MARY came for Camelia one morning while Perior was with her, to tell her that Jane Hicks was dying and asking for her. Mary saw that Camelia’s promptitude, where compunction blushed, gratified Perior, as did Jane’s devotion; she knew that he supposed the devotion based upon some new blossoming of thoughtful kindness in Camelia, and the ironic bitterness of this reflection was in no way made easier to Mary as she heard Camelia, while they all three walked to the farm, confess dejectedly to the one visit.

“I should have gone again!” Camelia repeated with sincerest self-reproach, and Mary could see that though he assented to the reproach her contrition lifted her in his estimation. Perior waited below while Camelia and Mary went up together. Camelia came down weeping; Mary’s face was quite impassive.

The poor girl had died with her hand in Camelia’s, her eyes fixed on the lovely Madonna head that bent over her with a beautiful piteousness, like a vision at the gates of heaven. Jane closed her eyes on that vision. She had not had one look for Mary, though her perfunctory thanks—the winding up of the trifling duties remaining to her on earth—had been feebly breathed out to her some hours before. Mary saw that she had been very unnecessary to Jane, and that the unknown Camelia, Camelia’s one smile, the one golden hour Camelia’s beauty had given her, made the brightness, the poetry, the symbolized radiance of things unseen and hoped for that had remained with the dying girl during the last months of her life. Mary was very still in walking back with the others. Camelia sobbed, and stumbled in the heavy road, so that Perior gave her his arm and held her, looking pityingly, more than pityingly, at the bent head and shaking shoulders. Mary felt her own lack of emotion to be unbecoming, but, indeed, she had none, was conscious instead of a dislike for poor, dead Jane.

For Mary was a most unhappy creature. Outside the inner circle, where Perior and Camelia wondered about, and evaded, one another, the very closeness of constant intercourse making blindness easy, Mary saw the truth, that Camelia did not see, very clearly. With her preconceived and half-mistaken ideas as to that truth, it remained one-sided. Perior loved Camelia; loved, and had weakly crawled back to her, craving at least the crumbs of friendship,—and that she was lavish with her crumbs who could deny?—since all else had been refused to him. Mary spent her days in a quivering contemplation of this fact. The bitter, sweet consolation of the whole truth never entered her mind. Camelia loving, and Camelia repulsed, was an imagining too monstrous for vaguest embodiment. Camelia’s own naÏve vanity would not have surpassed in stupefaction Mary’s sensations, had such a possibility been suggested to her. Camelia, who could have anybody, love Mr. Perior? She would have voiced her astonishment even more baldly. Not that Mary thought Mr. Perior nobody. To her he was everybody; but that knowledge was her painful joy, a perception lifting her above Camelia. Camelia judged by the world’s gross standards, and, by those standards, she must stoop in loving Perior.

That Camelia should stoop in the world’s eyes, that Camelia should do anything but soar, were unimaginable things. So her ignorance made her knowledge more bitter. The man she loved, adored,—her bleached, starved nature spreading every flower, stretching every tendril, her ideal and her rapture towards him,—that man did not see her, even. She was no one; a dusty little moth beating dying wings near the ground, and his eyes were fixed on the exquisite butterfly tilting its white loveliness in the sunshine. Under her stolid silence Mary was burning, panting. His misery, her doom, and Camelia’s indifference,—at the thought of all these a madness of helpless rebellion swam about her; and with a growing sense of weakness came a growing terror of self-betrayal. For she was dying, that was Mary’s second secret; there was even a savage pleasure in the thought of absolute and consummated wretchedness hidden so carefully. Hysterical sobs rose in her throat when she thought of it, and of their blindness. The sobs were nearly choking her one day as she sat alone in the morning-room casting up accounts.

Perior had been with Camelia in the library for two hours, and he had not come into the morning-room, though over two hours ago poor Mary had stationed herself there in the sorry hope of seeing him. The little touch of abandonment stabbed more deeply than ever on this morning, when her head was so heavy, her chest so hollow, breathing so difficult, all her sick self so in need of pitying gentleness and sympathy; and though no tears fell, that rising, strangling sob was in her throat. There was shame, too; her very rectitude was crumbling in her weakness and wretchedness; the wretchedness had seemed to exonerate her when, exasperated by envy and long waiting, she had gone to the library door and put her ear to the key-hole, like a base thing, to listen.

Since everything had abandoned her she might as well abandon herself, so she told herself recklessly; but she had only heard Camelia’s clear, sweet voice; and Camelia was reading Greek! Mary could only feel the irony as cruel, and on regaining her place at the writing-table she found herself shaking, and overwhelmed with self-disgust and a sort of desperation.

When Perior came in very shortly afterwards she could almost have risen to meet him with a scream of reproach. The mere imagining of such a strange revelation made her dizzy as he approached her.

“I had not seen you. I am just off. How are you, Mary?” he asked. In spite of the mad imaginings Mary’s mask was on in one moment, the white, stolid mask, as she turned her face to him.

“Very well, thanks.”

“You don’t look very well.”

“Oh, I am, thanks.” Mary averted her eyes.

Perior’s brow had an added look of gloom this morning. His eyes followed hers. The drizzling rain half blotted out the first faint purpling of the trees. “What a dreary day!” he ejaculated, with a long, involuntary sigh. He was not thinking of Mary; she saw that very plainly, though her eyes were fixed on the blurred tree-tops.

“Very dreary,” she echoed. He looked down at her again, this time with a certain pain and interest that Mary did not see. On his own thoughts, the perplexing juggling of “If she still loves me as I love her, why resist?” the ensuing fear of yielding, and yielding for no better reason than that he could not resist, broke the thought of Mary. It could not be a very big thought. Mary was a quiet, uneventful little person, spending a contented existence under her aunt’s wings, useful often as a whip wherewith to lash Camelia, but pitiful mainly from his sense of the contrast of which he really believed Mary quite unconscious. Something, now, in her still face, in the lax weariness of her thin hand, lying on the account book, roused in him a groping instinct. He looked at the hand with a certain surprise. Its thinness was remarkable.

“You do look badly, Mary,” he said. “Tell me, are you dreary, too? Can I do anything for you? We must have some rides when it grows finer.” His thoughts, as usual, gave Camelia an accusing blow.

“You are bored, tired, unhappy like the rest of us, Mary. Is that any consolation?” He smiled at her. She felt the smile in his voice, but did not dare to meet it, bending her head over the account books.

“Don’t do those stupid sums!”

“Oh, I like them!” Indeed, the scrupulous duties were her one frail barrier against the black sea of engulfing thought. And then, her heart just rising in the false but delicious joy of his kind presence, came a call, a call not dreary like the day, but fatally sweet and clear, the sound of it as if a flower had suddenly flung open rosy petals on the grayness.

“Alceste, come here! I want you.”

“Our imperious Camelia,” said Perior with a slight laugh. “Well, good-bye, Mary. Don’t do any more sums, and don’t look at the rain. Get a nice, cheerful book and sit down at the fire. Amuse yourself, won’t you?” He clasped her hand and was gone.

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 attitude 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 hoarsely.

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 hoarse 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 impassiveness 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 encompassed 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 gods, 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, snatched 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.

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 assumed 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 pass, and then, by the same hidden path, she could go home and confront her. Beyond that crash Mary did not look. It seemed final.