[CHAPTER: I] [II,] [III,] [IV,] [V,] [VI,] [VII,] [VIII,] [IX,] [X,] [XI,] [XII,] [XIII,] [XIV,] [XV,] [XVI,] [XVII,] [XVIII,] [XIX,] [XX,] [XXI,] [XXII,] [XXIII,] [XXIV,] [XXV,] [XXVI,] [XXVII,] [XXVIII,] [XXIX,] [XXX.]

The Confounding of
Camelia

By
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
Author of
“The Dull Miss Archinard,” Etc.

New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1899

TO
“CHARLIE” AND “JIMMIE”

The Confounding of Camelia

CHAPTER I

WHEN Camelia came down into the country after her second London season, descended lightly upon the home of her forefathers, her coming unannounced, and as much a matter of caprice as had been her long absence, a slowly growing opinion, an opinion that had begun to form itself during Camelia’s most irresponsible girlhood, became clearly defined, a judgment fixed and apparently irrevocable. The Patons had always been good, quiet people; absolutely undistinguished, were it not that the superlative quality of their tranquil excellence gave a certain distinction. There were no black sheep in their annals, and a black sheep gives, by contrast, a brilliancy lacking to unaccented bucolic groupings, strikes a note of interest at any rate; but none of the Paton sheep were even gray. They fed in pleasant, plenteous pastures, for it was a wealthy, though not noticeably wealthy family, and perhaps a rather sheep-like dulness, an unimaginative contentment not conducive to adventurous strayings, accounted for the spotless fleeces.

Their cupboards had never held a skeleton—nor so much as the bone of one. The family portraits, none even pretending to be Sir Joshuas or Vandycks, only presented a respectable number of generations, so that the mellow perspective of old ancestry, remarkable at least for a lengthy retrogression into antiquity, made no background to their commonplace. Sir Charles, Camelia’s father, was the first Paton weighted with an individuality that entailed nonconformity, and since Sir Charles’s individuality had confused all anticipations, further developments of the wild streak could not be unexpected. Many of the quiet, conservative people, who had known Camelia, her father and mother, and Patons of an earlier epoch, pronounced with emphasis that Camelia was spoiled; there was a tenderness in the term, an implication of might-have-beens; and other people, more bitter and perhaps more sensitive, remarked that not her head-turning London successes, of which big echoes had rolled down to Clievesbury, but the inherent, the no doubt inherited defects of Miss Paton’s character were responsible for her noticeable variation from family traditions. Did not that portion of Blankshire, which lay about the dim old village of Clievesbury, send up to the capital every year its native offerings of maidenhood? A London season had never induced in these well-balanced young ladies the merry arrogance so provokingly apparent in Miss Paton. Old Mrs. Jedsley it was, the last rector’s widow, who most openly denounced Camelia, and that, despite her long friendship for the Patons; denounced her frivolity, her insincerity, her egotism, and her wonderful gowns—their simplicity did not deceive Mrs. Jedsley’s keen eye; the price of one would keep the parish in flannel for a year she declared, and, no doubt, include the school feast. Mrs. Jedsley prided herself on her impartial faculty for seeing disagreeable truths clearly and for announcing them unflinchingly. Her fondness for Lady Paton—“poor Lady Paton”—could not blind or silence her. Poor Lady Paton was more than ever effaced, Mrs. Jedsley said; one might have thought that Sir Charles had required as much submission as a woman’s life could well yield, but the daughter had called forth further capabilities.

“The very way in which she says ‘Oh, Camelia!’ is flattering to the girl. Her mother’s half-shocked admiration encourages her in the belief that she is very naughty and very clever; and really while Camelia talks Lady Paton looks like a hare under a bramble.”

The simile hit the mark so nicely that the alarmed retirement of Lady Paton’s attitude was pictorially apparent forthwith. And, “Ah, well!” Mrs. Jedsley added, “What can one expect in the child of such a father! The most gracefully selfish man who ever lived. Charles Paton would have smiled you out of house and home, and left you to sit in the snow, while he warmed himself at your fireplace.”

Indeed this application of the laws of heredity might have induced a certain charitable philosophy on Camelia’s behalf. The love of adventure, of prowess, of power, had shown itself in Charles Paton; but much had been forgiven—even admired—with a sense of breathlessness, in a cloud-compelling younger son (his good looks had been altogether supreme), which, when seen flaunting indecorously in the daughter, was highly unpopular. Charles Paton at a very early age had found the family traditions “devilish dull” (and, indeed, it could not be denied that dull they were); he entered the army, kicked over the traces, and was “wild” with all his might and main. Clievesbury disapproved, but at the same time Clievesbury was dazzled.

Surrounded by this naughty atmosphere, reverberating with racing and betting, dare-devil big-game shooting, and the extreme fashion that is supposed to reverse the “devilish dull” morality of tradition, Charles Paton—like his daughter—returned to Clievesbury, and there fell most magnanimously and becomingly in love with little Miss Fairleigh, the eighth daughter of a country baronet—a softly pink and white maiden—wooed and married her and settled down, after a fashion, to carve out an army career for himself. He carved to good purpose, luck giving him the opportunity. He carried his life as lightly and gallantly as a flag; sought peril, and the tingling excitement of the strangest feats. His reckless bravery won him a knighthood; his fame, his happy good-nature, and extreme good looks, made him a hero wherever he went. Charles Paton’s yellow curls, his smile, the Apollo-like line of his lips, were as well known as his martial exploits.

He was vastly popular, and his little wife in the shadow by his side, looked up, like the others, and adored where they admired. Sir Charles liked a sunny atmosphere, and though the hearthstone flame in its steady commonplace did not count for so much as the wider outdoor effulgence, it was very cosy to come back to, when domesticity was a momentary necessity. He would not have liked a change of temperature, and tolerated the wifely worship very graciously. He was fond of her too; she was very pretty, not clever—(an undesirable quality in a wife)—far more of a help than a hindrance, though how much of a help he perhaps never realized. That broad triumphal road down which the hero marched was swept and garnished by the indefatigable wife. The dustiness and thorniness of daily life were kept from him. Lady Paton packed and paid, and dashed from post to pillar. She was a delicate woman who, petted and made much of, might have allowed herself an occasional headache and a tea-gown existence. The years in India were not easy years; through them all she unwaveringly adored her husband, and in many phases of a varied life showed the steely fibre so often and so unexpectedly displayed by the most delicately inefficient looking women.

Camelia was the fifth child; the others died, two in India and two in England, away from the poor mother. This last one was little more than a baby when ill-health and the death of his brother decided Sir Charles on a return to England. Lady Paton rejoiced in the home-coming. With her pretty baby—a girl, alas! but the estate was unentailed—and her great and glorious husband by her side—the future seemed to open on an unknown happiness. But Lady Paton was to know few compensations. Sir Charles found the rôle of country gentleman very flavorless, and his attempts to evade boredom left his wife more lonely—and too, more conscious of loneliness, than in busier days.

When Camelia was eight her father died. One saw then that Lady Paton was supremely adapted to eternal mourning. As a widow, she reached a black-encompassed repose, a broken-hearted finality of woe. Camelia was the one reason for her life. The child had never to enforce her will, her mother’s devotion yielded to the slightest pressure. Camelia was hardly conscious of ruling, nor the mother of being ruled. As the stronger egoism, Camelia domineered inevitably. She was a gay, kind child, happy in the unfettered expansion of her individuality; she delighted in its exercise, and in all sorts of unconventional acquirements. She read voraciously and loved travel. Lady Paton had by no means reached the end of packing and paying days. Camelia hated beaten tracks; the travelling must be different from other people’s; she managed in a tourist-ridden Europe to find the element of adventurous experience. Camelia was keen on experiences. Lady Paton did not appreciate them properly; but then Lady Paton saw life from no artistic standpoint. She thought undiscovered Greece and Poland more trying than the most trying places in India. The steppes depressed her; she dared not mention wolves, but her mind dwelt dejectedly upon them. She could hardly think of the cooking in certain out-of-the-way corners in Spain without shuddering. But she bore all with apparent placidity, and her helpful qualities won her daughter’s approval just as they had won her husband’s.

There was nothing rude or uncouth in Camelia’s domineering spirit, it was too happy, too spontaneous, too sure of its own right. Even after these two years of London her severest detractors could not accuse her of the grosser forms of vanity, nor of affectation, nor of the ugly thing that goes by the name of “fastness.” Her unerring sense of the best possible taste made “fast” girls seem very tawdry, and her coolly smiling eyes told them that she found them so. Even with the fact of her serene indifference to them growing into the consciousnesses of the people about Clievesbury, they still owned, generously, but perforce, that she was neither strident nor slangy, nor given to any form of posing. The change in Camelia, if change there were, was a mere evolution. She had tasted the joys of a wide effectiveness. She was only twenty-three, and more than once had been told that she was the only woman in London fitted to hold a “salon,” a “salon” that would be a power social, artistic, and political. Authors talked to her about their books, painters about their pictures; her presence at the opera was recorded as having judicial importance; a new pianist was made if he played at one of her musicals. She was a somebody to whom the Clievesburyites were nobodies indeed.

