So he was in London. Camelia, sitting at home in the library, could
think of the nearness with a new calm. She was preparing herself to meet
its closer approach. She was not leaving herself defenceless. She
plunged into her reading--architecture, agriculture, decoration, and
sociology. The books came down from London in heavy boxes, and she sat
encompassed by the encouraging perfume of freshly-cut leaves.
"Are you happy, dear?" her mother asked her. She would come in with her
usual air of deprecatory gentleness, and bend over the absorbed golden
head that did not turn at her entrance. On this day the absorption wore
a look of eager interest that seemed to justify the question.
Camelia finished her sentence, smiling, however, as she put her hand on
her mother's without looking up. Her mind, indeed, was soothed,
comparatively comfortable.
"No rude questions, Mamma!"
"You understand all these solemn books?" Over her daughter's shoulder,
where she leaned, Lady Paton looked respectfully at the heavy volume.
"I am beginning to understand that whatever one does in philanthropy is
wrong from the point of view of some authority!" Camelia said,
stretching herself on a long yawn, and then gently pinching her mother's
chin, while the smile dwelt upon her appreciatively, "As usual I find
that the only thing to do in this world is to do just as one likes."
"If one can," said Lady Paton, with a half sad playfulness.
"If one can;" the words woke in Camelia a painfully personal
affirmative, and with the wave of self-pity that swept through her
mingled a sense of her mother's unconscious pathos. Still holding her
chin she looked up at her, "It has often been _can't_ with you, hasn't
it?"
Lady Paton's glance fluttered to a shy alarm and surprise at this
application.
"With me, dear?"
"Yes--you have had to give up lots of things, haven't you? to put up
with any amount of disagreeable inevitables."
"I have had many blessings."
"Oh! of course! You would say that over your last crust! But it has been
can't with you, decidedly. I wonder if it was because you weren't strong
enough to have your own way!"
"That would be a bad way, surely."
"Ah!--not yours!"
"And perhaps I have no way at all," Lady Paton added, and Camelia was
obliged to laugh at the subtle simplicity.
"That is being too submissive. Yet--it is comfortable, no doubt.
Absolute non-resistance isn't a bad idea. And yet, why shouldn't one
make one's struggle?--survive if one is fittest? Why is not having
one's own way as good as submitting to somebody else's? Oh dear!" she
cried.
"What is it?"
"Nothing, nothing; I am unfittest, that is all!" Camelia stared out of
the window.
"What do you mean, dear?"
"I mean that I can't have my own way--I, too, can't. And it wasn't a bad
way either. There is the cruelty of it, the irony, the jeer! All the bad
ways are given to me, and when I turn from them, don't want them, and
try for the _best_--I don't get it! Isn't it intolerable?"
To Lady Paton this was wild, bewildering, pitiful, yet she grasped
enough to say, "That would be the punishment, would it not, dear, for
the bad ways?"
"Yes, the punishment. Like damnation. One has made one's self too
ugly--the best can't recognize one at all."
That evening the last number of the _Friday Review_ lay on the
drawing-room table. Perior had not written in it for some time, but with
the quiver of the heart any association with him now gave her, Camelia
picked up the paper and carried it to the fireside. Mary, sewing in the
lamp's soft circle of light, looked up quickly, and her hand paused with
an outstretched thread as she saw Camelia's literary fare.
Camelia turned the pages in a half fretful search for what she felt sure
of not finding; then, abruptly, the rustling leaves came to a
standstill. There was the article, at last! a long one, on the Factory
Bill. Impossible to question the concise, laconic style; no one else
wrote with such absolute directness, such exquisite choice, free from
all hint of phrasing.
Camelia's gray eyes kindled as she read, and her lips parted
involuntarily; she drew quick, shallow little breaths. Oh! through it
all went that fervor, that cold, bracing fervor she knew and loved.
Perior's strong feeling was at times like a clear, indignant wind,
sweeping before it cowering littlenesses. Her mind half forgot him as
she read, conscious as was her heart. For the first time the intrinsic
right of the bill was borne in upon her. She had glibly dressed its
merits, laughing at her own theatrical dexterity. She had never really
cared for any bill. Now it became the greatest, the only bill in the
world. Her ardor rushed past the unfortunate initiator, to fall at the
propagator's feet. Ah! if she could but help now, and for his sake! Poor
Sir Arthur!
Mary, who from her seat could just see, beyond the sharply held review,
the lovely line of Camelia's cheek, the little ear, set in its delicate
closeness against the shining hair, Mary, intent on the rising color in
this bit of cheek, had quite stopped sewing. Her pale eyes widened in a
devouring significance, her lips set tightly on repressed pain. Mary,
too, had read the article.
Coming to the end of it, Camelia slanted the paper downwards, and
vaguely, over the top of it, looked at the fire. Then suddenly her eyes
met Mary's. A violent shock of self-consciousness shook her through and
through. She felt herself snatch back her secret from a precipice edge
of revelation--revelation to dull Mary, of all people. Mary, against
whom, in regard to Perior, she had long felt--not knowing that she felt
it--a strong, reasonless antagonism. She could not shake and slap her
secret, as a frightened mother slaps and shakes her rescued child; but
she could turn the terrified anger on its cause, and, in a strangely
pitched voice, she said, "What are you staring at? You look like a spy!"
Mary gave a great start. If indeed she had been slapped outright her
guilty amazement could not have been more cruel.
She stammered at a repetition of "staring"; but no words came. Her face
was scarlet. Camelia was immediately sorry, but not one whit less angry,
more so, perhaps, since pity is often an irritating ingredient; and,
too, she felt that to any one less stupid her very outburst might have
betrayed her. She was angry with herself as well as with Mary. Mary's
very helplessness was repulsive, and she hated to see her light blue
eyes set in that scarlet confusion.
"Yes, staring;" she helped the stammering. "Is there anything you want
to find out? Do ask, then. Don't let your eyes skulk about in that
sneaking fashion. It makes me quite sick to see you."
Mary stood up, looking from side to side in a half-dazed way that
Camelia observed with a pitying disgust that indeed sickened her. It
reminded her of the gestures of an ugly animal wounded by a stone flung
by some cruel boy. The simile came in a flash that it did not at the
moment give her time to complete it and see herself as stone-thrower.
She felt relief, as well as an added dismay, when Mary broke suddenly
into sobs, and stumbled out of the room, her sewing, caught in her
skirt, following her with ungainly leaps. Only then Camelia realized
that it was her own cruelty that sickened her; her irrational terror,
breaking in upon a tender, thrilling absorption, had urged her to it,
almost irresistibly; but now, the terror past, its foundationless folly
apparent, she really felt quite sick as she still sat looking at the
fire.
The _Friday Review_ sliding suddenly from her knees gave her a nervous
pang that tingled to her finger-tips, and when she stooped to pick it up
Perior's personality seemed to confront her. She cowered before it. The
hot blood beat in her head. Only by degrees, as her mind faltered over
extenuations, did she quiet herself. Her hidden unhappiness--her love,
it had been like a blundering hand thrust among her heart-strings; how
could she have helped the sharp anger in which her naked anguish clothed
itself? Lastly, but with a kind of shame, Mary's displeasing personality
made a subtle condonation; her inarticulate stupidity was almost
infuriating. Not for one moment did her secret suspect Mary's. Her own
pain seemed already an expiation, and, in analyzing it, she could put
Mary aside, promising herself that she would atone by a "Forgive me,
Mary, I did not mean it," the next time they met. She would even add, "I
was a devil." Her sigh of decision left her only half comforted.