These days were very lonely for Lady Paton. The house was empty, and one
could not call companionship Camelia's mute, white presence.
Camelia read all day in the library, where only Siegfried was made
welcome, or rode for hours about the wintry country. To all timid
questions, as to future plans, she only answered by a coldly decisive,
"I don't know." When her mother put her arms around her, Camelia stood
impassive in their circling love, locked in her own frozen mood of
despairing humiliation.
One day when in her room she had broken down her outward endurance by an
impulsive cry of woe, and stood sobbing, her face in her hands, her
mother came in, made courageous by pity.
"My dearest child, tell me--what is it? You are breaking your heart and
mine. Do you love him? Tell me, darling. Is it some hidden scruple? some
fancy? Let me send for him," poor Lady Paton's thoughts dwelt longingly
on amorous remedies.
"Love him? Sir Arthur? Are you mad, mother?" Camelia lifted a stern
face. "He doesn't enter my mind. He is nothing to me--simply nothing."
"But, Camelia--you are miserable----"
"Ah! I have a right to that dreary liberty."
"And--Oh don't be angry, dearest--is there no one else?"
"No one else?" Camelia repeated it angrily indeed;--that her mother
should give this stupid wrench to her heart was intolerable. "Of course
there is no one else! How can you be so tiresome, mother. There--don't
cry. I am simply sick of everything--myself included, that is all that
is the matter with me. Please don't cry!" for sympathetic tears were
coming into her own eyes, and above all things, she dreaded a breaking
down of reserves, a weakened dignity that might bring her to a sobbing,
maudlin confession, that would burn her afterwards, and follow her
everywhere in the larger pity of her mother's eyes.
Lady Paton, her handkerchief at her lips, pressed back her grief, saying
in a broken entreaty, "But, Camelia--why? How long will it last? You
were always such a happy creature."
"How can I tell?" Camelia gave a little laugh that carried her over the
vanquished sob to a certain calmness; leaning back against the
mantelpiece she added, smiling drearily, "Don't worry, mother; don't
_you_ be miserable."
Lady Paton looked at her with eyes in which Camelia felt the unconscious
dignity of an inarticulate reproof.
"Oh, my child!" she said, "my child! Am I not your mother? Is not your
happiness my only happiness?--your sorrow my last and greatest sorrow?
You forget me, dear, in your own grief. You shut me out--because you
don't love me--as I love you;--it is that that hurts the most."
Camelia stood looking at her. Her artistic sensibility was decidedly
impressed by this unexpected revelation of character. How well her
mother's white hair and cap looked on the pale greens of the room; the
exquisite face, and the more exquisite soul looking from it. How well
she had spoken; how truly too. Yes, her own worthlessness clung to her;
she, so far inferior in moral worth, made this sweet, fragile creature
unhappy; she was everything to her mother, the light that shone through
and sustained the white petals of her flower-like being; and her mother
was to her only a pretty detail. Camelia analyzed it all very
completely, and resting on an achieved self-disgust she said, gravely
contemplating her, "It is a great shame, mother. That is the way of this
wretched world. The good people are always making beauty for the bad
ones. You shouldn't let that lovely, but most irrational maternal
instinct dominate you; see me as I am, a horrid creature." She paused,
and all thoughts of artistic effects, all poetical and scientific
appreciations, were blotted out in a flame-like leap of memory--"false,
selfish, hard as a stone," she said.
"Don't say it, dear--you could not say it if it were so."
"Oh, yes!--one can, if one has a devilish clearness of perception about
everything. I am horrid--and I know that I am horrid. And you are very
lovely. There." And kissing her, Camelia pushed her gently to the door.
Perhaps, however, more than artistic sensibilities had been touched.
Camelia shrank as quickly as before from any demonstration that seemed
to look too closely at her heart, but she herself would make advances.
