The Confounding of Camelia Part 11

"Do you know, my dear, that phrase," and Lady Henge struck it out demonstratively from the piano near which she stood; "that phrase does sound a little weak." Weak! Camelia could have capped the criticism very pungently. With a good deal of disgust at a situation which had so neatly turned the tables upon her, she said, "Mr. Perior may tell you so; I really can't." Her fate evidently was to support Lady Henge by a fraternity in inferior taste; and to be branded with inferior taste, even in Lady Henge's eyes, was certainly rather galling. She had not bargained for it at all, nor dreamed that Lady Henge's complacency would go down like a ninepin before Perior's brutal missile. Her little perjury had not been in the least worth while.

Perior, having the grace to look somewhat embarra.s.sed, arrived next morning with an impressive roll of music, and Camelia laughed, with some acidity it must be confessed, as she heard in the drawing-room the convincing energy of his demonstrations. Fragments of the poor _poeme symphonique_, panting from their cruel dissection, reached her ears while she strolled about the lawns with Sir Arthur.

She foresaw that Lady Henge would prove a humble convert, and that she herself, if not to be convicted of gross insincerity, must remain gibbeted in a stubborn unconversion.

"Your mother is very patient," she said, as, from the distant piano, the dogged repet.i.tion of a phrase emphasized its feeble absurdity. "Mr.

Perior as mentor is in his element."

Sir Arthur laughed with a good-humored recollection of his own political rebuff at Perior's hands.

"He is uncompromisingly honest. If you ask for his advice he'll give it to you."

"Give it to you unasked sometimes," said Camelia.

Sir Arthur had told her all about that lost cause, and all about his plans for the future. There was a very delightful plan for the very near future; the next session would decide the fate of the Factory Bill that went by her lover's name, and Camelia, under her attentive quietness, felt a heaving sigh of ambition gather. Sir Arthur's grave eagerness showed that after his winning of herself, his political campaign filled the chief place in his hopes and thoughts. Her interest delighted him, and the intelligence of her comments.

He had himself an almost reverent belief in the bill, and Camelia's sympathetic affirmatives seemed to chime deliciously with his own deep, active pity for the dim, toiling ma.s.ses the bill was to reach and succor. Such a common object was a sanctification; he could hardly, he felt, have loved a woman who did not feel his own deep pity. They talked now of the coming struggle, of the rather dubious success of the second reading that might yet be enhanced for the third.

"And do you know," he said, "Perior, positively Perior, approves; he is buckling on his armor for the final fray. An individuality like that counts, you know. A few leaders in the _Friday_ would rally many waverers."

Camelia flushed suddenly when he said this; it delighted her sense of proprietors.h.i.+p in Perior to hear his praise--to hear that for others, too, he counted. And yet a touch of pain came with the delight, reminding her that under present conditions the delight was very generous, and proprietors.h.i.+p very una.s.sured.

How he evaded it! Yes, he certainly was horrid; but her breath came quickly, and with a deft persistence she kept Sir Arthur still talking of him, finding in his answers to her questions on his youth glimpses of Perior's.

"Always generous, always intolerant, always tripping into ditches while star-gazing," said Sir Arthur; "he has an exaggerated strain in him; it must be that Irish ancestress. He feels everything more acutely than thicker-skinned mortals, sees everything, the good and the bad, magnified--a trifle grotesquely. But it is a n.o.ble nature;" and he went on, as they walked back and forth over the lawn, Perior's pianoforte exposition, firmly insistent, coming to their ears at broken intervals: "Perior is staunch on individualism, as you know; believes in the hygienic value to the race of the combat--a savage creed, I tell him; but he has amended it; he is not one jot afraid of seeming inconsistent; he owns to the scientific logic of our att.i.tude. I was afraid he would accuse us of socialistic methods, tyrannical kindness, State intervention," and so from Perior Sir Arthur went back to the all-absorbing topic of the bill; he could allow the bill to absorb him.

For all Camelia's evasions and smiling warnings to patience, he was deliciously sure of the ultimate end of all. He could afford to be patient with the luminous sympathy of her eyes upon him, afford to talk of the unfortunate women-workers whose long hours the kind tyranny of the bill would restrict, while this woman listened with such a sweet chiming of pity.

"If you could only count on a fair following among the Liberals,"

Camelia said, phrasing his keenest anxiety, "horrid egotists! They all have factories, I suppose. Mr. Rodrigg may wrest your dubious majority from you; he is the lion in your path, isn't he? and he has a whole town of factories. What chance has a moral conviction against a town of factories? And he is such a bull-dog; I did wrong to dignify him by the leonine simile."

"Such a clever chap, too," said Sir Arthur; "bull-dog cleverness, I mean."

"And bull-dogs are so dear," Camelia said, as a small brindled member of the race, his head haloed by a ferociously bristling collar, came bounding to them over the lawn. "Dear, precious beastie," she put her hand on the dog's head as he stood on his hind-legs to greet her, "we must indeed find another epithet for Mr. Rodrigg, not that I dislike him, you know. He shares some of your opinions," she added rather roguishly.

"Not one, I fear."

"Yes, one," she insisted. Sir Arthur's eyes dwelt on her charming look; it carried him into vagueness as he asked--

"What one?" not caring at all for Mr. Rodrigg's community of taste, and smiling at her loveliness.

