The Confounding of Camelia Part 29

"Will they indeed?" his eyes sought hers for a moment, seemed to see in them the past's triumphant mausoleum, presented for inspection quite magnificently.

"Thanks, Camelia." The boldness delighted him, delighted all of him except that grumbling prisoner who, in his dungeon, felt foolishly aggrieved. "Yes, I am coming back--since I am welcome," he said, adding while they went along the road, "As for the worsted right, the right usually is worsted, in the first place. One must try to keep one's faith in eventual winning."

"Tell me," said Camelia, feeling foundations quite secure, since each had helped the other, "Mr. Rodrigg's opposition, that last speech of his--the satanic eloquence of it!--you don't think--ah! say you don't think me altogether responsible?"

"Would it please you--a little--to think you were?" The old rallying smile pained her.

"Ah, don't! That has been knocked out of me--really! Don't imply such a monstrous perversion of vanity."

"I retract. No, Camelia, I don't think you _altogether_ responsible. The eloquence would always have been against us, its satanic quality was, I fear, your doing."

"Yet, I meant for the best--indeed I did. Say you believe that."

"Indeed, I do believe it, Camelia."

They were nearing home when he said, "You were in London--I heard from Lady Tramley."

"Yes, I went up on business."

"Did you? How are Lady Paton and Mary?"

"Very well. You don't ask about my business,"--Camelia smiled round at him.

"Very blunt in me. What was the business, Camelia?" His answering smile made amends.

Camelia placed herself against her background.

"I am building model cottages! You should see how economical we have become! _Your_ glory is diminished!"

"With all my heart!" cried Perior, with a laugh of real surprise and pleasure. "Lady Tramley did not tell me. Good for you, Celimene!"

It was delightful to bring him into the drawing-room that she had left only an hour before. Camelia almost fancied herself perfectly happy as she flung open the door with the announcement--

"Here is Alceste, Mamma!" No nervousness was possible before her mother and Mary; it required no effort to act for them since she had so successfully performed her part to him. Mrs. Jedsley was gone, but Mary and Lady Paton sat before the fire, Mary reading aloud. She dropped the book; Camelia's voice, in her ears, sounded with a brazen clang of victory, and Perior seemed to her conquered, brought captive in an old bondage. She could hardly speak, hardly welcome him; his return crushed every hope of his liberation, the joy of seeing him was a mere desolation. With a settled dulness she listened to them--all three talking and exclaiming.

Perior had taken her hand, had shaken it warmly, looking at her with kindest eyes; but now he listened to Lady Paton, and Lady Paton, of course, after the first flood of rejoicing, condolences, and questionings, was talking of Camelia.

The resentment that had smouldered in Mary for many months seemed now to leap, and lick her heart with little flames of hatred. How she hated Camelia; she turned the black thought quite calmly in her mind--it was not unfamiliar.

Lady Paton was telling Perior about the cottages; she was rather proud of Camelia's beneficent schemes, though gently teasing her about some of their phases: "And, Michael, she is going to make them into veritable palaces of art. Specially designed furniture--and j.a.panese prints on the walls! Now they won't care about prints, will they?"

"They ought to, Camelia thinks," laughed Perior, looking at Camelia, who, hat and coat thrown aside, leaned forward in the lamplight, smiling and radiant, the pathos that her thinner face had gained emphasizing its enchanting loveliness.

Mary looked at her too, at the curves of the figure in the perfect black dress, at the narrow white hands, one lying on her knee, like a flower, with the almost exaggerated length and delicacy of the fingers; at the profile, the frank upraised eyes, the smiling mouth, the flashing white and gold that rose from the nun-like white and black of the dress, and the wide cambric collar falling about her shoulders and clasping her throat. Beautiful! Mary felt the beauty with a sort of sickening. Of course he looked at her, had no eyes but for her. Of course he had come back.

"They must like them," said Camelia, "I don't see why such people should not grow into good taste; and taste is often such a negative thing--a mere leaving out of all ugliness. I have a lot of these prints; I picked them up in Paris--the arcade of the Odion, Alceste--cheap things, but excellent in their way; then a few good photographs. The rooms are to be very bare. I should ask for all decoration a vase of flowers on the table--I think I shall offer prizes to my cottagers for the best arrangement of flowers."

