"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 repet.i.tion. 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 n.o.bility! 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 n.o.ble 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, a.s.suming 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."
"Ah!--not before me, then! I love her," Sir Arthur repeated. "Good-bye, Perior. I came to say good-bye. We are going, you know."
"Yes--So am I."
Sir Arthur"s eyes dwelt upon him for a compa.s.sionate, a magnanimous moment. "You are? Ah! I understand."
"More or less?" said Perior, with a spiritless smile.
"Oh, more--more than you can say."
Perior let him go on that supposition. Arthur understood that Camelia had hurt him. That, after all, was sufficient; left his friend"s mind without rancor for his galling truth-telling. And, as Perior walked back into the library, he heaved a long sigh of relief. The Rubicon was crossed. In so speaking to Arthur he had fortified himself. The truth, so spoken, was an eternal barrier between him and Camelia. The barrier was a plain necessity; for Perior was conscious that a possible thrill lurked for him in the contemplation of Camelia"s last move. Its reckless disregard of consequences proclaimed a sincerity to which he had done injustice yesterday. She believed she loved him; she gave up all for his subjection. Yes, the thrill required suppression. He must abide in the firm reality of the words spoken to Arthur--"hard, false, voraciously selfish;" yes, she might love him, but her love could be no more than a perplexing combination of these ineradicable qualities.
The short autumn day drew to a close. From the library window the evening grayness dimmed the nearest group of larches, golden through all their erect delicacy. The sad sunset made a mere whiteness in the west.
Perior had been at his writing-table for over an hour, diligently strangling hara.s.sing thoughts, a pipe between his teeth, a consolatory cat at his elbow, when, in a tone of commonplace that rang oddly in his ears, "Miss Paton, sir," was announced by the solemn old retainer.
Perior wheeled round, and stumbled to his feet; the papers he held fell in a sprawling heap upon the floor, and the dozing cat jumped down and took nervous refuge under a chair.
Camelia, following old Lane with dexterous determination, saw the astonished commotion and found it encouraging. She was determined but not desperate. Even without encouragement she fancied that she could have held her own, sustained as she was by her inner conviction, and while Lane went out and closed the door, she was even able to cast a rea.s.suring smile at the cat, whose widened eyes shone at her from under the chair edge.
The door safely shut, she turned a steady look upon Perior"s rough head, silhouetted in monotone on the pale landscape outside. She herself faced the light. She had walked, and her face showed an exquisite freshness, an imperative youth and energy. In the austere room the sudden rose and white of cheeks and lips and brow, the l.u.s.tre of her eyes, the pale gold of her hair, dazzled.
Fixing Perior with this steady look, she said: "He has been here."
"Henge? yes," said Perior. Even in the shock of his dismayed confusion he felt with thankfulness a strong throb of an unswerving energy quite fit to match hers. He could look at her, dazzled, but not wavering, and, stooping from the successful encounter of eyes, he picked up the fallen papers, pushed them into shape, and laid them on the table coolly enough.
"You have heard what has happened, then?" Camelia was in nowise disconcerted by these superficialities.
"Yes."
"Did you tell him why I broke my engagement?"
Perior looked again, and very firmly, at the rose and white and gold.
"He gave me the reason you had given him. That was sufficient, wasn"t it?"
"Sufficient for him, yes. I gave him only half the truth--I should not have minded, you know, had you given him the whole."
"I should have minded."
"You? Why should you mind? It was my fault--the whole truth could tell him nothing less than that," said Camelia quickly.
"I appreciate your generosity"--Perior laughed a little--"that really is generous." It really was. He put another mark against himself; but a perception of his own past injustice did not weaken him.
"You know why," she said, and her eyes were now solemn; "you know that I don"t care about myself any longer--so long as you care. That is all that makes any difference--now. So you might have told him had you wished."
"I didn"t want to;" Perior leaned back against the writing-table, feeling a certain shrinking. Camelia"s power took on new attributes. He could but recognize a baleful n.o.bility in her self-immolation. After all, the falseness of yesterday had held a great sincerity--though the sincerity might only be a morbid folly. He had hardly the excuse of blindness. With a renewed pang of self-disgust he saw that his more subtle falseness to her was a weapon in her hand. She had not turned it against him. Perhaps she did not realize her need. He was glad, by lowering himself, to lift her.
