CAMILLA
I
THE village of Gorseley lay among the South Downs five or six miles distant from the Hampshire capital. Camilla, coming over the hills towards it, met, one after the other, two horsemen, each of whom stopped to put to her the same question:
"How is Mrs. Brodhurst?"
"O! ever so much better, thank you. She seems quite herself again."
The first speaker, the young local doctor, Mr. Marks, nodded cheerily, with a "That's capital," and passed on his busy way; the second, Mr. Robert Spurling, Vicar of St. Woolnoth's, dismounted and walked beside the young lady.
"She has not asked for me, I suppose?" he said.
He was an ascetic young man, tall, dark, eagle-featured, much under the neighbouring Keble influence, and intensely in earnest. He had the passions of a dogmatist, a perilous equipment, and not a vestige of a sense of humour.
Camilla shook her head, shook her chestnut ringlets momentarily over her face; for this was the era of neat partings, and dropping curls, and little cosy bonnets of a Quaker cast. She had rolls of fur round her neck and round the hems of her plain brown dress and long-skirted jacket; and at her throat snuggled a bow of ribbon as blue as her eyes.
Mr. Spurling walked on for some moments in silence, with compressed lips. He was a bachelor, contemplating matrimony, and ardently attracted to this fair neighbour, who had not been so long in his parish as to stale of her romantic novelty. But there were objections. The mother was little better than a heathen, and obstinately deaf to the call. There were associates, moreover—or, to speak correctly, one associate—of a particularly undesirable character. He felt that, even if accepted, he would be at an ungodly discount in such a household—soiled through his connexion. Only the girl herself (she was twenty-seven, by the way) was elect—a sweet rose to have blossomed from such a stem. She seemed in all things dutiful, submissive, a lovely tranquil mind, a pastoral saint. He pictured her the very shepherdess of quiet thoughts; he dreamt of the lambs she might sanctify to him. He could riot in imagery, like all passionate zealots, and that was his danger.
They walked on together, without a word spoken between them, until they topped the hill and descended towards a copse beside which stood the sailless blackened hulk of a windmill, burnt out in some forgotten night of long ago. It was a February day of noisy winds and hammering showers soon spent. The branches of the trees were strung with drops like rainbow buds; in the little wood the leafless shafts of the birches stood up like silver scaffolding poles, raised ready for the building of the coming spring. All the world was bright with joy and promise; only the windmill blotted the green and blue, a memento mori, the skeleton at the feast. It hung, a cindery anomaly, in the vicar's vision; how could he wed a woman whose loved mother was doomed to eternal perdition?
"I am deeply sorry," he said suddenly. "I had hoped to entreat a claim upon her consideration other than that proper to my office; but so long as she remains obdurate and deaf to the appeals of religion my lips are closed. I bid you a very good day, Miss Brodhurst."
The implication was unmistakable. He had spoken with the prescriptive assurance of his cloth—as a vicar, contemplating wedlock, to a penniless parishioner. These people were poor, but they baffled him—the mother so independent, the girl so orthodox. And yet she, the latter, never seemed distressed in her mind. He supposed she had very little. She had actually smiled on him as he remounted to leave her.
Truth to tell Camilla would have married him if desired. Filially, she did most things that she was told. Nevertheless there were some idiosyncrasies in her that he never suspected—an odd vein of resolution for one; for another, a sense of what he wholly lacked—humour.
She went past the copse, past the windmill, and down the hill to the main road, striking which at a half-mile from the village, she came to the Dingle-nook, her cottage home.
A fat unclean Frenchman of middle age, heavy of jaw, fierce of eye, with close-clipped scalp and a smudge of black hair on his upper lip, met her at the door. He was in a baggy suit of brown 'dittoes,' so called, soiled and large of check, and a limp full collar, innocent of stock or tie, embraced his wattle-like neck.
"A la bonne heure!" he said, in his vibrant overbearing voice: "She is well, the little mother; she has never been so well. Come in and see."
