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The Confounding of
Camelia
By
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
Author of
"The Dull Miss Archinard," Etc.
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1899
Copyright, 1899, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
MANHATTAN PRESS
474 W. BROADWAY
NEW YORK
_TO
"CHARLIE" AND "JIMMIE"_
The Confounding of Camelia
CHAPTER I
When Camelia came down into the country after her second London season,
descended lightly upon the home of her forefathers, her coming
unannounced, and as much a matter of caprice as had been her long
absence, a slowly growing opinion, an opinion that had begun to form
itself during Camelia's most irresponsible girlhood, became clearly
defined, a judgment fixed and apparently irrevocable. The Patons had
always been good, quiet people; absolutely undistinguished, were it not
that the superlative quality of their tranquil excellence gave a certain
distinction. There were no black sheep in their annals, and a black
sheep gives, by contrast, a brilliancy lacking to unaccented bucolic
groupings, strikes a note of interest at any rate; but none of the Paton
sheep were even gray. They fed in pleasant, plenteous pastures, for it
was a wealthy, though not noticeably wealthy family, and perhaps a
rather sheep-like dulness, an unimaginative contentment not conducive to
adventurous strayings, accounted for the spotless fleeces.
Their cupboards had never held a skeleton--nor so much as the bone of
one. The family portraits, none even pretending to be Sir Joshuas or
Vandycks, only presented a respectable number of generations, so that
the mellow perspective of old ancestry, remarkable at least for a
lengthy retrogression into antiquity, made no background to their
commonplace. Sir Charles, Camelia's father, was the first Paton weighted
with an individuality that entailed nonconformity, and since Sir
Charles's individuality had confused all anticipations, further
developments of the wild streak could not be unexpected. Many of the
quiet, conservative people, who had known Camelia, her father and
mother, and Patons of an earlier epoch, pronounced with emphasis that
Camelia was spoiled; there was a tenderness in the term, an implication
of might-have-beens; and other people, more bitter and perhaps more
sensitive, remarked that not her head-turning London successes, of which
big echoes had rolled down to Clievesbury, but the inherent, the no
doubt inherited defects of Miss Paton's character were responsible for
her noticeable variation from family traditions. Did not that portion of
Blankshire, which lay about the dim old village of Clievesbury, send up
to the capital every year its native offerings of maidenhood? A London
season had never induced in these well-balanced young ladies the merry
arrogance so provokingly apparent in Miss Paton. Old Mrs. Jedsley it
was, the last rector's widow, who most openly denounced Camelia, and
that, despite her long friendship for the Patons; denounced her
frivolity, her insincerity, her egotism, and her wonderful gowns--their
simplicity did not deceive Mrs. Jedsley's keen eye; the price of one
would keep the parish in flannel for a year she declared, and, no doubt,
include the school feast. Mrs. Jedsley prided herself on her impartial
faculty for seeing disagreeable truths clearly and for announcing them
unflinchingly. Her fondness for Lady Paton--"poor Lady Paton"--could not
blind or silence her. Poor Lady Paton was more than ever effaced, Mrs.
Jedsley said; one might have thought that Sir Charles had required as
much submission as a woman's life could well yield, but the daughter had
called forth further capabilities.
"The very way in which she says 'Oh, Camelia!' is flattering to the
girl. Her mother's half-shocked admiration encourages her in the belief
that she is very naughty and very clever; and really while Camelia talks
Lady Paton looks like a hare under a bramble."
The simile hit the mark so nicely that the alarmed retirement of Lady
Paton's attitude was pictorially apparent forthwith. And, "Ah, well!"
Mrs. Jedsley added, "What can one expect in the child of such a father!
The most gracefully selfish man who ever lived. Charles Paton would have
smiled you out of house and home, and left you to sit in the snow, while
he warmed himself at your fireplace."
