BUT retribution followed Camelia’s manœuvre. On the advent of Mr. Rodrigg, very red and hot after a long country walk with Lord Haversham (who also had axes to grind), Perior said good-bye, remounted his horse, and rode off. It was six o’clock, a warmly rosy evening. The hot gold was gone, but in the sunset influences there was a certain oppression. Perior yawned and rode slowly along the strip of turf that bordered the dusty road. But though he felt physically very indolent, his mind was delightfully alert, weaving busily, with a sense of freedom and joyousness, a web of hopeful imaginings, swinging the illusive, intangible filaments from point to point of the afternoon’s experience. Nothing, in his estimation, could raise Camelia much above the level to which that cluster of frivolous lies had sunk her; his very heart ached when he thought of them—especially of the lie to Arthur; but the tears of last week, though his reason denied their influence, had in reality touched, surprised, and softened him, and made him hopeful. And now came the smiles, the sincerity, the sweetness of this afternoon; he could not distrust them. The idealist impulse—the master mood of his nature, though reined in so often by bitter experience, began to evolve an ell from thesupposititious inch of excellence. The possibility of moral worth; the implication of some real rectitude of soul, that her truth to him seemed to justify; the formative power of a real affection for Arthur: so Perior wove his spider web, working as the spider does, from the merest foothold, and bridging chasms with a shining thread of trust.
Yet alas! for Camelia—that afternoon had certainly been a bungling piece of mismanagement, a covetous snatching at the present, a foolhardy forgetting of the future.
Perior met Mary returning in the dog-cart. He had not forgotten Mary, nor his suspicions of self-sacrifice. He turned his horse’s head again and proposed to ride back with her. Yes, he had plenty of time; and in assuring her of it he smiled his kindest smile, and the pony and the horse fell into a walk. The hours under the copper-beech, with Camelia’s white dress, and Camelia’s shining head to look at, had seemed delightfully cool and pleasant, yet the autumn afternoon had been a hot one, and Mary’s face was flushed, tired, and to her own knowledge, even a little tremulous.
“Did you have a nice afternoon?” he asked her.
“Oh, very, thanks,” the habit of submissive gratitude was too strong to be mastered at the first moment, though she added, “Camelia told you howsorryI was?”
“Yes, but I am still wounded. I did not think you would have deserted me for the babies of Copley.”
It was rather useless to attempt humor with Mary, for even he could interpret as alarmed anddistressed the look of her face as it turned to him.
“Oh! but I did not want to go!” she exclaimed; “you know that! Camelia wished it—she had a headache, and said Mrs. Grier expected her, so, though I was quite ready for our ride, looking forward to it so much, I had to go; but I didn’t want to—indeed I was dreadfully disappointed—” And then suddenly the sense of injury, of resentment, of dismay at herself that she should wish to display that resentment—should wish to retaliate for humiliations too deep for display, getting altogether the better of her, two large tears—and Mary had been swallowing tears all the afternoon—rolled suddenly down her cheeks and splashed upon her dusty gloves.
“Why, Mary!Mary!” said Perior, aghast.
She searched for her handkerchief in hasty confusion. “How silly I am! I can’t help it; it has been so hot, I am so tired.”
“My poor child!” But Perior was more stricken than the sympathy of his tone made manifest. His pity sprang comprehendingly to Mary, but a deeper emotion underlay it. It was as if Mary had thrust that dusty dog-skin glove right through his beautiful, fragile spider web, and as he was dashed from his illusion his thoughts gathered themselves in quick bitter avengefulness.
“You were ready? dressed, you say?” he was already sure of Camelia’s falseness, but he wished to define it, to see just how much she had lied, to see just how far went her heartlessness.
“Yes,” Mary could not restrain the plaintivenote, though she was drying her eyes in a sort of terror over her weakness.
“And Camelia forced you to go?”
“Oh, don’t think that!” Mary had thought it, but the words spoken by him shocked her. “She did not know how much I had set my heart on the ride, and it would have been a pity had Mrs. Grier been disappointed. That is what Camelia thought of—” and Mary quite believed Camelia as far as that went; but the cruel manner of discharging her duty! the deep injury of the forces brought to bear! The memory of them rose irrepressibly, poignantly.
“How considerate of Camelia!” Perior’s anger made any careful analysis of Camelia’s motives impossible. She had shirked an irksome duty, and kept him to entertain her laziness. The latter fact did not in the least mollify him; it was of a piece with her grasping selfishness, Mary’s pleasure not weighing a feather’s weight against the momentary wish. She had gone to “hurry” Mary, and on her return from the cousinly little errand, had given him the impression of Mary’s uninfluenced change of plan—even implying curates as its cause! Liar! The word almost choked him as he kept it down, for he did not want Mary to know her a liar.
“She went to your room to ask you to go?” he pursued, choosing a safe question.
But his persistence aroused in Mary a certain dim suspicion.
“Yes,” she said; “she was surprised to see me dressed. She did not know I was going with you.” The very force of her inner resentment—a hatingresentment, as she felt with terror—made her grasp at an at least outward loyalty. But hardly had she spoken the words when the suspicion, definite, tingling with probability, leaped upon her. She looked quickly at Perior. He was white to the lips. This revelation fairly silenced him. He put his horse to the trot, and the dog-cart, hastening its pace, kept beside him.
Mary could hardly have spoken. Her mind was in a whirl of broken, distracted thoughts, that only grew to coherence when the wave-like conviction of Camelia’s mean robbery broke over her.
Perior’s scorning rage meanwhile hurried forward to wreak itself on Camelia; he was conscious only of its scorching.
They reached the park gates in silence; then Mary was able to say, “Are you coming in?”
“Yes, I will come in for a moment.”
“You—you won’t say anything about—my silliness?”
“My dear Mary, I must speak to Camelia; but you have accused her of nothing, nor shall she think you have. I will come for you to-morrow,” he added as he helped her down from the dog-cart at the door; “we will have our ride. Don’t be persuaded out of it either. Let other people do their own charities. It won’t harm them.”
Lady Paton was in the hall, a cool, gentle embodiment of the evening. “Mary brought you back?—You are going to dine, Michael?” she asked.
“No; I only want to see Camelia for a moment.”
“I have just come from her. She is with Mr.Rodrigg, talking politics,” and Lady Paton’s smile implied the softest pride in Camelia’s prowess in that pursuit. “She says you have had an old-time afternoon, reading together. You must take up your reading again, Michael—for the time that she is left to us.”
Mary, going slowly up the stairs, bent her head as she heard, “Yes: he had stayed with Camelia all the afternoon.” He did not care to ride with her—no, for all his kindness, the pleasure of the rides was poisoned forever. That was the thought that, at the sight of him, had cut her to the quick, bringing the tears to her eyes. More than Camelia’s lie, Camelia’s cruelty in dealing her that humiliation, burned. When she thought of it the blackness of her own heart terrified her. She felt that she hated Camelia, and when she reached her room, she bolted the door and fell on her bed in an agony of weeping.
Camelia perhaps counted a little too confidently upon Mary’s “adoration” for her. To Mary, Camelia had always seemed the bright personification of beauty, cleverness, joy. She had wondered at her, rather than admired her. Her attitude of mind had been as that of a child staring at the unattainable moon, shining silvery-gold, and sailing far above in a wide clear sky.
