“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.”