The Confounding of Camelia Part 31

Then indeed shame came upon Mary. She saw herself gibbeted between them, knew too well what he would think. He would himself hang her up, since truth demanded it, and since Camelia must be comforted. The glaring lucidity dazzled Mary a little at times, and now the awful justice of Perior's character a.s.sumed in her eyes a Jove-like cruelty, that more than matched Camelia's dastardliness. The past hour seemed painless in comparison with the present moment; its blackness, in looking back at it, was gray. To be debased, utterly debased, in his eyes--that was to drink the very dregs of her cup of agony. Her hatred of Camelia was her only guide in the night. She went into the hall and took down her hat and cloak. She could not wait for Camelia's return. She must herself see the actuality of her betrayal. Camelia might lie unless she could hold the truth before her face; might say that she had not ridden to Perior's. Mary would see for herself, and then--oh then! confronting Camelia, she would find words, if she died in speaking them.

She ran down the avenue and turned off into the woods by a short cut that led more directly than the curving high road to the Grange. Her weakness was braced by the fierceness of her purpose. She felt herself a flame, hastening relentlessly through the smoke-like mist.

The woods were cold and wet. She pushed past dripping branches, splashed through muddy pools; the inner fire ignored its panting frame. When she arrived at the foot of the hill on which stood the Grange, she knew that Camelia must have been with him there for an hour or more. She could not see the house through the heavy atmosphere, but, hidden by the trees and fog, she could see the road and be herself unseen. On the edge of the wood was a little stile; she shuddered with wet and cold as she sat down on it to wait. She would wait for Camelia to pa.s.s, and then, by the same hidden path, she could go home and confront her. Beyond that crash Mary did not look. It seemed final.

CHAPTER XXV

But Mary was quite mistaken--as absolute logic is apt to be when dealing with human beings. Camelia, indeed, had gone to Perior, but on a very different errand from the one Mary's imagination painted for her.

Camelia was not thinking of herself, nor of throwing off the iron chains of that responsibility with which she felt herself manacled for life.

Mary's story had crushed every thought of self, beyond that consciousness of riveted guilt. It was of Mary alone she thought as she galloped through the mist. With terror and pity infinite she looked upon Mary's love and the approaching death that was to end it; their tragedy filled everything, and at the feet of the majestic presences her own personality only felt itself as a cowering criminal. It was as though the ocean of another's suffering had flooded the complacent rivers of her life. They overflowed their narrow channels; they were engulfed, effaced in the mighty desolation; never again could they find their flowering banks, their sunny horizons.

This moan of a suffering universe, heard before only in vaguest whispers, the minor key of the happy melody that she had known, making the melody all the sweeter for its half-realized web of sadness--this moan was now like the tumult of great waters above her head, and a loud outcrying of her awakened soul answered it. She was guilty--yes, as guilty as Mary knew her to be, for all the mistaken deductions of Mary's ignorance. She loved Perior, and he did _not_ love her; but those facts in no way touched the other unalterable facts--a cruelty, a selfishness, a blindness, hideous beyond words.

Yet now she did not think of this guilt, irrevocable as it was.

Mary--Mary--Mary. The horse's hoofs seemed to beat out the cry! Mary and her fate. Camelia stood with Mary against that fate; but her att.i.tude of rebellion was even fiercer, more determined than poor Mary's flickering light could have sustained. Mary good--with nothing. Virtue _not_ its own reward. Suffering, crus.h.i.+ng, unmerited suffering, eating away the poor empty life. She herself bad, and the world at her feet. Camelia felt herself capable of taking the immoral universe by the throat and shaking it to death--herself along with it.

She was galloping for help, yes, to Perior. He must help her, he alone could help her, to clutch the malignant cruelty, tear it off Mary, and then give her some gleam of happiness before she died. Camelia straightened herself in the saddle at the thought. "She shall not die,"

clenched her teeth on the determination. She might be saved. Who could tell? One heard of wonderful cures. And at least, at least, she should not die unhappy. Camelia would wrench happiness for her out of despair itself. She would fight the injustice of the G.o.ds until her last breath left her.

All the pitiful humanity in Camelia clung to the human hope of retribution and reward. Her mind fixed in this desperate hope, she could take no thought of the coming interview; that would have implied a retrospective glance at her last visit to the Grange, and Camelia could not think of herself, nor even of Perior.

The Grange was desolate on its background of leafless trees. Camelia, as she dismounted at the door, looked down at the whiteness which brimmed the valley; the tree-tops emerged from it as from a flood; but where she stood there was no mist--a clear, sad air, and a few faint patches of blue in a colorless sky above. She rang, holding the horse's reins over her arm. Her habit was heavy with the wet, and her loosened hair clung damply about her throat and forehead. Old Lane, when he appeared, showed some alarm. She could infer from his expression what her own must be.

"Mr. Perior? Yes, Miss; in the laboratory with Job Masters. Just go up, Miss, and I'll take the horse round to the stables."

The laboratory was at the top of the house. Camelia found herself panting from the swiftness of her ascension when she reached the door.

