Mary sat quite still, moving her pen in slow curves, waves, meaningless figures over the paper. The arrested sob seemed frozen, and no tears came. She looked dully at the black zigzags on the paper while she listened to the distant sound of voices in the hall, Camelia's laugh, a lower tone from Perior, Camelia's cheerful good-bye.

A sudden fit of coughing seized her, and while she shook with it Camelia came in. Mary's coughing irritated Camelia, but she did not want to hurt her feelings by departing before it after getting the newspaper she had come for, so, walking to the table, she said, taking up and opening the _Times_ with a large rustling--

"All alone, Mary?"

"Yes," Mary replied. The coughing left her, and she clenched her handkerchief in her hand. The madness rose again, lit by a keener sense of horror.

"But Mr. Perior came in, did he not?" Camelia scanned the columns, her back to the light.

"Yes," Mary repeated.

"Well, what did he have to say?" Camelia felt her tone to be satisfactorily detached. She wanted to know. That sense of something lacking, something even awkward, had become almost acute this morning; only her quiet gaiety had bridged it over. Mary was again looking out of the window. An inner impulsion made her say in a tone as dull as her look--

"He said he was dreary."

The _Times_ rustled with a somewhat aggressive effect of absorption, and then Camelia laid it down. Something in Mary's voice angered her; it implied a sympathy from which she was to be shut out; he had not said to _her_ that he was dreary. But she still kept her tone very light as she walked to the fire.

"Well, he is always that--is he not?" she commented, holding out a foot to the blaze; "a very glum person indeed is my good Alceste."

Mary did not reply, and Camelia, with a quick turn of conjecture that seemed to cut her, wondered if there had been further confidences. She paused for a moment, swallowed on a rising tremor of apprehension, before saying, as she turned her back to the fire and faced the figure at the table--the figure's heavy uncouthness of att.i.tude making her a little angrier--"What further moans did my melancholy friend pour into your sympathetic bosom, Mary?" Mary, looking steadily out of the window, felt the flame rising.

"He said that he was bored, tired, unhappy."

After a morning spent with _her!_ Camelia clasped her hands behind her back, and tried to still her quick breathing. She eyed Mary, but she did not think much of Mary.

"Really!" she said.

"Yes. Really." Suddenly Mary rose from her chair; she clutched the chair-back. "Oh, you cruel creature! you bad creature!" she cried hoa.r.s.ely.

Camelia stared, open-mouthed.

"Oh, you bad creature," Mary repeated. Camelia never forgot the look of her--the ghastly white, stricken out of sharp shadows, the splash of garish color on either cheek, the pale intensity of her eyes. She noticed, too, the sharp prominence of Mary's knuckles as she clutched the chair-back, and in her amazement stirred a certain, quite different discomfort. She could find no words, and stared speechlessly at the apparition.

"You are cruel to every one," said Mary. "You don't care about any one.

You don't care about your mother--or about _him_, though you like to have him there--loving you; you don't care about me--you never did--nor thought of me. Well, listen, Camelia. I am dying; in a month I will be dead; and _I_ love him. There! Now do you see what you have done?"

A fierce joy filled her as she spoke the words out. To tear the bleeding tragedy from its hiding-place, and make Camelia shudder, scream at it--it brought relief, lightness; she breathed deeply, with a sense of bodily dissolution; and Camelia's look was better than screams or shudders. Let the truths go like knives to the heart that deserved them.

As she spoke Mary felt her wrongs gather around her like an army. She had no fear. She straightened herself to send to her cousin a solemn look of power.

"You did not know I was dying; of course you would not know it--for you think of nothing but yourself. There, do you see that handkerchief? I have been coughing blood for a long time. Nothing can be done for me.

You know how my father died. And when I am dead, Camelia, you may say to yourself, 'I helped to make the last year of her life black and terrible--quite hideous and awful.' Yes; say it. Perhaps it will make you feel a little badly." With the words all the anguish of those baffled, suffering months came upon her. The sobs rose, panting; the tears gushed forth. Staggering, she came round the chair and dropped into it, and her sobs filled the silence.

Camelia stood rooted in terror. She expected to see the sudden horror fulfil itself, to see Mary die before her eyes, Mary's curse upon her, and all her misdeeds one vague, menacing blackness. To clutch at any doubt was impossible. From the first moment of her uprising Mary's body had been like a shattered casket from which streamed a relentless light.

Camelia's eyes were unsealed; she saw that the casket was shattered--the light convicted her.

"What have I done?" she gasped. "Tell me, Mary, what is it?"

She found a difficulty in speaking. She did not dare approach her cousin.

"I will tell you what you have done," said Mary, raising her head, and again Camelia felt the hoa.r.s.e intentness of her voice, like a steady aiming of daggers. "You have taken from me the one thing--the only thing--I had. I love him! He is nothing to you; and you took him from me."

"Oh, Mary! Took him from you!"

"Yes, yes; you did not know. He did not know. _I_ saw it all. He might have loved me had you not come back. He must have loved me, when I loved him so much! oh, so much!" and, sobbing again, she pressed to her eyes the blood-stained handkerchief, careless now of its revelations.

"Oh, Mary!" cried Camelia, shuddering.

"I was so happy last winter. He would come and read, and ride. He was so kind. Auntie, and he, and I--it was the happiest time of my life. But you came, and he never looked at me again! Oh, how horrible! how unjust!

Why should you have everything?--I nothing! nothing! I suppose you thought me contented, since I was ugly, and poor, and stupid. And you, because you are beautiful, and rich, and clever, you have everything!