She was well, the worn-out invalid, in the sense that suffering is well over. It was the leap of the guttering candle-flame. That night an express reached Dr. Marks, who lived in a farther suburban village, summoning him to the cottage. Camilla came from the death-room as he hurried up the stairs. Her eyes were tearless; there was a lost amazed look in them.
"Too late?" he whispered.
Her lips moved, but no sound came from them.
He took her hand and led her to the little room below, where the Frenchman, white and agitated, paced the carpet. There Camilla sank into a chair, her pathetic eyes fixed upon the ungainly figure. The doctor left them together while he went upstairs again.
II
It was February of the year 1859 when Camilla was thus orphaned. The Brodhursts, mother and daughter, had come to settle in Gorseley towards the latter part of 1857. The mother, an incurable invalid, had been medically ordered, it was understood, complete rest and seclusion; hence their arrival in the remote village, casually recommended to them.
The sentence, to one of Mrs. Brodhurst's constitution, had been virtually a sentence of death. She had known herself from the first incapable of supporting the ennui of an existence so "stale, flat, and unprofitable"; yet life, or the residue of it which remained to her, had not seemed worth economising. It was merely to prolong a pain which, like an unassuageable tooth- ache, could be ended at a single wrench. And she regarded her certain doom unemotionally. She was not, she said, going to complain of her ejection from an entertainment into which she had been dragged, kicking and squealing. She had cried when she was born; it would be the highest inconsistence to snivel over her departure. Moreover, Camilla, perhaps for the first time in her life, was realising her natural habitat.
That last pretext, given with some good-humoured contempt, may have come the nearest to the truth. The mother and daughter were, in all essential characteristics, poles apart, the one nervous, brilliant, spirituelle; the other simple, placid, unassuming. Camilla, in her mother's philosophy, had always figured as a rather negligible prude, oddly lacking in originality. The girl amused her, but for her negative rather than her positive qualities. She appreciated her sweetness, of course; she loved her prettiness; but the two were never comrades in the intimate sense, and they lived their lives together rather as employer and "companion" than as parent and child.
But the asperities of conscious wit are wont to soften with age, and the mother had come, perhaps in the prospect of the wider light, to recognise dimly in Camilla certain qualities of uncomplaining self-sacrifice and self-effacement to which she had hitherto been blind. The girl, the woman, had endured long in her service, trusted but unconfided-in, hating in her heart, she suspected now, the life of social restlessness and cabal to which she had condemned her, longing for the quiet of uneventful places. Possibly, had Camilla been suffered her bent ear her, she would have realised herself, would have married. It might not be too late yet; she might discover, in the atmosphere of rural orthodoxy, that soul's affinity which all the crowded life of cities had been unable to produce for her—poor and unrecommended as she was. It would be right to make a virtue of necessity by giving her the chance. And so the two had arrived at Gorseley; and almost immediately Mr. Spurling had come into evidence.
Mrs. Brodhurst had laughed, rallying her droll Camilla on her conquest. But she was disposed to do little more, least of all to concede another point to her own sacrifice. She had done all that could be expected of her in this pastoral self-immurement; she was not going to cease to be herself for all the orthodox divines in the world. She should have left herself behind, indeed, had she wished her magnanimity to bear fruit. As it was, she shocked the vicar infinitely more by her heterodoxy and neglect of spiritual observances than ever Camilla gratified him by her pious dutifulness.
