The Confounding of Camelia Part 5

"The rents are lower than the lowest in the village. Lord Haversham was telling me about it yesterday."

"Oh, Haversham!" laughed Perior.

"He was very plaintive. Said that times were hard enough for landlords as it was, without your charitable visionaries and your socialistic theories."

"The two accusations don't fit; but of the two I prefer the latter."

"It is a mere egotistic diversion then?"

"Yes, a purely scientific experiment."

"And your tenants have bath-tubs, I hear. Do they use them with Pears'

soap every morning?"

"I flatter myself that they are fairly clean. That alone is an interesting experiment. Dirt, I firmly believe to be the root of all evil."

"Ah, we come down to the bed-rock of ethics at last, don't we? Well, how is the laboratory getting on? Have you found traces of original sin in protoplasm?"

"I think I have spotted perverse tendencies," Perior smiled.

"What a Calvinist you are!"

"Michael a Calvinist, my dear child!" Lady Paton looked up from her knitting in amazement.

"An illogical Calvinist. Instead of burning sinners he washes them! and I've no doubt that to some of them the latter form of purification is as disagreeable as the former. He puts them into model cottages, with Morris wall-papers."

"I beg your pardon. No Morris wall-papers."

"Camelia, my dear, how extravagantly you talk," said Lady Paton, her smile reflecting happily Perior's good-humor. Michael did not mind the teasing--liked it perhaps; and though she did not understand she smiled.

Camelia sank down to a low chair beside her mother's, and taking her mother's hand she held it up solemnly, saying, "Mamma, Mr. Perior is a tissue of inconsistencies. He despises humanity; and he works for it like a n.i.g.g.e.r."

"You are an impressionist, Camelia. Don't lay on your primaries so glaringly."

"Confess that you are a philanthropist, though an unwilling one."

"I confess nothing," said Perior, looking across the room at Mary with a smile that seemed to invite her partic.i.p.ation in his well-borne baiting.

"Is not your life one long effort to help humanity--not _la sainte canaille_ with you--but, and hence your inconsistency, the gross _canaille_, the dull, treacherous, diabolical _canaille_?"

"Not to hurt it, rather; and as one is oneself gross, dull, treacherous, and diabolical, that may well engage one's energies. There would be less cant and more comfort in the world if we would merely avoid treading upon our neighbor's corns. Let us cultivate the negative virtues. What do you say, Mary? You have a right to a strong opinion, since I never saw you hurt anybody."

Mary, thus unexpectedly appealed to, started, grew red, and laughed an embarra.s.sed and apprehensive laugh. Camelia cast a glance upon the long strip of rather foolish embroidery lengthening under her cousin's fingers.

"My philosophy!" she declared. "People who make a row about things are such bores."

Lady Paton, still smiling, quite at sea, but conscious of a pleasant atmosphere, bent her eyes upon an intricate turn in the futile garment upon which she was engaged.

"Do you avoid your neighbor's corns, my young lady?" Perior inquired.

"I never think of such unpleasantnesses," Camelia replied lightly. "As I haven't any corns myself, I proceed upon the supposition that other people enjoy my immunity. If they don't, why, that is their own fault--let them cut them and give up tight boots."

Perior, looking on the floor, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, laughed again.

"Little pagan!" he said.

"Frank, healthy paganism, an excellent thing. I don't own to it, mind; but is not the soul in our modern sense a disease of the body?"

"Oh, Camelia!" said Lady Paton, looking up with eyes rounded. Camelia's smile rea.s.sured her somewhat, and she glanced for its confirmation at Perior.

Mary Fairleigh, in her distant seat, carefully drew her silk about the contour of an alarming flower.

"Never mind, Lady Paton, she doesn't shock me at all," said Perior.

"I am glad of that, Michael; she will make herself misunderstood.

Camelia dear, it is one o'clock. The others must be in the drawing-room.

Shall we go there?"

"Willingly, Mamma. I'm very hungry. Did you order a _good_ lunch, Mary?"

"I hope you will like it." Mary paused in the act of neatly rolling up her work. "Fowls, asparagus----"

"_Don't_," Camelia interposed in mock horror; "the nicest part of a meal is unexpectedness!" She laughed at her cousin; but Mary, securing her work with a pin, murmured solemnly, "I am so sorry."

"Mary, you are as silly as your own fowls!" cried Camelia; she gave her cousin's flaxen head a pat, and then, as Lady Paton had taken Perior's arm and led the way, she drew herself up in a mimicry of their stately progress, and followed them demurely.

CHAPTER V

Michael Perior was an unfortunate man; unfortunate in his temperament, which was enthusiastic, sensitive, and idealistic; unfortunate in the circ.u.mstances with which that temperament found itself called upon to do battle. To a man who had expected less of life the circ.u.mstances might have been more amenable and far more endurable, but Perior had the ill-luck to be born with an unmanageable instinct for the best, with an untamable scorn for the second-best. It is not necessary to go into the details of a life which had not spared these qualities nor improved while disillusionizing him. Two blinding buffets met him at its threshold. His father was ruined in a lawsuit, which by every ethical standard he should have won, and Perior was in consequence jilted by the girl whom he had enshrined in his heart as the perfect star of his existence. At twenty-three he found himself under a starless sky, with a heart stupefied at its own emptiness, and in a world of thieves and murderers--for his father died under the shock of disaster, and Perior did not pick his phrases.