She had seldom been conscious in the past of any slight or injury. Her most constant feeling was one of quiet duty. Camelia’s little kindnesses surprised her; her unkindnesses she took as a matter of course. But now, in this dreadful clash of ill-matched interests, her life against Camelia’s game, all the sense ofduty, of gratitude, of admiration, went down in black shipwreck. She found that they had been flimsy things, after all, that under their peaceful surface there had been for many weeks a lava-like heaving of resentment. And the worst terror was to see her life bereft of all supports—to see it unblessed, all hatred and despair. For even at the moment she could judge herself, measure how much she had lost in losing her blind humility—that at least gave calm and a certain self-respect—could accuse herself of injustice. Camelia had lied; but then Camelia could never have divined the rash folly of Mary’s secret—must never divine it; and the cruel humiliation of that one blighting intimation of Perior’s charity hurt more than the lie; and Camelia’s ignorance of the hurt she had inflicted only made it ache the more.
MEANWHILE Perior marched off to the garden. He passed through the morning-room where Mrs. Fox-Darriel was writing.
“So you didn’t get your ride either?” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, who had her own reasons—and not at all complex ones—for disliking Mr. Perior. “Itwasrather hot.”
Perior in his indifference did not even divine the suspicion that saw in his arrival, and Camelia’s defection and amusing headache, a portentousness threatening to the object she had set her heart upon.
Perior replied shortly, and it was with very little love that she watched him walk over the lawn. Camelia really was a fool, and who knew how far her folly might not go.
Camelia was still under the copper-beech, and still talking to Mr. Rodrigg. Perior perforce acknowledged her innocence of flirtatious methods. Her earnest pose—elbows on the arm of her chair, hands clasped, head gravely intent—denoted the seriousness with which she took her rôle.
Mr. Rodrigg’s smile might have warned her. He balanced a teaspoon neatly on his cup, and looked from it to her, vastly unimpressed as to the real purport of the conversation.
Perior’s mood was too miserable, too savage, to allow him more than a mere dart of cynical amusement at her folly. Camelia turned her head, surprised at seeing him. Smiling a complacent little smile she patted the chair beside her.
“So you came back after all.”
“Yes.” The nipped monosyllable, like a suddendoucheof icy water, told her that since he had left her their relations had changed, and changed very much for the worse. Her conjectures sprang immediately to Mary. Bother Mary! what had she said? But at the thought of what she might have said Camelia knew that her heart was shaking. Her look, on a first impulse, would have been entreating, but in the presence of a third person it grew cold in answer to his, and she turned again to Mr. Rodrigg.
“Go, on, please; I want your answer. I have still that one fallacy to demolish, you know.”
Mr. Rodrigg observed Perior affably; he was a really important opponent. “Miss Paton wishes, I believe, to institute a sort of eighteenth century rôle for women in politics,” he said, “the rôle that obtained in France during that ominous century. She expects to rule England through hercauseries.”
“Indeed, I fancy that England would be very prettily ruled!” said Camelia, laughing.
Perior switched the dust on his boots and made no reply.
“You have been reading, I hear,” Mr. Rodrigg continued, seizing gratefully the chance of escaping from the bill, “a very interesting number of theRevue des Deux Mondes. I looked at it a day or two since: the serial romance is quite a new departure in style. There is certainly new leaven working in French literature. The revolt from naturalism is very significant, very interesting, though some of the extremes of opposition, such as symbolism, tend to become as unhealthy.”
“Symbolism, mysticism, in the modern naturalistic French writer, is merely the final form of decadence,” Camelia observed with some sententiousness, feeling Perior’s silent presence as an impulsion towards artificiality in tone and manner, “the irridescent stage of decay—pardon me for being nasty—but they are so nasty! I have had quite enough of theRevue des Deux Mondes—so to business, Mr. Rodrigg.” But though Camelia was quite willing to ignore the new-comer, Mr. Rodrigg insisted on dragging him into the running, until at last, perceiving a most unencouraging unwillingness, he rose and left him to thetête-à-têtefor which he had evidently returned, going off to the house very good-humoredly. Perior’s position was altogether unique, and not one of Camelia’s lovers gave his intimacy a thought.
As Mr. Rodrigg’s wide back disappeared through the morning-room windows Camelia turned her head to Perior.
“Well,” she said, leaning back in her chair and putting her finger-tips together with a pleasantly judicial air, “what have you to say? You look very glum.”
“I met Mary, Camelia.”
“Ah! Did she have a good afternoon?”
“No; I fancy it was as dull to her as it would have been to you.”
“Impossible. Mary loves such things; besides, I do not find them dull.”
Perior looked at her.
“What a liar you are,” he said. If hate and scorn could wither, Camelia felt they would then have withered her; she quite recognized them in his tone.
But she was able to say with apparent calm—not crediting the endurance of those unkind sentiments towards her, “indeed; you have called me that before.”
“Will you deny,” said Perior, looking at her with his most icy steadiness—Camelia keeping her eyes on his, and feeling that for the moment the best thing she could do was to hold firmly to their calm and luminous directness of expression—“will you deny that you went up to ask Mary to take your place? that you found her ready to go with me? that you pretended not to know that I had come for her?—she let that out in excusing you from my disgust!—didn’t suspect you!—that to me you pretended she had gone to Mrs. Grier’s of her own accord?”
The withering had begun to operate. Camelia felt his outward and her inner press of feeling vanquishing the mild inquiry of her look. She dropped her eyes. “Will you tell me why you take the trouble to debase yourself—for such a trifle?”
Camelia gazed at the grass. She had cried when he accused her unjustly; but now that her ownhurrying, searching thoughts could find no loop-hole for denial she felt no wish to cry. She was not touched, but silenced, quelled. The enormity of her misdeeds made her thoughtful, now that they were put so plainly before her. She felt herself contemplating the sum of lies with an almost impersonal curiosity.
“Camelia!” The odd pitch of his voice, sharp with a sudden, uncontrollable emotion, made her look up.
He rose, paused, looking back at her. “You are breaking my heart,” he said. He had not intended to say it, nor known the truth that now came imperatively to his lips. How she had hurt him, after all! He felt that he was almost appealing to her, that indignation, scorn, hatred of her baseness, were as nothing compared with that appeal—not to hurt him; and he grew very white. An answering pang shot through Camelia’s heart—whether pain, pity, or triumph she could not have told; but she said quickly, her eyes rounded in unfamiliar solemnity, still on his—
“Breaking your heart?”
“I care for you,” said Perior; “I only ask for a mere cranny, where a friendly tenderness might find foothold—one ray of sincerity, of honor—to make me feel that my fondness for you is not a—a contemptible, a weakening folly. It’s as if you dashed me down on the rocks—just as I fancy I’ve found something to hold on by!” he spoke brokenly, clutching and unclutching his hands on his riding cane. “And I have to watch you dragging yourself through the dustiest meannesses;would I care if it was another woman!—no—let her be contemptible, ugly, puny, I could give it a laugh—one can only laugh; but you! to be fond of you! to watch you growing more and more greedy, soulless; a liar, a flatterer! Oh, it makes me sick!”
Camelia had again lowered her eyelids, but her eyes stared, startled at the grass. A creeping coldness went through the roots of her hair; she knew that her face was pale. For quite a long time there was perfect silence.