She was only gentle, now, towards her mother; she never failed to kiss
or caress her when they met. A cheerful coldness seemed at once her
surest refuge and most becoming medium for an affection that could allow
itself no warmer and more dangerous avowals. It was a colorless, still
affection, held, as it were, from development, only felt by Lady Paton
as a more careful kindness, and by Camelia as a new necessity for
incurring no further self-reproach.
Poor Lady Paton, devouring her heart in sorrowful conjecture and
helpless sympathy, had no thought but of her child; but by her side,
Mary, the silent witness of her grief and anxiety, might have claimed,
from disengaged eyes, a foreboding attention. Since the day of her
stolen ride Mary had effaced herself in a shadowy taciturnity. She
watched Camelia, and avoided her. Her absorption in every household duty
became minutely forced. She slipped early to bed after a day of
self-imposed labor. Work and its ensuing weariness, were the only
sedatives for intolerable pain; she deadened herself with the drug. The
weather was bad, and Lady Paton too depressed to rouse herself to her
usual benignant activity. Mary took upon herself her Aunt's abandoned
occupations. She went every day to read to the paralyzed girl at the
Manor Farm. She made the weekly round of visits through the wet village
streets; consulted with the well-worked rector; kept an eye upon the
school and almshouses. Mary was not particularly popular in the village.
Her kindness was rather flat and flavorless; Jane Hicks at the farm
complained to her mother that Miss Fairleigh's reading was "so dull
like; one didn't seem to get anything from it."
Jane never forgot the one visit Miss Paton made her, nor how Camelia had
sat beside her and kept her laughing the whole hour. Camelia, seeing the
effect she made, had promised to return some day, but events had
interfered, she now was in no mood for laughing, and Jane was always
eager to question Mary about Camelia's doings, and to sigh with the
pleasant reminiscence of her "pretty ways." Mary's virtues were all
peculiarly unremunerative, they sought, and obtained, no reward.
Towards the beginning of December Camelia's despair threw itself into
action. The rankling sense of Perior's scorn at first stupefied, and at
last roused her. Before him she had felt her powerlessness. His rocky
negative had broken her. He would not change--not a thought of his
changing stirred her deep hopelessness; but she herself might
change--merit at least a friendship unflawed--cast off crueller
accusations.
She must be good, she must struggle from the shell; she must realize,
however feebly, his ideal. He would never love her--that delusion of her
vanity he had killed forever; but he might be fond of her without a
compunction.
Towards this comparatively humble attainment Camelia strove. How to be
good was the question. Of course she would never tell lies any
more--unless necessary lies of self-defence, in protection of her dear,
her dreadful secret--Camelia could address it by both names; the love
that sustained and must lift her life, even he should never see again.
After all, it was easy enough to tell the truth when one cared no more
for any of the things gained by falseness. That was hardly a step
upward. Some other mode of development must be found; Camelia pondered
this necessity, and one day during a walk past Perior's model cottages
the thought came. She, too, would build cottages, beautiful cottages,
more beautiful than his! She almost laughed at the delicious, teasing,
old friendliness of that addenda.
The Patons' estate boasted only very commonplace residences for its
laborers, and delightful visions of co-operative farming, of idealized
laboring conditions flashed joyously through Camelia's mind. Vast fields
of study opened alluringly, and, immediately in the foreground, these
idyllic cottages. They bloomed with trellised flowers on the gray
December landscape as she walked. The wall-papers were chosen by the
time she reached home. She burst upon her mother in the firelit
drawing-room at tea-time with an enthusiasm that made Lady Paton's heart
jump.
"Mother! Such an idea! I am going to build."
Mary, who was toasting a muffin to hotter crispness before the fire,
turned a thin, flushed face at the announcement.
"Build what, dear?" asked Lady Paton; while Mary, certain in one moment
of what Camelia was going to build, and why, silently put the
ameliorated muffin on the little plate by her aunt's side.
"Cottages. Model cottages. Beautiful cottages--really beautiful, you
know--Elizabethan; beams, white plaster, latticed windows, deep
window-seats, and the latest modernity in drains and bath-tubs."
