"That must be very comforting to you, personally, but is Mary's?"

She looked at him candidly.

"You foolish, fussy old person! Mary is solidly, stolidly well; who could a.s.sociate the lilies and languors of illness with Mary? You are trying to poetize Mary's prose to worry me, but you can't rhyme it, I a.s.sure you."

"I don't know about that!" Perior was again, for a moment, silent. "I don't think Mary has a very gay time of it," he said, speaking with a half nervous resolution, as though he had often wished to speak and kept back the words. "She doesn't go out much with you in London, does she?"

Camelia did not like his tone, but she replied with lightness, "Not much, Mary is a home-keeping body. She is not exactly fitted for worldly gaieties, and she understands it perfectly."

"How trying for Mary"--the nervousness was quite gone now--once he had broached a delicate subject Perior could handle it with little compunction.

"Mary is very happy, if you please. She adores me, and is devoted to Mamma. Mamma is certainly nicer to her than I am--that is an affair of temperament, for Mary does bore me tremendously--I think she knows that she does, but she adores me, since I don't deserve it--the way of the world--a horrid place--I don't deny it."

"Happy Mary! allowed to adore your effulgence--but at a distance--since she bores you, and knows she does!" And over his collar Camelia could observe that Perior's neck had grown red. She joined him at the window, and said, looking up at his face--

"Why do you force me to such speeches? I am not responsible for the inequalities of nature--though I recognize them so cold-bloodedly. The contrast does not hurt her, for she is a good, contented little soul, and then--for nature does give compensations--she has no keen susceptibilities;" she locked her hands on his shoulder, and smiling at him, "Come, you know that I am fond of Mary. You should have seen how prettily I arranged her hair to-day--it would have softened your heart towards me. Come, we are not going to quarrel again."

Perior's eye turned on her, certainly softened in expression, "By no means, I hope," and he smiled a little, "especially as I must be off--since I have missed my ride."

Camelia's face at this unlooked-for consummation took on an expression of sincerest dismay.

"Going! you will leave me all alone! They have all gone!"

Perior laughed, looking at her now with the same touch of irrepressible pleasure she could usually count on arousing.

"Poor little baby! and it has a headache, too?"

"Yes, it has; please stay with it."

She was quite sure that he wanted to stay; indeed, Camelia's certainty of Perior's fundamental fondness for her was an article of faith untouched by doubt.

"Very well, you want to show off your dress, I see." Perior's smile in its humoring coyness was charming; Camelia felt that she quite adored him when he so smiled at her. "A very pretty dress it is; I have been taking it in."

"And we will have tea in the garden," said Camelia, in tones of happy satisfaction, "and you will see how good I am--when you are good to me.

And I'll tell you all about the people who are coming--for I must have more of them--droves of them; in batches, artistic batches, 'smart'

batches, intellectual batches, political batches. You and I will look at them."

"Thanks; you don't limit me to a batch then?"

They were still standing near the window, and she kept a hand on his shoulder, and looked at him now with the gravity that made her face so strange.

"No, dear Alceste, you know I don't."

He returned her look, smiling with a little constraint.

"We must be more together," Camelia went on, "we must take up our studying. No, Mr. Rodrigg, I can't walk with you this morning, I am reading the Agamemnon with Mr. Perior." Camelia's eyes, mouth, the delicately long lines of her cheek, quivered with the half malicious, half tender smile that tilted every curve and every shadow from calm to roguery.

"How Mr. Rodrigg will hate me, to be sure," said Perior, who at that moment felt that he would like to kiss his bunch of primroses--an illusion of dewiness possessed him.

"And now for tea under the copper beech. And I will read to you. What shall I read? It will be quite like old days!"

"When we were young together," said Perior, smiling at her so fondly that she felt deliciously rea.s.sured as to everything.

The G.o.ds always helped a young lady who helped herself. Such had been Camelia's experience in life, even when she helped herself to other people's belongings.

At all events, with hardly a qualm of conscience, Camelia enjoyed the afternoon she had wrested from poor Mary.

The tea-table was duly installed under the wide shade of the copper-beech. Perior carried out an armful of books and reviews from which to choose. They drank their tea and ate their bread and b.u.t.ter, and Camelia read aloud from the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. And it cannot be denied that Perior, sitting in the cool green shadow, listening to the perfect French accent, looking at the white figure sprinkled with the pale shifting gold that filtered through the leaves above them, enjoyed himself a great deal more than he would have done with Mary.

