The servant, as he showed Perior into the drawing-room, told him that
Miss Fairleigh was dying, and the imminence of the tragedy was
sorrowfully emphasized by Lady Paton's woe-stricken face, as she came in
to him.
"Yes, Michael, dying," she said before he spoke; his look had asked the
question. He took her hands, and they sat down, finding a comfort in
being together, and Perior was in as much need of it as she, felt not
one whit stronger before the approaching end.
"Tell me about it. It has been so sudden."
Lady Paton sobbed out the sad facts. Her own blindness; poor Mary's long
concealment--too successful; the doctor's fatal verdict.
"I was blind, too," said Perior, "though I always feared it."
"Ah! that is the cruellest part of it! And her indifference--she does
not seem to care; she does not speak to any of us."
"Not to Camelia? Is Camelia with her?"
Perior's heart must spare some of its aching to his unhappy Camelia.
"She has not once left her. She is so brave; I can only cry; but it has
made Camelia already different; a strength, a gentleness, yet a despair.
She feels it terribly, Michael, and the first shock was hers. Mary was
out all yesterday afternoon--in the wet and cold, and when she came in
she fainted in Camelia's room."
Perior looked at her, pondering this sinister announcement.
"I should like to see Mary--when she is able," he said.
"Yes. She must have her friends about her, my poor, poor child. Ah
Michael! I can never forgive myself."
"Why do you say that? You gave Mary all her sunshine."
"Not enough! not enough! She must have seen that it was Camelia, only
Camelia, in whom my heart was bound up. She must have felt it."
Perior sighed heavily. He, too, had regrets. Had he but known, guessed
what he had been to Mary! But he said, "Don't exaggerate that; Mary must
have understood; it was inevitable, quite, and pardonable. Camelia was
your daughter."
"Ah! Camelia had so much, Mary so little!" and to this Perior must
perforce assent.
Meanwhile Camelia sat by Mary's side. She divided the vigils with the
nurse who came down from London. She found that her eternal
self-reproach had strengthened her. She could bear its steady
contemplation and soothe her mother's more helpless grief.
Mary was sinking fast. During the next three days she hardly spoke,
though her eyes followed the ministering figures that moved about her
bed. Conscious that she was dying, but wrapped in an emotionless
sadness, she watched them all indifferently, and slept quietly from time
to time. It was going to be much easier than she had thought. Hardly a
thread bound her to life; even her passionate hatred of Camelia was
dimmed by the creeping mists; even her love for Perior wailed, it
seemed, at a long distance from her; she listened to it as she lay
there; only at moments came a throb of pain for all the happiness she
had never had. Camelia meeting the calm eyes would smile tremulously,
but Mary gave no answering smile, and her eyes kept all their calm.
Camelia had to hold firmly to the self-abnegation of perfect
self-control to keep down the cry of confession that would give her
relief, that would perhaps admit her to Mary's heart; it was not until
the third night, as she sat beside her, that the yearning allowed itself
to grow to hope. Mary's eyes, on this night, turned more than once from
their vacant gaze and dwelt upon her with a fixity almost insistent.
Camelia dared, at last, to take in both her own the tragic hand that lay
on Mary's chest, and, after a timid pause, she raised it to her lips. It
lay resistless; she held it against her cheek; through the dimness, Mary
felt the tears wetting it.
The merciful hardness about her heart seemed to melt. She knew a keener
pang, a longer aching, that did not end and give her peace again. It was
not calm, after all, not good to die with that unloving frost holding
one. She lay in silence, looking, in the faint light, at her cousin's
bent head, the ruffled outline of the golden hair. The thought of
Camelia's beauty bowed in this desolation touched her sharply,
intolerably. She felt her heart beating heavily, and suddenly,
"Camelia, I am sorry," she said.
Camelia clasped the imprisoned hand to her breast, and leaned forward.
"Sorry! Oh, Mary--what have you to be sorry for?"
"I was wicked--I hated you--I struck you."
