Mary came for Camelia one morning while Perior was with her, to tell her
that Jane Hicks was dying and asking for her. Mary saw that Camelia's
promptitude, where compunction blushed, gratified Perior, as did Jane's
devotion; she knew that he supposed the devotion based upon some new
blossoming of thoughtful kindness in Camelia, and the ironic bitterness
of this reflection was in no way made easier to Mary as she heard
Camelia, while they all three walked to the farm, confess dejectedly to
the one visit.
"I should have gone again!" Camelia repeated with sincerest
self-reproach, and Mary could see that though he assented to the
reproach her contrition lifted her in his estimation. Perior waited
below while Camelia and Mary went up together. Camelia came down
weeping; Mary's face was quite impassive.
The poor girl had died with her hand in Camelia's, her eyes fixed on the
lovely Madonna head that bent over her with a beautiful piteousness,
like a vision at the gates of heaven. Jane closed her eyes on that
vision. She had not had one look for Mary, though her perfunctory
thanks--the winding up of the trifling duties remaining to her on
earth--had been feebly breathed out to her some hours before. Mary saw
that she had been very unnecessary to Jane, and that the unknown
Camelia, Camelia's one smile, the one golden hour Camelia's beauty had
given her, made the brightness, the poetry, the symbolized radiance of
things unseen and hoped for that had remained with the dying girl during
the last months of her life. Mary was very still in walking back with
the others. Camelia sobbed, and stumbled in the heavy road, so that
Perior gave her his arm and held her, looking pityingly, more than
pityingly, at the bent head and shaking shoulders. Mary felt her own
lack of emotion to be unbecoming, but, indeed, she had none, was
conscious instead of a dislike for poor, dead Jane.
For Mary was a most unhappy creature. Outside the inner circle, where
Perior and Camelia wondered about, and evaded, one another, the very
closeness of constant intercourse making blindness easy, Mary saw the
truth, that Camelia did not see, very clearly. With her preconceived and
half-mistaken ideas as to that truth, it remained one-sided. Perior
loved Camelia; loved, and had weakly crawled back to her, craving at
least the crumbs of friendship,--and that she was lavish with her crumbs
who could deny?--since all else had been refused to him. Mary spent her
days in a quivering contemplation of this fact. The bitter, sweet
consolation of the whole truth never entered her mind. Camelia loving,
and Camelia repulsed, was an imagining too monstrous for vaguest
embodiment. Camelia's own naïve vanity would not have surpassed in
stupefaction Mary's sensations, had such a possibility been suggested to
her. Camelia, who could have anybody, love Mr. Perior? She would have
voiced her astonishment even more baldly. Not that Mary thought Mr.
Perior nobody. To her he was everybody; but that knowledge was her
painful joy, a perception lifting her above Camelia. Camelia judged by
the world's gross standards, and, by those standards, she must stoop in
loving Perior.
That Camelia should stoop in the world's eyes, that Camelia should do
anything but soar, were unimaginable things. So her ignorance made her
knowledge more bitter. The man she loved, adored,--her bleached, starved
nature spreading every flower, stretching every tendril, her ideal and
her rapture towards him,--that man did not see her, even. She was no
one; a dusty little moth beating dying wings near the ground, and his
eyes were fixed on the exquisite butterfly tilting its white loveliness
in the sunshine. Under her stolid silence Mary was burning, panting. His
misery, her doom, and Camelia's indifference,--at the thought of all
these a madness of helpless rebellion swam about her; and with a growing
sense of weakness came a growing terror of self-betrayal. For she was
dying, that was Mary's second secret; there was even a savage pleasure
in the thought of absolute and consummated wretchedness hidden so
carefully. Hysterical sobs rose in her throat when she thought of it,
and of their blindness. The sobs were nearly choking her one day as she
sat alone in the morning-room casting up accounts.