Entering, she faced the white light from the wide expanse of window, which overlooked on bright days miles of wooded, rolling country, to-day the sea of mist. Perior's back was to her, and he was bending with an intent interest over a microscope; a collection of gla.s.s jars was on the table, and Job Masters, his elementary features lit by the intelligent gravity of close attention, was standing beside him. Perior was saying--

"Now, Job, take a look at it." His gray head did not turn.

"It's Miss Paton, sir," Job volunteered. At that Perior rose hastily, and Camelia advancing, looked vaguely at Job, at the microscope, at the jars of infusoria.

A thought of the last visit had shot painfully through Perior on hearing her name, but, after one stare at her white face, his fear, freed from any selfish terror, took on a sympathetic acuteness.

"I must speak to you," she said.

"Very well. You may go, Job," and as Job's heavy footsteps pa.s.sed beyond the door, "What is it, Camelia?" he asked, holding her hands, his anxiety questioning her eyes.

For a moment, the press of all that must be said crowding upon her, of all that must be said with a self-control that must not waver or misinterpret through weakness, Camelia could not speak. She looked at him with a certain helplessness.

"Sit down, you are faint," said Perior, greatly alarmed, but, shaking her head, she only put her hand on the back of a chair he brought forward.

"I have something terrible to tell you, Michael." That she should use his name impressed him even more than her announcement, emphasized the gravity of the situation in which he was to find himself with her. In the ensuing pause their eyes met with a preparatory solemnity.

"Michael, Mary is dying." He saw then that her eyes seized him with a deep severity of demand. The shock, though not unexpected, found him unprepared.

"She knows it?" he asked.

"Yes, she knows it. Listen. She told me everything. It was more horrible than you can imagine. She told me how cruel I had been to her--how I had neglected her--how I had cut again and again into her very soul. She hates me, she hates her life, but she is afraid of death. She is not going to die happily, hopefully, as one would have thought Mary would die. She is dying desperately and miserably, for she sees that being good means merely being trodden on by the bad. She has had nothing, and she regrets everything." Perior dropped again into the chair by the table. He covered his eyes with his hands.

"Poor child! Unhappy child!" he said.

The shuddering horror of the morning came over Camelia. She clasped her hands, pressing them against her lips. It seemed to her suddenly that she must scream.

"What does it mean? What does a life like that mean?" Her eyes, in all their helpless guilt and terror, met his look of non-absolving pity.

"It means that if one is good one is often trodden upon. We must accept the responsibility for Mary's unhappiness. My poor Camelia," Perior added, in tones of saddest comprehension, and he stretched out his hand to her. But Camelia stood still.

"Accept it!" she cried, and her voice was sharp with the repressed scream. "Do you think I am trying to s.h.i.+rk it? Do you think that I do not see that it is I--_I_, who trod upon her? Don't say 'We'; say 'You,'

as you think it. You need have no compunctions. I could have made her happy--happier, at least, and I have made her miserable. I have done--said--looked the cruellest things--confiding in her stupid insensibility. I have crushed her year after year. I am worse than a murderer. Don't talk of me--even to accuse me; don't think of me, but think of _her_. Oh, Michael! let us think of her! Help me to mend--a little--the end of it all!"

"Mend it?" He looked at her, taken aback by her words, the strange insistence of her eyes. "One can't, Camelia--one can't atone for those things."

"Then you mean to say that life _is_ the horror she sees it to be? She sees it! There is the pity--the awful pity of it! Not even a merciful blindness, not even the indifference of weakness! Morality is a gibe then? Goodness goes for nothing--is trampled in the mud by the herd of apes s.n.a.t.c.hing for themselves! That is the world, then!" The fierce scorn of her voice claimed him as umpire. Perior put his hand to his head with a gesture of discouragement.

"That is the world--as far as we can see it."

"And there is no hope? no redemption?"

"Not unless we make it ourselves--not unless the ape loses his characteristics." He paused, and a deepened pity entered his voice as he added, "You have lost them, Camelia."

"Yes; I can hear the canting moralist now, with his noisome explanation of vice and misery. Mary has been sacrificed to save _my_ soul, forsooth! _My_ soul!"

"Yes." Perior's monosyllable held neither a.s.sent nor repudiation.

"Yes? And what does my miserable soul count for against her starved and broken life?"

"I don't know. That is for you to say."

"I say that if virtue is to give a reward to vice, life is a nightmare."

Perior again put his hands over his eyes. The thought of poor Mary, conscious of injustice, the sight of Camelia writhing in retributory flames, made him feel shattered.

"But I didn't come to talk about my problematic soul," said Camelia in an altered voice; "I came to tell you about Mary." She approached him, and stood over him as she spoke, so that he looked up quickly.

"She will probably be dead in a month. She knows it; and, Michael, she loves you." Perior flushed a deep red, but Camelia whitened to the lips.

He would have risen; she put her hand on his shoulder.

"Impossible!" he said.

"No, listen. She told me. She lashed me with it this morning--that hopeless love--for she thinks that you love me--thinks that I am playing with you. She loves you. She has loved you for years."

"Don't say it, Camelia!" Perior cried brokenly. "Mary's disease explains hysteria--melancholia--a pitiful fancy--that will pa.s.s--that should never have been told to me."