Whether Camelia were decided on accepting Sir Arthur or not, every one
else, under a waiting silence, considered the engagement an accomplished
fact. Poor Mr. Merriman departed disconsolately when the reality of his
utter ruin forced itself upon his unwilling understanding. Sir Harry
contemplated the hopeless situation more compliantly, oscillated for a
few days between feeble despair and jocular resignation, and then
finding it impossible to utterly tear himself away from his charmer's
magnetic presence, he settled down to a melancholy flirtation with Mrs.
Fox-Darriel that masked his inability to retreat. Lord and Lady Tramley
went on to another visit, and the poet who wrote the virile poems and
believed in the joy of life, finding Miss Paton less sympathetic than
usual, penned a laconic, psychological verselet for her benefit, and
departed.
Camelia seemed rather vague in the furtherance of hospitable projects,
and the merest trickle of visitors went through the house, affecting
very slightly the really placid routine.
Lady Paton's whole personality expanded in prettiest contentment; the
calm so far surpassed her expectations, and Camelia seemed very happy.
Lady Paton could but take for granted her happiness.
Camelia was living the most poetical moment of life; she made no
confidences; but Lady Paton's trust walked in a sadly sweet dream where
her daughter's courtship mingled with tearful memories of her own.
Charles Paton's smile; the first fluttering consciousness that the smile
came oftenest for her; she still blushed as she remembered the moment
when he had murmured to her as they danced that she had the prettiest
throat in England; it had seemed so daring to little Miss Fairleigh, who
had read her first novel only six months before; the very memory still
had the glamour of daring. And Camelia was feeling all those tremulous
delights, with their deep undercurrent of sacred solemnity.
Camelia was not demonstrative, Lady Paton had sighed over the accepted
fact, but she could trace all such natural emotions on Sir Arthur's face
when he watched or spoke to her daughter. She already felt a maternal
tenderness for him, and his exquisite courtesy, that already implied
rights, was nothing less than filial.
Lady Henge's dignified intellectuality she found indeed rather awesome,
but she hoped by careful listening to expand her powers of
comprehension, and Lady Henge delivered her expositions of social ethics
with a pleasant faith in their tonic effect upon the suppressed mind of
her hostess--
"Suppressed, repressed, Arthur, not shallow," she said to her son, "and
you could not ask a daintier, truer gentlewoman for your wife's mother,
dear." Lady Henge sighed just a little--though quite resigned to the
future--for the Duchess of Amshire's mind was neither suppressed nor
shallow, but as expansive and capable an organ as her own, and
infinitely sympathetic. Lady Elizabeth, too!--Lady Elizabeth, who had
worked at shirt-making in the slums for two weeks, and had caught
typhoid fever at it--even Camelia's sunny charm could not efface the
thought of Lady Elizabeth's almost providential fitness. But in spite of
inevitable regrets Lady Henge was resigned, and the two mothers got on
together very pleasantly, since moulding capability can hardly carp at a
gentle, clay-like receptivity.
Mr. Rodrigg seemed the only new guest intended for any permanence of
stay. He duly arrived at the given date and hour, a punctual man, very
much aware of his own importance, and of the importance to him, and to
others, of every moment.
And Mr. Rodrigg was really a very important personage and his moments
weighty with significance. And this iron-gray, middle-aged man had not
at all foolishly fallen in love with the brilliant Miss Paton. A wife so
beautiful, so capable, so charming, would be the finishing touch to his
influence; matter-of-fact motives may well have underlain Mr. Rodrigg's
amorous determination, which Camelia thought so effectually snuffed out.
But indeed Mr. Rodrigg's determination was far too strong to credit
hers. His self-confidence smiled kindly upon a pretty coquetry. The
exquisite grace of Camelia's rebuff--she had almost thought it worthy of
publicity, so felicitous had been its delicate sweep round a corner
dangerous to friendship--had merely impressed Mr. Rodrigg's
unappreciative bluntness with a reassuring conviction of trifling and
postponement.