Camelia smiled at her own power. She did not think more highly of herself, but less well of other people, for she measured at once the comparative worth of her own attributes in a world of mediocrity. She saw through the flattery, valued it at its proper rate, but enjoyed it, and indulged in a little air of self-mockery that to appreciative minds crowned her beauty irresistibly. But she was rather disappointed in finding most people so stupid. It was difficult to hold to one’s standard in a world where the second-best passed so fluently. By those standards Camelia saw herself very second-best; but were there then no clever people to see it with her? She caught herself in a yawning weariness of it all. A lazy month or so in the country appealed to her; other motives, too, were perhaps not wanting. With a little retinue of friends she reappeared at Clievesbury, and, by degrees, old neighbors discovered that little Camelia had developed into a rather prickling personality. On calling they found Lady Paton very much in the background. Camelia seemed to make no claim, and yet she was the important personage, and to ignore her prominence was to efface oneself with her mother. It was thought—and hoped—that Lady Haversham, the magnate of the county, would vanquish that complacent sweetness, the aerial lightness of demeanor that glanced over one’s head while one spoke, and “positively” said Mrs. Jedsley “makes one feel like a cow being looked at along with the landscape.”

But although Lady Haversham held rule in the country, in London she, too, was a nobody, and Camelia very much the contrary. Lady Haversham knew right well that in going to see her old friend Lady Paton, Camelia was her objective point, and to try a fall with Camelia upon her native heath, her intention. Lady Haversham knew that in the eyes of the world—the world that counted—she was a mere country mouse creeping into the radiant effulgence of the young beauty, and this unpleasant consciousness gave her quite a drum-like sonority of manner—a fatal manner, as she felt helplessly while she beat out her imposing phrases beneath the clear smiling of Camelia’s eyes. Lady Haversham tried in the first place to exclude Camelia, and addressed herself with most solicitous fondness to Lady Paton; but Camelia’s silent placidity stung her into self-betrayal. Camelia evidently cared nothing for Lady Haversham’s graciousness—or lack of it; seemed, indeed, unconscious of the cold shoulder turned so emphatically upon her. Lady Haversham thumped and rumbled, and knew herself worsted.

“Manner! Unpleasant manner!” she said to Mrs. Jedsley later on in the day, “the child has no manners at all! That takes in London nowadays, you know. Anything in the shape of arrogant youth and prettiness is sure of having its head turned. And as to prettiness, I should call her curious-looking rather than pretty.” And by this Mrs. Jedsley knew that Camelia had snubbed Lady Haversham, without trying to—there was the smart; Camelia was making no effort at all to be unpleasant, to impose herself, but, unmistakably, she only thought of the good people about her home as cows in the landscape.

“I suppose she finds us all very provincial,” said Mrs. Jedsley, not averse to planting the shaft, for she had felt Lady Haversham’s graciousness to be rather rasping at times.

CHAPTER II

ON the sunny autumn day with which this story opens, Miss Paton was in the morning room at Enthorpe Lodge, waiting for some one—a some one who to her was not a nobody; and though her attitude hardly denoted much anxiety, her mind was alert and very conscious of a pleasing and yet exasperating suspense. Her friend Mrs. Fox-Darriel was with her. Miss Paton leaned against the mantelpiece as she talked, her eyes often swerving to the clock, but calmly, with no perceptible impatience, or passing in a quiet glance over her hand, the falling folds of her white dress, her friend’s face and figure—figure and face equally artificial, and perhaps affording to Miss Paton’s mind a pleasing contrast to her own distinctive elegance.

There is in Florence a plaque by one of the della Robbia; a long throated girl’s head leans from it, serenely looking down upon the world; a delicate head, with a clear brow, a pure cheek, a mouth of sad enchanting loveliness; Camelia’s head was like it; saint-like in contour, but with an added air, an air of merry irresponsibility. The outward corners of her eyes smiled into a long upward curve of shadow, her brows above them made a wing-like line, wings hovering extended, and a little raised. The upward tilt pervaded the corners of her mouth, a sad mouth, yet even in repose it seemed just about to smile, and its smile sliding to a laugh. The very moulding of her cheek and chin showed a tender gaiety. As for coloring it might have been the coloring of a pensive Madonna, so white was her skin, so palely gold her smooth thick hair. She was slender too, with the long narrow hands and feet of an Artemis, and on seeing her one thought of a maiden-goddess, of a St. Cecilia, and, without surprise over the incongruity, of an intimately modern young taster of life, whose look of pagan joyousness took neither herself nor other people seriously, said “que voulez-vous,” to all blame, and gently mocked puritanical earnestness.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel was plunged into the depths of an easy-chair, a type without hints and whispers to baffle and fascinate. She was thoroughly conventional and not in the least perplexing. Her elaborate head, a masterpiece of wave and coil and curl, rested against the high-chair back, its lustre a trifle suspicious where the light caught too gold a bronze on the sharp ripples.

She was considered a beauty, and her steely, regular face looked at one from every stationer’s shop in London. Miss Paton’s photographs were to be procured at no stationer’s, one among the many differences that distinguished her from her friend.

On Camelia’s “coming-out” in all the dryad-like freshness of her one and twenty years, Mrs. Fox-Darriel, smartest of the “smart,” kindly determined to “form” and “launch” her. She was very winning, and Camelia seemed very willing. But Mrs. Fox-Darriel soon recognized that she was being led—not leading, soon recognized that Camelia would never follow. The first defeat was at the corsetière’s visible symbol of the “forming” process. Under Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eye, Miss Paton’s nymph-like slimness was measured for stays of all sorts and descriptions; Camelia, when the stays were done, surveyed her figure therein confined, with reflective rather than submissive silence.

The week after she went to Paris, and when she returned it was with a stayless wardrobe. Mrs. Fox-Darriel was fairly quelled as Camelia swept before her in these masterpieces of the Rue de la Paix.

“They are not æsthetic,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel—“I own that—not a greenery-yallery whiff about them; nor too self-conscious; but my dear, why? Don’t you like my figure?”

Camelia turned candid eyes upon the accurate waist, the rigid curves and right angles. “I can’t say I do, Frances,” she owned, wherewith Mrs. Fox-Darriel winced a little. “I don’t think it looks alive, you know,” said Miss Paton. “Of course one must know how to dress one’s nonconformity. I think I have succeeded.” And Camelia went to court looking like a glorified Romney, with hardly a whalebone about her. Their future relationship was forecast by this declaration of independence. The stayless protégée conferred, did not receive lustre.

Inevitably Mrs. Fox-Darriel found herself revolving about the young beauty—a satellite among the other satellites, and more than Camelia herself was Mrs. Fox-Darriel impressed by Camelia’s effectiveness.

On this morning from the depth of her laziness she observed her young friend’s glances at the clock with some wondering curiosity; it was difficult to imagine a cause for the stirring of Camelia’s contemplative quiescence under country influences, but Mrs. Fox-Darriel was quick to see the faintest ripple of change, and to her well-sharpened acuteness the ripple this morning was perceptible.

“No new guests coming to-day?” she had asked, receiving a placid negative. “And what are you going to do?” she pursued, patting the regular outline of her fringe.

“I thought of a ride with Mr. Merriman and Sir Harry. Do you care to come?”

“No, no, I have too much of Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman as it is.”

“It is dull down here, Frances. Perhaps you had best be off to Homburg. I am bent on recuperative vegetating, you know.”

“Whom are you waiting for?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked, coming to the point with a circumspection rendered rather ridiculous by the frank promptness of Miss Paton’s answer.

“I’m waiting for Mr. Perior, Frances,” and she laughed a little, glancing at her friend with a rapid touch of ridicule, “and he is half-an-hour late; and I want to see him very badly.”

“Mr. Perior?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s vagueness was not affected. “One of the vegetables, my dear? Has not the curiosity of the neighborhood exhausted itself?”

“Ah—this vegetable isn’t curious, I fear, not a shoot shows at least. If he is curious he will pretend not to be, and pretend very successfully.”

“That is subtle for a vegetable. Perior, the name is familiar. Who is this evasive person?”

Miss Paton’s serene eyes looked over her friend’s head at the strip of blue and green outside framed by the long window. She was asking herself with an inward smile for her own perversity, whether she had not come down into the country for the purpose of seeing the “evasive person.” She would not mind owning to it in the least. Pickles after sweets; she anticipated the tart taste of disapproval pleasantly.

“Who is he?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel repeated.

