept and garnished by the indefatigable wife. The dustiness and thorniness of daily life were kept from him. Lady Paton packed and paid, and dashed from post to pillar. She was a delicate woman who, petted and made much of, might have allowed herself an occasional headache and a tea-gown existence. The years in India were not easy years; through them all she unwaveringly adored her husband, and in many phases of a varied life showed the steely fibre so often and so unexpectedly displayed by the most delicately inefficient looking women.

Camelia was the fifth child; the others died, two in India and two in England, away from the poor mother. This last one was little more than a baby when ill-health and the death of his brother decided Sir Charles on a return to England. Lady Paton rejoiced in the home-coming. With her pretty baby--a girl, alas! but the estate was unentailed--and her great and glorious husband by her side--the future seemed to open on an unknown happiness. But Lady Paton was to know few compensations. Sir Charles found the role of country gentleman very flavorless, and his attempts to evade boredom left his wife more lonely--and too, more conscious of loneliness, than in busier days.

When Camelia was eight her father died. One saw then that Lady Paton was supremely adapted to eternal mourning. As a widow, she reached a black-encompa.s.sed repose, a broken-hearted finality of woe. Camelia was the one reason for her life. The child had never to enforce her will, her mother's devotion yielded to the slightest pressure. Camelia was hardly conscious of ruling, nor the mother of being ruled. As the stronger egoism, Camelia domineered inevitably. She was a gay, kind child, happy in the unfettered expansion of her individuality; she delighted in its exercise, and in all sorts of unconventional acquirements. She read voraciously and loved travel. Lady Paton had by no means reached the end of packing and paying days. Camelia hated beaten tracks; the travelling must be different from other people's; she managed in a tourist-ridden Europe to find the element of adventurous experience. Camelia was keen on experiences. Lady Paton did not appreciate them properly; but then Lady Paton saw life from no artistic standpoint. She thought undiscovered Greece and Poland more trying than the most trying places in India. The steppes depressed her; she dared not mention wolves, but her mind dwelt dejectedly upon them. She could hardly think of the cooking in certain out-of-the-way corners in Spain without shuddering. But she bore all with apparent placidity, and her helpful qualities won her daughter's approval just as they had won her husband's.

There was nothing rude or uncouth in Camelia's domineering spirit, it was too happy, too spontaneous, too sure of its own right. Even after these two years of London her severest detractors could not accuse her of the grosser forms of vanity, nor of affectation, nor of the ugly thing that goes by the name of "fastness." Her unerring sense of the best possible taste made "fast" girls seem very tawdry, and her coolly smiling eyes told them that she found them so. Even with the fact of her serene indifference to them growing into the consciousnesses of the people about Clievesbury, they still owned, generously, but perforce, that she was neither strident nor slangy, nor given to any form of posing. The change in Camelia, if change there were, was a mere evolution. She had tasted the joys of a wide effectiveness. She was only twenty-three, and more than once had been told that she was the only woman in London fitted to hold a "salon," a "salon" that would be a power social, artistic, and political. Authors talked to her about their books, painters about their pictures; her presence at the opera was recorded as having judicial importance; a new pianist was made if he played at one of her musicals. She was a somebody to whom the Clievesburyites were n.o.bodies indeed.

Camelia smiled at her own power. She did not think more highly of herself, but less well of other people, for she measured at once the comparative worth of her own attributes in a world of mediocrity. She saw through the flattery, valued it at its proper rate, but enjoyed it, and indulged in a little air of self-mockery that to appreciative minds crowned her beauty irresistibly. But she was rather disappointed in finding most people so stupid. It was difficult to hold to one's standard in a world where the second-best pa.s.sed so fluently. By those standards Camelia saw herself very second-best; but were there then no clever people to see it with her? She caught herself in a yawning weariness of it all. A lazy month or so in the country appealed to her; other motives, too, were perhaps not wanting. With a little retinue of friends she reappeared at Clievesbury, and, by degrees, old neighbors discovered that little Camelia had developed into a rather p.r.i.c.kling personality. On calling they found Lady Paton very much in the background. Camelia seemed to make no claim, and yet she was the important personage, and to ignore her prominence was to efface oneself with her mother. It was thought--and hoped--that Lady Haversham, the magnate of the county, would vanquish that complacent sweetness, the aerial lightness of demeanor that glanced over one's head while one spoke, and "positively" said Mrs. Jedsley "makes one feel like a cow being looked at along with the landscape."