But indeed the world had always stood paramount in the good lady's interests. Born St. Marie, the daughter of Bourbonist refugees long settled in England, she had married in 1830 Commander Brodhurst, who, ten years later, had been killed at the bombardment of Acre. Left a widow then, with a little daughter of nine and a quite inadequate pension supplemented by some scant private means, she had forthwith plunged into political intrigue, as a means of relief from that tædium vitæ which is imposed upon the necessitous. The little house in London, towards which she had finally gravitated, had become a petty centre of conspiracy—mostly talk and innocuous—which made some bright spirits, madam herself among the rest, a whetstone for their wits. It had amounted to a pocket salon, in fact, of a political complexion, and there were hatched, for plots, whole nests of wind-eggs. No wonder that in such an atmosphere Camilla, right daughter of her father, the plain seaman and Churchman, had found herself out of her element. And yet her simple nature had halted between sorrow and gladness when the decree, banishing her mother—by then a hopeless invalid—from active life was issued; and she had found infinitely pathetic that adaptation of the inevitable to her own late-considered interests. Beneath her quiet exterior was always a most wistful filial worship.
Pathetic, in its conception, indeed, might have been the mother's resolve; unfortunately Mrs. Brodhurst had not the nerve to maintain the self-sacrificial pose. She might make a virtue of necessity; she could not make a grace. Shrewd, caustic, witty, a woman of the world having infinite interests and vivacity, the atmosphere to which she had committed herself proved sterilising beyond her worst expectations. Mr. Spurling in himself was an epitome of its solemn dullness, its narrow respectability, the capacity of its insignificant minds for bearing monolithic prejudice, social and spiritual. She had come here to die, but not to be tortured to death; and she was very soon crying out on, and "crying-off," her own martyrdom. It was the Chevalier du Garde alone, who saved her to reason and to resignation.
He was there, in the cottage, one day, and thenceforth he remained—a rather gross unparticular gaillard, with black eyebrows that met, a fund of anecdote, and an excited witty tongue. Camilla, coming home from a walk, had found him already established as a guest. Recovering from her first amazement, she had been given to understand that the Chevalier, a friend of her mother's but unknown to herself, had heard of their retirement, had come to call and was now to remain, on Mrs. Brodhurst's invitation, indefinitely. The two, it appeared, had been acquainted in London, and sufficiently intimately for the stranger to have ventured to bring with him a big decayed old valise, containing as much wardrobe as might serve for a week-end visit. But the visit had been prolonged, without any addition to the wardrobe, and, at the date of Mrs. Brodhurst's death, had already extended to over a year.
This odd intrusion had seemed to justify itself, Camilla thankfully admitted, in its effects. It had reconciled Mrs. Brodhurst to her fate, had restored to her some interest in an existence doomed, as it appeared, to an early and dreary extinction. The two cronies played piquet together, talked incessantly, dissected characters and anathematised existing Governments. They were at one, it seemed, in their criticism of all social, political and religious institutions; their human sympathies ran parallel—so much so that, in the opinion of Mr. Spurling, the coincidence of their principles, or want of them, amounted to no better than an exchange of heterodoxy from single harness into double. He had been gravely concerned before; he was now scandalised; and he made Camilla the scapegoat of his indignation.
And Camilla herself—poor Camilla? It was wrong, perverse, unmaidenly, she knew; yet in some naughty corner of her heart she had got to like the Chevalier. He was an unscrupulous, derisive creature, apt at innuendo none too refined; but his detractions, while she disapproved them, made her laugh, and somehow, she could not tell how, he seemed, after the manner of his countrymen, to understand women. Thus the most feminine of Camilla's sex, even to the saintly, betray themselves in their relish of a little sly backbiting. He had shocked and frightened her at first; he appeared, indeed, to take a mischievous pleasure in bringing the blush to her cheek, in holding her native prudery up to ridicule; but she always felt that inherent sympathy under his ribald banter. Even his slovenliness, his uncleanness, his disregard of conventions had ceased to offend her after a time, no less than his tolerant contempt for herself, from which, however, there grew a real tolerant affection. She amused him, as she did her mother; and perhaps, better than the parent, he recognised in her that underlying vein of humour which could find expression on occasion. He had never forgotten a certain retort of hers upon some sly pleasantry uttered by himself: "I would rather, for my part, that people should ask why a man had not married me than why he had."
"Hein!" But that is famous!" he had cried in his harsh, jeering voice; and from that moment he had loved her.
