The little moonlit episode had very thoroughly mended the rift within
the lute. Camelia's seeming frankness of confessional confidence more
than atoned for every doubting qualm. Sir Arthur evidently put doubts
and distresses behind him. He allowed himself to be wholly in love. He
wondered resentfully at himself for the mixed impulses he had known,
since all were now merged in one fixed determination.
The country influences of green trees and summer sky seemed to have
breathed a heretofore unrealized gentleness into his fair one. Her
playful sallies, her little audacities, delighted him now unreservedly,
for under the tantalizing shifting and shimmering of surface moods, the
translucent depths of a loyal and lovely nature, were at last fully
revealed to him.
Camelia felt the resultant ardor hovering during all their constant
companionship, but she evaded it. The conquest had been so easy, was so
complete, that fitness seemed to require a compensatory dallying. The
atmosphere of adoration, submissive in its certainty of ultimate
success, felt as flatteringly around her as the warm sweetness of a
summer breeze. Conquest was delightful, so was dallying, so was her own
indecision; that was the most delightful part of all. She felt, too, in
the loving warmth that encompassed her, a consolation, a refuge from
cold and rugged depreciation.
Perior had not reappeared since the musical _mêlée_, and, while enjoying
the sunny harbor where she rocked so peacefully, Camelia was conscious
that thoughts about that rough, that unsympathetic sea outside
preoccupied her amidst the kinder waters. Her gaiety was therefore a
little forced, absent-minded, in a sense a mask; her gentler mood was
the result of inner cogitations, so involved at times as to give to her
manner a dreamy sweetness. Her moral snubbing, though she rejected it as
undeserved, subdued her.
Lady Henge's vanity was of no petty or immovable order. Far from
antagonizing, Perior's judgment had aroused in her an anxious
self-doubt, an anxious respect for her candid critic. Despite Camelia's
sympathy--for Camelia stuck to her colors, entrenched herself behind a
staunch fidelity to a false position, listened with absorption to
frequent renderings of the "Thalassa," thoughtfully discussed its
iconoclastic merits, the high value of its full flavored modernity, and
felt a certain ethical elevation from these painful sacrifices to the
only constancy permitted her--despite this steady sympathy, Lady Henge
perversely longed for a further expression of unsympathetic opinion from
the ruthless Perior. And one morning she told Camelia that she had
written to him, had asked him to fulfil his promise, to bring some music
of his choosing that might, with his aid, be useful to her.
"I had hoped to see him every day," she owned, and Camelia realized the
power of a negative attitude--how flat beside it, how feeble, was her
exaggeratedly affirmative one. All her pretty conciliations were as
nothing to Lady Henge beside the stinging interest of Perior's dislike.
"I think he may help me about so many things, I so often feel a
helplessness in self-expression; the idea is there--but the form! the
form! ah, my dear, art, after all, is form." (This piece of information
was certainly bitter to our martyrized heroine.)
"As you said, his severity may, to a certain extent, be conservatism,
academic narrowness, but I have always heard of him as widely
appreciative."
Camelia could answer for the width of appreciation that her resentment
had falsified on the unlucky night of the first performance; she
remembered now, with a little flush, that her saddling of him with
tastes not his own must have seemed to him the culmination of spiteful
pettiness. And then he had not rejoined--had not defended himself, even
against that intimation of academics opposed to his dearly loved
Schumann. Camelia could soothe herself with an "I don't care! He
deserved it. He was horrid;" but all the same the memory brought a
hotness to her cheeks. She felt very angry, too, with Lady Henge, and,
while smiling pleasantly, found some satisfaction in various cynical
mental comments on the weighty intricacy of her cap, and the vast
stupidity of her self-absorption.
"Do you know, my dear, that phrase," and Lady Henge struck it out
demonstratively from the piano near which she stood; "that phrase does
sound a little weak." Weak! Camelia could have capped the criticism
very pungently. With a good deal of disgust at a situation which had so
neatly turned the tables upon her, she said, "Mr. Perior may tell you
so; I really can't." Her fate evidently was to support Lady Henge by a
fraternity in inferior taste; and to be branded with inferior taste,
even in Lady Henge's eyes, was certainly rather galling. She had not
bargained for it at all, nor dreamed that Lady Henge's complacency would
go down like a ninepin before Perior's brutal missile. Her little
perjury had not been in the least worth while.
Perior, having the grace to look somewhat embarrassed, arrived next
morning with an impressive roll of music, and Camelia laughed, with some
acidity it must be confessed, as she heard in the drawing-room the
convincing energy of his demonstrations. Fragments of the poor _poème
symphonique_, panting from their cruel dissection, reached her ears
while she strolled about the lawns with Sir Arthur.
