Sir Arthur"s long breath escaped with the relief of recovered joy.
"Don"t be insincere;--dearest," he added, looking at her; and seeing the surprise with which she received the grave, impulsive word, he went on quickly, yet gently.
"You know you often want to please people--to make every one like you;--even I have fancied it--forgive me, won"t you, at the price of a little falseness. When one feels as I do, the least flaw cuts into one like a knife." With Camelia"s triumph there now mingled a bitter distaste; she could hardly bring herself to look into his honest, adoring eyes; the quickness of her breath and wavering of her glance were, again, quite spontaneous, and that she knew them to be effective, deepened her humiliation.
"To see you laugh at mother--and then praise her--I thought it; and I can"t tell you how it pained me. You forgive me?"
Her self-disgust now seemed to lend her a certain sense of atoning self-respect. "How good you are!" she said, looking at him very gravely, and this recognition of his goodness restoring still more fully that sick self-respect, she was able to smile at him, to think that she must not exaggerate the little _contretemps_, and to ask herself whether she might not fall in love with Sir Arthur--simply and naturally. Dear man!
The words were almost on her lips--her eyes at least caressed him with the implication.
He looked embarra.s.sed, but very happy. "No--no! Please don"t say that!
How divinely kind you are. I have been insufferable. It is n.o.ble of you to understand--. Can"t we get away from all these people--if only for a moment. Let us go into the garden--it is very warm." She would rather not have gone into the garden, but she could not refuse him, she felt that to some extent she would like to justify his faith in her, and to shake from her that snake-like imputation of baseness. She glanced at Perior as she went out; he was talking most affably with Lady Henge, and did not look at her. His lack of faith stung perhaps more than Sir Arthur"s faith. It was unmerited too, more unmerited than Sir Arthur"s trust, so she told herself, stepping down from the terrace on to the gravel-path, and the sense of unmerited scorn sharpened that wish to justify herself--as far as might be--to the kinder judge.
"No, Sir Arthur, you are good," she went on, pausing before him, her hands clasped behind her after a little-girl fashion habitual with her; "and I am horrid--it"s quite true--but not as horrid as you thought me.
I do like to please people. I am often pettily, impulsively false; it"s quite, quite true. I do like your mother"s piece, but probably not as much as I implied to her by my praise--not as much as greater things: and Mr. Perior"s silence made me angry too; but I probably was a little insincere, and that every one is the same is no excuse for me. I don"t want to be like every one, and you don"t want me to be, do you? But if I had _not_ liked it, you would not have wished me to express myself with the bludgeon-like directness of our rugged friend, would you?" Camelia asked the question with real anxiety, conscious though she was that she had thought the composition quite as ridiculous as Perior had declared it. After all, his ugly sincerity justified her kindly fibbing; and as for the laughing, she was sorry she had laughed, since Sir Arthur had seen her. His erectness of moral vision would so distort that unintentional meanness that she could not be asked to confess it; but her partial confession, all the same, left her confused by the stinging of small, uncomfortable compunctions. These, however, did not show themselves in her eyes, nor in the pure lines of her face. Her silvered garments and exquisite whiteness gave her in the moonlight an angelic look that might well humble modest manhood before her. Sir Arthur had never felt himself so near to the girl he loved, nor his love so well justified.
"No, I don"t think it"s necessary to give a person the truth like a box on the ear," he said, and he would have taken her hands, but Camelia again put them behind her back, and stood smiling at him.
"Poor old Perior," he added, and they walked slowly for a little way down the path. "You can understand it, though, can"t you? He thought you were fibbing, and that made him give mother the ruthless _coup de dent_."
This was very true, and so Camelia knew, knowing, too, that she _had_ been fibbing. "But that didn"t justify the _coup de dent_," she declared, "and why should he think I was fibbing?" The bit of audacity was so inevitable that she hardly felt a qualm over its enunciation. On Perior"s loyalty she relied as she relied on the ground beneath her feet.
"Well, he knows that you are clever, and that your taste has not been distorted--as mother"s has--by fancied talent." Sir Arthur was all candid confidence.
"He was _very_ nasty," said Camelia, "and I shall tell him so. And now that I have made my little confession, and that you have absolved me--for I am absolved, am I not?--shall we go in?" Camelia drew back from the proposal she saw looming in the moonlight; there was time, ample time, for that, now that she was sure of him, quite sure. A warm little thrill of pleasure went over her at the thought that it was she who was not ready, was not sure, though she had never liked him more.
