“When we were young together,” said Perior, smiling at her so fondly that she felt deliciously reassured as to everything.
The gods always helped a young lady who helped herself. Such had been Camelia’s experience in life, even when she helped herself to other people’s belongings.
At all events, with hardly a qualm of conscience, Camelia enjoyed the afternoon she had wrested from poor Mary.
The tea-table was duly installed under the wide shade of the copper-beech. Perior carried out an armful of books and reviews from which to choose. They drank their tea and ate their bread and butter, and Camelia read aloud from the Revue des Deux Mondes. And it cannot be denied that Perior, sitting in the cool green shadow, listening to the perfect French accent, looking at the white figure sprinkled with the pale shifting gold that filtered through the leaves above them, enjoyed himself a great deal more than he would have done with Mary. Truly at times the way of transgressors is very easy.
CHAPTER XIII
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 the supposititious 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 how sorry I was?”