Perior had been with Camelia in the library for two hours, and he had
not come into the morning-room, though over two hours ago poor Mary had
stationed herself there in the sorry hope of seeing him. The little
touch of abandonment stabbed more deeply than ever on this morning, when
her head was so heavy, her chest so hollow, breathing so difficult, all
her sick self so in need of pitying gentleness and sympathy; and though
no tears fell, that rising, strangling sob was in her throat. There was
shame, too; her very rectitude was crumbling in her weakness and
wretchedness; the wretchedness had seemed to exonerate her when,
exasperated by envy and long waiting, she had gone to the library door
and put her ear to the key-hole, like a base thing, to listen.
Since everything had abandoned her she might as well abandon herself, so
she told herself recklessly; but she had only heard Camelia's clear,
sweet voice; and Camelia was reading Greek! Mary could only feel the
irony as cruel, and on regaining her place at the writing-table she
found herself shaking, and overwhelmed with self-disgust and a sort of
desperation.
When Perior came in very shortly afterwards she could almost have risen
to meet him with a scream of reproach. The mere imagining of such a
strange revelation made her dizzy as he approached her.
"I had not seen you. I am just off. How are you, Mary?" he asked. In
spite of the mad imaginings Mary's mask was on in one moment, the white,
stolid mask, as she turned her face to him.
"Very well, thanks."
"You don't look very well."
"Oh, I am, thanks." Mary averted her eyes.
Perior's brow had an added look of gloom this morning. His eyes followed
hers. The drizzling rain half blotted out the first faint purpling of
the trees. "What a dreary day!" he ejaculated, with a long, involuntary
sigh. He was not thinking of Mary; she saw that very plainly, though her
eyes were fixed on the blurred tree-tops.
"Very dreary," she echoed. He looked down at her again, this time with a
certain pain and interest that Mary did not see. On his own thoughts,
the perplexing juggling of "If she still loves me as I love her, why
resist?" the ensuing fear of yielding, and yielding for no better reason
than that he could not resist, broke the thought of Mary. It could not
be a very big thought. Mary was a quiet, uneventful little person,
spending a contented existence under her aunt's wings, useful often as a
whip wherewith to lash Camelia, but pitiful mainly from his sense of the
contrast of which he really believed Mary quite unconscious. Something,
now, in her still face, in the lax weariness of her thin hand, lying on
the account book, roused in him a groping instinct. He looked at the
hand with a certain surprise. Its thinness was remarkable.
"You do look badly, Mary," he said. "Tell me, are you dreary, too? Can I
do anything for you? We must have some rides when it grows finer." His
thoughts, as usual, gave Camelia an accusing blow.
"You are bored, tired, unhappy like the rest of us, Mary. Is that any
consolation?" He smiled at her. She felt the smile in his voice, but did
not dare to meet it, bending her head over the account books.
"Don't do those stupid sums!"
"Oh, I like them!" Indeed, the scrupulous duties were her one frail
barrier against the black sea of engulfing thought. And then, her heart
just rising in the false but delicious joy of his kind presence, came a
call, a call not dreary like the day, but fatally sweet and clear, the
sound of it as if a flower had suddenly flung open rosy petals on the
grayness.
"Alceste, come here! I want you."
"Our imperious Camelia," said Perior with a slight laugh. "Well,
good-bye, Mary. Don't do any more sums, and don't look at the rain. Get
a nice, cheerful book and sit down at the fire. Amuse yourself, won't
you?" He clasped her hand and was gone.
Mary sat quite still, moving her pen in slow curves, waves, meaningless
figures over the paper. The arrested sob seemed frozen, and no tears
came. She looked dully at the black zigzags on the paper while she
listened to the distant sound of voices in the hall, Camelia's laugh, a
lower tone from Perior, Camelia's cheerful good-bye.
A sudden fit of coughing seized her, and while she shook with it Camelia
came in. Mary's coughing irritated Camelia, but she did not want to hurt
her feelings by departing before it after getting the newspaper she had
come for, so, walking to the table, she said, taking up and opening the
_Times_ with a large rustling--
"All alone, Mary?"
"Yes," Mary replied. The coughing left her, and she clenched her
handkerchief in her hand. The madness rose again, lit by a keener sense
of horror.
"But Mr. Perior came in, did he not?" Camelia scanned the columns, her
back to the light.
