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Title: The Rescue

Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Release date: February 25, 2013 [eBook #42194]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)








The Rescue

[Illustration: frontispiece]




The Rescue

BY
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
AUTHOR OF "THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIA"
"THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD"

[Illustration: colophon]

NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1902

Copyright, 1901, 1902, by
THE CENTURY CO.

_Published May, 1902_

THE DEVINNE PRESS.




TO

G. S. S.

AND

M. D. S.





THE RESCUE

[Illustration]

I


EUSTACE DAMIER bent his long, melancholy profile over
the photograph-album. It was an old-fashioned album; its faded morocco
cover, its gilt clasp loosened with age, went with the quiet
old-fashioned little room, that had no intentions, made no efforts, and
yet was full of meaning, with the charm of an epoch near enough to be
easily understood, yet with a grace and a pathos in its modern antiquity
deeper than that possessed by a more romantic remoteness. It was the
sort of little drawing-room where one's mother might have accepted one's
father: one could not quite see one's present in it, but one saw a near
and a dear past. The gray wall-paper with its flecked gold flower, the
curved lines of the sedately ornamental chairs and sofas, the crisp yet
faded chintzes, the wedded vases on the marble mantelpiece, the books,
well worn, on stands, the group of family silhouettes on the wall, the
cheerful floral carpet--all made a picture curiously unlike the early
nineties, and fully characteristic of the sixties. There were many
flowers about the room, arranged with a cheerful regularity; the very
roses looked old-fashioned in their closely grouped bunches; and in a
corner stood a tall étagère bearing potted plants in rows that narrowed
to an apex. Between curtains, carefully drawn, of white lace and green
rep, one saw a strip of garden brilliantly illuminated with sunlight.

It was in just such a room and in such surroundings that Damier had
imagined seeing again his old friend, and his mother's friend, Mrs.
Mostyn. He always associated her with a sprightly conservatism. With a
genial, yet detached, appreciation of modern taste, she would be
placidly faithful to the taste of her girlhood. The house, he
remembered, had been her mother's, and its contents had probably
remained as they were when her mother's death put her in possession of
it. He remembered Mrs. Mostyn's caps, her cameos, her rings, her
bracelet with the plaited hair in it, her jests, too, and her
gaieties--all with a perfume of potpourri, with a niceness and
exactitude of simile that had not attempted to keep pace with the
complexities, the allusiveness and elusiveness, of modern humor.

Mrs. Mostyn had lived for many years in this small country house; she
had entered it as a childless widow after a life of some color and
movement, her husband having been a promising diplomat, whose death in
early middle age had cut short a career that had not yet found an
opportunity of rising from promise to any large achievement. After his
death Mrs. Mostyn devoted herself to books, to her garden, her poor
people, and her friends. Her house was not adapted to a large
hospitality, but one of these friends was usually with her. Damier,
however, was only paying a call. He had never visited Mrs. Mostyn; she
had visited his mother in London, and since his mother had died he had
been little in England. Now he was staying with the Halbournes, eight
miles away.

The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm,
fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy
mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an
impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural
to see there his mother's gentle, thoughtful face--first of a
round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the
face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair;
natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the
thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it
was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly
unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon
the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and
the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some
bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and
without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing
silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against
the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the
late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke
of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face
was not that of a French-woman. One's first impression--not too
superficial, either--was of a finished little _mondaine;_ but finished,
poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty--indeed, as
Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in
ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long.
Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and
drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the
narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her
eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight
eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions
to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen,
and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the
modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting
face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more
than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped
in this sensation--of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from
the past, of something mysterious and urgent--when Mrs. Mostyn came in.