"I think he is rather fond of me," Camelia owned. Sir Arthur could afford a generous laugh.

"Poor old Rodrigg! He has then a vulnerable point in his armor?"

"Yes, indeed, yes. I don't know that it amounts to a weakness. I fear I couldn't wheedle him. But, you might convince him, and I might help,--and, he is coming down next week." She laughed out at his look of surprise. "That is news, isn't it?"

In her very heart of hearts Camelia was rather complacently convinced that Mr. Rodrigg's fondness _did_ amount to a weakness. Mr. Rodrigg's devotion was in our young lady's fastidious opinion his one redeeming quality. She had kindly, but thoroughly, she thought, nipped in the bud certain too aspiring attempts; but the man was all the more her friend.

His devotion was built upon a fine hopelessness that really dignified him.

She was an Egeria who hovered above him, gently smiling at his earthiness. Yes, she was kind; for Mr. Rodrigg was a most important person--emphatically, personally important just now, it seemed; and though Camelia's thoughts of him were merely humorously tolerant, she felt quite sure of a wealth of unreturned friends.h.i.+p, ready to trans.m.u.te itself into golden action at her bidding. She could but pride herself a little upon her intellectual influence over her unpresumptuous Numa, and thought that she could, through that dignified influence alone, by all means wheedle him, if wheedling became necessary. Sir Arthur would hardly approve of these personal methods, and therefore he need not know of the little game that might win his cause; a perfectly innocent game, she a.s.sured herself, since it hurt no one and helped Sir Arthur; and if Mr. Rodrigg were to be convinced, Sir Arthur must fancy himself sole winner.

He did not seem to recognize the possibility, for after his pause of surprise he laughed again, saying, "Is he coming on _my_ account?"

"Not on _his_, I am sure!"

"You know, it won't do any good," he smiled fondly at her, as one smiles at the folly of a loved woman; "Rodrigg is too deeply pledged, has his whole party behind him. I could no more convince him, even in these enchanted premises, than in the dry precincts of the House. Political conversions are very rare."

"But you _may_ convert him," Camelia urged. "I will give you every opportunity."

"And it is rather unfair, you know." Sir Arthur paused in their strolling to look at her face, half shadowed in the sunlight by the brim of her white hat. "He perhaps imagines that he is coming for purposes far removed from the political."

"Oh no, no, no. I tell you, dear Sir Arthur, that--well--since you must have it--I refused him. He hasn't a hope; I pinched the last pangs out of him a long time ago. In fact, I let him see that I found his audacity rather funny than piteous. I have laughed him into most submissive platonics. He will come, because he really is my friend, and really likes me; and I want him to come, because he must like you."

"Camelia!" Sir Arthur had used her name more than once of late, and she let it pa.s.s with a half-merry, half-menacing little glance.

"You dear little schemer," he added. Though spoken in tenderest teasing, Camelia was just enough conscious of a certain applicability to say with some quickness--

"Not _really_. You know I'm not. I only want to help you--legitimately, I would not lift my little finger to win your cause if you did not want me to."

"Really, I know you're not!" Sir Arthur's voice retained the teasing quality, but the tenderness had deepened; Camelia was listening all the while to those dogged pa.s.sages from the piano. They ceased now, and a certain gravity and determination of look that had succeeded Sir Arthur's last words quite justified a sudden retreat.

"I must go and make Mr. Perior stop to lunch. One only gets him out of his lair by force and wheedling! I wheedle _him_!" She left Sir Arthur rather disconsolately cut short, and ran off to the house, her own words ringing rea.s.suringly in her ears. Yes, she could wheedle him. Despite unreason, stupid unreason, despite rebellious crossness and pretended indifference, she had the mastery. He cared so much; that was the fundamental fact that upheld Camelia's a.s.surance; he cared enough to be very angry. He would try to hide his anger of course. Her heart had beaten rather quickly when Sir Arthur's face took on that look of resolve--she was not ready, not quite sure, not yet, but flight from his purpose had been only a secondary impulse. She must see Perior. She ran through the morning-room and met him coming down the stairs, and panting a little, laughing a little, she leaned against the banisters and opposed his pa.s.sage.

"Well, have you taught her how bad it is?"

"I think I have," said Perior, looking over Camelia's head at the open doorway. She stood aside to let him join her.

"What have you to teach me this morning--_caballero de la triste figura_?" she said as he came down the stairs and stood beside her.

"I don't propose to teach you anything. I am not responsible for you."

Camelia had not a.n.a.lyzed his probable mood incorrectly; he was angry, and he was trying to hide his anger, fearing for his self-control. But more than that--though this the acute Camelia had never quite divined--he was feeling very unhappy. That he was angry she saw, however, with a little thrill of triumph running through her veins.

Smiling an even smile she said, slipping her hand through his arm--

"Ah! but you _are_ responsible. Come into the morning-room."

"Is Lady Paton there?" Perior asked gloomily.

"Yes." Camelia had seen her mother and Mary walking safely away into the garden with Gwendolen Holt and Lady Tramley. She threw open the door and ushered him in.

CHAPTER X

Perior surveyed the emptiness; it hardly surprised him, and well understanding her determination to wheedle him, he felt an added strength of determination not to be wheedled.