Truly at times the way of transgressors is very easy.

CHAPTER XIII

But retribution followed Camelia's manoeuvre. On the advent of Mr.

Rodrigg, very red and hot after a long country walk with Lord Haversham (who also had axes to grind), Perior said good-bye, remounted his horse, and rode off. It was six o'clock, a warmly rosy evening. The hot gold was gone, but in the sunset influences there was a certain oppression.

Perior yawned and rode slowly along the strip of turf that bordered the dusty road. But though he felt physically very indolent, his mind was delightfully alert, weaving busily, with a sense of freedom and joyousness, a web of hopeful imaginings, swinging the illusive, intangible filaments from point to point of the afternoon's experience.

Nothing, in his estimation, could raise Camelia much above the level to which that cl.u.s.ter of frivolous lies had sunk her; his very heart ached when he thought of them--especially of the lie to Arthur; but the tears of last week, though his reason denied their influence, had in reality touched, surprised, and softened him, and made him hopeful. And now came the smiles, the sincerity, the sweetness of this afternoon; he could not distrust them. The idealist impulse--the master mood of his nature, though reined in so often by bitter experience, began to evolve an ell from the supposit.i.tious inch of excellence. The possibility of moral worth; the implication of some real rect.i.tude of soul, that her truth to him seemed to justify; the formative power of a real affection for Arthur: so Perior wove his spider web, working as the spider does, from the merest foothold, and bridging chasms with a shining thread of trust.

Yet alas! for Camelia--that afternoon had certainly been a bungling piece of mismanagement, a covetous s.n.a.t.c.hing at the present, a foolhardy forgetting of the future.

Perior met Mary returning in the dog-cart. He had not forgotten Mary, nor his suspicions of self-sacrifice. He turned his horse's head again and proposed to ride back with her. Yes, he had plenty of time; and in a.s.suring her of it he smiled his kindest smile, and the pony and the horse fell into a walk. The hours under the copper-beech, with Camelia's white dress, and Camelia's shining head to look at, had seemed delightfully cool and pleasant, yet the autumn afternoon had been a hot one, and Mary's face was flushed, tired, and to her own knowledge, even a little tremulous.

"Did you have a nice afternoon?" he asked her.

"Oh, very, thanks," the habit of submissive grat.i.tude was too strong to be mastered at the first moment, though she added, "Camelia told you how _sorry_ I was?"

"Yes, but I am still wounded. I did not think you would have deserted me for the babies of Copley."

It was rather useless to attempt humor with Mary, for even he could interpret as alarmed and distressed the look of her face as it turned to him.

"Oh! but I did not want to go!" she exclaimed; "you know that! Camelia wished it--she had a headache, and said Mrs. Grier expected her, so, though I was quite ready for our ride, looking forward to it so much, I had to go; but I didn't want to--indeed I was dreadfully disappointed--"

And then suddenly the sense of injury, of resentment, of dismay at herself that she should wish to display that resentment--should wish to retaliate for humiliations too deep for display, getting altogether the better of her, two large tears--and Mary had been swallowing tears all the afternoon--rolled suddenly down her cheeks and splashed upon her dusty gloves.

"Why, Mary! _Mary!_" said Perior, aghast.

She searched for her handkerchief in hasty confusion. "How silly I am! I can't help it; it has been so hot, I am so tired."

"My poor child!" But Perior was more stricken than the sympathy of his tone made manifest. His pity sprang comprehendingly to Mary, but a deeper emotion underlay it. It was as if Mary had thrust that dusty dog-skin glove right through his beautiful, fragile spider web, and as he was dashed from his illusion his thoughts gathered themselves in quick bitter avengefulness.

"You were ready? dressed, you say?" he was already sure of Camelia's falseness, but he wished to define it, to see just how much she had lied, to see just how far went her heartlessness.

"Yes," Mary could not restrain the plaintive note, though she was drying her eyes in a sort of terror over her weakness.

"And Camelia forced you to go?"

"Oh, don't think that!" Mary had thought it, but the words spoken by him shocked her. "She did not know how much I had set my heart on the ride, and it would have been a pity had Mrs. Grier been disappointed. That is what Camelia thought of--" and Mary quite believed Camelia as far as that went; but the cruel manner of discharging her duty! the deep injury of the forces brought to bear! The memory of them rose irrepressibly, poignantly.