“To rob that poor child of her little pleasure,” Perior said at last, “to lie to her—to me; and for what? What use had you for me? Were you so anxious to read me theRevue des Deux Mondes?Whydid you lie?”
“I don’t know,” said Camelia feebly.
“You don’t know?” he repeated.
“No—I thought Mary would not mind. I thought she would like to go.”
“And you left me intending to ask her?”
“Yes.”
“Telling me you were going to hurry her?”
“Yes.”
“Pretending to her that you did not know I had come for her?”
“Yes.” There was an impulse struggling in Camelia’s heart—frightening her—but worse than fright, the thought of not freeing it. “One ray of sincerity.” Mary had been noble enough not to tell him—she must be noble enough to tell.
“More than that—” she added, feeling her very breath leave her.
“More!”
“Yes; I let Mary think you would rather stay with me;—that you didn’t care to ride with her——”
“Camelia!” They were in full view of the house, but his hand fell heavily upon her shoulder; and so he stood for a long moment, too much stupefied by the confession to find another word.
But Camelia took a long breath of recovery; sighed with it, and felt the blood come back gratefully to her heart.
“But why?—why?—why?” Perior said at last, in a voice from which anger seemed to have ebbed despairingly away, leaving only an immense and wondering sadness, “Why, Camelia?”
A faint, appealing little sparkle lit her face as she glanced up at him; that weight gone, all the buoyancy of her nature rose, ready to win smiles and rewarding looks of caressing encouragement.
“I wanted to read you theRevue des Deux Mondes.”
He stared at her, baffled and miserable.
“And though I was a viper—it was true, wasn’t it? Youwouldrather stay with me.”
“Yes, no doubt I would,” said Perior with a gloom half dazed.
“And you see I did want you so much! Mary could not have wanted you nearly so much! Why, I gave up my ride to stay with you! I had no headache!” she announced the fact quite joyously; “I simply thought suddenly how nice it would be to spend the afternoon with you—like old days—when we were young together! I really thoughtMary would prefer Mrs. Grier—really I did! And once embarked on a fib—for I did not want her to think that I cared so much to have you—I had to go on—they all came one after the other,” said Camelia, dismally now, “and even when I saw how disappointed she was I hardened my heart in its selfishness—a perfect devil, of course; yes, I see quite well that I was a devil. So there is the truth for you. Really the truth. More thanone ray of sincerity, is it not? And I need not have told you, since good old Mary was such a trump. There! I have lain down under your feet—and you may scrub your boots on me if you want to!”
“Alas, Camelia!” said Perior. He sat down again. Her confession had indeed forced upon him a certain resignation. For some moments he did not speak. “I believe I am the only person in the world to whom you would humble yourself like this,” he said at last. “I am a convenient father-confessor for you. You find yourself more comfortable after dumping your load of sins on me. It’s a corner in your psychology I’ve never quite understood—another little twist of egotism my mind is too blunt to penetrate. I am not worth while deceiving—is that it?” and as her eyes rested on his in mute, but unmistakable pain, he added, the note of resignation deepened, “You do not repent, that is evident. You confess; but it is very much as if I particularly hated dirty finger-nails, and to please my fastidiousness you washed yours.”
“I might have hidden them,” Camelia murmured, glancing down at the translucent pink and white of thoseobjets d’art.
“Yes, you might; that is your advantage. The speck of dirt worried you, knowing my taste. The matter to you is just about on that level of seriousness. You are not sorry for Mary; you are merely preening yourself for me. It is that; your heartlessness, your selfishness, your hard indifference to other people’s feelings that makes me despair of you. For I do despair of you.”
“Am I so heartless, so selfish, so hard?”
“I am afraid you are.”
“And it breaks your heart?”
Perior laughed shortly.
“Ah; you find compensation in that! I shall survive, Camelia. I have managed to survive a great many disagreeable experiences.”
“And I am one. Don’t you feel a little more kindly towards me? Are you not a little flattered by the realization that my misdeeds arose entirely from my affection for you?” Camelia smiled sadly, adding, “It’s quite true.”
“You want to monopolize me, as you monopolize everything, Camelia. If there was a cat that did not devote itself exclusively to you, you would woo the cat. In this case I am the cat.”
“Dear cat!” she stretched out her hand and put it on his arm. “May I stroke you, cat?”
“No, thanks. You shall not enthral me.” He rose as he spoke. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye? Will you not stay to dine?”
“No; I am in no dining humor.”
“Haven’t you forgiven me—absolved me—one little bit?”
“Not one little bit, Camelia.”
His farewell look she felt to be steeled against her in its resoluteness, though weak in its long dwelling. She knew that when he was gone the resoluteness would remain with him; the weakness would leave him with his departure from her presence. She enthralled him by the mere fact of being before him, baffling and exquisite; therefore he was leaving her. There was an air of finality in his very way of turning from her in silence. She watched him walk away over the lawn, and sat on in the dusk. She was a little dazed, and an evening dreaminess veiled from her the poignancy of her own fear. She evaded it, too, by the thought: he cares so much, so much. Then, too, what difference did it make? She could always wrap herself, in case of a shivering emergency, in that cloak of carelessness; but the fact of his caring so very much kept her now from shivering. When she went into the house at last she found Mrs. Fox-Darriel still alone in the morning-room.
“My dear Camelia,” she said, looking round at her young friend, “when next you submit to being shaken by Mr. Perior, I really would choose a more secluded spot. The whole house might have been staring at you; and I can assure you that the spectacle you offered was highly ludicrous. A rabbit in an eagle’s claws.”
“And, really, if I choose to be whipped up and down the drive by Mr. Perior, I shall do it, Frances, notwithstanding your disapproval.” Camelia was in no temper for smarting advice.
“The man is insufferable,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel, “il porte sa tête comme un saint sacrement; provincialapostolics. Your flattering wish to please him is not at all in character.”
“Your knowledge of my character, Frances, is very restricted,” Camelia replied, walking away to her room.
CAMELIA during the next few days was conscious of an expectant pause. There was a page to be turned. She kept her own hand from it; for a day or two, at least, she would not stir a finger; and if Perior chose to turn it, the turning bound her to nothing—would probably reveal mere blankness, whereon he might inscribe an affectionate dedication for her new life. In that case the new chapter would be hymeneal; indeed, it seemed inevitable that she should marry Arthur Henge; the waiting volume seemed inevitably that of her married life.
But her thoughts were not with Arthur. They fixed themselves persistently on Perior. Let him come—write the friendly dedication, certify, by his blessing, to the sincerity and wisdom of her choice; or else, was it not possible that he might dash the volume out of her hands? No doubt she would pick it up again. Still, to see him dash it down would be eventful. Therefore, she waited, more breathlessly than she quite realized.
The last act of the drama had left her with no spite at all against Mary—its chief but insignificant factor. She was not resentful on the score of Mary’s revelations; on the other hand, Mary’s charitable reticence did not move her to gratitude.After all, it was a very explicable reticence; her own confession to Perior had lent it the kindest glamour. For Mary to have told Perior all would have been a humiliating plea for his negative; and the negative he could not have given with sincerity. Mary had felt that. No; Camelia’s analysis disowned any obligation; but neither was she conscious of the least anger. A mean revengefulness was not in her nature, she was as easy towards Mary as towards herself; she quite saw that to Mary she must have seemed horrid, and that perfectly atoned for the whines in which poor Mary had probably indulged. She was sure the whines had not been spiteful. She could imagine Mary injured, but not at all spiteful; and on their first meeting after the portentous dressing-room scene, her eyes rested in blankest serenity upon her cousin’s flushed and miserable face.
