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 of
reparation. 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 difficult for 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 her
yesterday; 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."
"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 compassionate, 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 harassing 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
reassuring 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 lustre 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 nobility 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 shell 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 shell?" 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 nobody. 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.
"Why?"--her voice at last showed a tremor. "You debase me by your
incredulity. If I do not love you--what did yesterday mean?--what does
_this_ mean? It is my only excuse."
"Excuse?"--in this nearing antagonism his voice flamed up at the sudden
outlet--"Excuse? There was no excuse--for yesterday." Saved from the
direct brutality of refusing her love, the memory of Arthur's betrayed
trust rose hot within him. Arthur's sincerity shone in its noble
unconsciousness of the falseness of friend and sweetheart, one falseness
forced, one willing and frivolous; his grief was mocked by her
indifference.
"Nothing can excuse that," he said. "What right had you to accept him?
What right had you to keep me in ignorance? Why did you not break with
him before turning to me? By Heaven, Camelia! even knowing you as I do I
cannot understand how you did it! I could hardly look him in the face
when he was here, the thought of it sickened me so."
"Yes, that was horrible," said Camelia.
"Horrible?" Perior repeated. Her judicial tone exasperated him. He
walked away to the window repeating, "Horrible!" as though exclaiming at
inadequacy.
"But have I not atoned?" Camelia asked.
"Atoned?" he stared round at her.
"I have set him free. I have owned myself unworthy. I did not know you
cared for me when I accepted him, or, at least, I did not know I cared
for you--so much."
Perior continued to look at her for a silent moment, contemplating the
monstrousness, yet strangely intuitive truth of her amendment. He let it
pass, feeling rather helpless before it.
"So that is the way you pave the way to penitence? You atone to the
broken toys by walking over them? No, Camelia, no, nothing atones,
either to him or to me, for that unspoken lie." He came back to her,
feeling the need to face her for the solemn moment of the contest.
Camelia was speaking hurriedly at last, losing a little her sustaining
calm--"And had I told you?--Had I said at once that I was engaged to
him?--Would that have helped us?--Could you have said, then, that you
loved me? You would have been too angry--for his sake--to say it, when I
had told you that in one day I had accepted and meant to reject
him"--the questions came eagerly.
He looked at her face, strong with its still unshaken certainty, white,
delicate, insistent. Loving it and her, his eyes held hers intently, and
he asked, "Did I say I loved you?"
A serene dignity rose to meet his look. "You did not _say_ it, perhaps.
You said you did _not_ love me," she added, with a little smile.
"I was base--and I spoke basely. I said that I loved you enough to kiss
you. You may scorn me for it."
"Ah!" she said quickly, "that was because you did not believe that I
loved you! You are exonerated."
"Not even then. But if you do love me--choose me, as you say; if I do
love you--which I have not said--and will not say, will not say even to
exculpate my folly of last night--even then, Camelia! I would not marry
a woman whom I despise."
"Despise?" she repeated. Her voice was a toneless echo of his. She
weighed the word, and found it heavy, as he saw. Her eyes dwelt on his
mutely, and there dawned slowly in them the terror of the eternal
negative that rose between her and him.
"You are not good enough for me, Camelia," said Perior.
"Because of yesterday!" she gasped. "You can't forgive that!"
"Not only that, Camelia--I do not love you."
She stood silent, gazing. His heart bled for her. To tell the saving
lie, he had faced a jibing self-scorn; yet he continued to face it
inflexibly.
"I could not live with you. I think you would kill me. I said to poor
Arthur this afternoon what I believe of you--that you are selfish, and
false, and hard as a stone. I could not love a woman of whom I could
think--of whom I had been forced to say--that."
Compunctions rained upon him--sharp arrows. Her mute, white face
appealed--if only to the long devotion, the long tenderness of years.
The crucial moment was past, and the upwelling tenderness, devotion,
called to him to hurry her away from it, and support her under his own
most necessary cruelty.
His voice broke in a stammer as he said, taking her hands--"How can I
tell you how I hate myself for saying this?--it is hideous--it is mean
to say."
And Camelia said nothing, seemed merely to await, in a frozen stupor,
another blow. He could not see in her now the lying jilt of yesterday.
"Don't think of me again as I've been this afternoon. Forget it, won't
you?" he urged; "I am going away to-morrow--and--you will get over it,
be able to see me again--some day, as the good old friend who never
wanted to be cruel--no, I swear it, Camelia. You must go now; you will
let me order the trap? You will let me drive you home?"
She had drawn her hands away; in the dim room her eyes met his--bereft,
astonished.
"You will let me drive you?" Perior repeated with some confusion.
"No, I will walk," she said, hardly audibly.
"The five miles back? It is too far--too late." He looked away from her,
too much touched by those astonished eyes.
"No--I will walk." Then, as he stood still, rather at a loss--
"You are going to-morrow?"
"Yes."
"Because of me?"
"Ah--that pleases you!" he said, with a smile a little forced.
"Pleases me!" The sharpness of her voice cut him, made him feel gross in
his unkindness.
"It does not please me, but it is the best thing under the
circumstances. Now, Camelia, you must go. I will walk with you. We won't
speak of this at all--will pretend it never happened. You must forgive
my folly of last night, and get over this touching folly of yours. Come,
we won't talk of it any more," he repeated, drawing her hand through
his arm, holding it with a clasp consolatory and entreating.
She did not follow him. "No! no!" she said, half-choked, drawing away
the hand. Then, suddenly, with a great sob, turning to him, she flung
herself upon his breast, clung to him, her hands clutching his
shoulders--
"Oh! don't leave me! Don't leave me! I can't bear it!" she cried,
shuddering. "I will be good! Oh, I _will_ be good! Give me time, just
wait--and see--" The words were half lost, as with hidden face she wept.