But although Lady Haversham held rule in the country, in London she, too, was a n.o.body, and Camelia very much the contrary. Lady Haversham knew right well that in going to see her old friend Lady Paton, Camelia was her objective point, and to try a fall with Camelia upon her native heath, her intention. Lady Haversham knew that in the eyes of the world--the world that counted--she was a mere country mouse creeping into the radiant effulgence of the young beauty, and this unpleasant consciousness gave her quite a drum-like sonority of manner--a fatal manner, as she felt helplessly while she beat out her imposing phrases beneath the clear smiling of Camelia's eyes. Lady Haversham tried in the first place to exclude Camelia, and addressed herself with most solicitous fondness to Lady Paton; but Camelia's silent placidity stung her into self-betrayal. Camelia evidently cared nothing for Lady Haversham's graciousness--or lack of it; seemed, indeed, unconscious of the cold shoulder turned so emphatically upon her. Lady Haversham thumped and rumbled, and knew herself worsted.

"Manner! Unpleasant manner!" she said to Mrs. Jedsley later on in the day, "the child has no manners at all! That takes in London nowadays, you know. Anything in the shape of arrogant youth and prettiness is sure of having its head turned. And as to prettiness, I should call her curious-looking rather than pretty." And by this Mrs. Jedsley knew that Camelia had snubbed Lady Haversham, without trying to--there was the smart; Camelia was making no effort at all to be unpleasant, to impose herself, but, unmistakably, she only thought of the good people about her home as cows in the landscape.

"I suppose she finds us all very provincial," said Mrs. Jedsley, not averse to planting the shaft, for she had felt Lady Haversham's graciousness to be rather rasping at times.

CHAPTER II

On the sunny autumn day with which this story opens, Miss Paton was in the morning room at Enthorpe Lodge, waiting for some one--a some one who to her was not a n.o.body; and though her att.i.tude hardly denoted much anxiety, her mind was alert and very conscious of a pleasing and yet exasperating suspense. Her friend Mrs. Fox-Darriel was with her. Miss Paton leaned against the mantelpiece as she talked, her eyes often swerving to the clock, but calmly, with no perceptible impatience, or pa.s.sing in a quiet glance over her hand, the falling folds of her white dress, her friend's face and figure--figure and face equally artificial, and perhaps affording to Miss Paton's mind a pleasing contrast to her own distinctive elegance.

There is in Florence a plaque by one of the della Robbia; a long throated girl's head leans from it, serenely looking down upon the world; a delicate head, with a clear brow, a pure cheek, a mouth of sad enchanting loveliness; Camelia's head was like it; saint-like in contour, but with an added air, an air of merry irresponsibility. The outward corners of her eyes smiled into a long upward curve of shadow, her brows above them made a wing-like line, wings hovering extended, and a little raised. The upward tilt pervaded the corners of her mouth, a sad mouth, yet even in repose it seemed just about to smile, and its smile sliding to a laugh. The very moulding of her cheek and chin showed a tender gaiety. As for coloring it might have been the coloring of a pensive Madonna, so white was her skin, so palely gold her smooth thick hair. She was slender too, with the long narrow hands and feet of an Artemis, and on seeing her one thought of a maiden-G.o.ddess, of a St.

Cecilia, and, without surprise over the incongruity, of an intimately modern young taster of life, whose look of pagan joyousness took neither herself nor other people seriously, said "que voulez-vous," to all blame, and gently mocked puritanical earnestness.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel was plunged into the depths of an easy-chair, a type without hints and whispers to baffle and fascinate. She was thoroughly conventional and not in the least perplexing. Her elaborate head, a masterpiece of wave and coil and curl, rested against the high-chair back, its l.u.s.tre a trifle suspicious where the light caught too gold a bronze on the sharp ripples.

