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.
CHAPTER XXV
BUT Mary was quite mistaken—as absolute logic is apt to be when dealing with human beings. Camelia, indeed, had gone to Perior, but on a very different errand from the one Mary’s imagination painted for her. Camelia was not thinking of herself, nor of throwing off the iron chains of that responsibility with which she felt herself manacled for life. Mary’s story had crushed every thought of self, beyond that consciousness of riveted guilt. It was of Mary alone she thought as she galloped through the mist. With terror and pity infinite she looked upon Mary’s love and the approaching death that was to end it; their tragedy filled everything, and at the feet of the majestic presences her own personality only felt itself as a cowering criminal. It was as though the ocean of another’s suffering had flooded the complacent rivers of her life. They overflowed their narrow channels; they were engulfed, effaced in the mighty desolation; never again could they find their flowering banks, their sunny horizons.
This moan of a suffering universe, heard before only in vaguest whispers, the minor key of the happy melody that she had known, making the melody all the sweeter for its half-realized web of sadness—this moan was now like the tumult of great waters above her head, and a loud outcrying of her awakened soul answered it. She was guilty—yes, as guilty as Mary knew her to be, for all the mistaken deductions of Mary’s ignorance. She loved Perior, and he did not love her; but those facts in no way touched the other unalterable facts—a cruelty, a selfishness, a blindness, hideous beyond words.