She foresaw that Lady Henge would prove a humble convert, and that she
herself, if not to be convicted of gross insincerity, must remain
gibbeted in a stubborn unconversion.
"Your mother is very patient," she said, as, from the distant piano, the
dogged repetition of a phrase emphasized its feeble absurdity. "Mr.
Perior as mentor is in his element."
Sir Arthur laughed with a good-humored recollection of his own political
rebuff at Perior's hands.
"He is uncompromisingly honest. If you ask for his advice he'll give it
to you."
"Give it to you unasked sometimes," said Camelia.
Sir Arthur had told her all about that lost cause, and all about his
plans for the future. There was a very delightful plan for the very near
future; the next session would decide the fate of the Factory Bill that
went by her lover's name, and Camelia, under her attentive quietness,
felt a heaving sigh of ambition gather. Sir Arthur's grave eagerness
showed that after his winning of herself, his political campaign filled
the chief place in his hopes and thoughts. Her interest delighted him,
and the intelligence of her comments.
He had himself an almost reverent belief in the bill, and Camelia's
sympathetic affirmatives seemed to chime deliciously with his own deep,
active pity for the dim, toiling masses the bill was to reach and
succor. Such a common object was a sanctification; he could hardly, he
felt, have loved a woman who did not feel his own deep pity. They talked
now of the coming struggle, of the rather dubious success of the second
reading that might yet be enhanced for the third.
"And do you know," he said, "Perior, positively Perior, approves; he is
buckling on his armor for the final fray. An individuality like that
counts, you know. A few leaders in the _Friday_ would rally many
waverers."
Camelia flushed suddenly when he said this; it delighted her sense of
proprietorship in Perior to hear his praise--to hear that for others,
too, he counted. And yet a touch of pain came with the delight,
reminding her that under present conditions the delight was very
generous, and proprietorship very unassured.
How he evaded it! Yes, he certainly was horrid; but her breath came
quickly, and with a deft persistence she kept Sir Arthur still talking
of him, finding in his answers to her questions on his youth glimpses of
Perior's.
"Always generous, always intolerant, always tripping into ditches while
star-gazing," said Sir Arthur; "he has an exaggerated strain in him; it
must be that Irish ancestress. He feels everything more acutely than
thicker-skinned mortals, sees everything, the good and the bad,
magnified--a trifle grotesquely. But it is a noble nature;" and he went
on, as they walked back and forth over the lawn, Perior's pianoforte
exposition, firmly insistent, coming to their ears at broken intervals:
"Perior is staunch on individualism, as you know; believes in the
hygienic value to the race of the combat--a savage creed, I tell him;
but he has amended it; he is not one jot afraid of seeming inconsistent;
he owns to the scientific logic of our attitude. I was afraid he would
accuse us of socialistic methods, tyrannical kindness, State
intervention," and so from Perior Sir Arthur went back to the
all-absorbing topic of the bill; he could allow the bill to absorb him.
For all Camelia's evasions and smiling warnings to patience, he was
deliciously sure of the ultimate end of all. He could afford to be
patient with the luminous sympathy of her eyes upon him, afford to talk
of the unfortunate women-workers whose long hours the kind tyranny of
the bill would restrict, while this woman listened with such a sweet
chiming of pity.
"If you could only count on a fair following among the Liberals,"
Camelia said, phrasing his keenest anxiety, "horrid egotists! They all
have factories, I suppose. Mr. Rodrigg may wrest your dubious majority
from you; he is the lion in your path, isn't he? and he has a whole town
of factories. What chance has a moral conviction against a town of
factories? And he is such a bull-dog; I did wrong to dignify him by the
leonine simile."
"Such a clever chap, too," said Sir Arthur; "bull-dog cleverness, I
mean."
"And bull-dogs are so dear," Camelia said, as a small brindled member of
the race, his head haloed by a ferociously bristling collar, came
bounding to them over the lawn. "Dear, precious beastie," she put her
hand on the dog's head as he stood on his hind-legs to greet her, "we
must indeed find another epithet for Mr. Rodrigg, not that I dislike
him, you know. He shares some of your opinions," she added rather
roguishly.
"Not one, I fear."
"Yes, one," she insisted. Sir Arthur's eyes dwelt on her charming look;
it carried him into vagueness as he asked--
"What one?" not caring at all for Mr. Rodrigg's community of taste, and
smiling at her loveliness.
"I think he is rather fond of me," Camelia owned. Sir Arthur could
afford a generous laugh.
"Poor old Rodrigg! He has then a vulnerable point in his armor?"
"Yes, indeed, yes. I don't know that it amounts to a weakness. I fear I
couldn't wheedle him. But, you might convince him, and I might
help,--and, he is coming down next week." She laughed out at his look
of surprise. "That is news, isn't it?"