"Yes," Mary repeated.
"Well, what did he have to say?" Camelia felt her tone to be
satisfactorily detached. She wanted to know. That sense of something
lacking, something even awkward, had become almost acute this morning;
only her quiet gaiety had bridged it over. Mary was again looking out of
the window. An inner impulsion made her say in a tone as dull as her
look--
"He said he was dreary."
The _Times_ rustled with a somewhat aggressive effect of absorption, and
then Camelia laid it down. Something in Mary's voice angered her; it
implied a sympathy from which she was to be shut out; he had not said to
_her_ that he was dreary. But she still kept her tone very light as she
walked to the fire.
"Well, he is always that--is he not?" she commented, holding out a foot
to the blaze; "a very glum person indeed is my good Alceste."
Mary did not reply, and Camelia, with a quick turn of conjecture that
seemed to cut her, wondered if there had been further confidences. She
paused for a moment, swallowed on a rising tremor of apprehension,
before saying, as she turned her back to the fire and faced the figure
at the table--the figure's heavy uncouthness of attitude making her a
little angrier--"What further moans did my melancholy friend pour into
your sympathetic bosom, Mary?" Mary, looking steadily out of the window,
felt the flame rising.
"He said that he was bored, tired, unhappy."
After a morning spent with _her!_ Camelia clasped her hands behind her
back, and tried to still her quick breathing. She eyed Mary, but she did
not think much of Mary.
"Really!" she said.
"Yes. Really." Suddenly Mary rose from her chair; she clutched the
chair-back. "Oh, you cruel creature! you bad creature!" she cried
hoarsely.
Camelia stared, open-mouthed.
"Oh, you bad creature," Mary repeated. Camelia never forgot the look of
her--the ghastly white, stricken out of sharp shadows, the splash of
garish color on either cheek, the pale intensity of her eyes. She
noticed, too, the sharp prominence of Mary's knuckles as she clutched
the chair-back, and in her amazement stirred a certain, quite different
discomfort. She could find no words, and stared speechlessly at the
apparition.
"You are cruel to every one," said Mary. "You don't care about any one.
You don't care about your mother--or about _him_, though you like to
have him there--loving you; you don't care about me--you never did--nor
thought of me. Well, listen, Camelia. I am dying; in a month I will be
dead; and _I_ love him. There! Now do you see what you have done?"
A fierce joy filled her as she spoke the words out. To tear the bleeding
tragedy from its hiding-place, and make Camelia shudder, scream at
it--it brought relief, lightness; she breathed deeply, with a sense of
bodily dissolution; and Camelia's look was better than screams or
shudders. Let the truths go like knives to the heart that deserved them.
As she spoke Mary felt her wrongs gather around her like an army. She
had no fear. She straightened herself to send to her cousin a solemn
look of power.
"You did not know I was dying; of course you would not know it--for you
think of nothing but yourself. There, do you see that handkerchief? I
have been coughing blood for a long time. Nothing can be done for me.
You know how my father died. And when I am dead, Camelia, you may say to
yourself, 'I helped to make the last year of her life black and
terrible--quite hideous and awful.' Yes; say it. Perhaps it will make
you feel a little badly." With the words all the anguish of those
baffled, suffering months came upon her. The sobs rose, panting; the
tears gushed forth. Staggering, she came round the chair and dropped
into it, and her sobs filled the silence.
Camelia stood rooted in terror. She expected to see the sudden horror
fulfil itself, to see Mary die before her eyes, Mary's curse upon her,
and all her misdeeds one vague, menacing blackness. To clutch at any
doubt was impossible. From the first moment of her uprising Mary's body
had been like a shattered casket from which streamed a relentless light.
Camelia's eyes were unsealed; she saw that the casket was shattered--the
light convicted her.
"What have I done?" she gasped. "Tell me, Mary, what is it?"
She found a difficulty in speaking. She did not dare approach her
cousin.
"I will tell you what you have done," said Mary, raising her head, and
again Camelia felt the hoarse intentness of her voice, like a steady
aiming of daggers. "You have taken from me the one thing--the only
thing--I had. I love him! He is nothing to you; and you took him from
me."
