The Confounding of Camelia Part 26

CHAPTER XXI

These days were very lonely for Lady Paton. The house was empty, and one could not call companionship Camelia's mute, white presence.

Camelia read all day in the library, where only Siegfried was made welcome, or rode for hours about the wintry country. To all timid questions, as to future plans, she only answered by a coldly decisive, "I don't know." When her mother put her arms around her, Camelia stood impa.s.sive in their circling love, locked in her own frozen mood of despairing humiliation.

One day when in her room she had broken down her outward endurance by an impulsive cry of woe, and stood sobbing, her face in her hands, her mother came in, made courageous by pity.

"My dearest child, tell me--what is it? You are breaking your heart and mine. Do you love him? Tell me, darling. Is it some hidden scruple? some fancy? Let me send for him," poor Lady Paton's thoughts dwelt longingly on amorous remedies.

"Love him? Sir Arthur? Are you mad, mother?" Camelia lifted a stern face. "He doesn't enter my mind. He is nothing to me--simply nothing."

"But, Camelia--you are miserable----"

"Ah! I have a right to that dreary liberty."

"And--Oh don't be angry, dearest--is there no one else?"

"No one else?" Camelia repeated it angrily indeed;--that her mother should give this stupid wrench to her heart was intolerable. "Of course there is no one else! How can you be so tiresome, mother. There--don't cry. I am simply sick of everything--myself included, that is all that is the matter with me. Please don't cry!" for sympathetic tears were coming into her own eyes, and above all things, she dreaded a breaking down of reserves, a weakened dignity that might bring her to a sobbing, maudlin confession, that would burn her afterwards, and follow her everywhere in the larger pity of her mother's eyes.

Lady Paton, her handkerchief at her lips, pressed back her grief, saying in a broken entreaty, "But, Camelia--why? How long will it last? You were always such a happy creature."

"How can I tell?" Camelia gave a little laugh that carried her over the vanquished sob to a certain calmness; leaning back against the mantelpiece she added, smiling drearily, "Don't worry, mother; don't _you_ be miserable."

Lady Paton looked at her with eyes in which Camelia felt the unconscious dignity of an inarticulate reproof.

"Oh, my child!" she said, "my child! Am I not your mother? Is not your happiness my only happiness?--your sorrow my last and greatest sorrow?

You forget me, dear, in your own grief. You shut me out--because you don't love me--as I love you;--it is that that hurts the most."

Camelia stood looking at her. Her artistic sensibility was decidedly impressed by this unexpected revelation of character. How well her mother's white hair and cap looked on the pale greens of the room; the exquisite face, and the more exquisite soul looking from it. How well she had spoken; how truly too. Yes, her own worthlessness clung to her; she, so far inferior in moral worth, made this sweet, fragile creature unhappy; she was everything to her mother, the light that shone through and sustained the white petals of her flower-like being; and her mother was to her only a pretty detail. Camelia a.n.a.lyzed it all very completely, and resting on an achieved self-disgust she said, gravely contemplating her, "It is a great shame, mother. That is the way of this wretched world. The good people are always making beauty for the bad ones. You shouldn't let that lovely, but most irrational maternal instinct dominate you; see me as I am, a horrid creature." She paused, and all thoughts of artistic effects, all poetical and scientific appreciations, were blotted out in a flame-like leap of memory--"false, selfish, hard as a stone," she said.

"Don't say it, dear--you could not say it if it were so."

"Oh, yes!--one can, if one has a devilish clearness of perception about everything. I am horrid--and I know that I am horrid. And you are very lovely. There." And kissing her, Camelia pushed her gently to the door.

Perhaps, however, more than artistic sensibilities had been touched.

Camelia shrank as quickly as before from any demonstration that seemed to look too closely at her heart, but she herself would make advances.

She was only gentle, now, towards her mother; she never failed to kiss or caress her when they met. A cheerful coldness seemed at once her surest refuge and most becoming medium for an affection that could allow itself no warmer and more dangerous avowals. It was a colorless, still affection, held, as it were, from development, only felt by Lady Paton as a more careful kindness, and by Camelia as a new necessity for incurring no further self-reproach.

Poor Lady Paton, devouring her heart in sorrowful conjecture and helpless sympathy, had no thought but of her child; but by her side, Mary, the silent witness of her grief and anxiety, might have claimed, from disengaged eyes, a foreboding attention. Since the day of her stolen ride Mary had effaced herself in a shadowy taciturnity. She watched Camelia, and avoided her. Her absorption in every household duty became minutely forced. She slipped early to bed after a day of self-imposed labor. Work and its ensuing weariness, were the only sedatives for intolerable pain; she deadened herself with the drug. The weather was bad, and Lady Paton too depressed to rouse herself to her usual benignant activity. Mary took upon herself her Aunt's abandoned occupations. She went every day to read to the paralyzed girl at the Manor Farm. She made the weekly round of visits through the wet village streets; consulted with the well-worked rector; kept an eye upon the school and almshouses. Mary was not particularly popular in the village.

Her kindness was rather flat and flavorless; Jane Hicks at the farm complained to her mother that Miss Fairleigh's reading was "so dull like; one didn't seem to get anything from it."