She had come forward into the fuller light, and her face, more clearly revealed, showed the stress that Arthur had seen as a resolute woe. In a pause at a little distance from him, in the very tension of her face, Perior saw that she stooped to no weak appeal; it was an intelligent demand, rather, that he should recognize and do her justice.
"I know how angry you are with me," she said, after the slight pause in which they studied one another. "You believe that I have acted badly; and so I have. I see it too. I entrapped you, made you feel false to him, made you feel that you betrayed him. But if you _understood_. You have never really understood. You have taken the sh.e.l.l of me--the merely external silliness--so seriously."
Perior could wonder at his own firmness before her. He was filled with compunction for the pitiful certainty of success--once his stubborn disbelief were convinced--that spoke through her gravity. He loved her, and knew that he loved her, against his reason, against his will, against his heart even, yet heard himself saying, sure of the kindness of his cruelty--for any prolongation of her security was cruel--
"I hope never to take a merely external silliness seriously, Camelia.
Let me think of this as one. You should not have come, it can only hurt you, and me. We had best not see each other again until you have outgrown, shall we say, your present sh.e.l.l?" Yes, he could rely on the decisive clear-sightedness that had made him speak the truth, once for all, to Arthur and to himself. He felt secure in his moral antagonism; the ascetic admonishment of his voice gratified even a sense of humor, quite at his own expense, which he perceived in the rigor of his righteousness. But Camelia made no retreat before that rigor, though the color left her face, as if he had struck her; her eyes betrayed no confusion, but a keenness, a steadiness, almost scornful.
"You think it _that_?" Perior was not sorry to tell her and himself what he did think.
"I think it just that. A phase of your varied existence; a curious experience to sound. You have set your heart on being in love with me--since that was an experience most amusingly improbable. I am another toy to grasp since the last disappointed."
"You are dull," said Camelia. She looked down, clasping her hands behind her. "You are not sincere. It pleases you to blind yourself with your preconceived idea of me. Your self-righteousness would not like to own itself mistaken in believing anything but the worst of me."
"Ah! hasn"t it for years been struggling to see only the best of you!"
cried Perior; "I don"t deserve that, Camelia."
"You see the best now; why won"t you believe in it?"
"I don"t say I see the worst--by no means; even there is something that surprises me, that makes me confess, gladly, that I have misjudged you; but I can only believe that yesterday, in the impulsive reaction against your false position--you did not love Arthur--the fact frightened you; I am glad of that, too; but in the melting illusion you thought of me as something solid to cling to, and now you are determined to keep on clinging, deceiving yourself with an impossible mirage of fidelity, devotion, and self-forgetting, which you"ll never reach, Camelia --never, never." Camelia contemplated him.
"Yes, you believed that, or something even less pathetic; that accounts for your cruelty--the cruelty of your last words yesterday--so false as I knew them; but I understood them, saw all you thought, though your wrath, your injury, your impatience to punish--how fond you are of punishing!--wouldn"t let me explain. You did not believe that I loved you--_loved_ you. You do not believe it now. You can"t believe that I, who could have anybody, should choose you. It looks to you like an aberration. You are afraid of being hurt by believing, afraid I"ll treat you as I treated him, afraid that you will be another toy--that was what cut yesterday. You were being played with--I saw you thought it. But I do love you; you will have to believe it. I do--choose you." Her head raised, she was looking at him with the clear command of this inflexible choice. The sublimity of confidence was touching. Perior, grimly conscious of its illusory foothold over chasms, could afford a certain chivalry, could at least restrain the brutality of a push into the void.
He didn"t like the idea of Camelia, his smiling Camelia, really scared, tumbling from her pinnacles into the abyss where rocky facts awaited her.
"I am sensible to the compliment"--the mild irony of his tone was a warning of insecurity--"though you will own that it is, in some senses, a dubious one; but it"s very kind in you, who could have anybody, to stoop to a n.o.body. My obscurity is gilded by the preference; it will console, illuminate my solitude." She flushed, interrupting him with a quick, sharp--
"I didn"t intend that! You know it! You are cruel, yes, and mean; for only my sincerity gives you the power to wound me. You _are_ a somebody; though the whole world were blind, I can see; that is why I love you. Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?" Camelia did not come closer as she asked it, but her poised expectancy of look seemed to claim him. Perior folded his arms and stared at her. "I would rather not," he said.