She felt serenity and blankness to be tactful kindnesses, and they were very easy. The thought of Mary hardly stirred her deep, still absorption in the purely dual problem, for, after Mary’s ride—and Camelia missed him then—Perior did not come again.
The trial of strength in silence, they the two opponents facing one another for the test, filled her days with an excited sense of contest. It was not made more complex by outer jars. Mr. Rodrigg was unavoidably called away for a fortnight, and Sir Arthur might still be evaded, though Lady Henge’s brow had grown gloomy. Camelia rather enjoyed the grave inquiry in the looks bent upon her by her future mamma (oh yes, almost withoutdoubt, future mamma); but she did not intend to brighten them by the announcement of that fact until her own good time. Lady Henge’s gloom and Arthur’s patience touched only the outer rings of her consciousness. For Perior did not come. At the end of the first week her patience was out-worn; the detachment of mere contemplation became impossible. She essayed a flag of truce. Let it be peace, or, at all events, more close, more keenly realized warfare.
“Are you never coming to see me again?” she wrote. “Please do; I will be good.”
Perior laughed over the document. It was merely the case of the cat again dignified by its persistent absence. His reply was even more laconic. “Can’t come. Try to be good without me.” The priggishness of this pleased him, and would probably amuse her. He did not want to hurt her. Neither did he intend that she should hurt him. She probably guessed that.
The note gave her a mingled thrill, anger and pleasure. That he should not come showed more than the priggish intent to punish; that pedagogic mask did not hide his fear; and that he should fear meant much. He wanted to punish her, yes; and that he could succeed was very intolerable; but that was his only strength, held to amidst a weakness he would give her no chance to exploit. His cowardice was complimentary, but since she was helpless against it Camelia was angry with her cat. Strength, after all, is largely a matter of situation, and to stand in the street vainly cajoling one’s pet on the house-top gives one all the emotions ofacknowledged inferiority. To turn her back and walk away was the natural impulse of Camelia’s exasperated helplessness; she hoped that the cat would watch her, and feel badly as she turned the corner, for she determined to delay no longer decisions of far more importance, as she assured herself, than the ridiculous dwelling on such a trifling matter as a recalcitrant cat. The acceptance of Arthur Henge could be no longer evaded after this fortnight of evasions, each turn and twist leading her more inevitably to the centre of the labyrinth. Sir Arthur could hardly have a doubt of the final answer, though its postponement and her son’s attitude of smiling patience might bring the gloom to Lady Henge’s forehead.
“I do not like to see you played with, Arthur,” she confessed; and her look said as much to Camelia, who, in her absolute security, only frolicked the more in her leafy circles.
“I enjoy it, mother,” Sir Arthur assured her, “it’s a pretty game; she enjoys it and so do I. She is cutting up a surprise cake, and I am sure of her giving me the slice with the ring in it.”
“A rather undignified game, Arthur,” said Lady Henge in a deep tone of aggrievement, and Sir Arthur was sorry that Camelia, for the moment, had effaced that first good impression; but he would not see that he was aggrieved. He knew that he sat in the heart of the dear labyrinth, and Camelia’s peeps at him through the hedges, her slow advances and swift retreats, were all charming, and not too bewildering when one was trained to them.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel, however, was both aggrieved and impatient. Her long visit bored her badly, and Camelia’s smiling impenetrability irritated her. Her impatience almost descended to grossness.
“What a hostess you will make, Camelia, at Laversley Castle. I see you on that background of Grinling Gibbons and Titian. To be almost the richest, probably the cleverest, certainly the prettiest woman in England. What a future! An unending golden vista—widening. And for a base of operations, Laversley. Such tapestries, my dear, such porcelains, such a library and park. All in the hollow of your hand.”
Camelia stretched it out. “Yes,” she said, surveying its capabilities, “I have only to close it.”
“You will close it, of course.”
“No doubt,” said Camelia blandly, a blandness that snubbed and did not satisfy her friend’s grossness.
But under the blandness something struggled. Must she close the hand? Would no power outside her hold open and unstained by greed that pretty palm? The absurdity of the accusation gave her the melancholy comfort of an only half reassuring smile. Sir Arthur’s excellence, not his millions, had turned the scale; yet the accusation, for all its folly, cut. And Perior did not come. He too joined forces with fate, made the closing of the hand inevitable. She defied him with the sustaining thought, “Sir Arthur is best, best in all. I close my hand on his heart because no better heart could be offered me.”
A week had passed since Perior had received the first pleading note from Enthorpe, and one afternoon, when he was busy in his laboratory, another arrived, more a command than a supplication.
“Come at once. I must see you. I am very unhappy.”
Camelia indeed was very unhappy. She could hardly recognize or define the unusualness of the unfamiliar sensation, and her ignorance helped to hurt her, make her more bewildered under it. She had accepted Sir Arthur that morning, hurried by no impulse, but conscious as she walked with him in the garden of an ill-tempered recklessness, of a fate more easily accepted than evaded uselessly. If he would have it—if every one would have it, including herself, of course, let it be so. She said yes with almost a sigh of exhausted energy, smiled with lifted brows over Sir Arthur’s ensuing rapture, and then wondered that under the lightness with which she braved the decisive moment a sudden sickness of fear, of sorrow, should seize her. Reality this, then. No more choice. No more playing. The game ended. She was not being led into the Garden of Eden, but out of it, and a new world, a world bleak, leaden, a sunless immensity of drearinessstretched before her. She was frightened, and the lesser feelings of the next hour were dazed by her effort to dismiss this fear. She knew that her mother’s tearful, speechless joy, Lady Henge’s elevated approbation, Mary’s gasping efforts after fitting phrases, Frances’ cool, close-lipped little smile of satisfaction, and the background of congratulatory faces were all very irritating, and that she herself was unreasonably angry with them all.
She was glad to find herself alone in the library with Sir Arthur, even though strangely helpless before his joyous possessorship. His arm was about her, and she could hear Lady Henge thundering on the piano in the drawing-room.
“The dear mater is improvising an epithalamium,” said Arthur, with a laugh. To Camelia it seemed cynically in keeping with her jarred and jangled mood that her marriage should be interpreted by this pretentious music. It symbolized so much. Her own flimsiness and falseness, the immense distance from anything like perfect union. She turned her thought to the attainable pleasures of the future, tried to shut her soul on the lamenting ideal that Lady Henge’s music mocked, and her mind rested for a moment on the reassuring certainty of her own appreciation of Sir Arthur’s excellence. Strangely enough, though his possessorship frightened, his arm about her waist consoled her; a warm sense of his kindness and stability held her from inner terrors; she was glad to have him there; she foresaw in solitude an on-coming and chilly stupor. She felt it well to sit beside him, protected from her own fear by his devoted nearness. “Therenow, you are smiling,” said Sir Arthur; “you seemed sad, as though you were conscious of responsibility—and didn’t like it.” When he spoke of responsibility Camelia felt more keenly that she had received an injury from fate. The “Yes” that had been spoken only a few hours before had belonged to the game, was it quite fair that this solemnity should result? Yet why not take it gaily? Force it into a dancing ring of happy lightness?
