"How considerate of Camelia!" Perior's anger made any careful a.n.a.lysis of Camelia's motives impossible. She had shirked an irksome duty, and kept him to entertain her laziness. The latter fact did not in the least mollify him; it was of a piece with her grasping selfishness, Mary's pleasure not weighing a feather's weight against the momentary wish. She had gone to "hurry" Mary, and on her return from the cousinly little errand, had given him the impression of Mary's uninfluenced change of plan--even implying curates as its cause! Liar! The word almost choked him as he kept it down, for he did not want Mary to know her a liar.

"She went to your room to ask you to go?" he pursued, choosing a safe question.

But his persistence aroused in Mary a certain dim suspicion.

"Yes," she said; "she was surprised to see me dressed. She did not know I was going with you." The very force of her inner resentment--a hating resentment, as she felt with terror--made her grasp at an at least outward loyalty. But hardly had she spoken the words when the suspicion, definite, tingling with probability, leaped upon her. She looked quickly at Perior. He was white to the lips. This revelation fairly silenced him. He put his horse to the trot, and the dog-cart, hastening its pace, kept beside him.

Mary could hardly have spoken. Her mind was in a whirl of broken, distracted thoughts, that only grew to coherence when the wave-like conviction of Camelia's mean robbery broke over her.

Perior's scorning rage meanwhile hurried forward to wreak itself on Camelia; he was conscious only of its scorching.

They reached the park gates in silence; then Mary was able to say, "Are you coming in?"

"Yes, I will come in for a moment."

"You--you won't say anything about--my silliness?"

"My dear Mary, I must speak to Camelia; but you have accused her of nothing, nor shall she think you have. I will come for you to-morrow,"

he added as he helped her down from the dog-cart at the door; "we will have our ride. Don't be persuaded out of it either. Let other people do their own charities. It won't harm them."

Lady Paton was in the hall, a cool, gentle embodiment of the evening.

"Mary brought you back?--You are going to dine, Michael?" she asked.

"No; I only want to see Camelia for a moment."

"I have just come from her. She is with Mr. Rodrigg, talking politics,"

and Lady Paton's smile implied the softest pride in Camelia's prowess in that pursuit. "She says you have had an old-time afternoon, reading together. You must take up your reading again, Michael--for the time that she is left to us."

Mary, going slowly up the stairs, bent her head as she heard, "Yes: he had stayed with Camelia all the afternoon." He did not care to ride with her--no, for all his kindness, the pleasure of the rides was poisoned forever. That was the thought that, at the sight of him, had cut her to the quick, bringing the tears to her eyes. More than Camelia's lie, Camelia's cruelty in dealing her that humiliation, burned. When she thought of it the blackness of her own heart terrified her. She felt that she hated Camelia, and when she reached her room, she bolted the door and fell on her bed in an agony of weeping.

Camelia perhaps counted a little too confidently upon Mary's "adoration"

for her. To Mary, Camelia had always seemed the bright personification of beauty, cleverness, joy. She had wondered at her, rather than admired her. Her att.i.tude of mind had been as that of a child staring at the unattainable moon, shining silvery-gold, and sailing far above in a wide clear sky.

She had seldom been conscious in the past of any slight or injury. Her most constant feeling was one of quiet duty. Camelia's little kindnesses surprised her; her unkindnesses she took as a matter of course. But now, in this dreadful clash of ill-matched interests, her life against Camelia's game, all the sense of duty, of grat.i.tude, of admiration, went down in black shipwreck. She found that they had been flimsy things, after all, that under their peaceful surface there had been for many weeks a lava-like heaving of resentment. And the worst terror was to see her life bereft of all supports--to see it unblessed, all hatred and despair. For even at the moment she could judge herself, measure how much she had lost in losing her blind humility--that at least gave calm and a certain self-respect--could accuse herself of injustice. Camelia had lied; but then Camelia could never have divined the rash folly of Mary's secret--must never divine it; and the cruel humiliation of that one blighting intimation of Perior's charity hurt more than the lie; and Camelia's ignorance of the hurt she had inflicted only made it ache the more.

CHAPTER XIV

Meanwhile Perior marched off to the garden. He pa.s.sed through the morning-room where Mrs. Fox-Darriel was writing.

"So you didn't get your ride either?" said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, who had her own reasons--and not at all complex ones--for disliking Mr. Perior. "It _was_ rather hot."

