The Confounding of Camelia Part 19

CHAPTER XV

Camelia during the next few days was conscious of an expectant pause.

There was a page to be turned. She kept her own hand from it; for a day or two, at least, she would not stir a finger; and if Perior chose to turn it, the turning bound her to nothing--would probably reveal mere blankness, whereon he might inscribe an affectionate dedication for her new life. In that case the new chapter would be hymeneal; indeed, it seemed inevitable that she should marry Arthur Henge; the waiting volume seemed inevitably that of her married life.

But her thoughts were not with Arthur. They fixed themselves persistently on Perior. Let him come--write the friendly dedication, certify, by his blessing, to the sincerity and wisdom of her choice; or else, was it not possible that he might dash the volume out of her hands? No doubt she would pick it up again. Still, to see him dash it down would be eventful. Therefore, she waited, more breathlessly than she quite realized.

The last act of the drama had left her with no spite at all against Mary--its chief but insignificant factor. She was not resentful on the score of Mary's revelations; on the other hand, Mary's charitable reticence did not move her to grat.i.tude. After all, it was a very explicable reticence; her own confession to Perior had lent it the kindest glamour. For Mary to have told Perior all would have been a humiliating plea for his negative; and the negative he could not have given with sincerity. Mary had felt that. No; Camelia's a.n.a.lysis disowned any obligation; but neither was she conscious of the least anger. A mean revengefulness was not in her nature, she was as easy towards Mary as towards herself; she quite saw that to Mary she must have seemed horrid, and that perfectly atoned for the whines in which poor Mary had probably indulged. She was sure the whines had not been spiteful. She could imagine Mary injured, but not at all spiteful; and on their first meeting after the portentous dressing-room scene, her eyes rested in blankest serenity upon her cousin's flushed and miserable face.

She felt serenity and blankness to be tactful kindnesses, and they were very easy. The thought of Mary hardly stirred her deep, still absorption in the purely dual problem, for, after Mary's ride--and Camelia missed him then--Perior did not come again.

The trial of strength in silence, they the two opponents facing one another for the test, filled her days with an excited sense of contest.

It was not made more complex by outer jars. Mr. Rodrigg was unavoidably called away for a fortnight, and Sir Arthur might still be evaded, though Lady Henge's brow had grown gloomy. Camelia rather enjoyed the grave inquiry in the looks bent upon her by her future mamma (oh yes, almost without doubt, future mamma); but she did not intend to brighten them by the announcement of that fact until her own good time. Lady Henge's gloom and Arthur's patience touched only the outer rings of her consciousness. For Perior did not come. At the end of the first week her patience was out-worn; the detachment of mere contemplation became impossible. She essayed a flag of truce. Let it be peace, or, at all events, more close, more keenly realized warfare.

"Are you never coming to see me again?" she wrote. "Please do; I will be good."

Perior laughed over the doc.u.ment. It was merely the case of the cat again dignified by its persistent absence. His reply was even more laconic. "Can't come. Try to be good without me." The priggishness of this pleased him, and would probably amuse her. He did not want to hurt her. Neither did he intend that she should hurt him. She probably guessed that.

The note gave her a mingled thrill, anger and pleasure. That he should not come showed more than the priggish intent to punish; that pedagogic mask did not hide his fear; and that he should fear meant much. He wanted to punish her, yes; and that he could succeed was very intolerable; but that was his only strength, held to amidst a weakness he would give her no chance to exploit. His cowardice was complimentary, but since she was helpless against it Camelia was angry with her cat.

Strength, after all, is largely a matter of situation, and to stand in the street vainly cajoling one's pet on the house-top gives one all the emotions of acknowledged inferiority. To turn her back and walk away was the natural impulse of Camelia's exasperated helplessness; she hoped that the cat would watch her, and feel badly as she turned the corner, for she determined to delay no longer decisions of far more importance, as she a.s.sured herself, than the ridiculous dwelling on such a trifling matter as a recalcitrant cat. The acceptance of Arthur Henge could be no longer evaded after this fortnight of evasions, each turn and twist leading her more inevitably to the centre of the labyrinth. Sir Arthur could hardly have a doubt of the final answer, though its postponement and her son's att.i.tude of smiling patience might bring the gloom to Lady Henge's forehead.