The abject common-sense of his ex-_fiancee_ could be borne with perhaps more philosophy. He accepted the starlessness as in the nature of things, and his own brief belief in stars as typifying the ignorance of youth; but his father's death--the crushing out of life rather than its departure--was tragedy, and it was with the sense of inevitable and irretrievable tragedy that he began life. He had been thought clever at Oxford, and had considered himself destined for Parliament. With a huge load of debts upon his back, and an unresigned mother to support, all thoughts of the career for which he had fitted himself were out of the question. He turned to its only equivalent, and took up journalism. He was much in earnest; he believed in a right and in a wrong, and was intolerant of expediency. In a world of interested motives he bore himself with unflinching disapproval. He would limit his freedom by no party partiality, and in the laxity of public life his keen individuality made itself felt like a knife cutting through cheese. At the end of years of very bitter struggle he found himself in a position of some eminence, editor of a courteous, caustic review, whose chief characteristics were a stubborn isolation and a telling of truths that made both friends and foes blink. No half-measures, no half-truths.

Conformity with the faintest taint upon it was intolerable to him. His idealism had not evaporated in the storm and stress, it had condensed, rather, into a steely resistance to ugly reality. Insincerity, injustice, meanness, hurt him as badly in middle-age as they had at twenty-five, but he now expected them, and by a stoical presage braced himself against disappointment. The stoicism was only a rather brittle crust, hastily improvised by Nature's kindly adaptation; he was soured, but his heart was still soft; he expected nothing, and yet he was hurt by everything. It was now some time since he had promised himself that Camelia should never hurt him. Camelia had occupied his thoughts for a good many years. The pretty child, with her face of subdued saint-like curves, and her smile of frank unsaintliness, had seemed to claim him from the very first home-coming. By a final irony of fate poor Mrs.

Perior died only a few months before the Grange was freed from its last enc.u.mbrances. She had not made life easier for her son. She had always refused to believe in the necessity for letting the Grange, had always resented the lodgings in South Kensington, had always considered herself injured, and had not been chary in demonstrations of injury. Perior had looked forward with pride to the time when he should reinstate her in her own home, and her death made a mockery of his own home-coming.

It was in Camelia's early girlhood that ill-health, overwork, and a violent row with the powers of political darkness, made this home-coming definite. The battered idealist sought rather sulkily a retreat from the intolerable contemplation of a wider world's misdeeds. Young Camelia, so different from her dully worthy ancestors, so different even from her dashing but not intellectual papa, charmed him as the woods and flowers of spring charm eyes weary with city winter. She was too young to be taken seriously; that was a lifted weight, in the first place. The joyous receptivity of her mind afforded to his scholarly instincts just the foothold he required to excuse to himself an indulgent and thoughtless affection. As friend and adviser of Lady Paton, he drifted easily into a paternal att.i.tude towards the fatherless Camelia; he was over twenty years her senior, and her eagerness for knowledge appealed to him. As she had said, he taught her nearly everything she knew; she rebelled against other methods, and Perior himself would have felt robbed had governess or tutor supplanted him. During those quiet and pleasant years he felt that on a melancholy walk he had picked a handful of primroses--their pale young gold irradiated his solitude. He did not say to himself that Camelia would never disappoint him, nor own that the handful of primroses meant much in his life, but hopefulness seemed to emanate from her, and insensibly he lived in the sunny impression. Her very defects were charming, the mere superfluity of exuberant vitality, and with this conviction he observed her happy, youthful selfishness as one observes a kitten's antics, and treated her claims for dominion with gentle ridicule. Camelia laughed with him at herself, and this gave them an irresistible sense of companionship; consoling too, since no defect so humorously recognized could be deep; his primroses still kept their dew. But as she grew older, Perior began to realize uncomfortably that Camelia could laugh at the deepest defect, recognize it, a.n.a.lyze it, and stick to it--a deft combination. This faculty for firm sticking despite obstacles gave the paternal Perior food for reflection, and, as he reflected, he felt with a sudden little turn of terror that he was in a fair way to take Camelia seriously after all. His terror struck him as very cowardly, a shrinking from responsibilities--his, of a truth, to a certain extent. That lightly a.s.sumed guardianship meant much in her life. Had he failed in some essential? Was she not the product of her training? He owned with a sigh that the note of true authority it had not been his right to emphasize; yet in defending himself from the probable pain of a deep affection, had he not weakened his claim to a moral influence? And had he defended himself? Perior turned from the question. Camelia respected him, he knew that; and yet his very frankness with her--he, too, had laughed at himself for her benefit--had given her a power over him. He was not at all afraid of seeming priggish, but he was shy before certain contingencies; he knew that he should blunder if he preached, and that Camelia would force him to smile at the blunder and to blur the sermon.

