The Confounding of Camelia Part 28

"What do you mean, dear?"

"I mean that I can't have my own way--I, too, can't. And it wasn't a bad way either. There is the cruelty of it, the irony, the jeer! All the bad ways are given to me, and when I turn from them, don't want them, and try for the _best_--I don't get it! Isn't it intolerable?"

To Lady Paton this was wild, bewildering, pitiful, yet she grasped enough to say, "That would be the punishment, would it not, dear, for the bad ways?"

"Yes, the punishment. Like d.a.m.nation. One has made one's self too ugly--the best can't recognize one at all."

That evening the last number of the _Friday Review_ lay on the drawing-room table. Perior had not written in it for some time, but with the quiver of the heart any a.s.sociation with him now gave her, Camelia picked up the paper and carried it to the fireside. Mary, sewing in the lamp's soft circle of light, looked up quickly, and her hand paused with an outstretched thread as she saw Camelia's literary fare.

Camelia turned the pages in a half fretful search for what she felt sure of not finding; then, abruptly, the rustling leaves came to a standstill. There was the article, at last! a long one, on the Factory Bill. Impossible to question the concise, laconic style; no one else wrote with such absolute directness, such exquisite choice, free from all hint of phrasing.

Camelia's gray eyes kindled as she read, and her lips parted involuntarily; she drew quick, shallow little breaths. Oh! through it all went that fervor, that cold, bracing fervor she knew and loved.

Perior's strong feeling was at times like a clear, indignant wind, sweeping before it cowering littlenesses. Her mind half forgot him as she read, conscious as was her heart. For the first time the intrinsic right of the bill was borne in upon her. She had glibly dressed its merits, laughing at her own theatrical dexterity. She had never really cared for any bill. Now it became the greatest, the only bill in the world. Her ardor rushed past the unfortunate initiator, to fall at the propagator's feet. Ah! if she could but help now, and for his sake! Poor Sir Arthur!

Mary, who from her seat could just see, beyond the sharply held review, the lovely line of Camelia's cheek, the little ear, set in its delicate closeness against the shining hair, Mary, intent on the rising color in this bit of cheek, had quite stopped sewing. Her pale eyes widened in a devouring significance, her lips set tightly on repressed pain. Mary, too, had read the article.

Coming to the end of it, Camelia slanted the paper downwards, and vaguely, over the top of it, looked at the fire. Then suddenly her eyes met Mary's. A violent shock of self-consciousness shook her through and through. She felt herself s.n.a.t.c.h back her secret from a precipice edge of revelation--revelation to dull Mary, of all people. Mary, against whom, in regard to Perior, she had long felt--not knowing that she felt it--a strong, reasonless antagonism. She could not shake and slap her secret, as a frightened mother slaps and shakes her rescued child; but she could turn the terrified anger on its cause, and, in a strangely pitched voice, she said, "What are you staring at? You look like a spy!"

Mary gave a great start. If indeed she had been slapped outright her guilty amazement could not have been more cruel.

She stammered at a repet.i.tion of "staring"; but no words came. Her face was scarlet. Camelia was immediately sorry, but not one whit less angry, more so, perhaps, since pity is often an irritating ingredient; and, too, she felt that to any one less stupid her very outburst might have betrayed her. She was angry with herself as well as with Mary. Mary's very helplessness was repulsive, and she hated to see her light blue eyes set in that scarlet confusion.

"Yes, staring;" she helped the stammering. "Is there anything you want to find out? Do ask, then. Don't let your eyes skulk about in that sneaking fashion. It makes me quite sick to see you."

Mary stood up, looking from side to side in a half-dazed way that Camelia observed with a pitying disgust that indeed sickened her. It reminded her of the gestures of an ugly animal wounded by a stone flung by some cruel boy. The simile came in a flash that it did not at the moment give her time to complete it and see herself as stone-thrower.

She felt relief, as well as an added dismay, when Mary broke suddenly into sobs, and stumbled out of the room, her sewing, caught in her skirt, following her with ungainly leaps. Only then Camelia realized that it was her own cruelty that sickened her; her irrational terror, breaking in upon a tender, thrilling absorption, had urged her to it, almost irresistibly; but now, the terror past, its foundationless folly apparent, she really felt quite sick as she still sat looking at the fire.

The _Friday Review_ sliding suddenly from her knees gave her a nervous pang that tingled to her finger-tips, and when she stooped to pick it up Perior's personality seemed to confront her. She cowered before it. The hot blood beat in her head. Only by degrees, as her mind faltered over extenuations, did she quiet herself. Her hidden unhappiness--her love, it had been like a blundering hand thrust among her heart-strings; how could she have helped the sharp anger in which her naked anguish clothed itself? Lastly, but with a kind of shame, Mary's displeasing personality made a subtle condonation; her inarticulate stupidity was almost infuriating. Not for one moment did her secret suspect Mary's. Her own pain seemed already an expiation, and, in a.n.a.lyzing it, she could put Mary aside, promising herself that she would atone by a "Forgive me, Mary, I did not mean it," the next time they met. She would even add, "I was a devil." Her sigh of decision left her only half comforted.

CHAPTER XXIII

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 a.s.sume 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 embarra.s.sment 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 m.u.f.fin 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 Paton tried 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 pleased her 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 circ.u.mstance; 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 circ.u.mstance 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 it was 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 unembarra.s.sed. 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 courage was helped by the fact that the mood--the astonishing mood--had pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sure 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!"