On the sunny autumn day with which this story opens, Miss Paton was in
the morning room at Enthorpe Lodge, waiting for some one--a some one who
to her was not a nobody; and though her attitude hardly denoted much
anxiety, her mind was alert and very conscious of a pleasing and yet
exasperating suspense. Her friend Mrs. Fox-Darriel was with her. Miss
Paton leaned against the mantelpiece as she talked, her eyes often
swerving to the clock, but calmly, with no perceptible impatience, or
passing in a quiet glance over her hand, the falling folds of her white
dress, her friend's face and figure--figure and face equally artificial,
and perhaps affording to Miss Paton's mind a pleasing contrast to her
own distinctive elegance.
There is in Florence a plaque by one of the della Robbia; a long
throated girl's head leans from it, serenely looking down upon the
world; a delicate head, with a clear brow, a pure cheek, a mouth of sad
enchanting loveliness; Camelia's head was like it; saint-like in
contour, but with an added air, an air of merry irresponsibility. The
outward corners of her eyes smiled into a long upward curve of shadow,
her brows above them made a wing-like line, wings hovering extended, and
a little raised. The upward tilt pervaded the corners of her mouth, a
sad mouth, yet even in repose it seemed just about to smile, and its
smile sliding to a laugh. The very moulding of her cheek and chin showed
a tender gaiety. As for coloring it might have been the coloring of a
pensive Madonna, so white was her skin, so palely gold her smooth thick
hair. She was slender too, with the long narrow hands and feet of an
Artemis, and on seeing her one thought of a maiden-goddess, of a St.
Cecilia, and, without surprise over the incongruity, of an intimately
modern young taster of life, whose look of pagan joyousness took neither
herself nor other people seriously, said "que voulez-vous," to all
blame, and gently mocked puritanical earnestness.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel was plunged into the depths of an easy-chair, a type
without hints and whispers to baffle and fascinate. She was thoroughly
conventional and not in the least perplexing. Her elaborate head, a
masterpiece of wave and coil and curl, rested against the high-chair
back, its lustre a trifle suspicious where the light caught too gold a
bronze on the sharp ripples.
She was considered a beauty, and her steely, regular face looked at one
from every stationer's shop in London. Miss Paton's photographs were to
be procured at no stationer's, one among the many differences that
distinguished her from her friend.
On Camelia's "coming-out" in all the dryad-like freshness of her one and
twenty years, Mrs. Fox-Darriel, smartest of the "smart," kindly
determined to "form" and "launch" her. She was very winning, and Camelia
seemed very willing. But Mrs. Fox-Darriel soon recognized that she was
being led--not leading, soon recognized that Camelia would never follow.
The first defeat was at the corsetière's visible symbol of the "forming"
process. Under Mrs. Fox-Darriel's eye, Miss Paton's nymph-like slimness
was measured for stays of all sorts and descriptions; Camelia, when the
stays were done, surveyed her figure therein confined, with reflective
rather than submissive silence.
The week after she went to Paris, and when she returned it was with a
stayless wardrobe. Mrs. Fox-Darriel was fairly quelled as Camelia swept
before her in these masterpieces of the Rue de la Paix.
"They are not æsthetic," said Mrs. Fox-Darriel--"I own that--not a
greenery-yallery whiff about them; nor too self-conscious; but my dear,
why? Don't you like my figure?"
Camelia turned candid eyes upon the accurate waist, the rigid curves and
right angles. "I can't say I do, Frances," she owned, wherewith Mrs.
Fox-Darriel winced a little. "I don't think it looks alive, you know,"
said Miss Paton. "Of course one must know how to dress one's
nonconformity. I think I have succeeded." And Camelia went to court
looking like a glorified Romney, with hardly a whalebone about her.
Their future relationship was forecast by this declaration of
independence. The stayless protégée conferred, did not receive lustre.