"You are so cruel, so unjust--give me time and see how I will please
you--how you will love me. You must love me--you must--you must."
"Camelia! Camelia!" Perior was shocked, shaken as well. The deep note of
his own voice warned him in its pity, and amazement, and distress, of
the dangerous emotion that seized him. To yield again to an emotion,
even though a higher one than last night's--to yield with those thoughts
of hers--those spoken thoughts--never, never.
He tried to hold her off; her sobs made her helpless, but with arms
outstretched--blindly, as he remembered to have seen a crying, stumbling
child, she turned to him--it was too pitiful--as she might have turned
to her mother. How repulse the broken creature? He could but take the
outstretched hands, let her come to him again; she did not put her arms
around him; there was no claim; only a clinging, her face hidden, as she
sobbed, "Don't leave me! Don't! I love you! I adore you!"
"My poor child!"
"Yes, yes, your poor child! Be sorry for me, be kind--only a child. I
did not mean to deserve that--torture, you--despising! I never _meant_
anything--so wrong. Only a silly, a selfish, a frivolous child--won't
you see it?--never caring for the toys I played with--never caring for
anything but you, _really_. Can't you see it now, as I do? I have grown
up, I have put away those things. Can't you forgive me?"
"Yes, yes. Great heavens! I am not such a prig, such a fool! I have
always hoped----"
"That you could allow yourself to love me! Ah, say it! say it!" She
looked up, lifting her face to his.
"To be fond of you, Camelia," said Perior. "I can't say more than that!"
"Because you won't believe in me! Can't believe in me! And I can't live
without you to help me! Haven't you seen, all along, that you were the
only one I cared about? Half my little naughtinesses were only to
provoke you, to make you angry, to see that you cared enough to be
angry. All the rest--the worldliness--the using of people--yes, yes, I
own to it!--but no one was better than I! Why should I have been good
when no one else is? When all are playing the same game, and most people
only fit to play with? Why should I have been better than they?"
"I don't know, Camelia, but--my wife would have to be."
"She _will_ be."
"Don't make me hurt you--don't be so cruel to yourself."
"She will be," Camelia repeated.
"I beg of you--I implore you, Camelia." He hardened his face to meet her
look, searching, eager, pitiful.
"How could I say this unless I believed you loved me--had always loved
me? Don't speak; don't say no; don't send me away. You are angry. You
have the right to be; but, ah! if you only knew what I feel for you."
"Don't tell me, Camelia."
"But I must. I love everything about you--I always have. When you were
near me I saw every gesture you made, heard every word you spoke, knew
every thought you had about me. I love your little ways--I know them
all; that wag of your foot when you are angry, the look of your teeth
when you smile, your hands, your face, your dear rough hair----"
Perior had turned from red to white, and still looking at him, shaking
her head a little, she finished very simply on a long sigh--
"I can't live without you. I _can't_."
"Camelia, I can't marry you," he said; and then, taking breath in the
ensuing silence, "You are mistaken. I don't love you. I have your
welfare at my heart; I wish you all happiness, all good. I am sorry,
terribly sorry for you; but I do not love you. You must believe me. I do
not love you. I will not marry you.--God forgive me for the lie," he
said to himself; "but no, no, no, I can_not_ marry her, poor impulsive,
wilful, half noble, half pitiful child, a thousand times no." The strong
rebellion of his very soul steadied him. He could yield without a
tremor to his pity, could take her hands and hold them in a clasp
convincingly paternal and pitying.
Camelia closed her eyes, drawing in a long breath, too sharp in its
accepted bitterness for the break of a sob. Her face, with this tragedy
of still woe upon it, was almost unrecognizable. Until now it had been a
face of triumph. Defeat--and that at last she recognized defeat he
saw--changed its very lines; the iron entered her soul, and something
left her face for ever. For a long time she did not speak, and her voice
seemed dimmed, as though spoken from a great distance, when she said,
her eyes still closed, "Then you never loved me!"
"Never," said Perior, who, encompassed by the saving lie, could freely
breathe in the tonic atmosphere of his resolute pain.
"But--you are fond of me?" said Camelia; and as she spoke, from under
the solemn pressure of her eyelids, pressed down as on a dead hope,
great tears came slowly.
"Great Heaven! Fond of you? _Fond_ of you? Yes--yes, my dear Camelia."
He leaned forward and kissed her forehead above the closed eyes.
"Ah!" she murmured, "I was so sure you loved me!" More than its rigid
misery, the humble bewilderment on her face, as of a creature stricken
helpless, and not comprehending its pain, hurt him, warned him that
every moment made it more difficult to keep down the fluttering of a
longing he would not, must never satisfy. He seemed to crush a harsh
hand on its delicate wings as he said--
"And now you will go. You will let me walk home with you?"
She shook her head. "No, no."
She went towards the door, her hand still in his.
"You should not go alone. I beg of you, dear, to let me come."
"I would rather go alone."
They were in the hall, and she had not looked at him again. She put her
hand out to the door and then she paused. Perior had also paused.
"Will you kiss me good-bye?" she said.
"Will I? O Camelia!" At that moment he felt himself to be more false
than he had been during all the scene with her, for as he kissed her the
fluttering wings beat upward with the exultant throb of a released
desire. And she did not know. She believed him. All her hope was
stricken in the dust. And yet they clung together--lovers; he ashamed of
his knowledge; she pathetic, tragic, in her chastened, her humiliated,
trust and ignorance.