“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.
CHAPTER XVIII
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.