“He is my oldest friend; he doesn’t admire me in the least—so I am very fond of him. I christened him ‘Alceste,’ and he retaliated with ‘Célimène.’ He is forty odd; a bachelor; he lives in a square stone house, and taught me very nearly everything I know. My Greek is almost as good as my skirt dancing.”

“The square-stone gentleman didn’t teach you skirt-dancing, I suppose. I begin to place him. The editor; the family friend; the misanthrope.”

“Yes, my ‘Alceste.’ He has reason for misanthropy. His life has been a succession of disappointments. I am one of them, I fear.”

“Dear me, Camelia!” Mrs. Fox-Darriel sat upright, “have you ever dallied with this provincial Diogenes?”

Miss Paton smiled over the supposition. “His disappointments are moral, not amorous. Why do I tell you this, I wonder?”

“To show me that you don’t care for him perhaps,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, who to tell the truth, was rather alarmed. Since she had resigned herself to a planetary, a reflected brilliancy, her star at least must never wane; its orbit must widen. Camelia’s whole manner seemed suddenly suspicious. She was evidently waiting for this person, pleased, evidently, to talk of him, and though Camelia might be trusted for a full appreciation of her future’s possibilities, Mrs. Fox-Darriel was hardly satisfied by the frankness of her “Oh! but I do care for him; he preoccupies me.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel reflected for some moments on the dangers of country-house propinquity and retrospective intimacy before saying pleasantly—

“What does he look like?”

Camelia laughed again, soothing Mrs. Fox-Darriel somewhat by the good-humored glance which seemed to pierce with amusement the anxiety on her behalf.

“His eyes are thunderous; his lips pale with suppressed anger.”

“Dear me! I am really anxious to see this vial of wrath.”

“And since that is his footstep on the gravel, you shall see him immediately,” said Camelia.

A moment after Mr. Perior was announced.

CHAPTER III

MR. PERIOR was a tall man, well built, yet carrying himself with a certain ungainliness. He had an air of eagerness reined back. His face was at once severe and sensitive.

He gave no notice to Mrs. Fox-Darriel, whose head twisted round to observe his entrance, and walking up to Miss Paton he took her hands—she had put out both her hands in welcome—and, looking at her kindly, he said—

“Well, Célimène.”

“Well, Alceste.”

The smile that made of Camelia’s face a changing loveliness seemed to come and go, and come again while she looked at him, as a butterfly’s wings fold and open while it rests upon a flower. She rarely laughed outright, but her face in gravity was unfamiliar; one could hardly imagine it without the shifting charm.

“You might have come before,” she said—her hands in his, “and I expected you.”

“I was away until yesterday.”

“You will come often now.”

“Yes, I will.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eye—a none too friendly eye—travelled meanwhile up and down the “vial of wrath.” Clever, eccentric, he had evidently made an impression upon the not easily impressed Camelia, and his clean-shaved face, and the rough gray hair that gave his head a look of shaggy heaviness, seemed to express both qualities significantly.

“Did you ride over?” Camelia asked. “No? Hot for walking, isn’t it? Frances, my friend Mr. Perior.”

“You live near here, Mr. Perior?” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, glancing at his boots, which were peculiarly solid and very dusty.

“Only five miles away,” he said. Mr. Perior’s very boots partook of their wearer’s expression of uningratiating self-reliance.

“We have heard of you in London too, I believe. You are editor of—what review is it, Camelia?”

“I was the editor of the Friday Review, but I’ve given that up.”

“He quarrelled with everybody!” Camelia put in, “but you can hear him once a week in the leading article—dealing hatchet-blows right and left. They don’t care to keep him at closer quarters.”

Mr. Perior looked at her, smiling but making no repartee.

“And Camelia has been telling me that you are responsible for her Greek.”

“Is Camelia ashamed of her Greek? She needn’t be. She was quite a good scholar.”

“But Greek! For Camelia! Don’t you think it jars? To bind such dusty laurels on that head!”

“Laurels? Camelia can’t boast of the adornment—dusty or otherwise.”

“Oh! leave me a leaf or two. You are disloyal. I am glad of my Greek. When one is so frivolous the contrast is becoming. And every twig of knowledge is useful nowadays in a woman’s motley crown, provided she wears it like a French bonnet.”

Perior observed her laughingly—Mrs. Fox-Darriel had as yet seen no hatchets.

“No danger of your being taken for a blue-stocking, Camelia.”

“No, indeed! I see to that!”

“You little hypocrite,” said Perior.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eyebrows arched into her fringe. She got out of her chair trailingly.

“I will go into the garden. Lady Paton is there, Camelia? I think so. I know that you have reminiscences. I am in the way.”

“You are, rather,” said Perior, when she had gone out. “A very disagreeable face that, Camelia; how do the women manage to look so hard nowadays?”

“Thanks. She is a dear friend.”

“I am sorry for it. I hate to see eyes touched up; it gives me the creeps. I am sorry she is a dear friend.”

“I am afraid I shall often give you cause for sorriness.” Camelia stood by the mantelpiece, smiling most winningly. “Come, now, let us reminisce. I saw you last in London. Why didn’t you stop there longer?”

“I had enough of London to last me for a lifetime when I lived there,” said Perior. “I do go up for a bout of concerts now and then,” he added, and looking away from her he took up a large photograph that stood on the table beside him. “Is this the latest?”

“How do you like it?” she asked, leaning forward to look with him.

“It makes a very saintly little personage of you; but it doesn’t do you justice. Your Whistler portrait—the portrait of a smile—is the best likeness you’ll ever get.”

Camelia looked pleased, and yet a trifle taken aback.

“What a nice Alceste you are this morning!” she said. “Tell me, what are you doing with yourself down here? Growing more and more of the stoic? I expect some day to hear that you have left the Grange and moved into a tub. How do you get on without your pupil?” and Camelia as she stood before him made ever so faint a little dancing step backwards and forwards, expressive of her question’s merriment.

“I have existed—more comfortably perhaps than when I had her.”

“Now tell me, be sincere,” she came close to him, her own gay steadiness of look exemplary in the quality she recommended, “Are you crunchingly disapproving? Ready to bite me? Have you heard dreadful tales of frivolity and worldliness?”

“Not more than are becoming to a pretty young woman with such capacities for enjoyment.”

“You don’t disapprove then?”

“Of what, my dear Camelia?”

“Of my determination to enjoy myself.”

“Why should I? Why shouldn’t you have your try like the rest of us? I am not going to throw cold water on your laudable aspirations.”

Camelia still looked at him steadily, smilingly, and a little mockingly. Their eyes at these close quarters could but show a consciousness of familiarity that made evasions funny. Camelia’s eyes were gray, the sunlit gray of a brook—reflecting broken browns and greens, yeux pailletés, as changing as her smile; and Perior’s eyes, too, were gray, but the fixed, stony gray that is altogether another color, and they contemplated her fluctuations with an apparently unmoved, though smiling calm.

She laughed outright, and then Perior permitted himself a dry little responsive laugh that left his lips unparted.

“What are you up to, Camelia?” he asked.

“We do see through one another, don’t we?” she cried joyfully. “I see you are going to pretend not to mind anything. ‘That will sting her!—take down her conceit! I’ll not flatter her by scoldings!’ Eh! Alceste?”

“You little scamp!” he murmured, while Camelia, sitting down on the sofa, swept her white draperies over her feet and motioned to the place beside her. “You will not—no, you will not take me seriously.”

“If you see through me, Camelia,” said Perior, taking the seat beside her with a certain air of resignation, “you see that I am very sincere in finding your behavior perfectly normal—not in the least surprising. You are merely gay, and happy, and self-centred; and behaving as all girls, who have the chance, behave,” he added, putting his finger under her chin with a paternal pat and a look of gentle ridicule.

“Well done! That was very neat! Do you want me to show signs of discomfiture. I won’t. You know that I am quite individual, and that for years you have thought me a selfish, hard-hearted little scoundrel.”

“Oh no; not so bad as that.”

“What have you thought, then?” she demanded.

“I have thought that, like other girls, you can’t evade that label——”

“Oh, wretch!” Camelia interjected.

“That, like other girls,” Perior repeated with an unkind emphasis, “you are going to try to make a ‘good match.’” His face, for all its attempt at lightness, took on a shade of irrepressible repugnance as he spoke. “The accessories don’t count for much. You may be quite individually naughty, but in your motives I see only a very conventional conformity.”

“That’s bad—bad and crude. The good match is, with me, the accessory; therein lies my difference, and you know it. You know I am not like other girls. You saw it in London. You saw,” Camelia added, wrinkling up her nose in a self-mockery that robbed the coming remark of fatuity, “that I was a personage there.”

“As a noticeably pretty girl is a personage. You really are beating your drum rather deafeningly, Camelia.”