"Oh, Mary! Took him from you!"
"Yes, yes; you did not know. He did not know. _I_ saw it all. He might
have loved me had you not come back. He must have loved me, when I loved
him so much! oh, so much!" and, sobbing again, she pressed to her eyes
the blood-stained handkerchief, careless now of its revelations.
"Oh, Mary!" cried Camelia, shuddering.
"I was so happy last winter. He would come and read, and ride. He was so
kind. Auntie, and he, and I--it was the happiest time of my life. But
you came, and he never looked at me again! Oh, how horrible! how unjust!
Why should you have everything?--I nothing! nothing! I suppose you
thought me contented, since I was ugly, and poor, and stupid. And you,
because you are beautiful, and rich, and clever, you have everything!
That is all that counts! I am not selfish and cruel; at least, I used
not to be. I have thought about other people always! I have tried to do
right, and what have I got for it? My life has been a cheat! and I hate
it! And I am glad to die, because I see that you, who are bad, get all
the love, and that I will never have anything! And I see that I am
bad--that I have been made bad through having had nothing!"
"Oh, Mary! forgive me! oh, forgive me!" Camelia found her knees failing
beneath her. She stretched her clasped hands towards her cousin.
"I did not know; indeed, I did not! Indeed, I love you, Mary!--oh, I do
love you! We all love you!" She felt herself struggling, with weak,
desperate hands, against Mary's awful fate and her own guilt. "How can
you say that, when we all love you? know how good you are!--how sweet
and good--love you for it!" She buried her face in her hands, sobbing.
Mary, who herself no longer sobbed, observed her.
"Oh, you are a little sorry now," she said, in a voice of cold
impassiveness that froze Camelia's sobs to instant silence. "I make you
uncomfortable--a little more uncomfortable than when I cough. It is
strange that when I never did you any harm--always tried to please
you--you should have found pleasure in hurting me. Do you remember all
the little jeers at me before him? You mocked my dulness, my ugliness.
He did not laugh. It made him sad, because he did not like to see you
unbeautiful in anything; but he must have seen me more stupid, more ugly
than before. And when he was with me for one moment you would take him
away. And you lied to keep him to yourself, like that day we were to
have ridden together; and if you had known that I loved him you would
have been all the more anxious to have him--to hurt me."
"No, no, Mary!" Camelia's helpless sobs burst out again.
"Yes; why can I speak to you like this? because I am dying, you see that
I am dying--that gives me my only advantage; I can tell you what I think
of you, and you don't dare reply. You would not dare say to me now that
I am a spy--that I have sneaking eyes. I hate you, Camelia! I hate you!
Oh! oh!" She rose to her feet suddenly, and at the change of tone--the
wail--Camelia uncovered her eyes.
"I am going to die! I am going to die! And I love him, and he does not
care." Mary groped blindly to a sofa, fell upon it, buried her head in
the cushions.
Camelia rose to her feet, for she had been kneeling, and stood listening
to the dreadful sobs.
Her life had never known a comparable terror. The blackness of Mary's
point of view encompassed her. She felt like a murderer in the night.
She crept towards the sofa. "Oh, forgive me, say a word to me."
"Leave me; go away. I hate you."
"Won't you forgive me?" The tears streamed down Camelia's cheeks.
"Go away. I hate you," Mary repeated. There was a compulsion in the
voice Camelia could not disobey. Trembling and weeping she went out of
the room.
Mary lay there sobbing. She had never so realized to the full the extent
and depth of her woe, yet there was relief in the realization, relief in
the flinging off of secrecy and shame. That Camelia should suffer,
however slightly, restored a little the balance of justice, satisfied a
little the outraged sense of solitary suffering, atoned a very little
for fate's shameful unfairness. To poor Mary, sobbing over her one
triumph, the morality of the universe seemed a little vindicated now
that she had taken into her own hand the long-delayed lash of
vengeance.