"A very civilizing system!" Perior still laughed, for he found the prints and the flower-arrangements highly amusing, and he still looked at Camelia.

So that first meeting was over. It had pa.s.sed so easily, with an inevitable ease, based on long years that would not be disowned. Yet when he had gone, Camelia was conscious of a sinking of the heart. The exhilarating moment could not last. Her friend had come back, fond, gently mocking, tender, yet unimpressed, blind to the change in herself she pa.s.sionately clung to as consummated. As her love was n.o.ble, she thought that she had grown to match it. Her self-complacency, though on a higher plane, circled her more completely, and as the days went on, his blindness gave her a new sense of defeat. The ease remained, a tacit agreement to shut their eyes on a certain incident; it was done most successfully; they were quite prepared to meet _tete-a-tete_, and the inner wonder of each as to the other's unconsciousness betrayed itself only in a certain gentle formality that grew between them. That he should come--and so often--fulfilled the only hope left her, and yet her heart was darkened at moments by the thought that in these visits there was an effort. She missed something of the old intimacy; it was not quite the same--how could it be? that, after all, would have been too big a feat of forgetfulness. He did not laugh at her, nor grow angry and rage at her, as he had used to do, yet she could not feel that he approved of her the more. He was fond of her--that was evident, even though he might find this rebuilding difficult, and undertake it from a sense of duty; but the fondness was graver than before, at least, it made no pretence of hiding its gravity.

CHAPTER XXIV

Mary came for Camelia one morning while Perior was with her, to tell her that Jane Hicks was dying and asking for her. Mary saw that Camelia's prompt.i.tude, where compunction blushed, gratified Perior, as did Jane's devotion; she knew that he supposed the devotion based upon some new blossoming of thoughtful kindness in Camelia, and the ironic bitterness of this reflection was in no way made easier to Mary as she heard Camelia, while they all three walked to the farm, confess dejectedly to the one visit.

"I should have gone again!" Camelia repeated with sincerest self-reproach, and Mary could see that though he a.s.sented to the reproach her contrition lifted her in his estimation. Perior waited below while Camelia and Mary went up together. Camelia came down weeping; Mary's face was quite impa.s.sive.

The poor girl had died with her hand in Camelia's, her eyes fixed on the lovely Madonna head that bent over her with a beautiful piteousness, like a vision at the gates of heaven. Jane closed her eyes on that vision. She had not had one look for Mary, though her perfunctory thanks--the winding up of the trifling duties remaining to her on earth--had been feebly breathed out to her some hours before. Mary saw that she had been very unnecessary to Jane, and that the unknown Camelia, Camelia's one smile, the one golden hour Camelia's beauty had given her, made the brightness, the poetry, the symbolized radiance of things unseen and hoped for that had remained with the dying girl during the last months of her life. Mary was very still in walking back with the others. Camelia sobbed, and stumbled in the heavy road, so that Perior gave her his arm and held her, looking pityingly, more than pityingly, at the bent head and shaking shoulders. Mary felt her own lack of emotion to be unbecoming, but, indeed, she had none, was conscious instead of a dislike for poor, dead Jane.

For Mary was a most unhappy creature. Outside the inner circle, where Perior and Camelia wondered about, and evaded, one another, the very closeness of constant intercourse making blindness easy, Mary saw the truth, that Camelia did not see, very clearly. With her preconceived and half-mistaken ideas as to that truth, it remained one-sided. Perior loved Camelia; loved, and had weakly crawled back to her, craving at least the crumbs of friendship,--and that she was lavish with her crumbs who could deny?--since all else had been refused to him. Mary spent her days in a quivering contemplation of this fact. The bitter, sweet consolation of the whole truth never entered her mind. Camelia loving, and Camelia repulsed, was an imagining too monstrous for vaguest embodiment. Camelia's own nave vanity would not have surpa.s.sed in stupefaction Mary's sensations, had such a possibility been suggested to her. Camelia, who could have anybody, love Mr. Perior? She would have voiced her astonishment even more baldly. Not that Mary thought Mr.

Perior n.o.body. To her he was everybody; but that knowledge was her painful joy, a perception lifting her above Camelia. Camelia judged by the world's gross standards, and, by those standards, she must stoop in loving Perior.