“Yes; I’ll shock you by mere noise. But, Alceste, I am not as conceited as I seem; no, really, I am not,” and with her change of tone her look became humorously grave. “I know very well that the people who make much of me—who think me a personage—are sillies. Still, in a world of sillies, I am a personage. It does come round to that, you see.”

“Yes; I see.”

Camelia leaned back in her end of the little sofa, her arms folded, her head bent in a light scrutiny of her companion’s face. The warm quiet of the summer day pervaded the peaceful room, a room with so many associations for both of them. They had studied, read there together for years; laughed, quarrelled, been the best of friends and the fondest of enemies. Perior, as he looked about it, could call up a long vista of Camelias, all gay, all attaching, all evasive, all culminating and fulfilling themselves with an almost mathematical inevitableness, as was now so apparent to him, in the long, slim “personage” beside him, her eyes, as he knew, studying him, her mind amused with conjectures as to what he really thought of her, she herself quite ready to display the utmost sincerity in the attempt to elicit that thought. Oh no, Camelia would keep up very few pretences with him. Perior, gazing placidly enough at the sunlit green outside the morning-room, knew very well what he thought of her.

“Are you estimating the full extent of my folly,” she asked presently, “tempering your verdict by the consideration of extenuations?”

This was so apt an exposition of his mental process that Perior smiled rather helplessly.

“See,” she said, rising and going to the writing-table, “I’ll help you to leniency; show you some very evident extenuations.” From a large bundle of letters she selected two. “Weigh the extent of my influence, and find it funny, if you like, as I do.”

“I wonder if you quite realize the ludicrous aspect of our conversation,” said Perior, taking a thick sheaf of paper from the first letter.

“Quite—quite. Only you push me to extremes. I must make you own my importance—my individuality.”

“Ah, from Henge,” said Perior, looking at the end of the letter. “He was my fag at Eton, you know; dear old Arthur!”

“Yes, and you quarrelled with him five years ago, about politics.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” said Perior, with a touch of asperity; “he was quite big enough not to misunderstand my opposition. Must I read all this, Camelia? It looks rather dry.”

“Well, I should like you to. He is one of the strongest men in the government, you know.”

“Quite. He is the man for me, despite past differences of opinion. The man for you, too, perhaps,” he added, glancing sharply up at her from the letter; “his devotion is public property, you know.”

“But my reception of his devotion isn’t,” laughed Camelia.

“I am snubbed,” said Perior, returning to the letter, and flushing a little. Camelia noted the flush. Dear old Alceste! Shielding so ineffectually, under his sharp blunt bearing, that quivering sensitiveness.

She put her hand through his arm, sinking down beside him, her eyes over his shoulder following his, while he read her—certificate. Perior quite understood the smooth making of amends.

“Well, what do you say to that?” she asked when he had obediently read to the very end.

“I should say that he was a man very much in love,” said Perior, folding the letter.

“You are subtle if you can trace an amorous influence in that letter.”

“It doesn’t call for subtlety. Samson only abandons himself so completely under amorous circumstances. I hope you are not going to shear the poor fellow.”

“For shame,” said Camelia, while Perior, looking at her reflectively, softly slapped the palm of his hand with Arthur Henge’s letter. “I am his comrade. I help him; I am on his side, if you please, and against the Philistines.”

“Oh, are you? And this? Ah! this is from the leader of the Philistines, Rodrigg. Yes, I heard that Rodrigg was in the toils.” Perior examined the small, compact handwriting without much apparent curiosity.

“That is simply nonsense. There was a time—but he soon saw the hopelessness. He is my friend now; not that I am particularly fond of him—the grain is rather coarse: but he is a good creature, far more honest than he imagines, simple, after a clumsy fashion. He aims at distinguished diplomatic complexity, I may tell you, and, I fancy, comes to me for the necessary polishing. Read his letter.”

Perior had looked at her, still smiling, but more absently, while she spoke.

“Oh! Rodrigg is more cautious,” he said glancing through the great man’s neatly constructed phrases. “You are not with the Philistines; he feels that.”

“Politically no; but I have a good deal of influence with him. You see those reviews he mentions; I went through a lot of heavy French and Italian reading for him—sociology, industrialism—and saw the result in his last speech.”

“Really.”

“Ah, really. Don’t be sarcastic, Alceste, to me. One of those men will probably be Prime Minister some day. You can’t deny that they are eminent men.”

“And therefore you are an eminent woman. Well, the logic isn’t too lame. I’ll conclude, Camelia, that you may do quite a lot of harm in the world.”

“You don’t believe that a woman’s influence in politics can be for good?”

“Not the influence of a woman like you—a—a femme bibelot.”

“Good!” cried Camelia, gently clapping her hands.

“It is as that, you know, that these men court you. An objet d’art for their drawing-rooms.”

“You are mistaken, Alceste.”

“If I am mistaken—if they cherish ideals, they are unlucky devils.”

“No, Alceste, I am well justified in keeping my self-respect intact. It is not for my beaux yeux that I am courted—yes, yes—that wry look isn’t needed! I know in what hideously bad taste I am talking, but one can’t use artistic methods with you. As I say, I have my finger in any number of pies besides the pie political. You should see the respect in which I am held by the writers and painters. And I have good taste; I know that. You can’t deny it, since you helped it to grow. What other woman in London has a collection to equal mine? Dégas—Outamaro—Oh, Alceste, don’t look so funnily! Do you really imagine that I am not conscious of the baldness of my exposition? But what is the good of putting on a wig for you!”

“And all this to convince me——”

“Yes, to convince you.”

“Of what, pray?”

“That I am not a little insignificance to be passed by with indulgence.”

“Should you prefer severity?” and Perior, conscious that she had succeeded in “drawing” him, could not repress “You are an outrageous little egotist, Camelia.”

Camelia, her hands clasped over her knee, contemplated him with more gravity than he had expected.

“No,” she demurred, “selfish, but not egotistic. There is a difference, isn’t there? Egotism is subjective, selfishness objective. I wonder,” she added, “what you do think of me. Not that I care—much! Am I not frank? I must care, since I am shuffling about before you; getting a cuffing for my pains!” She rose suddenly, laughing, not in the least bitterly, and walked to the window.

“Mamma and Mary,” she announced. “Did Frances evade them? They disconcert her. Frances, you know, goes in for knowingness—cleverness—the modern vice. Don’t you hate clever people? Frances doesn’t dare talk epigrams to me; I can’t stand it. You saw a lot of Mamma and Mary last winter, didn’t you? Took Mary out riding. Now, come here, Mr. Perior, and tell me how she looked on horseback.”

Camelia was smiling irrepressibly as he joined her, and they watched the approach of the two ladies across the lawn. Certainly the angular, thick-set form of the younger gave no hint of pleasing possibilities under circumstances so trying as the equestrian.

“I never could wheedle Mary into the saddle. I should like to see her on horseback immensely.” Camelia’s eyes twinkled: “A sort of cowering desperation, wasn’t it?”

“No, she rode rather nicely,” said Perior concisely. There was something rather brutal in Camelia’s comments as she stood there with such rhythmic loveliness of pose and contour.

“I wish Mary did not look so much like a milk pudding,” she went on; “a raisinless milk pudding—so sane, so formless, so uneventful.”

Perior did not smile.

CHAPTER IV

LADY PATON was a thin, graceful woman, her slenderness emphasized, like her daughter’s, by a very small head. Since her husband’s death she had worn black, and even now it seemed to invade her delicate whiteness rather overwhelmingly, rising closely about her throat, falling over her fragile hands, enfolding her with a soft solemnity. Her white hair was smoothed thickly under the transparent cambrics of an exquisite cap, and framed the sweetness of a faded face, in profile like Camelia’s. Camelia’s eyes were her father’s, and her smile; Lady Paton’s eyes were round like a child’s, and her smile half-frightened, half-explanatory. With all the gentlewoman’s mild dignity, her look was timid, as though it besought indulgence for a lifelong sense of insignificance, a look that aroused in Perior his grimmest scorn for a world in which such flower-like moral loveliness is inevitably victimized by garish egotisms. He had known Sir Charles, a charming companion, a good fellow—in the somewhat widely licensed sense the term implies, but not fit to untie his wife’s shoe-strings when it came to a comparison. Camelia now had stepped upon her father’s undeserved pedestal, and Perior, watching the new epoch of incense-burning, had smiled more and more grimly. He was devoted to Lady Paton, and had been so since the days when a raw, sensitive, high-strung youth, fresh from college, her Madonna head had roused in him poetical idealizations, and her husband’s gay indifference a chafing resentment. With years he had grown rather fond of Sir Charles, could make allowances for him, and, too, had no longer idealized Lady Paton; but though he now saw her, sweet but dull, lovely in unselfishness, yet weak in all except a submission noble in its own way, the fragrant charm still stirred him with an almost paternal tenderness, a pity, even a reverence. She was too obtuse to see her own cramped and imprisoned life, but he saw it, and her unconsciousness was part of the pathos. He was very fond of her, and she of him, so that with all his protective partisanship there was, too, a willing filial deference.