At the age of eighteen he caught her more than once managing, manipulating the plastic elements about her with a skill approaching deceit. The very absence of a necessity for deceit alarmed him; she had so few temptations, there was no way of testing her, yet, that once or twice, when circ.u.mstances by a little twist or turn opposed her, he had caught her--too dexterous. Perior had not controlled himself, nor taken the advantage he might have seized. He had immediately lost his balance, exaggerated what Camelia regarded as a quite permissible and pretty compromise into a fault worthy of biting denunciation, and in so doing had given her a point of vantage from which she laughed--not even angrily. Perior for many years had thought most goodness negative, and preferred to see it tested before admiring, but he had forgotten to apply his philosophy in this case. He lost his temper, and Camelia kept hers, kept hers to the extent of soothing him by a smiling confession of her misdoing, an affectionate declaration that she was wrong and he quite right--"But don't be cross, dear Mr. Perior." What was he to do?

She did not care if she were wrong. Perior thought he would be wiser in the future; he would give Camelia no further opportunity for facile confession; but though the first sting of unexpected disappointment was over, many unmerited aches were still reserved to him--all the more painful from the fact that he had never intended to ache for Camelia.

Mary Fairleigh had come to the Patons when Camelia was sixteen, and Camelia's treatment of her cousin was another and more constant cause for growing discontent. Perior could not define the discomfort with which he watched Camelia's indifferent kindness, or, worse still, an unkindness as unintentional. He a.s.sumed by degrees an att.i.tude of compensatory gentleness towards poor Mary; it held, however, no sting for Camelia; she seemed to watch his doing of the things she left undone very complacently. It was by degrees that his dismay took refuge in a manner of unshocked indifference which he hoped would prove salutary. It did seem to irk and perplex her somewhat, and he had the consolation of thinking that many of her perversities might be intentionally engineered for his benefit. Perior, too, had learned to smile, and Camelia was baffled. He would not scold her. After all, he counted for very little, so Camelia a.s.sured herself as she entered upon her London life, and he should see that she could be indifferent with far more effectiveness.

Perior saw little of her during those years. The little he saw on his rare visits to London confirmed his grim conviction. She was a pretty, clever, foolish, worthless creature; her frankness threw no dust into his eyes. She might own herself a self-seeking worldling, and she did not overshoot the mark. Many were the corns she danced over in her quest of power and happiness. Her sincerity was insincere--it adapted itself too cleverly. Perior had seen her flatter, when only he and she knew that she was flattering; had seen her make her effect by pliancy or by resistance; had watched her smile light for those who could serve her, or stiffen to a sweet blankness for the incompetent. He recognized in her his own scorn for the world without his ideal, which would not permit him to stoop and use it; but, so Perior thought, Camelia knew no ideals; reality did not hurt her--she met it with its own weapons. One did not conquer an immoral world by moral methods; and if one lived in it, not to conquer it would be intolerable. The scorn no doubt excused her to herself, but it hedged her round with a sort of stupidity from which Perior's quick recognition of moral beauty preserved him. Ethical worth had come to be everything to him. Camelia simply did not see it.

He himself had armed her with that scientific impartiality before which he felt himself rather helpless, before which good and bad resolved themselves into very evasive elements. She told him that her science was more logical than his, it had made her charitable to the whole world, herself included, whereas he was hard on the world and hard on himself.

His very kindness lacked grace, while her unkindness wore a flower-like color. He was sorry for people, not fond of them--but Camelia was neither fond nor sorry. They were shadows woven into the web of her experience, her business was to make that experience pleasant, to see it beautifully. It was this love of beauty--beauty in the pagan sense--that baffled him in her. She had put appreciation and an exquisite good taste in the place of morality. Life to her was a game, to him a tragic, insistent conundrum. These, at least, were Perior's reluctant conclusions.

When he walked away from Enthorpe Lodge his mind was to a certain extent already reverting to the daily preoccupations of cottages, perverse protoplasm, and his weekly article for the _Friday Review;_ but also dwelling with the dual peculiarity observable in our meditations, upon the people he had just left, Lady Paton, Mary, Camelia's guests, and Camelia herself. It seemed really unnecessary to remind himself of that promise he had made himself some time ago; Camelia could not disappoint him; he knew just what to expect from her; she could not hurt him. Yet the promise had been made at a time when she was hurting him very badly, and even now, while he recalled it with some vehemence, he was feeling a most illogical smart.

The country road wound among dusty hedges and through the little village. About half a mile beyond it lay a remnant of the Perior estate, once large, second only in importance to the Haversham's, now sadly shrunken and dislocated. By degrees, and during years of only meagre competence, he had built upon this pretty bit of land a cl.u.s.ter of cottages, his playthings; to make them unnecessarily delightful was his perverse pleasure.