Inevitably Mrs. Fox-Darriel found herself revolving about the young
beauty--a satellite among the other satellites, and more than Camelia
herself was Mrs. Fox-Darriel impressed by Camelia's effectiveness.
On this morning from the depth of her laziness she observed her young
friend's glances at the clock with some wondering curiosity; it was
difficult to imagine a cause for the stirring of Camelia's contemplative
quiescence under country influences, but Mrs. Fox-Darriel was quick to
see the faintest ripple of change, and to her well-sharpened acuteness
the ripple this morning was perceptible.
"No new guests coming to-day?" she had asked, receiving a placid
negative. "And what are you going to do?" she pursued, patting the
regular outline of her fringe.
"I thought of a ride with Mr. Merriman and Sir Harry. Do you care to
come?"
"No, no, I have too much of Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman as it is."
"It is dull down here, Frances. Perhaps you had best be off to Homburg.
I am bent on recuperative vegetating, you know."
"Whom are you waiting for?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked, coming to the point
with a circumspection rendered rather ridiculous by the frank promptness
of Miss Paton's answer.
"I'm waiting for Mr. Perior, Frances," and she laughed a little,
glancing at her friend with a rapid touch of ridicule, "and he is
half-an-hour late; and I want to see him very badly."
"Mr. Perior?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel's vagueness was not affected. "One of the
vegetables, my dear? Has not the curiosity of the neighborhood exhausted
itself?"
"Ah--this vegetable isn't curious, I fear, not a shoot shows at least.
If he is curious he will pretend not to be, and pretend very
successfully."
"That is subtle for a vegetable. Perior, the name is familiar. Who is
this evasive person?"
Miss Paton's serene eyes looked over her friend's head at the strip of
blue and green outside framed by the long window. She was asking herself
with an inward smile for her own perversity, whether she had not come
down into the country for the purpose of seeing the "evasive person."
She would not mind owning to it in the least. Pickles after sweets; she
anticipated the tart taste of disapproval pleasantly.
"Who is he?" Mrs. Fox-Darriel repeated.
"He is my oldest friend; he doesn't admire me in the least--so I am very
fond of him. I christened him 'Alceste,' and he retaliated with
'Célimène.' He is forty odd; a bachelor; he lives in a square stone
house, and taught me very nearly everything I know. My Greek is almost
as good as my skirt dancing."
"The square-stone gentleman didn't teach you skirt-dancing, I suppose. I
begin to place him. The editor; the family friend; the misanthrope."
"Yes, my 'Alceste.' He has reason for misanthropy. His life has been a
succession of disappointments. I am one of them, I fear."
"Dear me, Camelia!" Mrs. Fox-Darriel sat upright, "have you ever dallied
with this provincial Diogenes?"
Miss Paton smiled over the supposition. "His disappointments are moral,
not amorous. Why do I tell you this, I wonder?"
"To show me that you don't care for him perhaps," said Mrs. Fox-Darriel,
who to tell the truth, was rather alarmed. Since she had resigned
herself to a planetary, a reflected brilliancy, her star at least must
never wane; its orbit must widen. Camelia's whole manner seemed suddenly
suspicious. She was evidently waiting for this person, pleased,
evidently, to talk of him, and though Camelia might be trusted for a
full appreciation of her future's possibilities, Mrs. Fox-Darriel was
hardly satisfied by the frankness of her "Oh! but I do care for him; he
preoccupies me."
Mrs. Fox-Darriel reflected for some moments on the dangers of
country-house propinquity and retrospective intimacy before saying
pleasantly--
"What does he look like?"
Camelia laughed again, soothing Mrs. Fox-Darriel somewhat by the
good-humored glance which seemed to pierce with amusement the anxiety on
her behalf.
"His eyes are thunderous; his lips pale with suppressed anger."
"Dear me! I am really anxious to see this vial of wrath."
"And since that is his footstep on the gravel, you shall see him
immediately," said Camelia.
A moment after Mr. Perior was announced.