This little corner of appreciation and affection was the softest spot in Perior’s character. He took both her hands now and said, looking at her with a whimsical gentleness, “So you are back at last! And glad to be back, too, are you not?”

“Oh, very. And Camelia seems to like it so much,” she smiled round at her daughter; “she was beginning to look quite fagged; already the country has done her good.”

Camelia smiled back with a humoring lightness.

Mary Fairleigh stood quietly behind her aunt. Her expressionless face certainly did suggest a lacteal dulness. The Fairleighs were not responsible for her short nose and clumsily-cut mouth. Impecunious Maurice Fairleigh, third son, had “done for himself” when he married his younger sisters’ nursery governess. Maurice had no money—and not many brains, and poor Miss Hockey had neither brains nor beauty, nor family nor money. Her flaxen hair and vacant blue eyes captured Maurice’s vagrant fancy during a lazy summer. He was very young, that fact was the only excuse possible; but, as the Fairleighs said, there was no accounting for Maurice’s folly. Maurice himself, after a very little time, could no longer account for it. He was a good-natured fellow, and his wonder at himself did not become too painfully apparent to his wife; but the short years of their married life were by no means a success. Maurice was very delicate, and the struggle to make both ends meet was but grudgingly aided by disapproving relatives. Lady Paton, only, was sympathetic, practically sympathetic too; but during the greater part of Maurice’s matrimonial venture she was in India, and, as the other Fairleighs said, Angelica never had the wit to resent anything. Maurice died at Davos-Platz, and Mrs. Fairleigh, when her daughter was sixteen, departed her seemingly very pointless existence. Her last years had been sweetened by Lady Paton’s devoted kindness, and she left Mary to this guardian angel. Since that time Mary had lived at Enthorpe Lodge; a grave, good little girl, solemnly submissive to her cousin, painstaking in dutiful gratitude toward her aunt. Camelia had always found this gratitude irritating, and Mary’s manner—as of one on whom Providence had laid the patiently-borne burden of obscurity and dependence, very vexing. Camelia intended as little as her mother to recognize a difference, and did not realize that her own dominant characteristics necessitated Mary’s non-resistance.

She laughed at Mary’s gravity, tried to tease her out of her stolid acceptance of the rôle of poor relation, but, inevitably, she came to treat Mary with the tolerant carelessness she seemed only to expect. As for Lady Paton, she never surmised about Mary, nor analyzed her. Lady Paton accepted people and things as they appeared, and without conjecture. Mary was a dear, good girl. It was indeed impossible that her uninteresting virtues should arouse enthusiasm, and her aunt’s appreciation from its very fulness was calmly unemotional.

Lady Paton having become in these latter days a sort of decorative adjunct to her daughter—for Camelia used her mother to the very best advantage,—lace caps, sweetness and all,—it was upon Mary that the duller duties fell. Mary managed bills and servants, and household matters; wrote little notes, ran little errands, chose embroidery silks, and sent for the books to Mudie’s,—the tender books with happy matrimonial endings that Lady Paton liked. She read these books aloud, and talked to her aunt—as Camelia never did, never could. Lady Paton listened to her daughter, but she and Mary talked about her. Mary’s conversation required no adjustment of amazed faculties, no quelling of old-fashioned alarms, nor acceptance of a wondering incompetence.

The little prattle of gardening and gowns, and Camelia’s doings went on happily, unless hushed in an absorbed observance of that young heroine herself,—flinging pretty missiles of speech far above the heads of her mother and cousin.

Both dull dears; such was Camelia’s realistic inner comment, but Mary was an earthenware dear, and Mamma translucent porcelain. Camelia, who appreciated and loved all dainty perfection, appreciated and loved her mother, with much the same love that she would have given a slender white vase of priceless ware, displayed on a stand of honor in her knowingly grouped drawing-room. She was a distinctly creditable and decorative Mamma. As for Mary, she was not decorative; a harmless, necessary hot water jug.

Camelia, now, as her mother spoke to Perior, went to her side and gave the muslin that fell over her shoulder a little touch and settling.

“You have had a nice walk round the garden?” she said, smiling, “your cheek is just the pink of a sweet-pea.”

“And how are you, Mary?” Perior asked, turning to Miss Fairleigh. “You might have more color I think.”

“Mary has a headache,” said Lady Paton, the fluttering smile with which she had received her daughter’s commendation fading, “I think she often has them and says nothing.”

“You must play tennis with the Mappuck girls. You need more exercise,” Perior continued. “They are at it vigorously from morning till night.”

“Oh—really,” Mary protested, “it is only Aunt Angelica’s kindness—I am quite well.”

“And no one must dare be otherwise in this house,” Camelia added. “Go and play tennis at once, Mary. I don’t approve of headaches.” Mary smiled a modest, decorous little smile.

“Nor do I,” said Perior, and then as Lady Paton had taken a chair near her work-table, he sat down beside her, while Mary sank from her temporary prominence, and, near the window, took up some sewing. Camelia remained near her, looking out at the smooth green stretches of the lawn, lending half an ear to the talk behind her, but keeping up at the same time a kindly little flow of question and reply with her cousin. How were the flowers getting on? and the hay making? Had she seen that morning her poor village people? The questions were rather perfunctory; and while she spoke Camelia aided the faltering march of a burnished little beetle up the window, and helped him out on to the fragrant branch of syringa that brushed the pane.

“I hear that you are embarked on a season of parties,” said Perior to Lady Paton.

“Yes, Camelia has so many friends. She thought she would like it here if she could keep it gay with people.”

“You will like it too. You were lonely last winter.”

“Ah, Camelia was not here; but I was not lonely, Michael; you were too kind for that; and I had Mary. You don’t think Camelia looks thin, Michael?” She had always called the family friend by his Christian name. Perior had Irish ancestry. “She has been doing so much all spring—all winter too; I can’t understand how a delicate girl can press so many things into her life—and studying with it too; she must keep up with everything.”

“Ahead of everything,” Perior smiled.

“Yes, she is really so intellectual, Michael. You don’t think she looks badly?”

“She is as pretty a little pagan as ever,” said Perior, glancing at Miss Paton.

“A pagan!” Lady Paton looked rather alarmed. “You mean it, Michael? I have been troubled, but Camelia comes to church with me. It is you who are the pagan, Michael,” she added, finding the gentle retort with evident relief.

“Oh, I wasn’t speaking literally. I have no doubt that Camelia is a staunch church-woman,” he smiled to himself. Camelia was a brazen little conformist, when conformity was of service.

“No, not that. I don’t quite know. I have heard her talk of religion, with Mr. Ballenden, who writes those books, you know, scientific, atheistic books, and Camelia seemed quite to overpower him; the illusions of science, the claims of authority.” Lady Paton spoke with some little vagueness. “I did not quite follow it all; but he became very much excited. Controversial religion does not interest me, it confuses me. It is the inner change of heart, Michael,” she added with a mild glance of affection, “the reliance on the higher will that guides us, that has revealed itself to us.”

Perior looked somewhat gloomily on the ground. The thought of Lady Paton’s religion, and Camelia’s deft juggling with negatives, jarred upon him.

“You don’t agree with me, Michael?” Lady Paton asked timidly.

“Of course I do,” he said, looking up at her, “that is the only definition needful. We may interpret differently, from different points of view.”

“You would find, I think, greater peace in mine, Michael. May you come to it in time!”

They were both silent for a moment, and both looked presently at Camelia.

“She is so much admired, and so unspoiled by it. So frank, so unaffected. She is found so clever.”

“So she tells me,” Perior could not repress.

“And so humorous,” Lady Paton added, taking his smile in its kindest sense, “she says the most amusing things.”

“Mr. Perior,” said Camelia, turning rather abruptly, “if Mamma is singing my praises I give you leave to repress her sternly.” She joined them, standing behind Lady Paton’s chair, and, over her head, looking at Perior. “I know how trying such praises are, heard outside the family circle.”

“In which I hope I may include myself. I enjoy Lady Paton’s interpretation.”

“Mamma would not believe the biting intention of that speech. Cuff! cuff! cuff! Il me fait des misères, Mamma!”

Lady Paton’s smile went from one to the other.

“You have always teased Michael, Camelia, and he has always been so patient with you.”

