It was during the third summer that Judith compassed her desire of standing within the portals of the Compton house. Celia, sitting with her mother and brother and their visitors in the shadow of the Dorian pillars, in the idleness of a warm afternoon, saw Judith’s carriage approach, and—instead of passing, stop. Judith, in splendid array, descended and came forward. Celia, wondering, arose. When the ordinary formalities had been dispatched, Celia ushered Miss Bray into the long museum-like sitting-room, with the odor of strange old far-away things. Judith, while she spoke, could not keep her eyes from roving. She said, and a simple-minded, rich delight in what she had to say, and felt herself able to do, pierced through her expressions: “I understand, Miss Compton, that you don’t like the idea of a line of electric cars running through our village and down to the lake. Some one said so. You think it would spoil the looks of the old street and bring a lot of rough Sunday people. I wanted to hear it directly from you, to be quite sure, for it really, when all is said, you know, depends upon my father, and my father—” she laughed with roguish audacity—“does exactly what I want him to. It’s true he’s set his heart on the line—it’s progress, in his way of looking. But if you don’t want it, there shan’t be any car-line. Isn’t it fun? There’s a town-hall and select-men, and all that, but it really depends upon us two. My Dad will do anything I say, and I’ll do anything you say. There!... You’ve only got to speak....”
Celia had felt herself growing pale with the sheer force of antipathy. Her nervous hands were so near trembling, she reached to a jade cup and took from it a string of curious blue beads with which to keep them occupied. She replied in precisely modulated tones; “You are mistaken in believing I care—beyond a certain point. I had rather there were electric cars than—than certain other things. Personally, it can affect me very little—since I believe we shall soon cease altogether coming here for the summer.”
Judith, the dense, went away charmed with her call. She had loitered a little while on the porch, in chatter with the company, and been escorted to her carriage by the brother. She was amply discussed after her departure, she and her errand; the brother and the other man, as far as circumstances permitted, wedging in good words for her, with half-ironical good-humor.
The small, withered gentlewoman in the rocking-chair said, “I fear you will be obliged to call upon her, Celia, after all.”
Celia somberly raged. “Is one to be forced to know people whom it gives one goose-flesh to hear mentioned? The Brays have made me 423 feel as if boiled cabbage were reeking from every house in the village, and I am to associate with them quite as with people I like? Voluntary intercourse should signify, after all, some degree of regard, and I am to pretend—No! I will not admit the legitimacy of any tyranny which could so coerce me! I will be civil to her every time my bad luck throws us together, but seek her out I will not.”
At the last of the season, nevertheless, Mrs. Compton’s card and Celia’s were left at the Brays’, their call falling upon a day when Judith was far from home, to the knowledge of every soul in the place, Judith truly believed. Celia left on the day after, with the comfortable sense of having done her duty and deserved the crumb of favor vouchsafed her by fate.
She supposed, when she came back the following year, that her relation with the Brays was now definitely established: one formal call from each party during the season. But the first time she met Judith, she perceived instantly that all was changed. She knew she had made an enemy. How the revulsion had come about was never clear: whether owing to the mere ripening of age—Judith was now twenty-four or -five, Celia five or six years older—or the souring of a despised prepossession, or the intimacy with Jess, which began at about this time. Celia’s punctilious bow met the response of as much petty rudeness as could be concentrated into a lifting of the chin and a stare. “Very well,” she said to herself stonily, “if you prefer it so, it is by far the most agreeable to me.”
It was not, altogether; that is, not all the time. We are seldom of a piece, and a part of Celia was chafed, and now and then saddened, by the sense of having brought about anything so unbeautiful as this hate. She could not at all moments clear her conscience of blame, and had pangs of regret—too honest with herself, however, not to know that if all were still to do, she should do the same. For another part of Celia, child of a worldly clan, felt itself eminently justified. One must keep the two worlds distinct in practice: Brethren before our Maker, we yet play the social game according to its rules. After the first, she relegated the matter to a high shelf. She had not made much case of Judith’s friendship, she made scarcely more of her enmity. Her life was full of other interests, and, as she mingled less and less with the village, the reminder of Judith’s sentiments toward her hardly recurred often enough to constitute an element in her consciousness. The truth is that as Judith dropped out of her existence in the character of one who could interfere with it, she disliked her less. Sometimes the flushed face with its assumed haughtiness, “cutting her dead,” (Celia, with some idea, perhaps, of doing for her part a Christian’s duty, continued to bow as if unaware of the insult intended her) smote her with a sense of pity at the evil passions hardening that really beautiful face. The Comptons’ idea that they might have to give up the village as a summering place was forgotten. When a little chafed by some noisy exhibition of the Brays’ vulgarity, Celia used to say to herself hopefully that no doubt Judith would in time marry and go to live elsewhere. She would have been amazed to discover that she was herself directly concerned with Judith’s singleness. Judith, the very type of whose charms proclaimed her passionate temperament, had never among her adorers seen one she was sure would have been felt good enough for Celia. There was a story passed along in confidence—how things which the persons concerned in them never breathe come to be generally known is a mystery—that Celia would never marry, because the one she should have married, renounced on account of some deadly habit of a drug, was off somewhere at the other end of the world, fighting his weakness, or, there were those who said, having given up the fight. Judith, hearing this long before, had considered the circumstances with an aching sympathy, mingled with awe. She knew she could never have done it. If she had cared for the man,—the most brilliant man before, and now the most unhappy,—she pictured him handsome as a hero of Byron’s,—she would have had to cling to him and go down into the depths together. But spinsterhood had acquired an effect of fineness for her from the study of Celia, with the destruction of her happiness so perfectly concealed that one could detect it by no sign, unless that air of detachment, sometimes, and distance and fatigue, were an expression of it. In her latter mood Judith chose savagely to despise Celia for her defection from her lover; at the same time she lent small ear to love-proffers, absorbed in a different passion. For the hatred of Celia, who did not think of her once a week, was grown to a passion.
It was at this time hardly a matter of resolve that Celia did not think of Judith, unless some vision obtruded itself of her, driving past with Jess, whose little sallow face—owing its effect of malignity perhaps to a defect of the eyes, of which one never could quite ascertain the nature—was so well fitted to set off the proud bloom of hers. A strain of magnificence had developed in her: she was perpetually organizing festivities, picnics, water-parties, lawn-parties: her garden could be seen a mile away 424 at night, festooned with Chinese lanterns, while the village band played among the trees, and the contingent of the village people which she had formed into “her set” ate ices on her verandah. Effluvia of these doings drifted necessarily to the Comptons.
But in time Celia began finding herself subjected to small occasional pin-pricks of annoyance at things reported to her as having been said by Judith. They were repeated without malicious intention, mostly as being funny. The village dressmaker, who sometimes sewed for Celia, was employed as well by Judith. It might almost have been supposed part of this woman’s business to tell the village news while, as was the custom, one sat and sewed with her. Celia expected it as much as that she should bring her thimble and wax. Miss Greene was one of her oldest village associations, a “character” she was called, and was a privileged and much-quoted person. She felt a whole-souled allegiance to the Comptons, but no less to the new-comer, Judith Bray, who had been lavish to her as to everybody. She “did not know as the one interfered with the other.” When she liked a person, the bent of her disposition was to tell her everything, but particularly whatever in the most distant way had reference to her.