"I deserved hatred, dear Mary."
"I should not hate you. It hurts me."
"Oh my darling!" sobbed her cousin, rising, and bending over her.
"It hurts me," Mary repeated, but in a voice unmoved.
"Do you still hate me, Mary?"
There was a pause before she answered--and then with a certain
faltering, "I--don't know."
"Will you--can you listen, while I tell you something?" said Camelia
almost in a whisper--for Mary's voice was hardly more, "I must tell you,
Mary, I deserve everything you said, and yet--you misjudged me. Will you
hear the truth?" Camelia clasped the hand more tightly to her breast. "I
am not going to defend myself--I only want you to know the truth;
perhaps--you will be a little sorry for me then--and be able to love
me--a little."
Mary looked up at her silently, and, when she paused, said nothing; yet
her intent look seemed to assent.
"It will not give you pain," Camelia said tremblingly, "the pain is all
mine here. Mary--I love him too." The words came with a sob. She sank
into the chair, and dropping Mary's hand she leaned her elbows on the
bed and hid her face.
"I loved him, Mary, and--I imagined that he must love me. My vanity was
so great that I thought I could choose or reject him. I accepted Sir
Arthur--from spite--partly, and then I was dreadfully frightened. On the
very day I accepted Sir Arthur I sent for Mr. Perior. Mary, I made love
to him. I did not tell him I was engaged; I wanted to escape from that
blunder unscathed. I could not believe in his embarrassment, nor in the
reality of his scorn when he found me out. I broke my engagement--as you
know. I went to Mr. Perior's house. I entreated him to love me--I hung
about his neck, cried, implored. He did not love me; he rejected me. He
scorns me--he is sorry for me; he is my friend, but he scorns me. I was
not playing with him--you see that now. I adore him--and he does not
love me at all."
Uncovering her face, Camelia found Mary's eyes fixed upon her.
"Do you understand now, Mary, why I went to him? I loved you so--was so
sorry for you--so infinitely sorry--for had I not felt it all? I never
told him that you thought he might have loved you; but I thought it
myself, I thought that he might love you, indeed, when he _knew_
you--knew the sweetness, the sadness of your hidden love. If he refused,
Mary, it was because he respected you too highly and himself--to act any
falsity towards you. It was not like my rejection; there was no shame,
no abasement for you. You have his reverent pity, his deep, loving
devotion. Don't regret, dear Mary, that through my well-meant folly he
really knows you now." She paused, and Mary still lay silent, slowly
closing and unclosing her hand on the sheet.
"Believe me, Mary," said Camelia, the monotony of her recitative
yielding to an appealing tremor, "I have told you the truth--the very
truth. I have not hidden a thought from you."
"You love him?" Mary asked, almost musingly.
"Yes, dear, yes. We are together there."
"I never saw it; never guessed it."
"Like you, Mary, I can act."
"And you wanted him to marry me," Mary added presently, pondering it
seemed.
"Oh, Mary!" said Camelia, weeping, "I did. I longed for it, prayed for
it--I would have given my life to have him marry you. Mary, believe me,
when I tell you that to atone in however a little measure for your
dreary life, I would die--oh gladly, gladly."
"Would it not have been worse than dying?" Mary asked in a voice that
seemed suddenly to subtly smile, though she herself lay unsmiling in the
shadowed whiteness of the bed.
"What--worse?"
"To see him marry me." Camelia gazed at her.
"I think, Mary," she said presently, "I could have seen it without one
pang for myself; I would have been too glad for you to think of that.
And then--he does not love me. The iron entered my soul long ago. I have
long since lost even the bitterness of hope."
"And he does not love you," Mary repeated quietly, raising her eyes and
looking away a little.
"He does not, indeed."
Camelia's quivering breaths quieted to a waiting depth. But Mary for a
long time said nothing more. Her hand lay across her breast, and above
it her face now surely smiled.
At last she turned her eyes on her cousin. Looking at her very gently,
she said, "But I love you, Camelia."