Perior in his indifference did not even divine the suspicion that saw in his arrival, and Camelia's defection and amusing headache, a portentousness threatening to the object she had set her heart upon.

Perior replied shortly, and it was with very little love that she watched him walk over the lawn. Camelia really was a fool, and who knew how far her folly might not go.

Camelia was still under the copper-beech, and still talking to Mr.

Rodrigg. Perior perforce acknowledged her innocence of flirtatious methods. Her earnest pose--elbows on the arm of her chair, hands clasped, head gravely intent--denoted the seriousness with which she took her role.

Mr. Rodrigg's smile might have warned her. He balanced a teaspoon neatly on his cup, and looked from it to her, vastly unimpressed as to the real purport of the conversation.

Perior's mood was too miserable, too savage, to allow him more than a mere dart of cynical amus.e.m.e.nt at her folly. Camelia turned her head, surprised at seeing him. Smiling a complacent little smile she patted the chair beside her.

"So you came back after all."

"Yes." The nipped monosyllable, like a sudden _douche_ of icy water, told her that since he had left her their relations had changed, and changed very much for the worse. Her conjectures sprang immediately to Mary. Bother Mary! what had she said? But at the thought of what she might have said Camelia knew that her heart was shaking. Her look, on a first impulse, would have been entreating, but in the presence of a third person it grew cold in answer to his, and she turned again to Mr.

Rodrigg.

"Go, on, please; I want your answer. I have still that one fallacy to demolish, you know."

Mr. Rodrigg observed Perior affably; he was a really important opponent.

"Miss Paton wishes, I believe, to inst.i.tute a sort of eighteenth century role for women in politics," he said, "the role that obtained in France during that ominous century. She expects to rule England through her _causeries_."

"Indeed, I fancy that England would be very prettily ruled!" said Camelia, laughing.

Perior switched the dust on his boots and made no reply.

"You have been reading, I hear," Mr. Rodrigg continued, seizing gratefully the chance of escaping from the bill, "a very interesting number of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. I looked at it a day or two since: the serial romance is quite a new departure in style. There is certainly new leaven working in French literature. The revolt from naturalism is very significant, very interesting, though some of the extremes of opposition, such as symbolism, tend to become as unhealthy."

"Symbolism, mysticism, in the modern naturalistic French writer, is merely the final form of decadence," Camelia observed with some sententiousness, feeling Perior's silent presence as an impulsion towards artificiality in tone and manner, "the irridescent stage of decay--pardon me for being nasty--but they are so nasty! I have had quite enough of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_--so to business, Mr.

Rodrigg." But though Camelia was quite willing to ignore the new-comer, Mr. Rodrigg insisted on dragging him into the running, until at last, perceiving a most unencouraging unwillingness, he rose and left him to the _tete-a-tete_ for which he had evidently returned, going off to the house very good-humoredly. Perior's position was altogether unique, and not one of Camelia's lovers gave his intimacy a thought.

As Mr. Rodrigg's wide back disappeared through the morning-room windows Camelia turned her head to Perior.

"Well," she said, leaning back in her chair and putting her finger-tips together with a pleasantly judicial air, "what have you to say? You look very glum."

"I met Mary, Camelia."

"Ah! Did she have a good afternoon?"

"No; I fancy it was as dull to her as it would have been to you."

"Impossible. Mary loves such things; besides, I do not find them dull."

Perior looked at her.

"What a liar you are," he said. If hate and scorn could wither, Camelia felt they would then have withered her; she quite recognized them in his tone.

But she was able to say with apparent calm--not crediting the endurance of those unkind sentiments towards her, "indeed; you have called me that before."

"Will you deny," said Perior, looking at her with his most icy steadiness--Camelia keeping her eyes on his, and feeling that for the moment the best thing she could do was to hold firmly to their calm and luminous directness of expression--"will you deny that you went up to ask Mary to take your place? that you found her ready to go with me?

that you pretended not to know that I had come for her?--she let that out in excusing you from my disgust!--didn't suspect you!--that to me you pretended she had gone to Mrs. Grier's of her own accord?"

The withering had begun to operate. Camelia felt his outward and her inner press of feeling vanquishing the mild inquiry of her look. She dropped her eyes. "Will you tell me why you take the trouble to debase yourself--for such a trifle?"