“Responsibility? Oh no, you can’t saddle me with that!” she said, returning his look, and smiling still more easily as she felt how much his handsome face pleased her; its very expression, an unaccented, humorous gaiety, worn for her sake, was a homage, a warrant of most chivalrous comprehension. “You alone are responsible”—and following her mental picture of the game of hide-and-seek in a Watteau landscape—“You caught me—that was all!”
“That was all!” he repeated; “and you were difficult to catch. Now that you are caught I shall keep you.”
“No, I am not sad,” Camelia pursued, “I only feel as if I had grown up suddenly.”
“No, don’t grow up. I must keep you always my laughing child.”
“Lady Henge wouldn’t approve of that!” said Camelia, yielding to a closer enfolding, but facilitating it by no gracious droopings.
“Ah, mother loves you,” said Sir Arthur, with a touch of added pride in his capture.
“Does she?” Camelia’s brows lifted a little; the enfolding continuing she was conscious enoughof a dart of irritation to wish to add, “I don’t love her!” but after a kiss he released her and she checked the naughty impulse, merely adding, with some perversity, keeping him now at arm’s length though she abandoned her hand for the purpose, “Would you have dared to love me had she not?”
“Camelia, you know that I did.” The perversity had grieved him a little. His clear brown eyes, that always reminded her of a dog’s in their widely opened sincerity, dwelt on her, questioning her intention. “She did not know you, that was all.”
“Nor did you, quite.” Camelia laughed at him gently, and put her hand on his shoulder, half as a reward for the pang, half to still keep him away.
“No, not quite,” Sir Arthur confessed, “though even my ignorance loved you. But you let me know you at last.”
“But whatdoyou know?” Camelia persisted.
“I know my laughing child.”
“Her faults the faults of a child?”
“Has she faults?”
“Oh, blinded man!”
“The faults of a child, then,” he assented.
When he had left her, for he was to spend the day in London, there was a lull after the stress of change. Camelia found herself in a solitude wherein she might sit and meditate. Every one seemed to fall away from her, and when she was left alone she was sorry for it, though it was she who had withdrawn, not they. Lady Henge had talked to her for half-an-hour, her arm affectionately, but heavily lying about her shoulders, seeming in the massive embrace to claim her with a kindness thatknew itself as wiser than mere maternal emotionalism. The low tones of her voice were impressive, and Camelia would have submitted to the newly assumed manner of guardianship, of confidential admonition, with a very ill grace, had not Lady Henge been now so truly indifferent to her.
Mary had been very tiresome, following her at a distance, wanting to kiss her and cry. Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s silent complacency was unendurable. Camelia knew that in the new epoch her friend saw only a tightly-closed fist, and this symbol affected her own imagination until she could have shaken Mrs. Fox-Darriel for having suggested it.
Then her mother had fallen upon her breast and wept. Camelia was ashamed of herself for seeing in the great lovingness a Scriptural exaggeration; and being ashamed of herself she was only the more anxious to get rid of the maternal clinging. She ended by locking herself in her own room, only to find that she had locked herself in with a melancholy that had been stepping silently beside her since the morning. She would not look this companion in the face, however. She was alone with it at last; but she feverishly avoided its fixed eyes, and eagerly busied herself with trivialities, a dramatic sense of courage animating all her actions. She emptied and rearranged her wardrobes and boxes, folded ribbons with intensest exactitude, introduced a new plan in the bestowal of her gloves and handkerchiefs, and even found herself unpicking a summer hat with a fictitious eagerness that implied an imperative want of that particular hat in a new trimming. When the hat was quite demolished she put it away,and polished her finger-nails, and, lastly, spent a fatiguing half-hour before the looking-glass in essays at new ways of hair-dressing. None were satisfactory, and with arms aching from their long uplifting, she at last swept the shining tresses into their accustomed lines, unlocked the door, and emerged deliberately, but with a sense of flight.
Every one had gone. The guests to golf at the Havershams; Mary, Lady Paton, and Lady Henge for a long drive. They had all respected the sensitive requirements of her new position. She was to be left alone, and as Camelia walked from room to room, the big house was desolate.
She nourished a sense of resentment, of injury, for it seemed to thrust away the chilly stupor of fear, fear of that new presence walking with her, waiting for her recognition. The loneliness, the melancholy, to which she could only feign blindness, were almost unendurable. The tears rose to her eyes more than once, and her thoughts circled nearer and nearer to Perior’s great unkindness. It was when the melancholy seemed suddenly to lay an imperative hand upon her that she flew to the writing-table and wrote the note. She looked at the clock as she heard the groom departing on horseback. Perior might easily arrive at six, and at the thought her spirits rose with a great soaring bound, and laughed down at the cold enemy. When he arrived she would see what would happen. She reined back her imagination from any plan.
According to his manner, she would tell immediately, or delay telling until a favorable moment. Perhaps when he knew he would say that his heartwas completely broken, but the thought of his unhappiness only seemed to send her spirits into a higher ecstasy of joyousness. She felt them bubble-like, floating in illusion, but the relief of the unthinking hour—she seemed to live in it only, to breathe only its expectancy—buoyed her above the clouds. In the long drawing-room, where the firelight made the autumnal landscape outside, its distant hills purpling with chilly evening, a mere picture, framed for the contrast in her rosy mood, she danced, trying over new steps. She had always loved her dancing, loved to feel herself so lovely, her loveliness set to such musical motion, the words of the song. She hummed the sad, dead beauty of a pavane, pacing it with stately pleasure; the gracious pathos of an old gavotte; and, feeling herself a brook, her steps slid into the flowing ripple of the courante. Perior had always loved these exquisite old dances. She would dance for him, of course. That thought had been growing, and the gavotte, the courante, the pavane becoming rehearsals. Yes, she would dance for him—at first. Flushed, panting a little from the long preparation, she ran upstairs to put on a white dress, a new one made for dancing, with sleeves looped over bare arms, flowing sash, and skirt like a flower-bell. She lingered on each detail. She must be beautiful for Alceste; dear Alceste, poor, poor Alceste; how unhappy he would be—when he knew. And suppose he should not come. The thought went through her like a dagger as she held a row of pearls against her throat. Over them she looked with terror-stricken eyes at the whiteness of her beauty—useless beauty? Ah, she could not believeit, and she clasped the pearls on a breast that heaved with the great sigh of her negation. She could not believe it. He must come. And when she reentered the drawing-room the sound of a horse’s hoofs outside set the time to the full throb of an ecstasied affirmation.
A delicious flood of contentment went through her. She stood smiling in the dark yet luminous room, where only the firelight shone along the polished oak of floor and wainscoting, half unconsciously emphasizing her sense of the moment’s drama by pressing her hands on her heart. Of course he had come. How could he not come if she really wanted him? Dear Alceste. In a moment he had entered. The firelight, as she stood before him, seemed to shine through her pearly glimmering. She looked sprite-like, a transparent fairy. Her dress, her attitude, her eyes, the hovering expectancy. Perior, too, was immediately conscious of drama, and felt as immediately an impulse to flight; but he came forward, a quick look of calm arming his sturdy opposition to the atmosphere of exaggerated meanings.
“Well, here I am,” he said, in a manner intended by its commonplace to rebuff the significance, whatever it might be, of eyes, dress, and attitude. Camelia took his hand, joyously entering once more into the dear, enchanted fairy-land—the old sense of a game, only a more delightful, a more exciting game than ever. She could almost have whirled him into the circle—a mad dancing whirl round and round the room. How astonished he would have been! Solemn, staid old Alceste!
