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.
CHAPTER XXIII
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.