Читать книгу The Confounding of Camelia - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 4

Table of Contents

ON the sunny autumn day with which this story opens, Miss Paton was in the morning room at Enthorpe Lodge, waiting for some one—a some one who to her was not a nobody; and though her attitude hardly denoted much anxiety, her mind was alert and very conscious of a pleasing and yet exasperating suspense. Her friend Mrs. Fox-Darriel was with her. Miss Paton leaned against the mantelpiece as she talked, her eyes often swerving to the clock, but calmly, with no perceptible impatience, or passing in a quiet glance over her hand, the falling folds of her white dress, her friend’s face and figure—figure and face equally artificial, and perhaps affording to Miss Paton’s mind a pleasing contrast to her own distinctive elegance.

There is in Florence a plaque by one of the della Robbia; a long throated girl’s head leans from it, serenely looking down upon the world; a delicate head, with a clear brow, a pure cheek, a mouth of sad enchanting loveliness; Camelia’s head was like it; saint-like in contour, but with an added air, an air of merry irresponsibility. The outward corners of her eyes smiled into a long upward curve of shadow, her brows above them made a wing-like line, wings hovering extended, and a little raised. The upward tilt pervaded the corners of her mouth, a sad mouth, yet even in repose it seemed just about to smile, and its smile sliding to a laugh. The very moulding of her cheek and chin showed a tender gaiety. As for coloring it might have been the coloring of a pensive Madonna, so white was her skin, so palely gold her smooth thick hair. She was slender too, with the long narrow hands and feet of an Artemis, and on seeing her one thought of a maiden-goddess, of a St. Cecilia, and, without surprise over the incongruity, of an intimately modern young taster of life, whose look of pagan joyousness took neither herself nor other people seriously, said “que voulez-vous,” to all blame, and gently mocked puritanical earnestness.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel was plunged into the depths of an easy-chair, a type without hints and whispers to baffle and fascinate. She was thoroughly conventional and not in the least perplexing. Her elaborate head, a masterpiece of wave and coil and curl, rested against the high-chair back, its lustre a trifle suspicious where the light caught too gold a bronze on the sharp ripples.

She was considered a beauty, and her steely, regular face looked at one from every stationer’s shop in London. Miss Paton’s photographs were to be procured at no stationer’s, one among the many differences that distinguished her from her friend.

On Camelia’s “coming-out” in all the dryad-like freshness of her one and twenty years, Mrs. Fox-Darriel, smartest of the “smart,” kindly determined to “form” and “launch” her. She was very winning, and Camelia seemed very willing. But Mrs. Fox-Darriel soon recognized that she was being led—not leading, soon recognized that Camelia would never follow. The first defeat was at the corsetière’s visible symbol of the “forming” process. Under Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eye, Miss Paton’s nymph-like slimness was measured for stays of all sorts and descriptions; Camelia, when the stays were done, surveyed her figure therein confined, with reflective rather than submissive silence.

The week after she went to Paris, and when she returned it was with a stayless wardrobe. Mrs. Fox-Darriel was fairly quelled as Camelia swept before her in these masterpieces of the Rue de la Paix.

“They are not æsthetic,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel—“I own that—not a greenery-yallery whiff about them; nor too self-conscious; but my dear, why? Don’t you like my figure?”

Camelia turned candid eyes upon the accurate waist, the rigid curves and right angles. “I can’t say I do, Frances,” she owned, wherewith Mrs. Fox-Darriel winced a little. “I don’t think it looks alive, you know,” said Miss Paton. “Of course one must know how to dress one’s nonconformity. I think I have succeeded.” And Camelia went to court looking like a glorified Romney, with hardly a whalebone about her. Their future relationship was forecast by this declaration of independence. The stayless protégée conferred, did not receive lustre.

Inevitably Mrs. Fox-Darriel found herself revolving about the young beauty—a satellite among the other satellites, and more than Camelia herself was Mrs. Fox-Darriel impressed by Camelia’s effectiveness.

On this morning from the depth of her laziness she observed her young friend’s glances at the clock with some wondering curiosity; it was difficult to imagine a cause for the stirring of Camelia’s contemplative quiescence under country influences, but Mrs. Fox-Darriel was quick to see the faintest ripple of change, and to her well-sharpened acuteness the ripple this morning was perceptible.

“No new guests coming to-day?” she had asked, receiving a placid negative. “And what are you going to do?” she pursued, patting the regular outline of her fringe.

“I thought of a ride with Mr. Merriman and Sir Harry. Do you care to come?”

“No, no, I have too much of Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman as it is.”

“It is dull down here, Frances. Perhaps you had best be off to Homburg. I am bent on recuperative vegetating, you know.”

“Whom are you waiting for?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked, coming to the point with a circumspection rendered rather ridiculous by the frank promptness of Miss Paton’s answer.

“I’m waiting for Mr. Perior, Frances,” and she laughed a little, glancing at her friend with a rapid touch of ridicule, “and he is half-an-hour late; and I want to see him very badly.”

“Mr. Perior?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s vagueness was not affected. “One of the vegetables, my dear? Has not the curiosity of the neighborhood exhausted itself?”

“Ah—this vegetable isn’t curious, I fear, not a shoot shows at least. If he is curious he will pretend not to be, and pretend very successfully.”

“That is subtle for a vegetable. Perior, the name is familiar. Who is this evasive person?”

Miss Paton’s serene eyes looked over her friend’s head at the strip of blue and green outside framed by the long window. She was asking herself with an inward smile for her own perversity, whether she had not come down into the country for the purpose of seeing the “evasive person.” She would not mind owning to it in the least. Pickles after sweets; she anticipated the tart taste of disapproval pleasantly.

“Who is he?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel repeated.

“He is my oldest friend; he doesn’t admire me in the least—so I am very fond of him. I christened him ‘Alceste,’ and he retaliated with ‘Célimène.’ He is forty odd; a bachelor; he lives in a square stone house, and taught me very nearly everything I know. My Greek is almost as good as my skirt dancing.”

“The square-stone gentleman didn’t teach you skirt-dancing, I suppose. I begin to place him. The editor; the family friend; the misanthrope.”

“Yes, my ‘Alceste.’ He has reason for misanthropy. His life has been a succession of disappointments. I am one of them, I fear.”

“Dear me, Camelia!” Mrs. Fox-Darriel sat upright, “have you ever dallied with this provincial Diogenes?”

Miss Paton smiled over the supposition. “His disappointments are moral, not amorous. Why do I tell you this, I wonder?”

“To show me that you don’t care for him perhaps,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, who to tell the truth, was rather alarmed. Since she had resigned herself to a planetary, a reflected brilliancy, her star at least must never wane; its orbit must widen. Camelia’s whole manner seemed suddenly suspicious. She was evidently waiting for this person, pleased, evidently, to talk of him, and though Camelia might be trusted for a full appreciation of her future’s possibilities, Mrs. Fox-Darriel was hardly satisfied by the frankness of her “Oh! but I do care for him; he preoccupies me.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel reflected for some moments on the dangers of country-house propinquity and retrospective intimacy before saying pleasantly—

“What does he look like?”

Camelia laughed again, soothing Mrs. Fox-Darriel somewhat by the good-humored glance which seemed to pierce with amusement the anxiety on her behalf.

“His eyes are thunderous; his lips pale with suppressed anger.”

“Dear me! I am really anxious to see this vial of wrath.”

“And since that is his footstep on the gravel, you shall see him immediately,” said Camelia.

A moment after Mr. Perior was announced.