That is all that counts! I am not selfish and cruel; at least, I used not to be. I have thought about other people always! I have tried to do right, and what have I got for it? My life has been a cheat! and I hate it! And I am glad to die, because I see that you, who are bad, get all the love, and that I will never have anything! And I see that I am bad--that I have been made bad through having had nothing!"

"Oh, Mary! forgive me! oh, forgive me!" Camelia found her knees failing beneath her. She stretched her clasped hands towards her cousin.

"I did not know; indeed, I did not! Indeed, I love you, Mary!--oh, I do love you! We all love you!" She felt herself struggling, with weak, desperate hands, against Mary's awful fate and her own guilt. "How can you say that, when we all love you? know how good you are!--how sweet and good--love you for it!" She buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

Mary, who herself no longer sobbed, observed her.

"Oh, you are a little sorry now," she said, in a voice of cold impa.s.siveness that froze Camelia's sobs to instant silence. "I make you uncomfortable--a little more uncomfortable than when I cough. It is strange that when I never did you any harm--always tried to please you--you should have found pleasure in hurting me. Do you remember all the little jeers at me before him? You mocked my dulness, my ugliness.

He did not laugh. It made him sad, because he did not like to see you unbeautiful in anything; but he must have seen me more stupid, more ugly than before. And when he was with me for one moment you would take him away. And you lied to keep him to yourself, like that day we were to have ridden together; and if you had known that I loved him you would have been all the more anxious to have him--to hurt me."

"No, no, Mary!" Camelia's helpless sobs burst out again.

"Yes; why can I speak to you like this? because I am dying, you see that I am dying--that gives me my only advantage; I can tell you what I think of you, and you don't dare reply. You would not dare say to me now that I am a spy--that I have sneaking eyes. I hate you, Camelia! I hate you!

Oh! oh!" She rose to her feet suddenly, and at the change of tone--the wail--Camelia uncovered her eyes.

"I am going to die! I am going to die! And I love him, and he does not care." Mary groped blindly to a sofa, fell upon it, buried her head in the cushions.

Camelia rose to her feet, for she had been kneeling, and stood listening to the dreadful sobs.

Her life had never known a comparable terror. The blackness of Mary's point of view encompa.s.sed her. She felt like a murderer in the night.

She crept towards the sofa. "Oh, forgive me, say a word to me."

"Leave me; go away. I hate you."

"Won't you forgive me?" The tears streamed down Camelia's cheeks.

"Go away. I hate you," Mary repeated. There was a compulsion in the voice Camelia could not disobey. Trembling and weeping she went out of the room.

Mary lay there sobbing. She had never so realized to the full the extent and depth of her woe, yet there was relief in the realization, relief in the flinging off of secrecy and shame. That Camelia should suffer, however slightly, restored a little the balance of justice, satisfied a little the outraged sense of solitary suffering, atoned a very little for fate's shameful unfairness. To poor Mary, sobbing over her one triumph, the morality of the universe seemed a little vindicated now that she had taken into her own hand the long-delayed lash of vengeance.

Her weakened religious formalities and conventionalities withered under this devouring, pagan flame. It was good to hate, and to revenge one's self, good to see the smooth and smiling favorite of the cruel G.o.ds, weeping and helpless. She was tired of rightness--tired of swallowing her tears.

The best thing in her life had been turned against her; everything was at war with her. Well, she would crouch no longer, she would die fighting, giving blow for blow. She threw her hands up wildly in thinking of it all--beat them down into the cushions. To have had nothing, nothing, and Camelia to have everything! Oh, monstrous iniquity! Camelia, who had done no good, happy; she, who had done no wrong, unutterably miserable.

For a long time she lay sobbing, still beating her hands into the cushion, a mechanical symbolizing of her rebellion and wretchedness. So lying, all the blackness of the past and future surging over her, engulfing her, she heard outside the sound of a horse's hoofs on the wet gravel. A moment afterwards running footsteps came down the stairs and crossed the hall. Mary pulled herself up from the sofa, and, with the outer curiosity of utter indifference, walked to the window. Camelia's horse stood before the door, a groom at his head. The drizzling mist shut out all but the nearest trees, flat, pale silhouettes on the white background, against which the horse's coat gleamed, a warm, beautiful chestnut. Mary's indifference grew wondering. Her sobs ceased as she gazed. The gaze became a stare, hard, fixed, as Camelia, in a flash, sprang to the saddle. Mary saw her profile, bent impatiently, the underlip caught between her teeth, the brows frowning, while the groom adjusted her skirt. In a moment she was off at a quick trot, and soon a sound of galloping died down the avenue.

Mary stood rigidly looking after the sound. A supposition, too horrible, too hideous, had come to her, too hideous, too horrible not to be true.

Its truth knocked, fiercely insistent, at her heart. Her knowledge of Camelia, acute yet narrow, and confused by this latter suffering, sprang at a bound to the logical deduction.

Camelia could not bear suffering, revolted against it, s.n.a.t.c.hed at any shield. She had gone now to Perior, that he might lift from her this dreadful load of responsibility, cast upon her so cruelly by Mary. He must tell her that he had never thought of Mary, and that the idea of robbery was a wild figment of Mary's sick brain. Mary's brain, though sick, was clear, clear with the feverish lucidity that sees all with a distinctness glaring and magnified. She saw all now. The meanness, the cowardice of Camelia's proceeding only gave a deepened certainty.