“Every one is patient with me, because I am a good girl. ‘Be good, sweet maid—’ I believe in a moral universe,” and Camelia over her mother’s head wrinkled up her nose roguishly as she made the edifying statement. “Mamma,” she added, “where is my flock this morning? I fancied that you were shepherding some of them. I want to trot them out before Mr. Perior. I want to study his expression as Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman present themselves. Sir Harry the mere superlative of Mr. Merriman’s fatuity. I imagine that by some biological adaptation of function they use their brains for digestive purposes, since I am sure they never think with them.”

Lady Paton took refuge from a painful recognition of the inhospitable nature of these remarks in a vague smile. Lady Paton had a faculty for misunderstanding when either misunderstanding or disapproval was necessary. If Camelia hoped by her brisk personalities to shock her former preceptor she failed signally, for laughing appreciatively he asked, “And for what purpose were these latest sports of evolution imported?”

“Purpose! Could one pin a purpose to such aimless beings? They came because I like to have beautiful things about me, and, in their way, they are beautiful. Then, too, with a plant-like persistency they turn to the sun, and I do not flatter myself in owning that I am their sun. It would have been cruel to deny them the opportunity of basking.”

“The hunting, dancing, yachting species, I suppose.”

“Yes; their lives comprise a few more movements, but very few. It is a mere sort of rhythmic necessity.”

Perior laughed again, and his eyes met hers, as she leaned above her mother’s chair, in quite a twinkling mood.

Mary, near the window, paused in her stitching to look at them both with a seemingly bovine contemplation.

“And who are your other specimens?” asked Perior, less conscious perhaps than was Camelia of the purely dual nature of the conversation. She enjoyed this little display before him, and her enjoyment was emphasized by the presence of two alien listeners, it defined so well the fundamental intellectual sympathy.

Her smile rested on him as she replied, “You saw Mrs. Fox-Darriel.”

“Yes.”

“My only other guest just now is Gwendolen Holt, in appearance a youthful replica of Mrs. Fox-Darriel, but in character very embryotic.”

“A very pretty girl,” said Lady Paton, finding at last her little foothold.

“A spice of ugliness—just a something to jar the insignificant regularity of her face, would make her charming. As it is, her prettiness is a bore. You will stay to lunch, Alceste, and see these people?”

“I can’t say that you have made me anxious to see them.”

“Have you no taste for sociology?”

“You will stay and see us, however, will you not?” said Lady Paton, advancing now in happy security. “I want a long talk with you.”

“Then I stay.”

“His majesty stays!” Camelia murmured.

“How are the tenants getting on?” asked Lady Paton, taking from the table a soft mass of white wool, and beginning to knit. She was one of those women whose hands are always uselessly and prettily busy.

“Mary and I drove past the cottages yesterday—I wish you had come, dear—you would have liked to see them. So pretty they are, among their orchards, with such beautiful gardens full of flowers.”

“Yes, don’t they look well?” said Perior, much pleased. “I am trying to get the people to devote themselves to fruit and flower growing. It pays well.”

“And do the cottages themselves pay?” Camelia inquired mischievously. “I hear that, asking the ridiculous rents you do, you need never expect to make the smallest profit—or even get back the capital expended.”

“Thank Heaven the money-making epoch of my life is over,” said Perior, folding his arms and looking at her rather defiantly.

“But what blasphemy against political economy! Cottages that don’t pay! It’s very immoral, Alceste. It is feminine. You are pauperizing your tenants.”

“I don’t at all disbelieve that a little infusion of femininity into political economy would be a very good thing. Besides, the cottages will pay in the end.”

“The rents are lower than the lowest in the village. Lord Haversham was telling me about it yesterday.”

“Oh, Haversham!” laughed Perior.

“He was very plaintive. Said that times were hard enough for landlords as it was, without your charitable visionaries and your socialistic theories.”

“The two accusations don’t fit; but of the two I prefer the latter.”

“It is a mere egotistic diversion then?”

“Yes, a purely scientific experiment.”

“And your tenants have bath-tubs, I hear. Do they use them with Pears’ soap every morning?”

“I flatter myself that they are fairly clean. That alone is an interesting experiment. Dirt, I firmly believe to be the root of all evil.”

“Ah, we come down to the bed-rock of ethics at last, don’t we? Well, how is the laboratory getting on? Have you found traces of original sin in protoplasm?”

“I think I have spotted perverse tendencies,” Perior smiled.

“What a Calvinist you are!”

“Michael a Calvinist, my dear child!” Lady Paton looked up from her knitting in amazement.

“An illogical Calvinist. Instead of burning sinners he washes them! and I’ve no doubt that to some of them the latter form of purification is as disagreeable as the former. He puts them into model cottages, with Morris wall-papers.”

“I beg your pardon. No Morris wall-papers.”

“Camelia, my dear, how extravagantly you talk,” said Lady Paton, her smile reflecting happily Perior’s good-humor. Michael did not mind the teasing—liked it perhaps; and though she did not understand she smiled. Camelia sank down to a low chair beside her mother’s, and taking her mother’s hand she held it up solemnly, saying, “Mamma, Mr. Perior is a tissue of inconsistencies. He despises humanity; and he works for it like a nigger.”

“You are an impressionist, Camelia. Don’t lay on your primaries so glaringly.”

“Confess that you are a philanthropist, though an unwilling one.”

“I confess nothing,” said Perior, looking across the room at Mary with a smile that seemed to invite her participation in his well-borne baiting.

“Is not your life one long effort to help humanity—not la sainte canaille with you—but, and hence your inconsistency, the gross canaille, the dull, treacherous, diabolical canaille?”

“Not to hurt it, rather; and as one is oneself gross, dull, treacherous, and diabolical, that may well engage one’s energies. There would be less cant and more comfort in the world if we would merely avoid treading upon our neighbor’s corns. Let us cultivate the negative virtues. What do you say, Mary? You have a right to a strong opinion, since I never saw you hurt anybody.”

Mary, thus unexpectedly appealed to, started, grew red, and laughed an embarrassed and apprehensive laugh. Camelia cast a glance upon the long strip of rather foolish embroidery lengthening under her cousin’s fingers.

“My philosophy!” she declared. “People who make a row about things are such bores.”

Lady Paton, still smiling, quite at sea, but conscious of a pleasant atmosphere, bent her eyes upon an intricate turn in the futile garment upon which she was engaged.

“Do you avoid your neighbor’s corns, my young lady?” Perior inquired.

“I never think of such unpleasantnesses,” Camelia replied lightly. “As I haven’t any corns myself, I proceed upon the supposition that other people enjoy my immunity. If they don’t, why, that is their own fault—let them cut them and give up tight boots.”

Perior, looking on the floor, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, laughed again.

“Little pagan!” he said.

“Frank, healthy paganism, an excellent thing. I don’t own to it, mind; but is not the soul in our modern sense a disease of the body?”

“Oh, Camelia!” said Lady Paton, looking up with eyes rounded. Camelia’s smile reassured her somewhat, and she glanced for its confirmation at Perior.

Mary Fairleigh, in her distant seat, carefully drew her silk about the contour of an alarming flower.

“Never mind, Lady Paton, she doesn’t shock me at all,” said Perior.

“I am glad of that, Michael; she will make herself misunderstood. Camelia dear, it is one o’clock. The others must be in the drawing-room. Shall we go there?”

“Willingly, Mamma. I’m very hungry. Did you order a good lunch, Mary?”

“I hope you will like it.” Mary paused in the act of neatly rolling up her work. “Fowls, asparagus——”

“Don’t,” Camelia interposed in mock horror; “the nicest part of a meal is unexpectedness!” She laughed at her cousin; but Mary, securing her work with a pin, murmured solemnly, “I am so sorry.”

“Mary, you are as silly as your own fowls!” cried Camelia; she gave her cousin’s flaxen head a pat, and then, as Lady Paton had taken Perior’s arm and led the way, she drew herself up in a mimicry of their stately progress, and followed them demurely.

CHAPTER V

MICHAEL PERIOR was an unfortunate man; unfortunate in his temperament, which was enthusiastic, sensitive, and idealistic; unfortunate in the circumstances with which that temperament found itself called upon to do battle. To a man who had expected less of life the circumstances might have been more amenable and far more endurable, but Perior had the ill-luck to be born with an unmanageable instinct for the best, with an untamable scorn for the second-best. It is not necessary to go into the details of a life which had not spared these qualities nor improved while disillusionizing him. Two blinding buffets met him at its threshold. His father was ruined in a lawsuit, which by every ethical standard he should have won, and Perior was in consequence jilted by the girl whom he had enshrined in his heart as the perfect star of his existence. At twenty-three he found himself under a starless sky, with a heart stupefied at its own emptiness, and in a world of thieves and murderers—for his father died under the shock of disaster, and Perior did not pick his phrases.