She was considered a beauty, and her steely, regular face looked at one from every stationer's shop in London. Miss Paton's photographs were to be procured at no stationer's, one among the many differences that distinguished her from her friend.

On Camelia's "coming-out" in all the dryad-like freshness of her one and twenty years, Mrs. Fox-Darriel, smartest of the "smart," kindly determined to "form" and "launch" her. She was very winning, and Camelia seemed very willing. But Mrs. Fox-Darriel soon recognized that she was being led--not leading, soon recognized that Camelia would never follow.

The first defeat was at the corsetiere's visible symbol of the "forming"

process. Under Mrs. Fox-Darriel's eye, Miss Paton's nymph-like slimness was measured for stays of all sorts and descriptions; Camelia, when the stays were done, surveyed her figure therein confined, with reflective rather than submissive silence.

The week after she went to Paris, and when she returned it was with a stayless wardrobe. Mrs. Fox-Darriel was fairly quelled as Camelia swept before her in these masterpieces of the Rue de la Paix.

"They are not aesthetic," said Mrs. Fox-Darriel--"I own that--not a greenery-yallery whiff about them; nor too self-conscious; but my dear, why? Don't you like my figure?"

Camelia turned candid eyes upon the accurate waist, the rigid curves and right angles. "I can't say I do, Frances," she owned, wherewith Mrs.

Fox-Darriel winced a little. "I don't think it looks alive, you know,"

said Miss Paton. "Of course one must know how to dress one's nonconformity. I think I have succeeded." And Camelia went to court looking like a glorified Romney, with hardly a whalebone about her.

Their future relationship was forecast by this declaration of independence. The stayless protegee conferred, did not receive l.u.s.tre.

Inevitably Mrs. Fox-Darriel found herself revolving about the young beauty--a satellite among the other satellites, and more than Camelia herself was Mrs. Fox-Darriel impressed by Camelia's effectiveness.

On this morning from the depth of her laziness she observed her young friend's glances at the clock with some wondering curiosity; it was difficult to imagine a cause for the stirring of Camelia's contemplative quiescence under country influences, but Mrs. Fox-Darriel was quick to see the faintest ripple of change, and to her well-sharpened acuteness the ripple this morning was perceptible.

"No new guests coming to-day?" she had asked, receiving a placid negative. "And what are you going to do?" she pursued, patting the regular outline of her fringe.

"I thought of a ride with Mr. Merriman and Sir Harry. Do you care to come?"

"No, no, I have too much of Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman as it is."

"It is dull down here, Frances. Perhaps you had best be off to Homburg.

I am bent on recuperative vegetating, you know."

"Whom are you waiting for?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked, coming to the point with a circ.u.mspection rendered rather ridiculous by the frank promptness of Miss Paton's answer.

"I'm waiting for Mr. Perior, Frances," and she laughed a little, glancing at her friend with a rapid touch of ridicule, "and he is half-an-hour late; and I want to see him very badly."

"Mr. Perior?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel's vagueness was not affected. "One of the vegetables, my dear? Has not the curiosity of the neighborhood exhausted itself?"

"Ah--this vegetable isn't curious, I fear, not a shoot shows at least.

If he is curious he will pretend not to be, and pretend very successfully."

"That is subtle for a vegetable. Perior, the name is familiar. Who is this evasive person?"

Miss Paton's serene eyes looked over her friend's head at the strip of blue and green outside framed by the long window. She was asking herself with an inward smile for her own perversity, whether she had not come down into the country for the purpose of seeing the "evasive person."

She would not mind owning to it in the least. Pickles after sweets; she antic.i.p.ated the tart taste of disapproval pleasantly.

"Who is he?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel repeated.

"He is my oldest friend; he doesn't admire me in the least--so I am very fond of him. I christened him 'Alceste,' and he retaliated with 'Celimene.' He is forty odd; a bachelor; he lives in a square stone house, and taught me very nearly everything I know. My Greek is almost as good as my skirt dancing."

"The square-stone gentleman didn't teach you skirt-dancing, I suppose. I begin to place him. The editor; the family friend; the misanthrope."