Her weakened religious formalities and conventionalities withered under
this devouring, pagan flame. It was good to hate, and to revenge one's
self, good to see the smooth and smiling favorite of the cruel gods,
weeping and helpless. She was tired of rightness--tired of swallowing
her tears.
The best thing in her life had been turned against her; everything was
at war with her. Well, she would crouch no longer, she would die
fighting, giving blow for blow. She threw her hands up wildly in
thinking of it all--beat them down into the cushions. To have had
nothing, nothing, and Camelia to have everything! Oh, monstrous
iniquity! Camelia, who had done no good, happy; she, who had done no
wrong, unutterably miserable.
For a long time she lay sobbing, still beating her hands into the
cushion, a mechanical symbolizing of her rebellion and wretchedness. So
lying, all the blackness of the past and future surging over her,
engulfing her, she heard outside the sound of a horse's hoofs on the wet
gravel. A moment afterwards running footsteps came down the stairs and
crossed the hall. Mary pulled herself up from the sofa, and, with the
outer curiosity of utter indifference, walked to the window. Camelia's
horse stood before the door, a groom at his head. The drizzling mist
shut out all but the nearest trees, flat, pale silhouettes on the white
background, against which the horse's coat gleamed, a warm, beautiful
chestnut. Mary's indifference grew wondering. Her sobs ceased as she
gazed. The gaze became a stare, hard, fixed, as Camelia, in a flash,
sprang to the saddle. Mary saw her profile, bent impatiently, the
underlip caught between her teeth, the brows frowning, while the groom
adjusted her skirt. In a moment she was off at a quick trot, and soon a
sound of galloping died down the avenue.
Mary stood rigidly looking after the sound. A supposition, too horrible,
too hideous, had come to her, too hideous, too horrible not to be true.
Its truth knocked, fiercely insistent, at her heart. Her knowledge of
Camelia, acute yet narrow, and confused by this latter suffering, sprang
at a bound to the logical deduction.
Camelia could not bear suffering, revolted against it, snatched at any
shield. She had gone now to Perior, that he might lift from her this
dreadful load of responsibility, cast upon her so cruelly by Mary. He
must tell her that he had never thought of Mary, and that the idea of
robbery was a wild figment of Mary's sick brain. Mary's brain, though
sick, was clear, clear with the feverish lucidity that sees all with a
distinctness glaring and magnified. She saw all now. The meanness, the
cowardice of Camelia's proceeding only gave a deepened certainty.
Then indeed shame came upon Mary. She saw herself gibbeted between them,
knew too well what he would think. He would himself hang her up, since
truth demanded it, and since Camelia must be comforted. The glaring
lucidity dazzled Mary a little at times, and now the awful justice of
Perior's character assumed in her eyes a Jove-like cruelty, that more
than matched Camelia's dastardliness. The past hour seemed painless in
comparison with the present moment; its blackness, in looking back at
it, was gray. To be debased, utterly debased, in his eyes--that was to
drink the very dregs of her cup of agony. Her hatred of Camelia was her
only guide in the night. She went into the hall and took down her hat
and cloak. She could not wait for Camelia's return. She must herself see
the actuality of her betrayal. Camelia might lie unless she could hold
the truth before her face; might say that she had not ridden to
Perior's. Mary would see for herself, and then--oh then! confronting
Camelia, she would find words, if she died in speaking them.
She ran down the avenue and turned off into the woods by a short cut
that led more directly than the curving high road to the Grange. Her
weakness was braced by the fierceness of her purpose. She felt herself a
flame, hastening relentlessly through the smoke-like mist.
The woods were cold and wet. She pushed past dripping branches, splashed
through muddy pools; the inner fire ignored its panting frame. When she
arrived at the foot of the hill on which stood the Grange, she knew that
Camelia must have been with him there for an hour or more. She could not
see the house through the heavy atmosphere, but, hidden by the trees and
fog, she could see the road and be herself unseen. On the edge of the
wood was a little stile; she shuddered with wet and cold as she sat down
on it to wait. She would wait for Camelia to pass, and then, by the same
hidden path, she could go home and confront her. Beyond that crash Mary
did not look. It seemed final.