The abject common-sense of his ex-fiancée could be borne with perhaps more philosophy. He accepted the starlessness as in the nature of things, and his own brief belief in stars as typifying the ignorance of youth; but his father’s death—the crushing out of life rather than its departure—was tragedy, and it was with the sense of inevitable and irretrievable tragedy that he began life. He had been thought clever at Oxford, and had considered himself destined for Parliament. With a huge load of debts upon his back, and an unresigned mother to support, all thoughts of the career for which he had fitted himself were out of the question. He turned to its only equivalent, and took up journalism. He was much in earnest; he believed in a right and in a wrong, and was intolerant of expediency. In a world of interested motives he bore himself with unflinching disapproval. He would limit his freedom by no party partiality, and in the laxity of public life his keen individuality made itself felt like a knife cutting through cheese. At the end of years of very bitter struggle he found himself in a position of some eminence, editor of a courteous, caustic review, whose chief characteristics were a stubborn isolation and a telling of truths that made both friends and foes blink. No half-measures, no half-truths. Conformity with the faintest taint upon it was intolerable to him. His idealism had not evaporated in the storm and stress, it had condensed, rather, into a steely resistance to ugly reality. Insincerity, injustice, meanness, hurt him as badly in middle-age as they had at twenty-five, but he now expected them, and by a stoical presage braced himself against disappointment. The stoicism was only a rather brittle crust, hastily improvised by Nature’s kindly adaptation; he was soured, but his heart was still soft; he expected nothing, and yet he was hurt by everything. It was now some time since he had promised himself that Camelia should never hurt him. Camelia had occupied his thoughts for a good many years. The pretty child, with her face of subdued saint-like curves, and her smile of frank unsaintliness, had seemed to claim him from the very first home-coming. By a final irony of fate poor Mrs. Perior died only a few months before the Grange was freed from its last encumbrances. She had not made life easier for her son. She had always refused to believe in the necessity for letting the Grange, had always resented the lodgings in South Kensington, had always considered herself injured, and had not been chary in demonstrations of injury. Perior had looked forward with pride to the time when he should reinstate her in her own home, and her death made a mockery of his own home-coming.

It was in Camelia’s early girlhood that ill-health, overwork, and a violent row with the powers of political darkness, made this home-coming definite. The battered idealist sought rather sulkily a retreat from the intolerable contemplation of a wider world’s misdeeds. Young Camelia, so different from her dully worthy ancestors, so different even from her dashing but not intellectual papa, charmed him as the woods and flowers of spring charm eyes weary with city winter. She was too young to be taken seriously; that was a lifted weight, in the first place. The joyous receptivity of her mind afforded to his scholarly instincts just the foothold he required to excuse to himself an indulgent and thoughtless affection. As friend and adviser of Lady Paton, he drifted easily into a paternal attitude towards the fatherless Camelia; he was over twenty years her senior, and her eagerness for knowledge appealed to him. As she had said, he taught her nearly everything she knew; she rebelled against other methods, and Perior himself would have felt robbed had governess or tutor supplanted him. During those quiet and pleasant years he felt that on a melancholy walk he had picked a handful of primroses—their pale young gold irradiated his solitude. He did not say to himself that Camelia would never disappoint him, nor own that the handful of primroses meant much in his life, but hopefulness seemed to emanate from her, and insensibly he lived in the sunny impression. Her very defects were charming, the mere superfluity of exuberant vitality, and with this conviction he observed her happy, youthful selfishness as one observes a kitten’s antics, and treated her claims for dominion with gentle ridicule. Camelia laughed with him at herself, and this gave them an irresistible sense of companionship; consoling too, since no defect so humorously recognized could be deep; his primroses still kept their dew. But as she grew older, Perior began to realize uncomfortably that Camelia could laugh at the deepest defect, recognize it, analyze it, and stick to it—a deft combination. This faculty for firm sticking despite obstacles gave the paternal Perior food for reflection, and, as he reflected, he felt with a sudden little turn of terror that he was in a fair way to take Camelia seriously after all. His terror struck him as very cowardly, a shrinking from responsibilities—his, of a truth, to a certain extent. That lightly assumed guardianship meant much in her life. Had he failed in some essential? Was she not the product of her training? He owned with a sigh that the note of true authority it had not been his right to emphasize; yet in defending himself from the probable pain of a deep affection, had he not weakened his claim to a moral influence? And had he defended himself? Perior turned from the question. Camelia respected him, he knew that; and yet his very frankness with her—he, too, had laughed at himself for her benefit—had given her a power over him. He was not at all afraid of seeming priggish, but he was shy before certain contingencies; he knew that he should blunder if he preached, and that Camelia would force him to smile at the blunder and to blur the sermon.

At the age of eighteen he caught her more than once managing, manipulating the plastic elements about her with a skill approaching deceit. The very absence of a necessity for deceit alarmed him; she had so few temptations, there was no way of testing her, yet, that once or twice, when circumstances by a little twist or turn opposed her, he had caught her—too dexterous. Perior had not controlled himself, nor taken the advantage he might have seized. He had immediately lost his balance, exaggerated what Camelia regarded as a quite permissible and pretty compromise into a fault worthy of biting denunciation, and in so doing had given her a point of vantage from which she laughed—not even angrily. Perior for many years had thought most goodness negative, and preferred to see it tested before admiring, but he had forgotten to apply his philosophy in this case. He lost his temper, and Camelia kept hers, kept hers to the extent of soothing him by a smiling confession of her misdoing, an affectionate declaration that she was wrong and he quite right—“But don’t be cross, dear Mr. Perior.” What was he to do? She did not care if she were wrong. Perior thought he would be wiser in the future; he would give Camelia no further opportunity for facile confession; but though the first sting of unexpected disappointment was over, many unmerited aches were still reserved to him—all the more painful from the fact that he had never intended to ache for Camelia. Mary Fairleigh had come to the Patons when Camelia was sixteen, and Camelia’s treatment of her cousin was another and more constant cause for growing discontent. Perior could not define the discomfort with which he watched Camelia’s indifferent kindness, or, worse still, an unkindness as unintentional. He assumed by degrees an attitude of compensatory gentleness towards poor Mary; it held, however, no sting for Camelia; she seemed to watch his doing of the things she left undone very complacently. It was by degrees that his dismay took refuge in a manner of unshocked indifference which he hoped would prove salutary. It did seem to irk and perplex her somewhat, and he had the consolation of thinking that many of her perversities might be intentionally engineered for his benefit. Perior, too, had learned to smile, and Camelia was baffled. He would not scold her. After all, he counted for very little, so Camelia assured herself as she entered upon her London life, and he should see that she could be indifferent with far more effectiveness. Perior saw little of her during those years. The little he saw on his rare visits to London confirmed his grim conviction. She was a pretty, clever, foolish, worthless creature; her frankness threw no dust into his eyes. She might own herself a self-seeking worldling, and she did not overshoot the mark. Many were the corns she danced over in her quest of power and happiness. Her sincerity was insincere—it adapted itself too cleverly. Perior had seen her flatter, when only he and she knew that she was flattering; had seen her make her effect by pliancy or by resistance; had watched her smile light for those who could serve her, or stiffen to a sweet blankness for the incompetent. He recognized in her his own scorn for the world without his ideal, which would not permit him to stoop and use it; but, so Perior thought, Camelia knew no ideals; reality did not hurt her—she met it with its own weapons. One did not conquer an immoral world by moral methods; and if one lived in it, not to conquer it would be intolerable. The scorn no doubt excused her to herself, but it hedged her round with a sort of stupidity from which Perior’s quick recognition of moral beauty preserved him. Ethical worth had come to be everything to him. Camelia simply did not see it. He himself had armed her with that scientific impartiality before which he felt himself rather helpless, before which good and bad resolved themselves into very evasive elements. She told him that her science was more logical than his, it had made her charitable to the whole world, herself included, whereas he was hard on the world and hard on himself. His very kindness lacked grace, while her unkindness wore a flower-like color. He was sorry for people, not fond of them—but Camelia was neither fond nor sorry. They were shadows woven into the web of her experience, her business was to make that experience pleasant, to see it beautifully. It was this love of beauty—beauty in the pagan sense—that baffled him in her. She had put appreciation and an exquisite good taste in the place of morality. Life to her was a game, to him a tragic, insistent conundrum. These, at least, were Perior’s reluctant conclusions.

When he walked away from Enthorpe Lodge his mind was to a certain extent already reverting to the daily preoccupations of cottages, perverse protoplasm, and his weekly article for the Friday Review; but also dwelling with the dual peculiarity observable in our meditations, upon the people he had just left, Lady Paton, Mary, Camelia’s guests, and Camelia herself. It seemed really unnecessary to remind himself of that promise he had made himself some time ago; Camelia could not disappoint him; he knew just what to expect from her; she could not hurt him. Yet the promise had been made at a time when she was hurting him very badly, and even now, while he recalled it with some vehemence, he was feeling a most illogical smart.