Jane never forgot the one visit Miss Paton made her, nor how Camelia had sat beside her and kept her laughing the whole hour. Camelia, seeing the effect she made, had promised to return some day, but events had interfered, she now was in no mood for laughing, and Jane was always eager to question Mary about Camelia's doings, and to sigh with the pleasant reminiscence of her "pretty ways." Mary's virtues were all peculiarly unremunerative, they sought, and obtained, no reward.

Towards the beginning of December Camelia's despair threw itself into action. The rankling sense of Perior's scorn at first stupefied, and at last roused her. Before him she had felt her powerlessness. His rocky negative had broken her. He would not change--not a thought of his changing stirred her deep hopelessness; but she herself might change--merit at least a friendship unflawed--cast off crueller accusations.

She must be good, she must struggle from the sh.e.l.l; she must realize, however feebly, his ideal. He would never love her--that delusion of her vanity he had killed forever; but he might be fond of her without a compunction.

Towards this comparatively humble attainment Camelia strove. How to be good was the question. Of course she would never tell lies any more--unless necessary lies of self-defence, in protection of her dear, her dreadful secret--Camelia could address it by both names; the love that sustained and must lift her life, even he should never see again.

After all, it was easy enough to tell the truth when one cared no more for any of the things gained by falseness. That was hardly a step upward. Some other mode of development must be found; Camelia pondered this necessity, and one day during a walk past Perior's model cottages the thought came. She, too, would build cottages, beautiful cottages, more beautiful than his! She almost laughed at the delicious, teasing, old friendliness of that addenda.

The Patons' estate boasted only very commonplace residences for its laborers, and delightful visions of co-operative farming, of idealized laboring conditions flashed joyously through Camelia's mind. Vast fields of study opened alluringly, and, immediately in the foreground, these idyllic cottages. They bloomed with trellised flowers on the gray December landscape as she walked. The wall-papers were chosen by the time she reached home. She burst upon her mother in the firelit drawing-room at tea-time with an enthusiasm that made Lady Paton's heart jump.

"Mother! Such an idea! I am going to build."

Mary, who was toasting a m.u.f.fin to hotter crispness before the fire, turned a thin, flushed face at the announcement.

"Build what, dear?" asked Lady Paton; while Mary, certain in one moment of what Camelia was going to build, and why, silently put the ameliorated m.u.f.fin on the little plate by her aunt's side.

"Cottages. Model cottages. Beautiful cottages--really beautiful, you know--Elizabethan; beams, white plaster, latticed windows, deep window-seats, and the latest modernity in drains and bath-tubs."

"Like Michael's, you mean," said Lady Paton, a little bewildered; "his are not Elizabethan, but the drains and bath-tubs are very good, I believe."

Camelia's face changed when her mother spoke of "Michael;" and Mary, watching as usual, compressed her lips tightly. The cottages were to be built for him--with him! Ah! he would come back. Camelia would keep him--for building cottages, for adoring her; while she, Mary, would be thrust further and further away.

"Yes, like his, only better than his. My tenants shall be the best housed of the county." Camelia threw herself into an easy-chair, and fixed her eyes thoughtfully upon the fire.

"It will be very expensive, dear."

"Never mind; we'll economize."

Camelia had not so looked or spoken for weeks, and Lady Paton smiled a happy acquiescence.

Camelia took the cup of tea her cousin offered her without looking away from the fire, where she saw the cottages charmingly pictured, and she and Perior looking at them--friends.

"Your boots are wet, dear, are they not?" asked Lady Paton; "it has been raining."

"They are wet, I think. Mary, just ring, will you? Grant must take them off down here. I am too tired, too comfortable, to go upstairs."

Camelia sighed as though the fundamental heaviness of her mood rose through the seeming light-heartedness of tone; sighed, and yet the relief of getting outside herself was filling her with an exhilarating energy.

As she drank her tea, ate a m.u.f.fin, Mary browning it nicely for her--"How cosy to have tea by ourselves," said Camelia, "and toast our own m.u.f.fins!"--she talked as she had not talked for a long time. Her mind ran quickly, escaping its miserable thraldom, from point to point of the project.

She pushed aside the tea-things to make with spoons and saucers a plan of the new scheme.

"That high bit of land, you know, with the beech woods behind it; I'll have six of the cottages, with big gardens; and what a view from the front windows. I will furnish them, too. I must see an architect at once: I'll go up to town for that, and talk it over with Lady Tramley.

Where is her last letter, I wonder? I remember her asking me for some date; but that doesn't matter. She wanted me to go out, and of course I won't." Camelia sprang up to rumple over the leaves of the blotter, the drawers of the writing-desk. "Where is the letter? In the library, I wonder?"

"There is a whole pile, dear, in the small cabinet. You did not care to look at them. I think they had better be gone over."

"No; here is hers. I don't care about the others. I don't want to hear anything about any one," Camelia added with some bitterness, as she dropped into her chair again and held out her foot to Grant, who had come in with the shoes. "Yes; she asks me for next week."

"If you won't go out, dear, it may be rather annoying for her."

"Oh! she can get out of things herself while I am with her," said Camelia easily, as her eyes skimmed over the letter.

The new impulse was too strong to be thwarted by the slightest delay.

That evening Camelia sent off a bulky letter to Lady Tramley, much astonishing that good friend by her absolute ignoring of important facts in recent history. Sir Arthur was not so much as hinted at. The whole letter bristled with cottages, and Camelia's earnestness panted on every page.