"Must we go in?" Sir Arthur looked up at her as she stood on the step above him. He was very handsome Camelia thought with some complacency.
"I think we must," she said prettily, adding, "I promised to do my skirt dancing for them, you know. You must tell me it is delightful when I have done, even if you laugh at me while I am dancing." Sir Arthur had held out his hand, and she put hers in it.
"You absolve me, don"t you?" he said. "You forgive me? You are not angry?"
"Angry? Have I seemed angry?"
"You had the right to be."
"Not with you," said Camelia, and at that he kissed her hand, and they went back into the drawing-room.
Camelia as she undressed that night decided that Perior was responsible for her still smarting irritation. It was too tiresome. Of course, apparently she had not behaved nicely; but, in neatly a.n.a.lyzing the whole affair, she could find herself guilty of nothing worse than a little humorous gaiety--that took an old friend"s sympathy for granted--(could one not think things one did not say? she had only thought aloud--to him), and a little kindly hypocrisy practised every day by models of uprightness. Perior"s rudeness set a standard by which social conventions were guilty of black falseness. It was too bad of him, and her anger put him aside with a sense of relief. The only really serious part was the stinging sequel. How closely Arthur Henge must have watched her to catch that irrepressible glint of the eye. He had caught it, though, and she had lied about it--well, yes--lied, deliberately lied to a man she respected.
Of course it made her feel uncomfortable--of course it did. "I am not the vain puppet _he_ thinks me," she said, leaning on her dressing-table, and looking gravely at her illuminated reflection--the _he_ being Perior--"the very fact of my worrying over such a trifling incident proves that I am not. It is _his_ fault that I should feel so."
She paused for a further turn of silent meditation before adding, "My only fault was in having trusted to his sense of fun, in having been amused. The rest followed inevitably. I could not have told Arthur Henge that I found his mother ridiculous, now _could_ I, you foolish creature?" and irrepressibly Camelia smiled at her lenient accuser in the gla.s.s. At this point of the colloquy a gentle tap at the door ushered in Mary. Mary, in a dressing-gown of just the wrong shade, was not an interesting object, and Camelia glanced over her reflection in the mirror without turning. She continued her own train of thought, hardly listening to Mary, though vaguely conscious that the awkward inquiries after her comfort were rather pointless.
"I thought you might want something, Camelia. I thought you looked rather pale," said Mary, drawing near with some timidity.
"No, thanks. I should have asked Grant, you know," replied Camelia, her elbows still on the dressing-table. She absently watched Mary lift her discarded gown from the floor, fold it, and lay it neatly over the back of a chair. "Don"t mind about picking up those things, Mary," she added, yawning a little, and wishing rather that Mary would go. "Grant can do all that."
"I like to tidy up after you." Mary"s smile was slightly forced. "See, Camelia, you need me to look after you--your pearl necklace under a chair."
"It must have caught in my bodice," said Camelia, glancing at the necklace as Mary laid it on the dressing-table. "That certainly was stupid of me. Thanks, dear." Mary still lingered.
"You don"t want anything, you are sure? You feel quite well--and--happy, Camelia?" The question was so odd that Camelia turned her head and looked up, surprised, at Mary"s rather embarra.s.sed countenance.
"Happy?" she repeated.
"Yes; I fancied you might have something to tell me." This initiative was certainly amazing in the reserved Mary, and Camelia stared.
"Something to tell you?" Then her deliberate departure for the moonlit _tete-a-tete_ with Sir Arthur coming luminously to her mind, she began to laugh. "Why, Mary, did you come in a congratulatory mood?"
Mary"s badly mastered nervousness melted somewhat. "Oh, Camelia--_may_ I?" her face lighted to an almost charming eagerness--a charm that our aesthetic heroine was quick to recognize. "_May_ I?"
"May you? No, you little goose," Camelia said good-humoredly. "Upon my word, Mary, you should have had your portrait painted at that moment; you never looked so--significant. Are you so anxious to get rid of me then?" The charming look had crumbled into inextricable confusion.
"Oh, Camelia, how can you?--how could you think----?"
"Now, Mary, imaginative efforts are bad for you; don"t indulge them."
