The Confounding of Camelia Part 38

"Oh! I hope not," cried Camelia.

"You know it. You know it. Lady Elizabeth hasn't a chance. She has become literary--is writing the life of her great-grandfather, deep in archives--that means hopelessness.--Camelia!" and Mrs. Fox-Darriel's cry gathered from Camelia's impa.s.sive smile a frenzied energy. "You are not--tell me you are not--going to marry that man--relapse into a country matron! He will swamp you. You have nothing in common. It is calf-love, pure and simple. I felt it all along; hoped he would see the incongruity of it--take your poor little cousin, who was cut out for submission and nurseries."

"Oh, I don't think a superfluity of either will be expected of me," said Camelia, with a laugh really unkind.

"Oh, heavens! You are going to marry him?"

"Yes, immediately," said Camelia, somewhat to her own surprise. She had not expected her rather indefinite views on this subject to crystallize so suddenly and so irrevocably. "Console yourself, Frances," she added, really feeling some compunction before Mrs. Fox-Darriel's tragic contemplation, "it won't be my funeral. He dug me out, and I am going to dig him out. You may hear of me yet--as his wife."

"Ah!" Mrs. Fox-Darriel had found the calm of her despair. "It is the same old story. His indifference has done it all. It may be brutal, but I must say it, you threw yourself at his head. The flattery at last penetrated his priggishness; Endymion stooped to Selena."

Camelia's serenity held good.

"You can't make me angry. I like your disinterestedness, Frances. Let me thank you for Endymion; I am sure the simile would flatter his forty-five years."

"And I came hoping----"

"Hoping what my kind Frances?"

"That I was to be a link; that I would find you sane again--willing to pay me a visit, and meet _him_."

"But, as you see, I am on Latmos, and like it."

"Yes, I see. I am disillusionized, Camelia; I confess it. I didn't expect that sort of floppiness from you. And there is a self-righteousness about your whole manner that is insufferable, quite; I tell you so frankly." Mrs. Fox-Darriel, as she spoke, shouldered her closed parasol, and clasped her hands over it in a militant antagonism of att.i.tude. "The sheep looking suavely from its fold at the goat. We are all goats to you now."

"Come, let us kiss through the bars, then."

"Oh, you are miles away--aeons away!"

Mrs. Fox-Darriel submitted drearily. "You are lost! done for! And the name, the power, the future you might have had! You were clever."

"I rather doubt that."

"Ah! of course you doubt it; you must doubt it. As the wife of a crusty country squire it would be a corroding cleverness merely. You turn your back on it."

"We won't be hopelessly provincial. You will see us in London. He may get into Parliament."

"Us! He! Alas! he will swamp you," she repeated. "He will turn you into a pillar of salt--looking back, and being sorry. _You_ to be wasted!"

was the last Camelia heard.

When she had gone Camelia went slowly across the lawn; Perior, she knew, was lurking about the garden waiting for her. Some of Mrs. Fox-Darriel's remarks had cut--so far less deeply, though, than her own thoughts during past months. It was the strong revival of these thoughts that pained her more than the mode of revival.

It was dusk, a pensive dusk, the evening sky faintly barred with pink.

Perior was walking up and down the garden between rows of tally growing flowers. Was the thought of his patience and loneliness, of her selfishness in prolonging them, a mere sophistry meant to hide her own longing for happiness? As she walked down the path towards him her mind juggled with this thought; it was very confusing.

"Who do you think it was?" she asked, putting her hand in his, a little _douceur_ Perior had never presumed upon.

"Mrs. Jedsley? Mrs. Grier? Lady Haversham?" he asked affably, but scanning, as she felt, the sadness of her face.

"No--the past has been having a flick at me--Mrs. Fox-Darriel the whip."

"Ah yes. I never liked her."

"There is not much harm in her."

"No, perhaps not," Perior acquiesced.

"I told her," said Camelia, after a little pause in which they turned a corner of the garden, and walked down it again by an outward path.

"Well, what did you tell her? She has hurt you. I can see that."

"No, not she. She asked me if I had never seen that Mary loved you, so, in reply, I said that I had only seen that _I_ loved you."

"Did that excellent piece of truth-telling pain you?"

"No; it was a delicious mouthful. But, she said too, that the flattery of my love had pierced your indifference--or your priggishness, she called it"--and Camelia gave him a rather arch glance, "and I didn't really wonder, not _really_; but you were so much more indifferent than I was, weren't you?" and she paused in the path to look at him, not archly, but very seriously. Her candor was so charming, with its little touch of fear, that Perior's answer could not resist an emphasis.

"Dearest," he said, and Camelia's wonder was not unpleasant, and his daring went unrebuked, as he put his arm around her.

"That means you were not?"

"It means a great deal more. I was in love with you when I was nothing to you. I've always been in love with you--horribly in love with you.

Indifference! Great heavens! that was what I prayed for, that was what I tried to feign, for I thought you such an abominable little siren. All the time that you were picking me up, and putting me down, and whisking past me, and torturing and teasing me, all the time I was adoring you, I couldn't help myself! adoring you with all your crimes upon you!

thinking myself a fool for it, I grant."

"Putting you down? No, I never did that," Camelia demurred.

"Well, I thought so. And at all events you know that you were most comfortably indifferent until you found out that you couldn't get me for the asking."

"No, no!" cried Camelia. "From the first, if you had really let me think you loved me, told me so, nicely, and begged a little, I should have fallen straight into your arms, and perhaps never have found out how bad I was!"

"And that would have been a pity, eh? No," he added, with an argumentative gravity that touched and made her smile sadly. "You were never _bad_. It was always half my fault. I misjudged you, and you danced to my lugubrious piping."

"This is the very madness of devotion! Oh, dear Alceste, with you, perhaps, with you I have not dealt so badly; but, _but_----" She walked on again, turning away her head.

"Don't," said Perior gently.

"Ah, I must, I must remember."

For a long time they were silent during the rounding of the whole garden, where the high walls grew dark against the sky, and the flowers, in the faint light, were ghostly.

"Michael," she said at last, "I rebel sometimes against my own unhappiness. I want to crush it--I am afraid of it; but I am more afraid of being happy."

"Why can't they go together?" he asked.

"Ah! but can they?"

"They must, sooner or later. Then you won't be afraid of either. Doesn't this all mean," he added, "that _now_ I may tell you how much I love you?" and he stopped to look at her. Her face was like a white flower in the dusk. Far away, over long sweeps of thin purpling cloud, shone one star, faint and steady. He saw together her face, the sky, and the star.