The Confounding of Camelia Part 13

"Oh, you little rogue!" Taking her face between his hands he studied it with a sad curiosity. "I am sorry for having _had_ to say it."

"Oh, prig, prig, prig." She smiled at him now from the narrow frame, her own delicious smile.

"And banders.n.a.t.c.h if you will," said Perior, shaking her gently by the shoulders, and putting her away with a certain resignation.

"My good old banders.n.a.t.c.h! _Dear_ old banders.n.a.t.c.h! After all, I need a banders.n.a.t.c.h, don't I, to keep me straight? Yes, I forgive you. I must put up with you, and you must put up with me, fibs and all--fibs, do you hear, not lies. Oh, ugly word!" She clasped her hands on his arm, poor Perior! "And you will stay to lunch?"

"No, I won't stay to lunch," said Perior, smiling despite himself.

"Why?"

"I am busy."

"You are a prig, you know," said Camelia, as if that summed up the situation conclusively.

CHAPTER XI

Whether Camelia were decided on accepting Sir Arthur or not, every one else, under a waiting silence, considered the engagement an accomplished fact. Poor Mr. Merriman departed disconsolately when the reality of his utter ruin forced itself upon his unwilling understanding. Sir Harry contemplated the hopeless situation more compliantly, oscillated for a few days between feeble despair and jocular resignation, and then finding it impossible to utterly tear himself away from his charmer's magnetic presence, he settled down to a melancholy flirtation with Mrs.

Fox-Darriel that masked his inability to retreat. Lord and Lady Tramley went on to another visit, and the poet who wrote the virile poems and believed in the joy of life, finding Miss Paton less sympathetic than usual, penned a laconic, psychological verselet for her benefit, and departed.

Camelia seemed rather vague in the furtherance of hospitable projects, and the merest trickle of visitors went through the house, affecting very slightly the really placid routine.

Lady Paton's whole personality expanded in prettiest contentment; the calm so far surpa.s.sed her expectations, and Camelia seemed very happy.

Lady Paton could but take for granted her happiness.

Camelia was living the most poetical moment of life; she made no confidences; but Lady Paton's trust walked in a sadly sweet dream where her daughter's courtship mingled with tearful memories of her own.

Charles Paton's smile; the first fluttering consciousness that the smile came oftenest for her; she still blushed as she remembered the moment when he had murmured to her as they danced that she had the prettiest throat in England; it had seemed so daring to little Miss Fairleigh, who had read her first novel only six months before; the very memory still had the glamour of daring. And Camelia was feeling all those tremulous delights, with their deep undercurrent of sacred solemnity.

Camelia was not demonstrative, Lady Paton had sighed over the accepted fact, but she could trace all such natural emotions on Sir Arthur's face when he watched or spoke to her daughter. She already felt a maternal tenderness for him, and his exquisite courtesy, that already implied rights, was nothing less than filial.

Lady Henge's dignified intellectuality she found indeed rather awesome, but she hoped by careful listening to expand her powers of comprehension, and Lady Henge delivered her expositions of social ethics with a pleasant faith in their tonic effect upon the suppressed mind of her hostess--

"Suppressed, repressed, Arthur, not shallow," she said to her son, "and you could not ask a daintier, truer gentlewoman for your wife's mother, dear." Lady Henge sighed just a little--though quite resigned to the future--for the d.u.c.h.ess of Amshire's mind was neither suppressed nor shallow, but as expansive and capable an organ as her own, and infinitely sympathetic. Lady Elizabeth, too!--Lady Elizabeth, who had worked at shirt-making in the slums for two weeks, and had caught typhoid fever at it--even Camelia's sunny charm could not efface the thought of Lady Elizabeth's almost providential fitness. But in spite of inevitable regrets Lady Henge was resigned, and the two mothers got on together very pleasantly, since moulding capability can hardly carp at a gentle, clay-like receptivity.

Mr. Rodrigg seemed the only new guest intended for any permanence of stay. He duly arrived at the given date and hour, a punctual man, very much aware of his own importance, and of the importance to him, and to others, of every moment.

And Mr. Rodrigg was really a very important personage and his moments weighty with significance. And this iron-gray, middle-aged man had not at all foolishly fallen in love with the brilliant Miss Paton. A wife so beautiful, so capable, so charming, would be the finishing touch to his influence; matter-of-fact motives may well have underlain Mr. Rodrigg's amorous determination, which Camelia thought so effectually snuffed out.

But indeed Mr. Rodrigg's determination was far too strong to credit hers. His self-confidence smiled kindly upon a pretty coquetry. The exquisite grace of Camelia's rebuff--she had almost thought it worthy of publicity, so felicitous had been its delicate sweep round a corner dangerous to friendship--had merely impressed Mr. Rodrigg's unappreciative bluntness with a rea.s.suring conviction of trifling and postponement.

The lightness of touch, the deft cleverness upon which our poor t.i.tania so prided herself, were surveyed in this instance by an a.s.s's head; the effect she thought so prettily made was quite missed, and she herself its only spectator.

The portentousness of Arthur Henge's presence at Enthorpe did not in the least weigh with Mr. Rodrigg against the final choice he considered as expressed in Lady Paton's invitation. Miss Paton had put him off--but she had not let him go; so Mr. Rodrigg interpreted the Egeria att.i.tude; she demanded patience--and she should have it. She was too clever a girl to tolerate whining commonplaces; she would appreciate his whimsical calm; he would not whine--he would wait and humor her.

She liked to have important people about her, and Mr. Rodrigg explained Sir Arthur very much as Camelia had explained Mr. Rodrigg. It was platonic friendliness--quite hopeless. He realized that Camelia might dally with his own hopes, that skill might be necessary to win her finally, and he intended to be very skilful, to show no jealousy or carping that might indispose her towards his future marital authority.

