“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.