"I hoped--I only wanted----"
"Yes, of course, you want me to be happy; and very nice it is of you too. Be patient, Mary; you shall congratulate me some day. I haven"t decided _when_ that shall be. I haven"t really quite decided _how_ I shall be happy--there are so many ways--the choice of a superlative is perplexing. When I choose you need not come to me, I promise you."
Camelia rose, stretching her arms above her head, and smiling very kindly at her cousin.
Her own words made her feel comfortable. Still smiling, she put her arm around Mary"s neck and kissed her. "I shall tell you _immediately_. Now run to bed, dear, for _you_ look pale." When Mary was gone, Camelia finished undressing, and got into bed in a frame of mind much rea.s.sured as to her own intrinsic merit.
CHAPTER IX
The little moonlit episode had very thoroughly mended the rift within the lute. Camelia"s seeming frankness of confessional confidence more than atoned for every doubting qualm. Sir Arthur evidently put doubts and distresses behind him. He allowed himself to be wholly in love. He wondered resentfully at himself for the mixed impulses he had known, since all were now merged in one fixed determination.
The country influences of green trees and summer sky seemed to have breathed a heretofore unrealized gentleness into his fair one. Her playful sallies, her little audacities, delighted him now unreservedly, for under the tantalizing shifting and shimmering of surface moods, the translucent depths of a loyal and lovely nature, were at last fully revealed to him.
Camelia felt the resultant ardor hovering during all their constant companionship, but she evaded it. The conquest had been so easy, was so complete, that fitness seemed to require a compensatory dallying. The atmosphere of adoration, submissive in its certainty of ultimate success, felt as flatteringly around her as the warm sweetness of a summer breeze. Conquest was delightful, so was dallying, so was her own indecision; that was the most delightful part of all. She felt, too, in the loving warmth that encompa.s.sed her, a consolation, a refuge from cold and rugged depreciation.
Perior had not reappeared since the musical _melee_, and, while enjoying the sunny harbor where she rocked so peacefully, Camelia was conscious that thoughts about that rough, that unsympathetic sea outside preoccupied her amidst the kinder waters. Her gaiety was therefore a little forced, absent-minded, in a sense a mask; her gentler mood was the result of inner cogitations, so involved at times as to give to her manner a dreamy sweetness. Her moral snubbing, though she rejected it as undeserved, subdued her.
Lady Henge"s vanity was of no petty or immovable order. Far from antagonizing, Perior"s judgment had aroused in her an anxious self-doubt, an anxious respect for her candid critic. Despite Camelia"s sympathy--for Camelia stuck to her colors, entrenched herself behind a staunch fidelity to a false position, listened with absorption to frequent renderings of the "Thala.s.sa," thoughtfully discussed its iconoclastic merits, the high value of its full flavored modernity, and felt a certain ethical elevation from these painful sacrifices to the only constancy permitted her--despite this steady sympathy, Lady Henge perversely longed for a further expression of unsympathetic opinion from the ruthless Perior. And one morning she told Camelia that she had written to him, had asked him to fulfil his promise, to bring some music of his choosing that might, with his aid, be useful to her.
"I had hoped to see him every day," she owned, and Camelia realized the power of a negative att.i.tude--how flat beside it, how feeble, was her exaggeratedly affirmative one. All her pretty conciliations were as nothing to Lady Henge beside the stinging interest of Perior"s dislike.
"I think he may help me about so many things, I so often feel a helplessness in self-expression; the idea is there--but the form! the form! ah, my dear, art, after all, is form." (This piece of information was certainly bitter to our martyrized heroine.)
"As you said, his severity may, to a certain extent, be conservatism, academic narrowness, but I have always heard of him as widely appreciative."
Camelia could answer for the width of appreciation that her resentment had falsified on the unlucky night of the first performance; she remembered now, with a little flush, that her saddling of him with tastes not his own must have seemed to him the culmination of spiteful pettiness. And then he had not rejoined--had not defended himself, even against that intimation of academics opposed to his dearly loved Schumann. Camelia could soothe herself with an "I don"t care! He deserved it. He was horrid;" but all the same the memory brought a hotness to her cheeks. She felt very angry, too, with Lady Henge, and, while smiling pleasantly, found some satisfaction in various cynical mental comments on the weighty intricacy of her cap, and the vast stupidity of her self-absorption.