The lightness of touch, the deft cleverness upon which our poor Titania
so prided herself, were surveyed in this instance by an ass's head; the
effect she thought so prettily made was quite missed, and she herself
its only spectator.
The portentousness of Arthur Henge's presence at Enthorpe did not in the
least weigh with Mr. Rodrigg against the final choice he considered as
expressed in Lady Paton's invitation. Miss Paton had put him off--but
she had not let him go; so Mr. Rodrigg interpreted the Egeria attitude;
she demanded patience--and she should have it. She was too clever a girl
to tolerate whining commonplaces; she would appreciate his whimsical
calm; he would not whine--he would wait and humor her.
She liked to have important people about her, and Mr. Rodrigg explained
Sir Arthur very much as Camelia had explained Mr. Rodrigg. It was
platonic friendliness--quite hopeless. He realized that Camelia might
dally with his own hopes, that skill might be necessary to win her
finally, and he intended to be very skilful, to show no jealousy or
carping that might indispose her towards his future marital authority.
And Mr. Rodrigg hardly felt the fitness of jealousy. He was, he thought,
a cleverer man than Henge, a man of more intrinsic weight. Henge had a
light and pretty talent, spoke with conviction, but was not the man to
sway the world with socialism rewarmed in Tory saucepans; whereas Europe
trembled at Mr. Rodrigg's nod, at least so Mr. Rodrigg, not
unreasonably, was convinced. The "good match" theory in explanation of
Camelia's motives only fortified his own quiet consciousness of
supremacy. He quite gave Camelia credit for an undazzled directness of
vision that would surely apprise her of the side on which her bread was
most thickly buttered. So Mr. Rodrigg arrived in an atmosphere of
blue-books and business unavoidable, though with a minor effect of a
great mind unbending to lighter mundanities. His face was typically
British; ruddy, with broad features clearly hewn; keen eyes, a tight
mouth, and an expression of sagacious toleration of things in general.
Camelia met him with her prettiest air of mutual understanding that
would warrant the neatest epigrams. Her penetration of Mr. Rodrigg's
character had never quite realized his tenacious conceit.
He had been anxious, he had been hurt; but he had never imagined that
Camelia thought him hopeless. Her complacent conviction of intellectual
conquest was far indeed from his suppositions; the results of her
Italian reading had been adroitly thrown into his speech as a piece of
pretty flattery, that a great man might harmlessly permit himself
towards a wilful, easily flattered woman. So the two stupidities met
quite unconscious one of the other.
Mr. Rodrigg was to stop for a fortnight at least, and as Sir Arthur had
to absent himself at intervals during the period, Camelia was all the
more content. She feared that Sir Arthur's attitude of independence and
non-expectancy might antagonize Mr. Rodrigg. She relied upon her own
arguments, her own flattering influence. She sat up late at night
cramming the pamphlets, reports, and books with which Sir Arthur
supplied her. The resultant pallor at breakfast deepened the effect of
an intellectual atmosphere in which she wrapped herself serenely. Mr.
Rodrigg smiled, paternally almost, and with his most tolerant calm, upon
these efforts. He cut her a large slice of cold beef at the side-board
and advised her to take a glass of port; "You mustn't tire yourself, you
know, my dear young lady."
He rather resented Henge's evident influence when he saw how deeply
Camelia was determined on the bill, but not really troubled by it.
Camelia's fervor of sympathy seemed really personal; girlish
emotionalism, a futile but pretty pity quite interpreted her tenacity.
He was rather pleased that she should be on the side of the factory
women, though anxious to explain to her that the logic of his own
position need not exclude that partiality.
He thought it safer, however, to argue as little as possible, and
listened attentively and pleasantly, quite willing to go this far in
humoring. Meanwhile Camelia's delay in announcing an engagement imposed
a general silence; no one spoke of Sir Arthur as an accepted lover, and
Mr. Rodrigg might perhaps be pardoned if no such instinctive intimation
penetrated his thick self-confidence. Sir Arthur coming down for a
Saturday and Sunday in Mr. Rodrigg's visit, and going off again on a
Monday, rather avoided an encounter.