The country road wound among dusty hedges and through the little village. About half a mile beyond it lay a remnant of the Perior estate, once large, second only in importance to the Haversham’s, now sadly shrunken and dislocated. By degrees, and during years of only meagre competence, he had built upon this pretty bit of land a cluster of cottages, his playthings; to make them unnecessarily delightful was his perverse pleasure.

Perior was by no means a paternal landlord; the lucky occupants of the cottages were never reminded of the propriety of gratitude. Indeed Perior had enraged neighboring landowners by remarking that the cottages were none too good for the rent—a saying big with implications, and perhaps intentionally spiteful. Indeed intentional spite was attributed to many of his actions. It was a great fox-hunting country; and one of the finest coverts, rich in foxes lovingly preserved by Perior’s forefathers, lay on his estate. Now it was currently reported that Perior had had all the foxes shot! A murder would have made him less unpopular. Malicious insanity seemed the only explanation.

He did not scruple to proclaim his blasphemous heresies on the sacred sport. He grew angry, said he abominated it, would do all in his power to stamp it out, and at least would see that no animal should be “tortured” on his property. The foxes had certainly disappeared from Mandelly Woods, and good, honest sportsmen could hardly trust themselves to mention the criminal fanatic’s name. It must be owned that Perior’s love of animals approached the grotesque. He entertained at the Manor a retinue of battered cats and outcast dogs, many garnered from London streets. He could hardly bear to have surplus kittens drowned, and only by the firmness of the housekeeper was the necessary severity accomplished. He was exaggerated, peculiar, unpractical; the kindest said it of him. He had sent two clever village boys to the University, one the son of the village poacher and ne’er-do-weel, a handsome lad with a Burns-like streak of genius, who had distinguished himself at Oxford, and disappointed many pessimistic prophecies by turning out more than creditably. At the present moment the son of one of Perior’s field-laborers came every day to the Grange for a coaching in the humanities. Perior was a fine master, and Camelia was none too well pleased when she heard of her successor. These experiments in sociology aroused only less hostile comment than the black affair of the foxes.

Our misanthropic gentleman paused at an angle of the road to survey his cottages, each set in its own happy acres, stretching flower-beds and young orchards into the sunny country. His tenants all had a pleasant look of successful adaptation. One was a cobbler, and made most of Perior’s boots; a fact rather apparent.

It was evening by the time he reached the tall gates through which the roadway led up to the Grange, a high-standing, unpretentious, gray stone house, rather bleakly situated on its height, but backed by a further rise of wood, and, despite its vineless severity of outline, gravely cheerful in aspect. An immaculately-kept lawn stretched in a gradual slope before it, shaded by two yew trees, and the light grace of beeches. Under the windows of the ground floor were beds of white and purple pansies, and at one side, near the shrubberies, were long rows of irises, also purple and white. From the other side of the house the ground descended very abruptly, giving one the realization of height, and a long view over woods, hills, and valleys to the distant sunset.

The house within carried out consistently the first impression of pleasant bareness. The wainscotted walls were reflected in the gleaming floors. No tenderness of draperies, no futile ornament. In the drawing-room three old portraits of three dead Mrs. Periors looked quietly from the walls; some good porcelain was on shelves where there was no danger of its breaking; the faded brocade of the furniture was covered with white chintz sprigged with green. The library, where the light came serenely through high windows, was lined with books; here and there on the peaceful spaces a good engraving or etching; philosophical bronzes above the shelves. The writing-table was spacious; opposite it was Perior’s piano—he played well. This was the room he lived in. Now, when he entered, an old setter, glossily well-groomed, looked up with an emotional thudding of the tail, and of two cats curled exquisitely in the easy-chair, one only opened placid eyes, while the other, after arching itself in a yawn, advanced towards him with a soundless mew.

Perior was devoted to his cats, and adored his dogs. After stooping to pat these animals, he took up a letter from the table. Arthur Henge’s writing was familiar, though of late years Perior had rarely seen it. The old friendship had borne pretty sharp twinges—had survived even Perior’s ruthless handling of Henge’s pet measure some years ago: Henge had believed ardently in the bill, and thought Perior responsible to a certain extent for its failure. That Henge had not been embittered by this political antagonism had deeply touched Perior. He always remembered the fact with a delightful, glowing comfort. His respect and fondness for Henge were a staff to him. The two men were intrinsically sympathetic, though they had hardly an opinion in common. Arthur Henge was an optimist, and deeply religious, his wide humanism going hand in hand with a fervent churchmanship. He was aided towards a happy view of things by happy circumstances. He was one of the richest men in England, and one of the most powerful; he held a high place in the present Government. No sword of Damocles in the shape of a peerage hung over his career in the Lower House, and at the same time the baronetcy, hoary with an honorable antiquity, had the consequence and standing of many greater but less significant titles. He was young, handsome, and serious. Above all small cynicisms and hardness, his experience of life seemed only to have taught him a wise, fine trust, and, perhaps in consequence of this attitude of mind, it was impossible not to trust him.

This was the man who had fallen in love with Camelia Paton. The fact was town talk, though it was surmised that despite his evident absorption he had not yet given her occasion to accept him. That he was courting her was not yet apparent, but his devotion remained gravely steady. Lady Henge was supposed to be the cause of this adjournment of decisive measures. Lady Henge was even more serious than her son, and her influence over him was paramount.

Now with all her ready qualities Camelia seldom pretended to seriousness. To Perior there was something highly distasteful in the whole matter. That Camelia should be the object of such comment, that her achievement of the “good match” should be canvassed, infuriated him. No blame could attach itself to Arthur’s reticence; if reticence there were it was on the highest grounds. It was the world’s base, materialistic chatter that jarred, its weighing of her charm and loveliness against his wealth and prominence merely. Perior weighed Camelia’s merits against Arthur’s. In his heart of hearts he did not consider Camelia fitted to make a high-minded man happy—and some dim foreboding of this fact no doubt chilled her lover’s resolution. Perior, however, was not logical. He might not approve of Camelia, but that Lady Henge should disapprove nettled him. Arthur no doubt was a fool in loving Camelia, but Perior wished to be alone in that knowledge. As for the world’s gross view of Henge as one of the greatest “catches” in England, of Camelia as lucky if she got him, Perior’s blood boiled when he thought of it,—and that Camelia, with all her reliance on her own attractions, was quite aware of the world’s opinion and was not angered by it.

She, too, thought Henge a great “catch,” no doubt; a great catch even for Camelia Paton.

Perior read the letter now, standing near the window and frowning very gloomily. It was natural that Henge should write to him in this strain of only thinly-veiled confidence.

Henge knew of the long paternal intimacy with Camelia, and relied perhaps too much on a paternal sympathy. Henge and his mother were coming down to Clievesbury to spend some weeks at Enthorpe. He avowed no intention, but the whole note, its very restraint, was big with intention. He seemed, too, to emphasize his mother’s pleasure in coming, and Perior felt in the emphasis a touch of triumph. He hoped to see a great deal of Perior, there was in the concluding passages of the note quite a prophecy of future relationship, nearer than any they had known. But through it all Perior fancied just the hint of an appeal—a quite unconscious appeal, none the less significant for that.

Camelia was to be put on trial before Lady Henge, and to Arthur the process would be painful. The Henges had stately requirements; and although Perior imagined that, were these requirements not satisfied, Arthur had almost determined to overlook them, he felt the keenness of the hope that all would be satisfactory, the support that the hope found in Perior’s intimacy with Camelia.

Lady Henge shared her son’s respect for Perior, and to her Perior’s friendship could interpret many phases in Camelia’s charming character perplexing to the anxious mother’s unaided vision.

“I am glad my mother is to know her better; she has seen only the surface as yet,” wrote Arthur. Arthur’s love was a surety not quite trustworthy, but the lifelong friendship of a man like Perior must convince grave Lady Henge of many depths. Perior felt that his rigidity was to be made use of. His well-known earnestness was to vouch for Camelia’s. His brow was very black as he finished the letter. He was nearly angry with Arthur.

CHAPTER VI

“Mrs. Jedsley is in the drawing-room,” Camelia announced, “so I ran away. I am really afraid of her.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel laughed slightly; she put down the book with which she was solacing a lazy afternoon on the sofa, and, looking at Camelia’s cloth dress and sailor hat, asked her if she had been out again.

“Yes, just back. I only stayed in the drawing-room long enough to show Mrs. Jedsley that she scared me. It’s those eyebrows, you know, that lack of eyebrow rather, emphasized by an angry redness in the place where they should be. No, I cannot face her.”

“She is rather épatante. I suppose you were walking with your brace of suitors.”

“No, I don’t know where they are. I was walking by myself. I think I must have walked eight miles,” Camelia added, stretching out her feet to look at her dusty shoes.

CONTENTS

The Confounding ofCamelia