CHAPTER XVI
A week had passed since Perior had received the first pleading note from Enthorpe, and one afternoon, when he was busy in his laboratory, another arrived, more a command than a supplication.
“Come at once. I must see you. I am very unhappy.”
Camelia indeed was very unhappy. She could hardly recognize or define the unusualness of the unfamiliar sensation, and her ignorance helped to hurt her, make her more bewildered under it. She had accepted Sir Arthur that morning, hurried by no impulse, but conscious as she walked with him in the garden of an ill-tempered recklessness, of a fate more easily accepted than evaded uselessly. If he would have it—if every one would have it, including herself, of course, let it be so. She said yes with almost a sigh of exhausted energy, smiled with lifted brows over Sir Arthur’s ensuing rapture, and then wondered that under the lightness with which she braved the decisive moment a sudden sickness of fear, of sorrow, should seize her. Reality this, then. No more choice. No more playing. The game ended. She was not being led into the Garden of Eden, but out of it, and a new world, a world bleak, leaden, a sunless immensity of dreariness stretched before her. She was frightened, and the lesser feelings of the next hour were dazed by her effort to dismiss this fear. She knew that her mother’s tearful, speechless joy, Lady Henge’s elevated approbation, Mary’s gasping efforts after fitting phrases, Frances’ cool, close-lipped little smile of satisfaction, and the background of congratulatory faces were all very irritating, and that she herself was unreasonably angry with them all.
She was glad to find herself alone in the library with Sir Arthur, even though strangely helpless before his joyous possessorship. His arm was about her, and she could hear Lady Henge thundering on the piano in the drawing-room.
“The dear mater is improvising an epithalamium,” said Arthur, with a laugh. To Camelia it seemed cynically in keeping with her jarred and jangled mood that her marriage should be interpreted by this pretentious music. It symbolized so much. Her own flimsiness and falseness, the immense distance from anything like perfect union. She turned her thought to the attainable pleasures of the future, tried to shut her soul on the lamenting ideal that Lady Henge’s music mocked, and her mind rested for a moment on the reassuring certainty of her own appreciation of Sir Arthur’s excellence. Strangely enough, though his possessorship frightened, his arm about her waist consoled her; a warm sense of his kindness and stability held her from inner terrors; she was glad to have him there; she foresaw in solitude an on-coming and chilly stupor. She felt it well to sit beside him, protected from her own fear by his devoted nearness. “There now, you are smiling,” said Sir Arthur; “you seemed sad, as though you were conscious of responsibility—and didn’t like it.” When he spoke of responsibility Camelia felt more keenly that she had received an injury from fate. The “Yes” that had been spoken only a few hours before had belonged to the game, was it quite fair that this solemnity should result? Yet why not take it gaily? Force it into a dancing ring of happy lightness?
“Responsibility? Oh no, you can’t saddle me with that!” she said, returning his look, and smiling still more easily as she felt how much his handsome face pleased her; its very expression, an unaccented, humorous gaiety, worn for her sake, was a homage, a warrant of most chivalrous comprehension. “You alone are responsible”—and following her mental picture of the game of hide-and-seek in a Watteau landscape—“You caught me—that was all!”
“That was all!” he repeated; “and you were difficult to catch. Now that you are caught I shall keep you.”
“No, I am not sad,” Camelia pursued, “I only feel as if I had grown up suddenly.”
“No, don’t grow up. I must keep you always my laughing child.”