III
The funeral was a week over, and Camilla and the Chevalier remained on at the Dingle-nook. One morning Mr. Spurling was announced. The girl, white, large-eyed, came down in her black frock to greet him in the little parlour. He faced her with the orthodox expression of commiseration, but strangely penetrated by some subtler emotion.
"You are comforted, resigned to the Eternal Will?" he asked her.
"I shall never be resigned to my mother's loss," she answered low.
"God," he said, "may even constitute that your gain." His eyes burned upon her; his lips were dry; but he put force upon himself to control his passion—for it amounted to no less. "Conceive," he said, "that clearer, holier understanding in whose light the repentant sinner beholds the actions of her past. Would she not rejoice to recognise the fulfilment of your happiness in her loss? I think so; I think she sees at last and comprehends."
Camilla made no answer; and he went on: "But, in duty to the enlightened dead, a task still remains to our hands. There are tares to be gathered in and burnt, obstacles to be removed. There I may help you—more, I am commanded. And first as to your material circumstances. The pension ceases, I presume?"
"Yes, it ceases," said Camilla.
"I venture to ask," said the Vicar, "on the strength of information voluntarily offered. It was not your mother's way to make a secret of anything. To do her justice, she was as perfectly outspoken about her worldly as about her spiritual affairs—as about her principles, if one may call them so, religious, social and political. A Legitimist, I think, and true child by temperament of her wild nation. And what beyond the pension?"
"Very little, I fear," said Camilla. "But I hope, between us, we shall have enough to live on."
Spurling breathed out a soft echo of astonishment, "We shall have?"
"The Chevalier du Garde and I," explained the young woman.
"You propose living together?"
"It was my mother's wish," said Camilla. "I promised her, when—when she was dying."
"It cannot possibly be. It must not be, I say." He had come even prepared for some such thunder-clap; yet the directness of it took his breath away. "Do you understand what you are suggesting? It is incredible that the man should have so lingered on under the circumstances. But he must go now—or you must go."
"My mother," whispered the girl; but he interrupted her.
"Your mother was not the fittest judge—you oblige me to say it. I have the reputation of my parish to consider—the welfare of my flock. Where is this man? I had better see him himself."
She barred his way. There was a look in her eyes, if he had only understood it.
"Mr. Spurling, I promised. I will not break my promise. You might kill him, for I will tell you the truth—he suffers from advanced heart disease, and the shock of my mother's death has already terribly affected him. And there is something more which I will take upon myself to confide to your honour. The Chevalier is a political refugee."
"From what?"
"I do not know."
The Vicar shook his head.
"I do not suppose you do; but it all makes no difference. I can hardly characterise as I should desire the moral insensibility which could impose such a task on you. The man must go." He stopped, gathering at last some faint understanding of the emotion in her face. "If only for my sake," he said, in a changed hoarse voice, "you will not re-erect a fallen barrier between us. Need I speak more plainly?"
"I shall never leave the Chevalier till he dies," answered the girl dully, steadily. "I pledged my word to my mother that I would not."
He was greatly angered. He had fancied that last plea irresistible, and his personal vanity was offended. He was really very much in love with this beautiful creature who had come so overwhelmingly into his life, and the surprise of opposition where he had looked, the great obstacle being removed, for submissive dependence, added fuel to his fire.
"You will not?" he said. "We shall see. In the meantime, as pastor of my flock, and accountable to heaven for its incorruption, I must not appear even to condone by silence a situation so scandalous. I warn you from my fold; my Church declines you; should you persist in attending it, it will be at the risk of a public denunciation."
"I may not come to celebration?" she asked, her voice trembling a little.
"No," he said; "I speak for the Divinity you affront," and, taking up his hat, he left the cottage.