That Camelia should stoop in the world's eyes, that Camelia should do anything but soar, were unimaginable things. So her ignorance made her knowledge more bitter. The man she loved, adored,--her bleached, starved nature spreading every flower, stretching every tendril, her ideal and her rapture towards him,--that man did not see her, even. She was no one; a dusty little moth beating dying wings near the ground, and his eyes were fixed on the exquisite b.u.t.terfly tilting its white loveliness in the sunshine. Under her stolid silence Mary was burning, panting. His misery, her doom, and Camelia's indifference,--at the thought of all these a madness of helpless rebellion swam about her; and with a growing sense of weakness came a growing terror of self-betrayal. For she was dying, that was Mary's second secret; there was even a savage pleasure in the thought of absolute and consummated wretchedness hidden so carefully. Hysterical sobs rose in her throat when she thought of it, and of their blindness. The sobs were nearly choking her one day as she sat alone in the morning-room casting up accounts.

Perior had been with Camelia in the library for two hours, and he had not come into the morning-room, though over two hours ago poor Mary had stationed herself there in the sorry hope of seeing him. The little touch of abandonment stabbed more deeply than ever on this morning, when her head was so heavy, her chest so hollow, breathing so difficult, all her sick self so in need of pitying gentleness and sympathy; and though no tears fell, that rising, strangling sob was in her throat. There was shame, too; her very rect.i.tude was crumbling in her weakness and wretchedness; the wretchedness had seemed to exonerate her when, exasperated by envy and long waiting, she had gone to the library door and put her ear to the key-hole, like a base thing, to listen.

Since everything had abandoned her she might as well abandon herself, so she told herself recklessly; but she had only heard Camelia's clear, sweet voice; and Camelia was reading Greek! Mary could only feel the irony as cruel, and on regaining her place at the writing-table she found herself shaking, and overwhelmed with self-disgust and a sort of desperation.

When Perior came in very shortly afterwards she could almost have risen to meet him with a scream of reproach. The mere imagining of such a strange revelation made her dizzy as he approached her.

"I had not seen you. I am just off. How are you, Mary?" he asked. In spite of the mad imaginings Mary's mask was on in one moment, the white, stolid mask, as she turned her face to him.

"Very well, thanks."

"You don't look very well."

"Oh, I am, thanks." Mary averted her eyes.

Perior's brow had an added look of gloom this morning. His eyes followed hers. The drizzling rain half blotted out the first faint purpling of the trees. "What a dreary day!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with a long, involuntary sigh. He was not thinking of Mary; she saw that very plainly, though her eyes were fixed on the blurred tree-tops.

"Very dreary," she echoed. He looked down at her again, this time with a certain pain and interest that Mary did not see. On his own thoughts, the perplexing juggling of "If she still loves me as I love her, why resist?" the ensuing fear of yielding, and yielding for no better reason than that he could not resist, broke the thought of Mary. It could not be a very big thought. Mary was a quiet, uneventful little person, spending a contented existence under her aunt's wings, useful often as a whip wherewith to lash Camelia, but pitiful mainly from his sense of the contrast of which he really believed Mary quite unconscious. Something, now, in her still face, in the lax weariness of her thin hand, lying on the account book, roused in him a groping instinct. He looked at the hand with a certain surprise. Its thinness was remarkable.

"You do look badly, Mary," he said. "Tell me, are you dreary, too? Can I do anything for you? We must have some rides when it grows finer." His thoughts, as usual, gave Camelia an accusing blow.

"You are bored, tired, unhappy like the rest of us, Mary. Is that any consolation?" He smiled at her. She felt the smile in his voice, but did not dare to meet it, bending her head over the account books.

"Don't do those stupid sums!"

"Oh, I like them!" Indeed, the scrupulous duties were her one frail barrier against the black sea of engulfing thought. And then, her heart just rising in the false but delicious joy of his kind presence, came a call, a call not dreary like the day, but fatally sweet and clear, the sound of it as if a flower had suddenly flung open rosy petals on the grayness.

"Alceste, come here! I want you."

"Our imperious Camelia," said Perior with a slight laugh. "Well, good-bye, Mary. Don't do any more sums, and don't look at the rain. Get a nice, cheerful book and sit down at the fire. Amuse yourself, won't you?" He clasped her hand and was gone.