She did not see Mary again until the next morning, and then Camelia gave
herself the satisfaction of fulfilling an uncompulsory duty. Mary's
mask-like look of endurance met her apology with a dumb confusion that
Camelia must assume as accepting it, since she could not imagine Mary as
unforgiving.
Holding Mary's hand she repeated with some insistence, "I was devilish,
indeed I was. I don't know what evil spirit entered me."
Mary was acute enough to see the apology as a mere poultice on Camelia's
bruised conscience, but she did not divine the stir of real pity that
had prompted it, nor the embarrassment that concealed itself, half
ashamed, under Camelia's bright smile, a smile like the flourishing
finality at the end of a conventional letter.
Mary only shrank more coweringly from the circling advance of pain. In
her solitude Camelia's whip-like words and Camelia's smile blended to
the same scorching; words, Mary thought, so true, that no apology, no
smile, could efface them. That Camelia had felt them true was a
nightmare suspicion; the instinct for the truth had at least been there,
and, like the wounded animal, Mary quaked in her warren, conscious of
insecurity. Camelia soon forgot both cruelty and apology.
The news of the defeat of the bill brought her no shock, when it came
late in January. She had regretted keenly her own interference for a
long time, and found herself prepared to meet the blow with the quiet of
exhausted feeling. Camelia was not given in these days to finding
excuses for her faults, but she could see that this one had been venial,
and escape an unjust self-reproach. It was certainly irritating to have
Mrs. Jedsley rub in the undeserved sting.
Coming from the library one afternoon Camelia found this lady ensconced
before the drawing-room fire, her muddy boots outstretched to the
blaze--Mrs. Jedsley's boots were chronically muddy--a muffin in one
hand, a cup of tea in the other, her expression divided among the triple
pleasure of warmth, tea, and interesting news.
"Well, my dear, you've all had your brushes cut off, it seems," was her
consolatory greeting.
Camelia sank into a chair, languidly detesting Mrs. Jedsley's bad taste.
"You did so much for the cause, too, didn't you?" said Mrs. Jedsley,
deterred by no delicate scruples. "Come, Camelia, confess that it has
been a tumble for you all!"
"Too evident a tumble I think to require confession."
"And Mr. Rodrigg here for such a time! You are less clever than I
thought you--don't be offended--I mean it in a complimentary sense.
Then, after all, it isn't a brush you need mind losing. I never thought
much of the bill myself."
Camelia sat coldly unresponsive, and Lady Paton tried to smile at Mrs.
Jedsley's remarks and to believe them purely humorous.
"I am sorry for poor Michael," she said, "I fear he has taken it to
heart." This unconscious opening was only too gratefully seized upon by
Mrs. Jedsley, who, after a meaning glance at Mary, fixed, over her
tea-cup, sharp eyes on Camelia.
"Ah!" she said, "he is a man cut out for misfortunes--they all fit him.
He is bound to fail in everything he undertakes."
"I can't agree with you there," Camelia spoke acidly. "I think he
succeeds at a great many things."
"Things he doesn't care about, then, you may be sure of that. Fortune
follows such men like a stray dog they have no use for, while they are
looking for their own lost pet."
Camelia drank her tea in silence, priding herself somewhat on her
forbearance, pondering, too, on the pathos of Mrs. Jedsley's simile in
which she could only see a purely personal applicability. It was not him
the stray dog followed, but any number followed her--and it was she who
had lost her all.
But would he not come back? Might she not see him again? To be with
him--brave, self-controlled, and reticent, how well worth the fuller
pain! Pain was so far preferable to these dragging mists where she
waited. She might be--she must be--developing, but she must measure
herself beside him to know just how much she had grown. It pleased her
to see herself smiling sadly upon his unwitting kindness--for since he
had thought it a folly he should think it now a folly outgrown. It
pleased her to think that now exterior things mattered less to her than
to him; he, for all his self-defence of calm, still winced under the
whips of material circumstance; no doubt he was now tearing his heart
out over the defeat of the bill, and trying to persuade himself that he
had always expected it! She saw all material circumstance with
Buddhistic indifference. This thought dwelt pleasantly while she drank
her tea. Looking from the window she saw the winter afternoon not yet
gray, and her contemplative mood impatient of the chiming sharp and mild
which her mother and Mrs. Jedsley made, she left them to go out. First,
though, she bent over her mother and kissed her. It gave her content to
find tender demonstration becoming more and more an unforced habit.
"Nice, pretty little mamma," she whispered.
In her long coat, Siegfried trotting in front of her, Camelia breasted
the tonic January wind. There was just a crispness of snow on the
ground; in the lanes thin patches of ice made walking wary. She emerged
from the shelter of the hedges on to the fine billowy stretch of common,
where the wind sang, and the sunset in the west made a wide red bar.
