Читать книгу The Confounding of Camelia - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 5

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MR. PERIOR was a tall man, well built, yet carrying himself with a certain ungainliness. He had an air of eagerness reined back. His face was at once severe and sensitive.

He gave no notice to Mrs. Fox-Darriel, whose head twisted round to observe his entrance, and walking up to Miss Paton he took her hands—she had put out both her hands in welcome—and, looking at her kindly, he said—

“Well, Célimène.”

“Well, Alceste.”

The smile that made of Camelia’s face a changing loveliness seemed to come and go, and come again while she looked at him, as a butterfly’s wings fold and open while it rests upon a flower. She rarely laughed outright, but her face in gravity was unfamiliar; one could hardly imagine it without the shifting charm.

“You might have come before,” she said—her hands in his, “and I expected you.”

“I was away until yesterday.”

“You will come often now.”

“Yes, I will.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eye—a none too friendly eye—travelled meanwhile up and down the “vial of wrath.” Clever, eccentric, he had evidently made an impression upon the not easily impressed Camelia, and his clean-shaved face, and the rough gray hair that gave his head a look of shaggy heaviness, seemed to express both qualities significantly.

“Did you ride over?” Camelia asked. “No? Hot for walking, isn’t it? Frances, my friend Mr. Perior.”

“You live near here, Mr. Perior?” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, glancing at his boots, which were peculiarly solid and very dusty.

“Only five miles away,” he said. Mr. Perior’s very boots partook of their wearer’s expression of uningratiating self-reliance.

“We have heard of you in London too, I believe. You are editor of—what review is it, Camelia?”

“I was the editor of the Friday Review, but I’ve given that up.”

“He quarrelled with everybody!” Camelia put in, “but you can hear him once a week in the leading article—dealing hatchet-blows right and left. They don’t care to keep him at closer quarters.”

Mr. Perior looked at her, smiling but making no repartee.

“And Camelia has been telling me that you are responsible for her Greek.”

“Is Camelia ashamed of her Greek? She needn’t be. She was quite a good scholar.”

“But Greek! For Camelia! Don’t you think it jars? To bind such dusty laurels on that head!”

“Laurels? Camelia can’t boast of the adornment—dusty or otherwise.”

“Oh! leave me a leaf or two. You are disloyal. I am glad of my Greek. When one is so frivolous the contrast is becoming. And every twig of knowledge is useful nowadays in a woman’s motley crown, provided she wears it like a French bonnet.”

Perior observed her laughingly—Mrs. Fox-Darriel had as yet seen no hatchets.

“No danger of your being taken for a blue-stocking, Camelia.”

“No, indeed! I see to that!”

“You little hypocrite,” said Perior.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s eyebrows arched into her fringe. She got out of her chair trailingly.

“I will go into the garden. Lady Paton is there, Camelia? I think so. I know that you have reminiscences. I am in the way.”

“You are, rather,” said Perior, when she had gone out. “A very disagreeable face that, Camelia; how do the women manage to look so hard nowadays?”

“Thanks. She is a dear friend.”

“I am sorry for it. I hate to see eyes touched up; it gives me the creeps. I am sorry she is a dear friend.”

“I am afraid I shall often give you cause for sorriness.” Camelia stood by the mantelpiece, smiling most winningly. “Come, now, let us reminisce. I saw you last in London. Why didn’t you stop there longer?”

“I had enough of London to last me for a lifetime when I lived there,” said Perior. “I do go up for a bout of concerts now and then,” he added, and looking away from her he took up a large photograph that stood on the table beside him. “Is this the latest?”

“How do you like it?” she asked, leaning forward to look with him.

“It makes a very saintly little personage of you; but it doesn’t do you justice. Your Whistler portrait—the portrait of a smile—is the best likeness you’ll ever get.”

Camelia looked pleased, and yet a trifle taken aback.

“What a nice Alceste you are this morning!” she said. “Tell me, what are you doing with yourself down here? Growing more and more of the stoic? I expect some day to hear that you have left the Grange and moved into a tub. How do you get on without your pupil?” and Camelia as she stood before him made ever so faint a little dancing step backwards and forwards, expressive of her question’s merriment.

“I have existed—more comfortably perhaps than when I had her.”

“Now tell me, be sincere,” she came close to him, her own gay steadiness of look exemplary in the quality she recommended, “Are you crunchingly disapproving? Ready to bite me? Have you heard dreadful tales of frivolity and worldliness?”

“Not more than are becoming to a pretty young woman with such capacities for enjoyment.”

“You don’t disapprove then?”

“Of what, my dear Camelia?”

“Of my determination to enjoy myself.”

“Why should I? Why shouldn’t you have your try like the rest of us? I am not going to throw cold water on your laudable aspirations.”