IV
The man who speaks too confidently for God, at heart implies his own omniscience. Dogmatism is arrogance; it is Humility that can hold all good human faiths in her arms. Spurling's passion, like his belief, was dogmatic. Its narrow self-sufficiency could conceive no legitimate worship but its own. He loved in the one right way, and his love was not to be questioned or its way disputed. His passion, being controverted, could have burnt this obstinate heretic in its own fierce miserable fires. Condemned to feed upon itself, it waxed gross, abnormal. From the morning of his interview with Camilla he never knew a happy moment.
It was, if he had known, the affront to his "professional" vanity which most poisoned. The condescending minister in him had been flouted, and by a comparative stranger.
It was not thus the elect of his cloth were wont to suffer rebuffs—least of all in the homes of incense-proffering virgins. For the moment he believed he hated the girl, with a purely righteous hatred.
Unhappy sophistry. How could one righteously hate what one so passionately desired? The fate of the man exorcised of the single unclean spirit was coming to be his. It maddened him presently to find how literally the girl accepted her sentence. She kept away from the church; she avoided all contact with himself. Yet she remained impenitent, faithful to her dishonourable undertaking. So he decreed it, and so, presently, in his most torturing possession, he believed it. She was true to her trust. Why, when the Church by which she held had pronounced against its inviolability?
Presently it ceased to be with him a moral question at all; it became solely a question of his will against hers—a combat merely animal in its temper. He lusted for conquest and possession. He must have her or perish.
All this time he had refrained from giving effect to his threat of denunciation. More, he had used his authority, indirectly, to excuse, to defend her position. It was the fruit, he implied, of a promise thoughtlessly exacted; it would end with the recovery and departure of the foreigner.
And then one day he learned casually that Camilla and her charge had given notice to quit possession of the cottage, and that in a month they would be gone—together.
The news quite crushed him for the instant. She would go—she could go, retorting thus effectively upon his interference? Well, he had brought it upon himself, and the conquest of will was to her, the creature all apparent gentleness and submission.
That night he was more like a wild animal than an orthodox divine. The one evil spirit was replaced by the seven, and he knew himself for what he was, a soul rent and demented by jealousy. Yes, jealousy—jealousy of the gross ungainly creature, who had come to illustrate in himself the penchant of the softer sex—the softer sex!—for grotesqueness and abnormality. A witty tongue, a flattering imagination had counted with Camilla above all the claims of moral excellence. He even bethought himself that there might have been a double entente in that plea of heart disease, that it had expressed a heart affection of another and corrupter order. To what was this travesty of devotion due—to the girl's up-bringing; to her misdirected enthusiasms?
He fell suddenly and mortally calm. A thought had crossed his mind, so new, so startling and yet so inevitable, that he was amazed it had not occurred to him before. The Chevalier was a political refugee. Very well: he, Spurling, had not abused the trust which had informed him of the fact. But would it be abusing any trust to enlarge, for his own purposes (of retaliation, in fact) on that restricted confidence? He declared not, his eyes glowing with fanatic vindictiveness. He got out certain references—papers and periodicals, which had survived from last year's litter.
The Orsini plot—that was what he wanted; the plot which had closed abortively, in the month of January, in the attempted assassination of the Emperor Napoleon in Paris. Three bombs had been thrown, killing or mutilating a number of people; but the Emperor himself had escaped. Most of the principals and their tools, all Italian malcontents, had been seized and dealt with at the time; a few, it was believed, had got away. The plot had been devised in London, and matured there about the date of Mrs. Brodhurst's flight to the country. That lady, no doubt, was not to be suspected of participation in it; but, as to her sympathies—that was another matter. She had intrigued; she was a violent Bourbonist; what more probable than that she would have been willing to give asylum to one implicated in the affair, and flying from its consequences? And the Chevalier had appeared in Gorseley coincidently with the hue and cry.
Mr. Spurling took a sheet of note-paper, and wrote a brief letter to the head of the detective force in London.
"There may be something or nothing in it," he muttered, his face very white. "At least there is no harm in trying. She does not know the worst. It may open her eyes to the man's true character. I owe it to myself, to her, to end, if possible, this scandal."