II


MRS. MOSTYN had changed little since he had last seen
her five years ago in London. Her hair, under the laces of her cap, was
whiter; her rosiness and plumpness--her little hands were especially
fat--more accentuated: but the gaiety and kindness were the same. As
much as in the past she entered into all his interests: asked questions
about his three years at the English embassy in Rome, about his recent
travels, what he had done, what he intended to do. When all
reminiscences were over, all plans discussed, and when Mrs. Mostyn had
sketched for him, with her crisp, nipping definitiveness, the people of
the neighborhood, Damier, who during all the talk had kept the album in
his hand, his forefinger between the leaves at the place where the
enchanted photograph had looked at him, said, opening the book: "I have
been immersing myself in the past. Is anything so full of its feeling as
an old photograph-album? _Çà sent le temps_, and I have made a discovery
there. Who is this?" He held out the opened page to her, and Mrs.
Mostyn, adjusting her eye-glasses, looked.

"Ah, yes. Is she not charming?"

"She has charmed me. She is wonderful."

"Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me,
too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time.
I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss
Chanfrey--Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know.
Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an
ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her,
and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to
Paris, where Clara's beauty made a furor--she was thought lovelier than
the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was
far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries--she wore a
white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the
opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was,
report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in
the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness
about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a
waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk _pour
passer le temps_--to make the something that was coming come more
quickly. Poor child! it came."

"She married Lord Pemleigh?" Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her
eyes vague with memories.

"No; don't you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan--but only after
years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing--a dreadful thing.
She eloped--ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no
fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted
Clara's portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of
Manet; a full-length portrait--I saw it--of Clara in a white lawn dress
with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black
hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference
charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made
her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No
explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the
position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say
nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they
loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her
back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married
him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without
ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered
her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only
unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her
all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with
him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found
that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant,
dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible
story;--a violet dragged in the mud."

Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the
album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, "I cannot associate
her with the gutter," he said, "nor can I understand this violet
stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too
intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment
dazzled by a shoddy bohemian."

"Oh," sighed Mrs. Mostyn, "has delicacy ever been a certificate of
safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional;
but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant--far more ignorant than
a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own
was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her
unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought
significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled
herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least,
more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,--I well remember
him,--an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of
her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous
unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and
perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her
English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the
match had already embittered her relations with her mother--Lady
Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then--and
then--she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only
final explanation of these stories."

"And she ceased to love him?" He seemed now to interpret the gaze more
fully. Did it not foresee? Did it not entreat--though so proudly?

"Ah, I don't know. All I know is that she stuck to him, and that she was
miserable. Poor, poor child!" Mrs. Mostyn repeated.

"And is she dead?" he asked after a little pause in which it seemed to
him that they had thrown flowers on a long-forgotten grave.

Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden,
the effort of difficult recollection on her face.

"I really don't know--I really can't remember. So soon afterward my
husband died; Lady Chanfrey died; I came here to live. I heard from time
to time of her misfortunes--of her death I don't think I heard; but for
years now I have heard nothing. How many years ago is it? This is '95,
and that was--oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago."

"So that she would be now?"

"She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is
over."

"I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive."

The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more
significant.

"Could you find out?" he asked presently.

Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like
a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of
night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in
their own epoch.

"My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won't say
dabbler--seeker-after."

"Not after impressions," said Damier, smiling a little sadly.

"And have you not found anything?" she asked.

"No; I don't think I have."

"Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!" smiled Mrs. Mostyn. "You
have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman
of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give
yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have
meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by--how many
years?--fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when
that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,--the
daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,--and you might find there an
adventure of the heart."

"Ah, I don't care about a daughter--or about an adventure."

Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled
and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said
presently:

"Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows
Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara's brother,--a man I never liked,--and she
could ask him."

"Pray do."

"But I don't fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject.
He and his sister were never sympathetic."

"I wish you would find out," Damier repeated.

"I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever
find her," smiled Mrs. Mostyn.




III


EUSTACE DAMIER was susceptible and fastidious,
idealistic and skeptical. He was not weak, for he rarely yielded to his
impressions; but his strength, since nothing had come into his life that
called for decisive action, was mainly negative. Perfection haunted him,
and seen beside that inner standard, most experience was tawdry. He was
quite incapable of loving what he had if he could not have what he
loved. The vacancy had once been filled, but since his mother's, his
sister's death, it had yawned, oppressive, unresponsive, about him. He
was no cynic, but he was melancholy. He had gone through life
alternating between ardor and despondency.