Siegfried's adventurous spirit soon warmed him to an energetic gallop
through the dead fern and heather, and Camelia followed his lead,
intending to cut across to the highroad, and by its long curve return
home. It was in lifting her eyes to this road that she saw suddenly a
distant figure walking along it at a quick pace that would bring them
together at the very point she aimed for. It needed only the very first
brush of a glance to tell her that it was Perior. For a moment joy and
fear, courage and cowardice, pride and shame, struggled within her. Her
step faltered, stopped even, and Siegfried stopping too, looked round at
her, interrogation in the prick of his ears.
Camelia walked on slowly. Perior had seen and recognized her--that was
evident. Whatever might be his own press of feeling he did not hesitate.
He took off his cap and hailed her gaily, and Camelia felt that her
answering hand-wave helped to prepare the way for a meeting most
creditable to them both.
He did not fear the meeting, or would not show he did, for he advanced
over the heather at a pace resolutely unembarrassed. In another moment
they were face to face, and then she could see that his repressed a
tremor, and was conscious that her own was, with the same attempt, a
little rigid in its smile. Partly to recover from this shock of seeing
her again, partly to give her time to recover from her own emotion,
Perior raised her outstretched hand to his lips. He was so determined in
his entrenched resistance to the lover he knew himself to be (the lover
whose complaints had brought him rebelliously back again, his coming a
sop angrily thrown at the uncontrollable gentleman on condition, that
satisfied so far, he would keep still), so sure was Perior, the friend,
of the bargain, that the kiss was most successfully friendly. It sealed
delicately the bond he insisted on recognizing between himself and
Camelia. His relief was great, in looking at her again, to see that she,
too, fully recognized it, and that perhaps her courage was helped by
the fact that the mood--the astonishing mood--had passed. It would much
simplify matters if it had. He longed to be with her again, a longing
her tacit acquiescence in the old friendship could alone justify him in
satisfying. That his coming had not been indelicately ill-judged the
directness of her eyes seemed to assure him; but however much the friend
might rejoice in believing that he alone had anything to conceal, the
repressed lover, most inconsistently, felt a pang. Perior only consented
to recognize his own contentment with the safe footing upon which he
found himself.
Camelia smiled at him, and he smiled at her, smiles that might have been
children kissing and "making up"; frank, and bravely light.
"I thought you were in London," said Camelia. "No; come back, Siegfried,
we are going no farther; for you were coming to us, I suppose, Alceste?"
She could look at him quite directly. She was not ashamed, no,
mercifully she was not ashamed, that was her jubilant thought. After the
pang of the first moment she felt the strong conviction, borne in upon
her by her own calmness, that her love for him could never shame her,
nor her confession of it. The warm power of his friendship kept her from
petty terrors. She felt, in a moment, that on her courage depended their
future relationship. To ignore the past, to make him ignore it, would be
to regain, to keep her friend.
"Yes, I was going to you--of course," said Perior, smiling, as they went
towards the road together.
"I have been to Italy, you know, but I came back some time ago. I
thought I might be of use."
"Ah! I should have liked to have been of use! but I had been too badly
bitten to dare put out a finger!"
"I wouldn't put out fingers, if I were you; it isn't safe--when, they
are so pretty." The intimacy was almost caressing; she leaned against it
thankfully. Proud to show him that of the crying child there was not a
trace, she determined on a swift glance at the past that would put him
quite at ease.
"And you are coming back? Since this dreary business of the worsted
right is over you won't exile yourself any longer--and rob us? All your
friends will be glad to have you again!"
"Will they indeed?" his eyes sought hers for a moment, seemed to see in
them the past's triumphant mausoleum, presented for inspection quite
magnificently.
"Thanks, Camelia." The boldness delighted him, delighted all of him
except that grumbling prisoner who, in his dungeon, felt foolishly
aggrieved. "Yes, I am coming back--since I am welcome," he said, adding
while they went along the road, "As for the worsted right, the right
usually is worsted, in the first place. One must try to keep one's faith
in eventual winning."
"Tell me," said Camelia, feeling foundations quite secure, since each
had helped the other, "Mr. Rodrigg's opposition, that last speech of
his--the satanic eloquence of it!--you don't think--ah! say you don't
think me altogether responsible?"
"Would it please you--a little--to think you were?" The old rallying
smile pained her.
"Ah, don't! That has been knocked out of me--really! Don't imply such a
monstrous perversion of vanity."
"I retract. No, Camelia, I don't think you _altogether_ responsible. The
eloquence would always have been against us, its satanic quality was, I
fear, your doing."
"Yet, I meant for the best--indeed I did. Say you believe that."