“Yes, here you are. At last,” she said. “How shamefully you have punished me this time!”
She laughed, but Perior sighed.
“I haven’t been punishing you,” he said, walking away to the fireplace. Camelia followed him and watched him hold out his hand to the warmth.
“Is it so cold?” she asked.
“Very chilly; the wind catches one on that mile along the common. My hands are half-numbed.” Prettily, as she leaned in her illumined whiteness beside him, she took his hands between her own and rubbed them briskly.
“You wrote that you were unhappy,” said Perior, looking down at the daintily imprisoned hands; “what is the matter?”
“The telling will keep. I am happier now.”
“Did you get me here on false pretences?” He smiled as he now looked at her, and the smile forgave her in advance.
“No, no. I needed you very much; really I did. I am growing melancholy; and I was all alone. I hate being alone.”
“There, that will do. They are quite warm now; thanks very much. Where are the others?”
“The others? They are away,” said Camelia vaguely.
“Rodrigg?”
“He comes back to-night, I think.”
“And Henge?” Perior asked it with a little hesitation. Of late he had wondered much about Arthur and Camelia. There was an effort in the unconscious aloofness of his voice.
“In London too.” Camelia looked clearly at him.No, she would not tell him now. The happy half-hour she must guard for them both. Her oblivion, his ignorance, would make a fairy-land. Let him think even that she had sent Arthur away finally. Arthur had no place in fairy-land.
“All the others are out,” she repeated, “golfing, calling, driving. But are you not glad to see me, even if I seem happier than strict consistency requires?”
“Yes, I am glad to see you.” Perior’s eyes showed the half-yielding, half-defiance of his perplexity. “But tell me, what is the matter? Don’t be so mysterious.”
“But tell me,” she returned, stepping backward, her skirt held out for displayal, “is not my dress pretty?”
“Very pretty.” Perior leaned back against the mantelpiece with an air of resignation. “Very exquisite.”
“Shall I dance for you?”
“By all means; since the dress was put on for that, I summoned for that. Isn’t it so?”
She made no reply, her smile lingering as she turned from him, and showing in its fixedness a certain gravity. He was satisfied that conjecture as to her meaning, her plan in all this, only wearied him, yet sorry that he had come. Under the weariness he was resentfully aware of excitement. And what of Arthur? Camelia’s whole manner subtly suggested that Arthur no longer counted. The note might be explained as an after-throb of doubt, or at least of dreariness, in a world momentarily without big issues. If she had refused Arthur definitely?The thought, as his eyes followed Camelia’s exquisite steps and slides, shook some careful balancing of self-control. He felt stripped of a shield, unpleasantly exposed to a dangerous moment. Camelia was dancing quite silently, yet the air, to Perior’s musical brain, seemed full of melody, and she the soundless embodiment of music made visible—so lovely, so dear to him; so dear in spite of everything. She was like a white flower, tilting, bending in the wind. She skimmed like a swallow, ran with rippled steps like a brook, flitted with light, languid balancings, a butterfly hovering on extended wings. Her slender body, like a fountain, rose and fell in a continuity of changing loveliness. Her golden head shone in the dusk.
Perior watched her, half-dreaming, half-dazzled. The long moments of acute, delicious contemplation drifted by as peacefully, as stilly as falling rose-petals, muffling all outer jars and murmurs, blurring the past, the future, making the present enchanted.
When she was far off his heart beat for her return, and when the swaying, hovering whiteness came near he shrank from the nearness. The unexpected sweeping turn that caught her away suddenly into the half-visionary distance stabbed him through with a pang of relief and disappointment.
He was entranced, half-mesmerized, conscious only of his delight in her, when her circling at last grew slower, the musical beat of the recovering tilt faltered. She came on a sliding, wavering step, and sank like the softest sigh before him, folded together in her wing-like whiteness.
“You enchanting creature,” Perior murmured.He bent over her—he would have lifted her—taking her hands, but Camelia herself rose between his arms, and inevitably they closed about her. It was so natural, so fitting in all its strangeness, that to Camelia the slow circling of the dance seemed still to carry her round and round, unbroken by the crash of a great revelation. She closed her eyes, hardly wondering at her perfect happiness, and from the last revolving mists the reality dawned sweetly upon her—the only reality. She had danced out of the game; it lay far behind her. Through it she had blundered on a mistake, but her mind put that swiftly aside. The mistake mattered nothing, the last act merely of the game—a reckless, angered act. She thought now that the game would hardly have been begun if only Perior had put his arms around her, claimed and reclaimed her foolishness, long ago. Of course she loved him. It needed but that to let her know.
But to Perior the moment, after its irresistible impulse, was merely one of shame and self-disgust. He held her, for she was enchanting, and she had enchanted him. Disloyalty to his friend did not forbid that satisfaction. That she meant to marry Arthur was now impossible. She had tossed him aside, dissatisfied; he could not pity Arthur for his escape, nor credit Camelia with disinterestedness. She was bored, disappointed, reckless in a wish for excitement. He analyzed her present mood brutally—the mood of a vain child, made audacious by childhood intimacy, her appetite for conquest whetted by his apparent indifference; he had not known that she would pay such a price forconquest. It was an ugly revelation of Camelia, but the revelation of himself was uglier. He at least pretended to self-respect. The folly of her coquetry hardly surprised him; his own yielding to it did; yet in the very midst of his self-disgust he fulfilled it to the uttermost by stooping his head to her upturned face, blind to its intrinsic innocence, and kissing her lips. As he kissed her he knew that for angry weeks and months he had longed to kiss her, the unrecognized longing wrestling with his pride, with his finer fondness for her—the firm, grave fondness of years, with even his loyalty to Henge. That barrier gone, the longing rushed over the others. Among the wrecks his humiliation overwhelmed him:—a girl he loved, but a girl he would not woo, had wooing been of avail!—in it he was able to be generous.
The moment had not been long. He released her. Feeling most ungentle, he yet put her away gently by the whole thrust of his arm. Leaning on the mantel-shelf, his face averted from hers, he said: “Too enchanting, Camelia. I have forgotten myself,” and he added, “Forgive me.”
“ButIdid it!” Camelia’s tone was one of most dauntless joyousness. She was necessarily as sure of his love as of her own, surer of its long-enduring priority. But his love feared—that was natural: dared not hope for hers—too natural. She could not bear to have him put her away in even a momentary doubt of her sincerity. Clasping both arms about his neck she said quite childishly, in her great unconsciousness of his thoughts about her—
“Why would you never say you were fond of me? Why would you never say you loved me? Say it now—say that you love me.”
His bewilderment at her audacity stung him to anger, and in self-defence, for her sake too as well as for his own, almost to brutality. “Ah, I love you enough to kiss you, Camelia,” he said; “you are only fit for that. There,” he unlocked the clasping arms, “go away.” The unmistakable sternness of his face struck her with pained perplexity. He would not meet her eyes; he turned from her, looking wretched. A flashing thought revealed the possibility of tempted loyalty. Did he think her bound? Divine the engagement? He could not have heard of it already. She saw, her heart throbbing at the half-truth, half-falseness of the unbecoming vision, how she must appear to him in that distorting illumination. Free in her own eyes, she hesitated on a lie that would release him from his doubts. But as she stood looking at him, smiling, a little sternly too, at the test, the door burst open with unpleasant suddenness, and Mr. Rodrigg, bull-like in his vehemence, charged into the room.