So his passion and his conscience were reconciled.
V
Camilla came down to the little parlour, to find two men, the Vicar and a stranger, awaiting her. The former, biting his lower lip, bowed stiffly, gloomily.
"I am sorry," he said, "to hear of this sudden attack; sorry in the necessity of calling you from your self-imposed duties."
"The doctor is there," she answered, and no more. But there was an alert look in her quiet eyes, a spot of colour on her cheek that he found it difficult to interpret.
"Nevertheless," he said, "I cannot regard our visit as inopportune, seeing the issues that hang upon it. This gentleman"—he signified the stranger—"is a detective officer from Scotland Yard. He has been making some enquiries lately in the neighbourhood—with what result I give you my honour that I do not know."
"Yes," she said, in the same even tone: "We suspected as much. The heart attack was directly due to that apprehension—that fear."
"I would not," he said, "have had that so. Yet the admission, in a way, implying, as it does, some suggestion of knowledge, makes my task easier. Have you any suspicion, Miss Brodhurst, as to who it may be that you have been harbouring in your house these long months?"
"I do not suspect. I know."
"You do? And who"
"It is Francesca Villani. She was implicated in the Orsini plot."
The detective uttered a sound as of a man happily vindicated in a theory. But Spurling uttered no sound—no word. He stood completely dumb-stricken.
At length, drawing a deep breath, he spoke, with difficulty:
"Francesca, did you say—did I understand?"
"That is so, sir," put in the detective. "Francesca Villani—an Italian, safe enough. I have a warrant here for her arrest. I had to keep close, you see, about my suspicions, until confirmed. She was supposed to have taken up some sort of male disguise, and your letter gave us the clue."
Spurling made an impatient gesture, as if to silence him.
"A woman?" He said it with a little groaning sigh, never taking his haunted eyes off the girl's face. And she regarded him as steadily.
"Yes, a woman," she answered.
"How could I know?"
"You could not. I myself only learned the truth the night my mother died."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"I had no right. I had vowed to her. It was not to be for long, she said, since Francesca was already doomed. The wonder was she lived on at all. O, it was pathetic—those two; and" her voice quivered a little; but she fought down her emotion. "So brave, so bright, so stricken; but one gone the other could not stay long—and she died an hour ago."
"Died!" He almost cried it. The detective checked himself in a hurried movement, and stood aghast.
"Did you think," said Camilla, "that I should have confessed otherwise? I have not broken my trust. You may know at last, since it no longer matters. You may know everything if you will—just as I received it from Francesca's dying lips. She had lived in Paris a great deal, but she was in London when the horrible attempt was made. She had taken no part in it, and the knowledge of her name being implicated almost killed her. It was Italian independence for which she plotted; she knew that no good cause was ever won by crime. Is there anything more you would like to be told, Mr. Spurling?"
He took a step towards her, his hands entreating, his chest heaving.
"I only did what my duty demanded," he said. His voice was quite broken. "Camilla!"
The girl, her eyebrows raised, looked from him to the detective, and back again.
"I am sure of it," she answered; "and that you may have thought you were justified in your estimate of what I was capable of. You did quite right, holding such an opinion of me, and quite right in sending for the police to help you in resolving a moral difficulty. And I dare say, anyhow, that poor Francesca would not have lived another week."
All her forced composure seemed to go out of her with the word, and she turned with a little cry to encounter the figure of the doctor who at that moment entered the room. Marks seized her hands into his, bade her instantly to be seated, and stood, his light arm over her shoulders, while she leaned her head, with closed eyes, against him.
"Sorry, Spurling," he said. "But you must say whatever else you've got to say to me. I know all about it, necessarily, you see—have known for a day or two. Well, the poor woman is dead, and beyond our righteous machinations. But for the question of this lady's disinterested devotion to a trust, I hold myself answerable. Miss Brodhurst has been terribly overtaxed of late, and I say that the thing must end. You will understand, I'm sure, when I tell you that she and I are to be married."