"I do not like to see you played with, Arthur," she confessed; and her look said as much to Camelia, who, in her absolute security, only frolicked the more in her leafy circles.

"I enjoy it, mother," Sir Arthur a.s.sured her, "it's a pretty game; she enjoys it and so do I. She is cutting up a surprise cake, and I am sure of her giving me the slice with the ring in it."

"A rather undignified game, Arthur," said Lady Henge in a deep tone of aggrievement, and Sir Arthur was sorry that Camelia, for the moment, had effaced that first good impression; but he would not see that he was aggrieved. He knew that he sat in the heart of the dear labyrinth, and Camelia's peeps at him through the hedges, her slow advances and swift retreats, were all charming, and not too bewildering when one was trained to them.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel, however, was both aggrieved and impatient. Her long visit bored her badly, and Camelia's smiling impenetrability irritated her. Her impatience almost descended to grossness.

"What a hostess you will make, Camelia, at Laversley Castle. I see you on that background of Grinling Gibbons and t.i.tian. To be almost the richest, probably the cleverest, certainly the prettiest woman in England. What a future! An unending golden vista--widening. And for a base of operations, Laversley. Such tapestries, my dear, such porcelains, such a library and park. All in the hollow of your hand."

Camelia stretched it out. "Yes," she said, surveying its capabilities, "I have only to close it."

"You will close it, of course."

"No doubt," said Camelia blandly, a blandness that snubbed and did not satisfy her friend's grossness.

But under the blandness something struggled. Must she close the hand?

Would no power outside her hold open and unstained by greed that pretty palm? The absurdity of the accusation gave her the melancholy comfort of an only half rea.s.suring smile. Sir Arthur's excellence, not his millions, had turned the scale; yet the accusation, for all its folly, cut. And Perior did not come. He too joined forces with fate, made the closing of the hand inevitable. She defied him with the sustaining thought, "Sir Arthur is best, best in all. I close my hand on his heart because no better heart could be offered me."

CHAPTER XVI

A week had pa.s.sed since Perior had received the first pleading note from Enthorpe, and one afternoon, when he was busy in his laboratory, another arrived, more a command than a supplication.

"Come at once. I must see you. I am very unhappy."

Camelia indeed was very unhappy. She could hardly recognize or define the unusualness of the unfamiliar sensation, and her ignorance helped to hurt her, make her more bewildered under it. She had accepted Sir Arthur that morning, hurried by no impulse, but conscious as she walked with him in the garden of an ill-tempered recklessness, of a fate more easily accepted than evaded uselessly. If he would have it--if every one would have it, including herself, of course, let it be so. She said yes with almost a sigh of exhausted energy, smiled with lifted brows over Sir Arthur's ensuing rapture, and then wondered that under the lightness with which she braved the decisive moment a sudden sickness of fear, of sorrow, should seize her. Reality this, then. No more choice. No more playing. The game ended. She was not being led into the Garden of Eden, but out of it, and a new world, a world bleak, leaden, a sunless immensity of dreariness stretched before her. She was frightened, and the lesser feelings of the next hour were dazed by her effort to dismiss this fear. She knew that her mother's tearful, speechless joy, Lady Henge's elevated approbation, Mary's gasping efforts after fitting phrases, Frances' cool, close-lipped little smile of satisfaction, and the background of congratulatory faces were all very irritating, and that she herself was unreasonably angry with them all.

She was glad to find herself alone in the library with Sir Arthur, even though strangely helpless before his joyous possessorship. His arm was about her, and she could hear Lady Henge thundering on the piano in the drawing-room.

"The dear mater is improvising an epithalamium," said Arthur, with a laugh. To Camelia it seemed cynically in keeping with her jarred and jangled mood that her marriage should be interpreted by this pretentious music. It symbolized so much. Her own flimsiness and falseness, the immense distance from anything like perfect union. She turned her thought to the attainable pleasures of the future, tried to shut her soul on the lamenting ideal that Lady Henge's music mocked, and her mind rested for a moment on the rea.s.suring certainty of her own appreciation of Sir Arthur's excellence. Strangely enough, though his possessorship frightened, his arm about her waist consoled her; a warm sense of his kindness and stability held her from inner terrors; she was glad to have him there; she foresaw in solitude an on-coming and chilly stupor. She felt it well to sit beside him, protected from her own fear by his devoted nearness. "There now, you are smiling," said Sir Arthur; "you seemed sad, as though you were conscious of responsibility--and didn't like it." When he spoke of responsibility Camelia felt more keenly that she had received an injury from fate. The "Yes" that had been spoken only a few hours before had belonged to the game, was it quite fair that this solemnity should result? Yet why not take it gaily? Force it into a dancing ring of happy lightness?