CAMELIA felt, in the glaring pause Mr. Rodrigg made before Perior’s baffling presence, that she herself was the red scarf he sought. Her mind, alert in self-defence, even in this stress of joy and terror, divined some unknown danger. Mr. Rodrigg had faded into complete insignificance, put away with the other toys; she looked coldly at him, as at a dusty jack-in-the-box, protruding its fatuousness in a grown-up world. Yet she felt the necessity for self-command and quick intelligence. Something ominous shone in Mr. Rodrigg’s eye. The lid must be pressed down firmly, fastened securely; she was sure of her complete control over the silly plaything, but an extinguishing dexterity might be requisite.
“Well, Mr. Rodrigg,” she said; and her tone fully implied the undesirability of his presence.
“Can I see you alone, Miss Paton?”
Mr. Rodrigg’s voice was offensively strident. Camelia looked at Perior, who, from under lowering brows, bent ungracious eyes on Mr. Rodrigg’s flushed insistency.
“No, I don’t think you can—at present.” She did not want to vex Mr. Rodrigg—she spoke not unkindly; but Mr. Rodrigg was dense, coarsely dense, or else coarsely angry. Angry with her;Camelia had time by now to wonder at that, and to feel less amicable with the greater need for feigning amiability.
He closed the door with decision. “Then I will speak before Mr. Perior. As a family friend, Mr. Perior will not be amiss between us. He is a witness of the whole affair. I appeal to Mr. Perior. Miss Paton, I have just met Lady Henge. She tells me that you accepted her son this morning.”
Camelia grew white. Though Perior spoke no word, his stillness equalling hers, she felt a fixed stare turned upon her. Unforeseen catastrophe! She had hoped to glide noiselessly from the cardboard stage, to pack up and send away the useless, even though misused puppets; and now the whole scenery, heavy too, fell crushingly upon her, pinning her in the very centre of the stage. There she was held—the mimic properties were stone-like—there she was held in the full glare of the footlights; and he was staring at her.
She drew herself together and clasped her hands behind her back. Her little head, with the intent resoluteness of its look, had never been more beautiful. Even Perior, in the frozen fury of his stupefaction, was aware of that. The mute, white cameo on the dim, rosy background gazing with not a tremor at its own perfidy, stamped itself ineffaceably on his memory as a Medusa type of splendid, pernicious courage. For one brief moment she wondered swiftly—and her thoughts flew like sharp flames—if a round, clear lie would save her, save her in Perior’s eyes, for she saw herself as he saw her, was conscious only of him, and cared not a buttonfor Mr. Rodrigg, the ugly raven merely who had croaked out the truth. The uselessness, the hopelessness of a lie, and too—in justice to her struggling better self be it added—shame for its smirch between her and him on the very threshold of true life—this hopelessness, this shame nerved her to the perilous truth-telling. Better his scorn for the moment, than a scorn delayed, but sure to find her out. Could she not explain—confess—on his breast, with tears? She did not look at Perior. Keeping fixed eyes on Mr. Rodrigg, an unpleasant but necessary medium for the communication, “Yes, Mr. Rodrigg, I did,” she said.
Perior at her side gave a short laugh, a cruel laugh. The moment was horrid; let it be hurried on, and Mr. Rodrigg, tool of the avenging gods, hurried out.
“Have you anything to say, Mr. Rodrigg?” she asked, conscious of hating Mr. Rodrigg, and, even at that moment, of a shoot of emphasized irritation with his nose, which caught the firelight bluntly.
“May I ask you, Miss Paton, if during these past weeks, you have always had that intention?” he inquired, speaking with some thickness of utterance.
“No, Mr. Rodrigg, you may not ask me that,” she returned.
The revelation of the man’s hopes was no longer to be evaded; she drank down the bitter draught perforce, her eyes on that squarely luminous nose-tip.
During the pause that followed Mr. Rodrigg’s eyes travelled up and down her with mingled scorn, wrath, and humiliation.
“Allow me to congratulate you,” he said at last,most venomously, “and to take my leave of you, Miss Paton. I have not understood, I perceive, the part I was supposed to play here.”
And Camelia was left alone with Perior. With an impression as of strong boxings on the ears she could only cry out “Odious vulgarian!” She tingled all over with a sense of insult.
“I, too, will bid you good-evening, Camelia,” said Perior. He could have taken her by the throat, but in the necessary restraint of that desire his glance, only, seized her as if it would throttle her.
“No! no!” she caught his arm, all thought of Mr. Rodrigg and his slaps burnt from her. “Listen to me—you don’t understand! Wait! I can explain everything! everything—so that you must forgive me!”
“I do understand,” said Perior, who stood still, scorning, as she felt, to touch and cast her off. “You are engaged to Arthur. You are disgraced—and I am disgraced.”
“Through me, then! You were ignorant! But wait—only listen—I am engaged to him; but I love you—don’t be too angry—for really I love you—only you—Oh! you must believe me!”
He retreated before her clasped imploring hands, she almost crying, following, indifferent to the indignity of her protesting supplication. “Indeed, I love you!” she reiterated, her chin quivering a little as the cruelty of his withdrawal brought the tears to her eyes.
Perior took the clasped hands by the wrists and held her off. “You love me?—and you love him too?”—she shook her head helplessly. “No; youhave accepted him, not loving him, and you dared,”—the cruelty was now physical, as his clench tightened on her wrists—“youdaredturn to me, to debase me with yourself, you false, you miserable creature!”
Under the double hurt she closed her eyes. “But why—but why did I turn?” she almost sobbed.
“You ask me why? Can I tell what folly, what vanity prompted you? Those are mild words.”
“Oh!—how you hurt me!” she breathed; the feminine sensitiveness was a refuge—a reproach. He released her wrists. “Because I love you,” she said, and standing still before him she looked at him through tears. “You may be angry, despise me, but I only want to tell you everything. You are so brutal. It was a mistake—I did not know—not till this evening. I accepted him because you would not prevent me—because you didn’t come—nor seem to care, and—yes, because I was bad—ambitious—vain—like other women—and I did like him—respect him. But now!”—the appealing monotone, broken by little gasps, wailed up at the inflexibility of his face—“it isn’t folly, it isn’t vanity—or why should I sacrifice everything for you, as I do—Oh! as I do!”
“Sacrifice everything for me? Go away!”
“Oh!—how can you!” She broke into sobs—“how can you be so cruel to me—when you love me!”
“Love you!”
“You cannot deny it! You know that you love me—dearest Alceste!”—her arms encircled his neck.
Perior plucked them off. “Love you?” he repeated, looking her in the face. “By Heaven I don’t!”
And with the negative he cast her away and left her.
