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.