"Responsibility? Oh no, you can't saddle me with that!" she said, returning his look, and smiling still more easily as she felt how much his handsome face pleased her; its very expression, an unaccented, humorous gaiety, worn for her sake, was a homage, a warrant of most chivalrous comprehension. "You alone are responsible"--and following her mental picture of the game of hide-and-seek in a Watteau landscape--"You caught me--that was all!"

"That was all!" he repeated; "and you were difficult to catch. Now that you are caught I shall keep you."

"No, I am not sad," Camelia pursued, "I only feel as if I had grown up suddenly."

"No, don't grow up. I must keep you always my laughing child."

"Lady Henge wouldn't approve of that!" said Camelia, yielding to a closer enfolding, but facilitating it by no gracious droopings.

"Ah, mother loves you," said Sir Arthur, with a touch of added pride in his capture.

"Does she?" Camelia's brows lifted a little; the enfolding continuing she was conscious enough of a dart of irritation to wish to add, "I don't love her!" but after a kiss he released her and she checked the naughty impulse, merely adding, with some perversity, keeping him now at arm's length though she abandoned her hand for the purpose, "Would you have dared to love me had she not?"

"Camelia, you know that I did." The perversity had grieved him a little.

His clear brown eyes, that always reminded her of a dog's in their widely opened sincerity, dwelt on her, questioning her intention. "She did not know you, that was all."

"Nor did you, quite." Camelia laughed at him gently, and put her hand on his shoulder, half as a reward for the pang, half to still keep him away.

"No, not quite," Sir Arthur confessed, "though even my ignorance loved you. But you let me know you at last."

"But what _do_ you know?" Camelia persisted.

"I know my laughing child."

"Her faults the faults of a child?"

"Has she faults?"

"Oh, blinded man!"

"The faults of a child, then," he a.s.sented.

When he had left her, for he was to spend the day in London, there was a lull after the stress of change. Camelia found herself in a solitude wherein she might sit and meditate. Every one seemed to fall away from her, and when she was left alone she was sorry for it, though it was she who had withdrawn, not they. Lady Henge had talked to her for half-an-hour, her arm affectionately, but heavily lying about her shoulders, seeming in the ma.s.sive embrace to claim her with a kindness that knew itself as wiser than mere maternal emotionalism. The low tones of her voice were impressive, and Camelia would have submitted to the newly a.s.sumed manner of guardianship, of confidential admonition, with a very ill grace, had not Lady Henge been now so truly indifferent to her.

Mary had been very tiresome, following her at a distance, wanting to kiss her and cry. Mrs. Fox-Darriel's silent complacency was unendurable.

Camelia knew that in the new epoch her friend saw only a tightly-closed fist, and this symbol affected her own imagination until she could have shaken Mrs. Fox-Darriel for having suggested it.

Then her mother had fallen upon her breast and wept. Camelia was ashamed of herself for seeing in the great lovingness a Scriptural exaggeration; and being ashamed of herself she was only the more anxious to get rid of the maternal clinging. She ended by locking herself in her own room, only to find that she had locked herself in with a melancholy that had been stepping silently beside her since the morning. She would not look this companion in the face, however. She was alone with it at last; but she feverishly avoided its fixed eyes, and eagerly busied herself with trivialities, a dramatic sense of courage animating all her actions. She emptied and rearranged her wardrobes and boxes, folded ribbons with intensest exact.i.tude, introduced a new plan in the bestowal of her gloves and handkerchiefs, and even found herself unpicking a summer hat with a fict.i.tious eagerness that implied an imperative want of that particular hat in a new tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. When the hat was quite demolished she put it away, and polished her finger-nails, and, lastly, spent a fatiguing half-hour before the looking-gla.s.s in essays at new ways of hair-dressing. None were satisfactory, and with arms aching from their long uplifting, she at last swept the shining tresses into their accustomed lines, unlocked the door, and emerged deliberately, but with a sense of flight.