"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 pailletes_, 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 a.s.sociations 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 f.a.g 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 coa.r.s.e: 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."