Camelia still looked at him steadily, smilingly, and a little mockingly. Their eyes at these close quarters could but show a consciousness of familiarity that made evasions funny. Camelia’s eyes were gray, the sunlit gray of a brook—reflecting broken browns and greens, yeux pailletés, as changing as her smile; and Perior’s eyes, too, were gray, but the fixed, stony gray that is altogether another color, and they contemplated her fluctuations with an apparently unmoved, though smiling calm.

She laughed outright, and then Perior permitted himself a dry little responsive laugh that left his lips unparted.

“What are you up to, Camelia?” he asked.

“We do see through one another, don’t we?” she cried joyfully. “I see you are going to pretend not to mind anything. ‘That will sting her!—take down her conceit! I’ll not flatter her by scoldings!’ Eh! Alceste?”

“You little scamp!” he murmured, while Camelia, sitting down on the sofa, swept her white draperies over her feet and motioned to the place beside her. “You will not—no, you will not take me seriously.”

“If you see through me, Camelia,” said Perior, taking the seat beside her with a certain air of resignation, “you see that I am very sincere in finding your behavior perfectly normal—not in the least surprising. You are merely gay, and happy, and self-centred; and behaving as all girls, who have the chance, behave,” he added, putting his finger under her chin with a paternal pat and a look of gentle ridicule.

“Well done! That was very neat! Do you want me to show signs of discomfiture. I won’t. You know that I am quite individual, and that for years you have thought me a selfish, hard-hearted little scoundrel.”

“Oh no; not so bad as that.”

“What have you thought, then?” she demanded.

“I have thought that, like other girls, you can’t evade that label——”

“Oh, wretch!” Camelia interjected.

“That, like other girls,” Perior repeated with an unkind emphasis, “you are going to try to make a ‘good match.’” His face, for all its attempt at lightness, took on a shade of irrepressible repugnance as he spoke. “The accessories don’t count for much. You may be quite individually naughty, but in your motives I see only a very conventional conformity.”

“That’s bad—bad and crude. The good match is, with me, the accessory; therein lies my difference, and you know it. You know I am not like other girls. You saw it in London. You saw,” Camelia added, wrinkling up her nose in a self-mockery that robbed the coming remark of fatuity, “that I was a personage there.”

“As a noticeably pretty girl is a personage. You really are beating your drum rather deafeningly, Camelia.”

“Yes; I’ll shock you by mere noise. But, Alceste, I am not as conceited as I seem; no, really, I am not,” and with her change of tone her look became humorously grave. “I know very well that the people who make much of me—who think me a personage—are sillies. Still, in a world of sillies, I am a personage. It does come round to that, you see.”

“Yes; I see.”

Camelia leaned back in her end of the little sofa, her arms folded, her head bent in a light scrutiny of her companion’s face. The warm quiet of the summer day pervaded the peaceful room, a room with so many associations for both of them. They had studied, read there together for years; laughed, quarrelled, been the best of friends and the fondest of enemies. Perior, as he looked about it, could call up a long vista of Camelias, all gay, all attaching, all evasive, all culminating and fulfilling themselves with an almost mathematical inevitableness, as was now so apparent to him, in the long, slim “personage” beside him, her eyes, as he knew, studying him, her mind amused with conjectures as to what he really thought of her, she herself quite ready to display the utmost sincerity in the attempt to elicit that thought. Oh no, Camelia would keep up very few pretences with him. Perior, gazing placidly enough at the sunlit green outside the morning-room, knew very well what he thought of her.

“Are you estimating the full extent of my folly,” she asked presently, “tempering your verdict by the consideration of extenuations?”

This was so apt an exposition of his mental process that Perior smiled rather helplessly.

“See,” she said, rising and going to the writing-table, “I’ll help you to leniency; show you some very evident extenuations.” From a large bundle of letters she selected two. “Weigh the extent of my influence, and find it funny, if you like, as I do.”

“I wonder if you quite realize the ludicrous aspect of our conversation,” said Perior, taking a thick sheaf of paper from the first letter.

“Quite—quite. Only you push me to extremes. I must make you own my importance—my individuality.”

“Ah, from Henge,” said Perior, looking at the end of the letter. “He was my fag at Eton, you know; dear old Arthur!”

“Yes, and you quarrelled with him five years ago, about politics.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” said Perior, with a touch of asperity; “he was quite big enough not to misunderstand my opposition. Must I read all this, Camelia? It looks rather dry.”

“Well, I should like you to. He is one of the strongest men in the government, you know.”

“Quite. He is the man for me, despite past differences of opinion. The man for you, too, perhaps,” he added, glancing sharply up at her from the letter; “his devotion is public property, you know.”

“But my reception of his devotion isn’t,” laughed Camelia.

“I am snubbed,” said Perior, returning to the letter, and flushing a little. Camelia noted the flush. Dear old Alceste! Shielding so ineffectually, under his sharp blunt bearing, that quivering sensitiveness.