"Like Michael's, you mean," said Lady Paton, a little bewildered; "his
are not Elizabethan, but the drains and bath-tubs are very good, I
believe."
Camelia's face changed when her mother spoke of "Michael;" and Mary,
watching as usual, compressed her lips tightly. The cottages were to be
built for him--with him! Ah! he would come back. Camelia would keep
him--for building cottages, for adoring her; while she, Mary, would be
thrust further and further away.
"Yes, like his, only better than his. My tenants shall be the best
housed of the county." Camelia threw herself into an easy-chair, and
fixed her eyes thoughtfully upon the fire.
"It will be very expensive, dear."
"Never mind; we'll economize."
Camelia had not so looked or spoken for weeks, and Lady Paton smiled a
happy acquiescence.
Camelia took the cup of tea her cousin offered her without looking away
from the fire, where she saw the cottages charmingly pictured, and she
and Perior looking at them--friends.
"Your boots are wet, dear, are they not?" asked Lady Paton; "it has been
raining."
"They are wet, I think. Mary, just ring, will you? Grant must take them
off down here. I am too tired, too comfortable, to go upstairs."
Camelia sighed as though the fundamental heaviness of her mood rose
through the seeming light-heartedness of tone; sighed, and yet the
relief of getting outside herself was filling her with an exhilarating
energy.
As she drank her tea, ate a muffin, Mary browning it nicely for
her--"How cosy to have tea by ourselves," said Camelia, "and toast our
own muffins!"--she talked as she had not talked for a long time. Her
mind ran quickly, escaping its miserable thraldom, from point to point
of the project.
She pushed aside the tea-things to make with spoons and saucers a plan
of the new scheme.
"That high bit of land, you know, with the beech woods behind it; I'll
have six of the cottages, with big gardens; and what a view from the
front windows. I will furnish them, too. I must see an architect at
once: I'll go up to town for that, and talk it over with Lady Tramley.
Where is her last letter, I wonder? I remember her asking me for some
date; but that doesn't matter. She wanted me to go out, and of course I
won't." Camelia sprang up to rumple over the leaves of the blotter, the
drawers of the writing-desk. "Where is the letter? In the library, I
wonder?"
"There is a whole pile, dear, in the small cabinet. You did not care to
look at them. I think they had better be gone over."
"No; here is hers. I don't care about the others. I don't want to hear
anything about any one," Camelia added with some bitterness, as she
dropped into her chair again and held out her foot to Grant, who had
come in with the shoes. "Yes; she asks me for next week."
"If you won't go out, dear, it may be rather annoying for her."
"Oh! she can get out of things herself while I am with her," said
Camelia easily, as her eyes skimmed over the letter.
The new impulse was too strong to be thwarted by the slightest delay.
That evening Camelia sent off a bulky letter to Lady Tramley, much
astonishing that good friend by her absolute ignoring of important facts
in recent history. Sir Arthur was not so much as hinted at. The whole
letter bristled with cottages, and Camelia's earnestness panted on every
page.
"She is going in for philanthropy, I suppose," Lady Tramley conjectured,
shaking her head with a patient smile over the small, flowing
handwriting--Camelia hated untidy scrawls. "Let us help her. Camelia is
sure to do something interesting in the way of cottages. She'll carry
them through like a London season."
Lady Tramley, as may be gathered from these remarks, was one of
Camelia's admirers, though not a blind or bigoted one. She shook her
head on many occasions, but Camelia's defects were not serious matters
to her gay philosophy, and Camelia's qualities in this frivolous world,
where nothing should be peered at too closely, were attractively
sparkling. As a successful hostess Lady Tramley prized the charming Miss
Paton.
"Now mind," Camelia said on arriving at her friend's house, "I am not
going to be shown to any one. I am in a monastic frame of mind, and must
be kept unspotted from the world. No dances or dinners, if you please,"
and she fixed her with eyes really grave.