And Mr. Rodrigg hardly felt the fitness of jealousy. He was, he thought, a cleverer man than Henge, a man of more intrinsic weight. Henge had a light and pretty talent, spoke with conviction, but was not the man to sway the world with socialism rewarmed in Tory saucepans; whereas Europe trembled at Mr. Rodrigg's nod, at least so Mr. Rodrigg, not unreasonably, was convinced. The "good match" theory in explanation of Camelia's motives only fortified his own quiet consciousness of supremacy. He quite gave Camelia credit for an undazzled directness of vision that would surely apprise her of the side on which her bread was most thickly b.u.t.tered. So Mr. Rodrigg arrived in an atmosphere of blue-books and business unavoidable, though with a minor effect of a great mind unbending to lighter mundanities. His face was typically British; ruddy, with broad features clearly hewn; keen eyes, a tight mouth, and an expression of sagacious toleration of things in general.

Camelia met him with her prettiest air of mutual understanding that would warrant the neatest epigrams. Her penetration of Mr. Rodrigg's character had never quite realized his tenacious conceit.

He had been anxious, he had been hurt; but he had never imagined that Camelia thought him hopeless. Her complacent conviction of intellectual conquest was far indeed from his suppositions; the results of her Italian reading had been adroitly thrown into his speech as a piece of pretty flattery, that a great man might harmlessly permit himself towards a wilful, easily flattered woman. So the two stupidities met quite unconscious one of the other.

Mr. Rodrigg was to stop for a fortnight at least, and as Sir Arthur had to absent himself at intervals during the period, Camelia was all the more content. She feared that Sir Arthur's att.i.tude of independence and non-expectancy might antagonize Mr. Rodrigg. She relied upon her own arguments, her own flattering influence. She sat up late at night cramming the pamphlets, reports, and books with which Sir Arthur supplied her. The resultant pallor at breakfast deepened the effect of an intellectual atmosphere in which she wrapped herself serenely. Mr.

Rodrigg smiled, paternally almost, and with his most tolerant calm, upon these efforts. He cut her a large slice of cold beef at the side-board and advised her to take a gla.s.s of port; "You mustn't tire yourself, you know, my dear young lady."

He rather resented Henge's evident influence when he saw how deeply Camelia was determined on the bill, but not really troubled by it.

Camelia's fervor of sympathy seemed really personal; girlish emotionalism, a futile but pretty pity quite interpreted her tenacity.

He was rather pleased that she should be on the side of the factory women, though anxious to explain to her that the logic of his own position need not exclude that partiality.

He thought it safer, however, to argue as little as possible, and listened attentively and pleasantly, quite willing to go this far in humoring. Meanwhile Camelia's delay in announcing an engagement imposed a general silence; no one spoke of Sir Arthur as an accepted lover, and Mr. Rodrigg might perhaps be pardoned if no such instinctive intimation penetrated his thick self-confidence. Sir Arthur coming down for a Sat.u.r.day and Sunday in Mr. Rodrigg's visit, and going off again on a Monday, rather avoided an encounter.

Mr. Rodrigg himself good-humoredly introduced the subject of the bill one evening in the smoking-room, and they talked of it amicably and impersonally for a little while. But after this talk Sir Arthur said to Camelia--

"I see very plainly where he stands. He will be firmly against me; his reticence doesn't conceal that."

"Are you sure?" asked Camelia. She herself was not at all sure. In a walk with Mr. Rodrigg that morning she had certainly observed promising leaf-blades break the stiff soil of his non-committal att.i.tude. Camelia did not imagine that her own beaming smile might well allure those vernal symptoms.

"Quite sure," said Sir Arthur, who was really getting rather tired of Mr. Rodrigg and his utility, "and--now that I won't see you again until next Thursday--won't you talk of something as far removed from the bill as possible."

"That would be a very uninteresting something," said Camelia. "No, I can think of nothing but politics just now. Whose fault is that, pray? Did you see the report Mr. Dobson sent me this morning? You don't want to see it! Fie, you lukewarm reformer. Now pray be patient--we will talk of something else on Thursday, perhaps." So she warded him off, conscious always of that trembling retreat when the momentous question approached her. She was almost glad when Sir Arthur was gone again. At all events, she would make a good fight for his cause whether or no she accepted him.

"And you are on our side too, are you not?" she said to Perior, for Perior, more silent than ever, and revolving inner cogitations on his own laxity, still made an almost daily visit.

He owned that he was on "their side."

"And you will support us in the _Friday_."

"I am going to do my best."

"But not because I ask you!" laughed Camelia, who still felt a little soreness since that uncomfortable interview where she had so much surprised herself. She was still rather resentful, and sorry that her tears might have implied confession. She was conscious now of a touch of defiance behind the light smiling of her eyes as he owned that her asking formed no compulsory element in his decision.

"Don't you think that Mr. Rodrigg may be malleable?" Camelia pursued, "Sir Arthur is to convert him, you know."

"You or Sir Arthur?" She laughed at this. "Would it be terribly wicked if I tried my hand at it?"

"It would be terribly useless," Perior remarked; but Camelia looked placidly unconvinced.

"I am justified in trying, am I not?"

"That depends;" Perior was decidedly cautious.

"Since I believe thoroughly in the bill; since only intellectual forces will be brought to bear on our stodgy friend,--there is nothing of the lobbyist in it."

"I am sure that Henge wouldn't like it," said Perior, with the certain coolness he always evinced in speaking to her of Sir Arthur.

"Why not?"