Mr. Rodrigg himself good-humoredly introduced the subject of the bill
one evening in the smoking-room, and they talked of it amicably and
impersonally for a little while. But after this talk Sir Arthur said to
Camelia--
"I see very plainly where he stands. He will be firmly against me; his
reticence doesn't conceal that."
"Are you sure?" asked Camelia. She herself was not at all sure. In a
walk with Mr. Rodrigg that morning she had certainly observed promising
leaf-blades break the stiff soil of his non-committal attitude. Camelia
did not imagine that her own beaming smile might well allure those
vernal symptoms.
"Quite sure," said Sir Arthur, who was really getting rather tired of
Mr. Rodrigg and his utility, "and--now that I won't see you again until
next Thursday--won't you talk of something as far removed from the bill
as possible."
"That would be a very uninteresting something," said Camelia. "No, I can
think of nothing but politics just now. Whose fault is that, pray? Did
you see the report Mr. Dobson sent me this morning? You don't want to
see it! Fie, you lukewarm reformer. Now pray be patient--we will talk of
something else on Thursday, perhaps." So she warded him off, conscious
always of that trembling retreat when the momentous question approached
her. She was almost glad when Sir Arthur was gone again. At all events,
she would make a good fight for his cause whether or no she accepted
him.
"And you are on our side too, are you not?" she said to Perior, for
Perior, more silent than ever, and revolving inner cogitations on his
own laxity, still made an almost daily visit.
He owned that he was on "their side."
"And you will support us in the _Friday_."
"I am going to do my best."
"But not because I ask you!" laughed Camelia, who still felt a little
soreness since that uncomfortable interview where she had so much
surprised herself. She was still rather resentful, and sorry that her
tears might have implied confession. She was conscious now of a touch of
defiance behind the light smiling of her eyes as he owned that her
asking formed no compulsory element in his decision.
"Don't you think that Mr. Rodrigg may be malleable?" Camelia pursued,
"Sir Arthur is to convert him, you know."
"You or Sir Arthur?" She laughed at this. "Would it be terribly wicked
if I tried my hand at it?"
"It would be terribly useless," Perior remarked; but Camelia looked
placidly unconvinced.
"I am justified in trying, am I not?"
"That depends;" Perior was decidedly cautious.
"Since I believe thoroughly in the bill; since only intellectual forces
will be brought to bear on our stodgy friend,--there is nothing of the
lobbyist in it."
"I am sure that Henge wouldn't like it," said Perior, with the certain
coolness he always evinced in speaking to her of Sir Arthur.
"Why not?"
"It would put him in a false position towards Rodrigg. Rodrigg will
imagine that you are bribing him."
"_Bribing_ him!" Camelia straightened herself.
"Yes; that the price paid for his apostasy will be your hand," and this
indeed was exactly what Mr. Rodrigg, with some alarm, was beginning to
think.
"Apostasy! If the creature won't be sincerely convinced we don't want
him!" cried Camelia.
"Very well, you have my opinion of the matter." Perior's whole manner
had of late been particularly irksome to Camelia.
Lady Henge meanwhile, seeing her son's foe within the gates, most
seriously and conscientiously, and openly, made good her opportunity.
She took her mental mastery far more gravely than Camelia took hers, and
poor Mr. Rodrigg began to think that he was asked to pay a heavy price
for his hymeneal visit when Lady Henge cornered him in the drawing-room
and stupefyingly admonished him. Lady Henge's arguments were all based
on superbly moral grounds, and levelled with severity at the iniquity of
individualistic theories, which she demonstrated to be scientifically
and ethically unsound. He at times found it very difficult to keep his
temper. But under the exquisite warmth of Camelia's urgency his hopes
were high. He could regard with humoring half compliances this pretty
whim of his pretty Camelia. Camelia would have raged could she have
known Mr. Rodrigg's real impressions--impressions accompanied by the
fatherly tolerance of that "pretty Camelia."