Indeed this application of the laws of heredity might have induced a
certain charitable philosophy on Camelia's behalf. The love of
adventure, of prowess, of power, had shown itself in Charles Paton; but
much had been forgiven--even admired--with a sense of breathlessness, in
a cloud-compelling younger son (his good looks had been altogether
supreme), which, when seen flaunting indecorously in the daughter, was
highly unpopular. Charles Paton at a very early age had found the family
traditions "devilish dull" (and, indeed, it could not be denied that
dull they were); he entered the army, kicked over the traces, and was
"wild" with all his might and main. Clievesbury disapproved, but at the
same time Clievesbury was dazzled.
Surrounded by this naughty atmosphere, reverberating with racing and
betting, dare-devil big-game shooting, and the extreme fashion that is
supposed to reverse the "devilish dull" morality of tradition, Charles
Paton--like his daughter--returned to Clievesbury, and there fell most
magnanimously and becomingly in love with little Miss Fairleigh, the
eighth daughter of a country baronet--a softly pink and white
maiden--wooed and married her and settled down, after a fashion, to
carve out an army career for himself. He carved to good purpose, luck
giving him the opportunity. He carried his life as lightly and gallantly
as a flag; sought peril, and the tingling excitement of the strangest
feats. His reckless bravery won him a knighthood; his fame, his happy
good-nature, and extreme good looks, made him a hero wherever he went.
Charles Paton's yellow curls, his smile, the Apollo-like line of his
lips, were as well known as his martial exploits.
He was vastly popular, and his little wife in the shadow by his side,
looked up, like the others, and adored where they admired. Sir Charles
liked a sunny atmosphere, and though the hearthstone flame in its steady
commonplace did not count for so much as the wider outdoor effulgence,
it was very cosy to come back to, when domesticity was a momentary
necessity. He would not have liked a change of temperature, and
tolerated the wifely worship very graciously. He was fond of her too;
she was very pretty, not clever--(an undesirable quality in a wife)--far
more of a help than a hindrance, though how much of a help he perhaps
never realized. That broad triumphal road down which the hero marched
was swept and garnished by the indefatigable wife. The dustiness and
thorniness of daily life were kept from him. Lady Paton packed and paid,
and dashed from post to pillar. She was a delicate woman who, petted and
made much of, might have allowed herself an occasional headache and a
tea-gown existence. The years in India were not easy years; through them
all she unwaveringly adored her husband, and in many phases of a varied
life showed the steely fibre so often and so unexpectedly displayed by
the most delicately inefficient looking women.
Camelia was the fifth child; the others died, two in India and two in
England, away from the poor mother. This last one was little more than a
baby when ill-health and the death of his brother decided Sir Charles on
a return to England. Lady Paton rejoiced in the home-coming. With her
pretty baby--a girl, alas! but the estate was unentailed--and her great
and glorious husband by her side--the future seemed to open on an
unknown happiness. But Lady Paton was to know few compensations. Sir
Charles found the rôle of country gentleman very flavorless, and his
attempts to evade boredom left his wife more lonely--and too, more
conscious of loneliness, than in busier days.
When Camelia was eight her father died. One saw then that Lady Paton was
supremely adapted to eternal mourning. As a widow, she reached a
black-encompassed repose, a broken-hearted finality of woe. Camelia was
the one reason for her life. The child had never to enforce her will,
her mother's devotion yielded to the slightest pressure. Camelia was
hardly conscious of ruling, nor the mother of being ruled. As the
stronger egoism, Camelia domineered inevitably. She was a gay, kind
child, happy in the unfettered expansion of her individuality; she
delighted in its exercise, and in all sorts of unconventional
acquirements. She read voraciously and loved travel. Lady Paton had by
no means reached the end of packing and paying days. Camelia hated
beaten tracks; the travelling must be different from other people's; she
managed in a tourist-ridden Europe to find the element of adventurous
experience. Camelia was keen on experiences. Lady Paton did not
appreciate them properly; but then Lady Paton saw life from no artistic
standpoint. She thought undiscovered Greece and Poland more trying than
the most trying places in India. The steppes depressed her; she dared
not mention wolves, but her mind dwelt dejectedly upon them. She could
hardly think of the cooking in certain out-of-the-way corners in Spain
without shuddering. But she bore all with apparent placidity, and her
helpful qualities won her daughter's approval just as they had won her
husband's.