In her very heart of hearts Camelia was rather complacently convinced
that Mr. Rodrigg's fondness _did_ amount to a weakness. Mr. Rodrigg's
devotion was in our young lady's fastidious opinion his one redeeming
quality. She had kindly, but thoroughly, she thought, nipped in the bud
certain too aspiring attempts; but the man was all the more her friend.
His devotion was built upon a fine hopelessness that really dignified
him.
She was an Egeria who hovered above him, gently smiling at his
earthiness. Yes, she was kind; for Mr. Rodrigg was a most important
person--emphatically, personally important just now, it seemed; and
though Camelia's thoughts of him were merely humorously tolerant, she
felt quite sure of a wealth of unreturned friendship, ready to transmute
itself into golden action at her bidding. She could but pride herself a
little upon her intellectual influence over her unpresumptuous Numa, and
thought that she could, through that dignified influence alone, by all
means wheedle him, if wheedling became necessary. Sir Arthur would
hardly approve of these personal methods, and therefore he need not know
of the little game that might win his cause; a perfectly innocent game,
she assured herself, since it hurt no one and helped Sir Arthur; and if
Mr. Rodrigg were to be convinced, Sir Arthur must fancy himself sole
winner.
He did not seem to recognize the possibility, for after his pause of
surprise he laughed again, saying, "Is he coming on _my_ account?"
"Not on _his_, I am sure!"
"You know, it won't do any good," he smiled fondly at her, as one smiles
at the folly of a loved woman; "Rodrigg is too deeply pledged, has his
whole party behind him. I could no more convince him, even in these
enchanted premises, than in the dry precincts of the House. Political
conversions are very rare."
"But you _may_ convert him," Camelia urged. "I will give you every
opportunity."
"And it is rather unfair, you know." Sir Arthur paused in their
strolling to look at her face, half shadowed in the sunlight by the brim
of her white hat. "He perhaps imagines that he is coming for purposes
far removed from the political."
"Oh no, no, no. I tell you, dear Sir Arthur, that--well--since you must
have it--I refused him. He hasn't a hope; I pinched the last pangs out
of him a long time ago. In fact, I let him see that I found his audacity
rather funny than piteous. I have laughed him into most submissive
platonics. He will come, because he really is my friend, and really
likes me; and I want him to come, because he must like you."
"Camelia!" Sir Arthur had used her name more than once of late, and she
let it pass with a half-merry, half-menacing little glance.
"You dear little schemer," he added. Though spoken in tenderest teasing,
Camelia was just enough conscious of a certain applicability to say with
some quickness--
"Not _really_. You know I'm not. I only want to help you--legitimately,
I would not lift my little finger to win your cause if you did not want
me to."
"Really, I know you're not!" Sir Arthur's voice retained the teasing
quality, but the tenderness had deepened; Camelia was listening all the
while to those dogged passages from the piano. They ceased now, and a
certain gravity and determination of look that had succeeded Sir
Arthur's last words quite justified a sudden retreat.
"I must go and make Mr. Perior stop to lunch. One only gets him out of
his lair by force and wheedling! I wheedle _him_!" She left Sir Arthur
rather disconsolately cut short, and ran off to the house, her own words
ringing reassuringly in her ears. Yes, she could wheedle him. Despite
unreason, stupid unreason, despite rebellious crossness and pretended
indifference, she had the mastery. He cared so much; that was the
fundamental fact that upheld Camelia's assurance; he cared enough to be
very angry. He would try to hide his anger of course. Her heart had
beaten rather quickly when Sir Arthur's face took on that look of
resolve--she was not ready, not quite sure, not yet, but flight from his
purpose had been only a secondary impulse. She must see Perior. She ran
through the morning-room and met him coming down the stairs, and panting
a little, laughing a little, she leaned against the banisters and
opposed his passage.
"Well, have you taught her how bad it is?"
"I think I have," said Perior, looking over Camelia's head at the open
doorway. She stood aside to let him join her.
"What have you to teach me this morning--_caballero de la triste
figura_?" she said as he came down the stairs and stood beside her.
"I don't propose to teach you anything. I am not responsible for you."
Camelia had not analyzed his probable mood incorrectly; he was angry,
and he was trying to hide his anger, fearing for his self-control. But
more than that--though this the acute Camelia had never quite
divined--he was feeling very unhappy. That he was angry she saw,
however, with a little thrill of triumph running through her veins.
Smiling an even smile she said, slipping her hand through his arm--
"Ah! but you _are_ responsible. Come into the morning-room."
"Is Lady Paton there?" Perior asked gloomily.
"Yes." Camelia had seen her mother and Mary walking safely away into the
garden with Gwendolen Holt and Lady Tramley. She threw open the door and
ushered him in.