"Indeed, I do believe it, Camelia."
They were nearing home when he said, "You were in London--I heard from
Lady Tramley."
"Yes, I went up on business."
"Did you? How are Lady Paton and Mary?"
"Very well. You don't ask about my business,"--Camelia smiled round at
him.
"Very blunt in me. What was the business, Camelia?" His answering smile
made amends.
Camelia placed herself against her background.
"I am building model cottages! You should see how economical we have
become! _Your_ glory is diminished!"
"With all my heart!" cried Perior, with a laugh of real surprise and
pleasure. "Lady Tramley did not tell me. Good for you, Célimène!"
It was delightful to bring him into the drawing-room that she had left
only an hour before. Camelia almost fancied herself perfectly happy as
she flung open the door with the announcement--
"Here is Alceste, Mamma!" No nervousness was possible before her mother
and Mary; it required no effort to act for them since she had so
successfully performed her part to him. Mrs. Jedsley was gone, but Mary
and Lady Paton sat before the fire, Mary reading aloud. She dropped the
book; Camelia's voice, in her ears, sounded with a brazen clang of
victory, and Perior seemed to her conquered, brought captive in an old
bondage. She could hardly speak, hardly welcome him; his return crushed
every hope of his liberation, the joy of seeing him was a mere
desolation. With a settled dulness she listened to them--all three
talking and exclaiming.
Perior had taken her hand, had shaken it warmly, looking at her with
kindest eyes; but now he listened to Lady Paton, and Lady Paton, of
course, after the first flood of rejoicing, condolences, and
questionings, was talking of Camelia.
The resentment that had smouldered in Mary for many months seemed now to
leap, and lick her heart with little flames of hatred. How she hated
Camelia; she turned the black thought quite calmly in her mind--it was
not unfamiliar.
Lady Paton was telling Perior about the cottages; she was rather proud
of Camelia's beneficent schemes, though gently teasing her about some of
their phases: "And, Michael, she is going to make them into veritable
palaces of art. Specially designed furniture--and Japanese prints on the
walls! Now they won't care about prints, will they?"
"They ought to, Camelia thinks," laughed Perior, looking at Camelia,
who, hat and coat thrown aside, leaned forward in the lamplight, smiling
and radiant, the pathos that her thinner face had gained emphasizing
its enchanting loveliness.
Mary looked at her too, at the curves of the figure in the perfect black
dress, at the narrow white hands, one lying on her knee, like a flower,
with the almost exaggerated length and delicacy of the fingers; at the
profile, the frank upraised eyes, the smiling mouth, the flashing white
and gold that rose from the nun-like white and black of the dress, and
the wide cambric collar falling about her shoulders and clasping her
throat. Beautiful! Mary felt the beauty with a sort of sickening. Of
course he looked at her, had no eyes but for her. Of course he had come
back.
"They must like them," said Camelia, "I don't see why such people should
not grow into good taste; and taste is often such a negative thing--a
mere leaving out of all ugliness. I have a lot of these prints; I picked
them up in Paris--the arcade of the Odion, Alceste--cheap things, but
excellent in their way; then a few good photographs. The rooms are to be
very bare. I should ask for all decoration a vase of flowers on the
table--I think I shall offer prizes to my cottagers for the best
arrangement of flowers."
"A very civilizing system!" Perior still laughed, for he found the
prints and the flower-arrangements highly amusing, and he still looked
at Camelia.
So that first meeting was over. It had passed so easily, with an
inevitable ease, based on long years that would not be disowned. Yet
when he had gone, Camelia was conscious of a sinking of the heart. The
exhilarating moment could not last. Her friend had come back, fond,
gently mocking, tender, yet unimpressed, blind to the change in herself
she passionately clung to as consummated. As her love was noble, she
thought that she had grown to match it. Her self-complacency, though on
a higher plane, circled her more completely, and as the days went on,
his blindness gave her a new sense of defeat. The ease remained, a tacit
agreement to shut their eyes on a certain incident; it was done most
successfully; they were quite prepared to meet _tête-à-tête_, and the
inner wonder of each as to the other's unconsciousness betrayed itself
only in a certain gentle formality that grew between them. That he
should come--and so often--fulfilled the only hope left her, and yet her
heart was darkened at moments by the thought that in these visits there
was an effort. She missed something of the old intimacy; it was not
quite the same--how could it be? that, after all, would have been too
big a feat of forgetfulness. He did not laugh at her, nor grow angry and
rage at her, as he had used to do, yet she could not feel that he
approved of her the more. He was fond of her--that was evident, even
though he might find this rebuilding difficult, and undertake it from a
sense of duty; but the fondness was graver than before, at least, it
made no pretence of hiding its gravity.