There was nothing rude or uncouth in Camelia's domineering spirit, it
was too happy, too spontaneous, too sure of its own right. Even after
these two years of London her severest detractors could not accuse her
of the grosser forms of vanity, nor of affectation, nor of the ugly
thing that goes by the name of "fastness." Her unerring sense of the
best possible taste made "fast" girls seem very tawdry, and her coolly
smiling eyes told them that she found them so. Even with the fact of her
serene indifference to them growing into the consciousnesses of the
people about Clievesbury, they still owned, generously, but perforce,
that she was neither strident nor slangy, nor given to any form of
posing. The change in Camelia, if change there were, was a mere
evolution. She had tasted the joys of a wide effectiveness. She was only
twenty-three, and more than once had been told that she was the only
woman in London fitted to hold a "salon," a "salon" that would be a
power social, artistic, and political. Authors talked to her about their
books, painters about their pictures; her presence at the opera was
recorded as having judicial importance; a new pianist was made if he
played at one of her musicals. She was a somebody to whom the
Clievesburyites were nobodies indeed.
Camelia smiled at her own power. She did not think more highly of
herself, but less well of other people, for she measured at once the
comparative worth of her own attributes in a world of mediocrity. She
saw through the flattery, valued it at its proper rate, but enjoyed it,
and indulged in a little air of self-mockery that to appreciative minds
crowned her beauty irresistibly. But she was rather disappointed in
finding most people so stupid. It was difficult to hold to one's
standard in a world where the second-best passed so fluently. By those
standards Camelia saw herself very second-best; but were there then no
clever people to see it with her? She caught herself in a yawning
weariness of it all. A lazy month or so in the country appealed to her;
other motives, too, were perhaps not wanting. With a little retinue of
friends she reappeared at Clievesbury, and, by degrees, old neighbors
discovered that little Camelia had developed into a rather prickling
personality. On calling they found Lady Paton very much in the
background. Camelia seemed to make no claim, and yet she was the
important personage, and to ignore her prominence was to efface oneself
with her mother. It was thought--and hoped--that Lady Haversham, the
magnate of the county, would vanquish that complacent sweetness, the
aerial lightness of demeanor that glanced over one's head while one
spoke, and "positively" said Mrs. Jedsley "makes one feel like a cow
being looked at along with the landscape."
But although Lady Haversham held rule in the country, in London she,
too, was a nobody, and Camelia very much the contrary. Lady Haversham
knew right well that in going to see her old friend Lady Paton, Camelia
was her objective point, and to try a fall with Camelia upon her native
heath, her intention. Lady Haversham knew that in the eyes of the
world--the world that counted--she was a mere country mouse creeping
into the radiant effulgence of the young beauty, and this unpleasant
consciousness gave her quite a drum-like sonority of manner--a fatal
manner, as she felt helplessly while she beat out her imposing phrases
beneath the clear smiling of Camelia's eyes. Lady Haversham tried in
the first place to exclude Camelia, and addressed herself with most
solicitous fondness to Lady Paton; but Camelia's silent placidity stung
her into self-betrayal. Camelia evidently cared nothing for Lady
Haversham's graciousness--or lack of it; seemed, indeed, unconscious of
the cold shoulder turned so emphatically upon her. Lady Haversham
thumped and rumbled, and knew herself worsted.
"Manner! Unpleasant manner!" she said to Mrs. Jedsley later on in the
day, "the child has no manners at all! That takes in London nowadays,
you know. Anything in the shape of arrogant youth and prettiness is sure
of having its head turned. And as to prettiness, I should call her
curious-looking rather than pretty." And by this Mrs. Jedsley knew that
Camelia had snubbed Lady Haversham, without trying to--there was the
smart; Camelia was making no effort at all to be unpleasant, to impose
herself, but, unmistakably, she only thought of the good people about
her home as cows in the landscape.
"I suppose she finds us all very provincial," said Mrs. Jedsley, not
averse to planting the shaft, for she had felt Lady Haversham's
graciousness to be rather rasping at times.