BUT he did love her. That was the worst of it, as he told himself through the night that followed. His love and his disgrace pursued him. Disgraced, though cruel enough to clearly see her as the temptress, disgraced by the weakness of his yielding to a moment of enchantment, disgraced by having given her the right to reproach him—the woman he loved, but the woman only fit to kiss. He was innocent of real disloyalty, and her perfidy might well exonerate his ignorance; but even Camelia’s perfidy could not excuse that kiss. He met the morning jaded, from torturing hours. When the first passion of his rage against her had died away the thought of her astounding declaration, her reiterated devotion, chilled him with the new fear of final yielding. Camelia, imagining herself in love with him, became an ominously alluring figure. She could claim him only through his weakness, but his dishonor gave her power. He accepted the morbid accusation, scourged himself with it, and the thought of her power urged him to escape. She was only fit to kiss, that was the final verdict. To marry such a woman meant a permanent disablement of all that was best in life. The kiss could not bind him to that atonement. It was she, rather, who owed him an infinity ofreparation. He determined to treat himself to a trip through Italy, and, alone with the beauty of the past, to shake his soul free from the choking entanglement of the present. He felt sick, battered, bereft of all security; and through everything throbbed the worst hurt of all—that Camelia should have proved herself worthless so utterly.
Early in the afternoon of a day spent in hurried preparations for departure, he heard a horse’s hoofs outside, and looking from the library window he saw Arthur Henge dismounting.
Perior felt the blood rush to his head. The first impulse of his thought was to see in Arthur the righteously angered friend come to heap upon him the shame of his discovered betrayal. He would of course bear the responsibility as the chiefly false and traitorous. The woman would shield herself; it was the right of her weakness, and his deep, unreasonable loyalty to Camelia, a loyalty paternal in its force and helplessness, accepted the vicarious position, rushed over and confused every self-asserting instinct. It was with almost the illusion of guilt that he stood upright, waiting. Then, this last straw he snatched at, despising it, as he heard Arthur’s step in the hall; was it possible that he had discovered nothing?—possible that he had come to announce his engagement?—possible that Camelia, in the bewilderment of her rejection, had returned to a doubly false, a dastardly allegiance? The irony of such a supposition did not make it by any means impossible. But one look at Arthur’s face dismissed the tragic-comic surmise.
It was a face of stiffened gloom, a face difficultfor the moment to interpret. Camelia had told the truth, then. Told more than the truth? Buttressed her falseness with his act of folly?
Perior expected nothing less than this craven insincerity. To shield her he must bare his breast for Arthur’s shafts. Arthur might as well know that he loved her, but Camelia should never know it, so Perior grimly promised himself as he met his friend’s look with some of the sternness necessitated by his pitch of unpleasant resolution.
But Henge’s first words proved that Camelia, at all events, had not been cowardly.
“Perior—she has broken our engagement! She accepted me yesterday—and to-day she has broken our engagement!” and the quick change of expression on Perior’s face moving him too much, he dropped into a chair, and leaning his arms on the table, bowed his head upon his hands.
Perior’s first feeling was a crumbling sense of baseness. The lie between him and his unfortunate friend scorched him, and his recognition of Camelia’s courage was swept away by the realization of her cruelty, by the avenging consciousness that owing to her he feared to meet his friend’s eyes.
He kept silent, studying the surrendered reticence of the bent head.
“She accepted me yesterday, Perior.” Henge repeated it helplessly.
Perior put his hand on his shoulder. “My dear Henge,” he said.
Arthur looked up. “I don’t know why I should come to you with it. I am broken. I could cry like a baby. I love that child, Perior! You saw heryesterday; yes, that is why I came. She accepted me yesterday, you know. Did she say anything to you about it?—when you saw her? You see”—he smiled miserably—“I want you to turn the knife in my wound.”
“I heard it,” said Perior, feeling that a rigid adherence to perhaps deceptive truth was all that was left to him.
“But she gave you no reason to think that she had changed her mind?”
“What has Camelia said to you, Arthur? One may interpret it differently,” said Perior, detesting himself.
Sir Arthur’s face resumed the blankness of its helpless wonder.
“I got back this morning and she sent for me. I found her white, woeful, resolute. She said, ‘I made a mistake. I can’t marry you. I am unworthy of you.’ That to me, Perior! to me! and only yesterday! Oh!—I could have sworn she cared for me! I don’t blame her; don’t think it. It was all pity—a fancied tenderness; the shock of realization showed her the difference. She can’t love me. She unworthy! The courage—the cruelty even, were worthy; but she repeated that again and again.”
“Was that all she said?” Perior asked presently.
“All? Oh no, that was only the beginning. I tortured her for an hour with pleadings and protestations. With her it was mere repetition. She did not love me; she felt it as soon as she had accepted me. She told me that she sent for you—not for counsel, but to see if her misery was not mere morbid fancy; she said that Rodrigg—the brute!—rushed in upon her with implied accusations; to me she confessed—dearest creature—that she had been foolishly hopeful, foolishly confident in her eagerness for my cause. She heaped blame upon herself. She called herself mean, and weak, and shallow—Ah! as if I did not understand the added nobility! I have not one hard thought of her, not a touch of the jilted lover’s bitterness. It is my misfortune to see too well the worthiness of the woman I have lost.”
“It is the best thing that could happen to you, Arthur.” Perior, standing silently beside his friend, absorbed in the contemplation of this pitifully noble idealization, could now defy his own pain, shake from himself the clogging sense of shame, and speak from the fulness of his deep conviction.
“You mean better than marrying an unloving woman,” said Sir Arthur; but he had flushed with the effort to misunderstand. Some lack in Perior’s feeling for Camelia he had always felt. He shrank now from confronting it.
“Yes, I mean that and more,” Perior went on, feeling it good to speak—good for him and good for Arthur—good to shape the hard truth in hard words, yet with an inconsistency in his resolution, since he wished Arthur to recognize her unworthiness, yet would have given his life to keep from him the one supremely blasting instance which he and Camelia alone knew.
“She is not worthy of you. I hope that in saying it she felt its truth, for truth it is.”
“Don’t, Perior—” Sir Arthur had risen. “You pain me.”
“But you must listen, my dear boy—and it has pained me. I have been fond of Camelia—I am fond of her, but I am never with her that she does not pain me. She pains every one who is unlucky enough to care about her; that is her destiny—and theirs.”
Sir Arthur’s face through a dawning bewilderment now caught a flashing supposition that whitened it, and kept him silent.
“From the first, Arthur, I regretted your depth of feeling for her,” said Perior, after the slight involuntary pause with which he recognized in his friend’s face his own unconscious revelation. They now stood on as truthful a ground as he could ever hope for. Arthur had guessed what Camelia should never know. He could speak from a certain equality of misfortune—for had not Camelia hurt them both? “In accepting you she did you one wrong, she would have done you a greater had she married you. She is not fit to be your wife. You wouldn’t have held her up. Most men don’t mind ethical shortcomings in their wives—lying, and meannesses, and the exploiting of other people—they forgive very ugly faults in a pretty woman; but you would mind. It isn’t as a pretty woman that you love Camelia, nor even as a clever one, so you would mind—badly. Don’t look white; there is nothing gross, vulgar, in Camelia’s wrongness. As your wife she would have been faithful, useful, kind, no doubt; there would be no stupidities to complain of. She is a charming creature—don’t I know it! But, Arthur, she is false, voraciously selfish, hard as a stone.”
Sir Arthur had the look of a man who sees a nightmare, long forgotten as darkest delusion, assuming before his eyes the shape and hue of reality; he retreated before the obsession. “Don’t, Perior—I cannot listen. I love her. You are embittered—harsh. Your rigorous conscience is distorting. You misjudge her.”
“No, no, Arthur. I judge her.”