"Very well." Lady Tramley acquiesced as to a humorous and pretty whim.
"My doors are closed while you are here--as on a retreat. But when will
the season of penance be over? We are all expiating with you, remember."
"Do I imply penance? Is that the habit my retirement wears?"
"People give you credit for all sorts of niceties of feeling." Lady
Tramley smiled her significant little smile, a smile not lavished on the
nothings of intercourse, and Camelia, taking her by the shoulders, shook
her softly.
"No; sly as you are you get nothing out of me, and give me credit for
nothing, please, not even for curiosity as to what people _do_ say of
me."
"You know, dear, he is to meet, I fear, a second disaster as
unmerited----"
Camelia had sat down to the tea-tray brought to refresh her after her
journey. She looked up from the filling of her cup to meet in a glance
the delicate directness of Lady Tramley's look.
"Jack knows the ropes, of course, and I thought you ought to know
too--and be sorry." In her heart Lady Tramley hoped for an expansion of
sorrow that would carry Camelia past her moment of inexplicable folly.
"I am sorry. The bill, you mean." Camelia folded a slice of bread and
butter, adding "Idiots."
"Idiots indeed. It won't be carried, I am afraid. There is a split in
the Government, and Mr. Rodrigg has developed a really spiteful
acrimony. I always hated that man."
"Ah! I loathe him!" said Camelia. She thought with a pang of
self-reproach of an unopened letter among the rejected pile--a letter
for Mr. Rodrigg. She had not cared to read his shuffling excuses. His
vanity, bulwarked by the strangely apt events succeeding his
discomfiture, might well renew hope. He might imagine these events the
result of remorse, and that, brought to a timely realization of her
folly, his fair one would consent to bury the hatchet and allow his firm
hand to tame her finally. All this Camelia had conjectured very rightly
on looking at the fat envelope. She had restrained the direct rebuff of
returning the unopened letter, but she had neither answered nor cared to
read it, and could well imagine that Mr. Rodrigg's cumulative
humiliation would urge him to his only possible vengeance. The "I loathe
him" was spoken with a most feeling intensity of tone.
"Yes." Lady Tramley's affirmative was meaning, and Camelia looked up
alertly. "Lady Henge told me."
"You know everything, I believe," cried Camelia. "Well, I am in good
hands."
"I understand--your idea in it. But how unwise. How you mistook the
man."
"Rather! Ass that I am!"
"You looked for superlative chivalry, if you come to think of it."
"No, for sincerity; common honesty. I thought I could convince him. I
didn't want chivalry without conviction. What did Lady Henge say of me?"
Camelia added bluntly.
Lady Tramley replied very frankly, "She said you were a shallow jilt. I
quite agreed with her inwardly--though I shamelessly defended you."
"If I say that I agree with you both it will only savor of ostentatious
humility--so I refrain. But, Lady Tramley, it was not the breaking of
our engagement that was shallow--that I will say. And so the bill is
doomed. Can we do nothing? Shear no Samson in the lobbies? Mr. Rodrigg,
of course, offers no hirsute possibilities."
"Not a hair. Your Mr. Perior will be disappointed. He came back from the
Continent, you know, and put his shoulder to the wheel."
Camelia stirred her tea evenly. Her nerves, as she felt with pride, were
very reliable.
"_Our_ Mr. Perior then, is he not?" she asked, while her thoughts flew
past Sir Arthur to nestle pityingly to Perior. His useless valiancy
embittered her against the world of unconvinced opponents. Idiots
indeed! But she could not see him yet; even her nerves were not yet
tempered to a meeting. She had no comfortable background against which
to present herself; when she did, the background must be so unfamiliar
that for neither of them could there be the confusion of a hinted
memory.
"Ours, by all means," said Lady Tramley. "I only effaced myself before
the paramount claim.--Not quite doomed. There is still the final fight,
and it is to be heralded by a thunderous article in the _Friday_. Mr.
Perior only goes down sword in hand."