She put her hand through his arm, sinking down beside him, her eyes over his shoulder following his, while he read her—certificate. Perior quite understood the smooth making of amends.

“Well, what do you say to that?” she asked when he had obediently read to the very end.

“I should say that he was a man very much in love,” said Perior, folding the letter.

“You are subtle if you can trace an amorous influence in that letter.”

“It doesn’t call for subtlety. Samson only abandons himself so completely under amorous circumstances. I hope you are not going to shear the poor fellow.”

“For shame,” said Camelia, while Perior, looking at her reflectively, softly slapped the palm of his hand with Arthur Henge’s letter. “I am his comrade. I help him; I am on his side, if you please, and against the Philistines.”

“Oh, are you? And this? Ah! this is from the leader of the Philistines, Rodrigg. Yes, I heard that Rodrigg was in the toils.” Perior examined the small, compact handwriting without much apparent curiosity.

“That is simply nonsense. There was a time—but he soon saw the hopelessness. He is my friend now; not that I am particularly fond of him—the grain is rather coarse: but he is a good creature, far more honest than he imagines, simple, after a clumsy fashion. He aims at distinguished diplomatic complexity, I may tell you, and, I fancy, comes to me for the necessary polishing. Read his letter.”

Perior had looked at her, still smiling, but more absently, while she spoke.

“Oh! Rodrigg is more cautious,” he said glancing through the great man’s neatly constructed phrases. “You are not with the Philistines; he feels that.”

“Politically no; but I have a good deal of influence with him. You see those reviews he mentions; I went through a lot of heavy French and Italian reading for him—sociology, industrialism—and saw the result in his last speech.”

“Really.”

“Ah, really. Don’t be sarcastic, Alceste, to me. One of those men will probably be Prime Minister some day. You can’t deny that they are eminent men.”

“And therefore you are an eminent woman. Well, the logic isn’t too lame. I’ll conclude, Camelia, that you may do quite a lot of harm in the world.”

“You don’t believe that a woman’s influence in politics can be for good?”

“Not the influence of a woman like you—a—a femme bibelot.”

“Good!” cried Camelia, gently clapping her hands.

“It is as that, you know, that these men court you. An objet d’art for their drawing-rooms.”

“You are mistaken, Alceste.”

“If I am mistaken—if they cherish ideals, they are unlucky devils.”

“No, Alceste, I am well justified in keeping my self-respect intact. It is not for my beaux yeux that I am courted—yes, yes—that wry look isn’t needed! I know in what hideously bad taste I am talking, but one can’t use artistic methods with you. As I say, I have my finger in any number of pies besides the pie political. You should see the respect in which I am held by the writers and painters. And I have good taste; I know that. You can’t deny it, since you helped it to grow. What other woman in London has a collection to equal mine? Dégas—Outamaro—Oh, Alceste, don’t look so funnily! Do you really imagine that I am not conscious of the baldness of my exposition? But what is the good of putting on a wig for you!”

“And all this to convince me——”

“Yes, to convince you.”

“Of what, pray?”

“That I am not a little insignificance to be passed by with indulgence.”

“Should you prefer severity?” and Perior, conscious that she had succeeded in “drawing” him, could not repress “You are an outrageous little egotist, Camelia.”

Camelia, her hands clasped over her knee, contemplated him with more gravity than he had expected.

“No,” she demurred, “selfish, but not egotistic. There is a difference, isn’t there? Egotism is subjective, selfishness objective. I wonder,” she added, “what you do think of me. Not that I care—much! Am I not frank? I must care, since I am shuffling about before you; getting a cuffing for my pains!” She rose suddenly, laughing, not in the least bitterly, and walked to the window.

“Mamma and Mary,” she announced. “Did Frances evade them? They disconcert her. Frances, you know, goes in for knowingness—cleverness—the modern vice. Don’t you hate clever people? Frances doesn’t dare talk epigrams to me; I can’t stand it. You saw a lot of Mamma and Mary last winter, didn’t you? Took Mary out riding. Now, come here, Mr. Perior, and tell me how she looked on horseback.”

Camelia was smiling irrepressibly as he joined her, and they watched the approach of the two ladies across the lawn. Certainly the angular, thick-set form of the younger gave no hint of pleasing possibilities under circumstances so trying as the equestrian.

“I never could wheedle Mary into the saddle. I should like to see her on horseback immensely.” Camelia’s eyes twinkled: “A sort of cowering desperation, wasn’t it?”

“No, she rode rather nicely,” said Perior concisely. There was something rather brutal in Camelia’s comments as she stood there with such rhythmic loveliness of pose and contour.

“I wish Mary did not look so much like a milk pudding,” she went on; “a raisinless milk pudding—so sane, so formless, so uneventful.”

Perior did not smile.