He was amused now, amused and yet amazed, by the extraordinary
impression that the old photograph had made upon him. More than once he
had drawn back on the verge of a great passion,--drawn back he could
hardly have said why,--feeling that the woman, or he himself, lacked
something of the qualities that could make them lastingly need each
other. And now it really seemed to him that he needed, and would need
lastingly, this woman of thirty years ago; and surely she needed him.
She called to him, and he answered. He understood her; he loved her.

It was whimsical, absurd, pathetic. He could smile over it, yet under
the smile some deeper self seemed to smile another smile--the smile of a
mystery speaking at last in words that he could not understand, but in a
voice that he could hear.

Mrs. Mostyn had yielded the photograph to his determined
claim,--laughing at his impudence,--and he kept it always beside him in
the weeks that followed his departure from ----shire. During those
weeks, that lengthened into months, no news came, and the eagerness of
his feeling died away. The feeling was still there, but it was like an
awakened and living memory of an old, dead love. He thought of her as
dead; it was best so, for he could imagine with repulsion the
degradation that a harried life in the slimier walks of bohemia might
have wrought in her had she lived. The sense of half-humorous,
half-tragic pathos remained with him. He smiled at the photograph every
day. It represented just what a memory, deep and still, would have
represented. It said to him, "We have found each other. Now we will
never part." And absurdly, deliciously, he felt--with an instinct that
fluttered wings high above any net of reason, singing, almost
invisible--that what he had missed was waiting for him somewhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

One day in late autumn, when he had returned to London, something
happened which changed the character of this unsubstantial romance. He
met at his club another old friend, a contemporary of Mrs. Mostyn's.
Sir Henry Quarle was a writer of pleasant reminiscences, a garrulous and
companionable man about town, who had kept careful pace with the times,
who, indeed, flattered himself that he usually kept a step or two ahead
of them: he was prophetic as well as reminiscent; had firm opinions and
facile appreciations.

He and Damier spoke of Mrs. Mostyn,--Sir Henry, too, had seen her
recently,--of Paris, and of her connection with it. "And by the way,"
said Sir Henry, "she told me that you were tremendously interested in
what she told you about Madame Vicaud--Clara Chanfrey that was. Now I
know a good deal about that unhappy history, and can, indeed, carry it
on to a further chapter; the first did interest you?"

"Tremendously," Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that
daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. "Is she alive?" he added.

"That I don't know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I
went to Vicaud's studio one day. They had been married only a few
years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness."

"In what way?" Damier's heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.

"Oh--not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt
most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but
white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already
poverty-stricken, but clean--grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed
the floor herself. Four or five artists were there--clever, well-known
men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally
realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted
pictures _pour épater le bourgeois;_ grossly materialistic, cynically
skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to
it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best
bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all
that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of
antagonism to the conformist, the bourgeois attitude. But the
bohemianism of her husband and his comrades could only turn her to ice.
It was strange to see her fear, and yet her strength, in these
surroundings. They saw it, too; her chill gentleness, her inflexible
face, cowed them, made them silly rather than vicious. Only, at that
time, she had not cowed her husband; at all events, he seemed to take a
pleasure in showing his mastery over her, his indifference to her
attitude. He was a genius, with the face of a poet and the soul of a
satyr. She had charmed him by her unusualness; he had determined to have
her, to snatch her, the fine, delicate creature, from another world, as
it were, and to make her part of his experience of life in very much the
same sense as he would have tried a new kind of sin for the sake of its
novelty. Then, too, he hoped, of course, for advancement, pecuniary and
social; the disappointment of that hope must have roused the fiend in
him. Of course he loved her--if one can turn the word to such base
uses. What man would not have loved her? He loved her as he might have
loved one of his mistresses; and I remember that on that day he
dared--as perhaps he would not have dared had they been alone--to go to
her before us all, fondle her cheek, and, putting his arm around her,
kiss her. We all, I think, felt the ugly bravado of it, and I know that
I never detested a man as I detested him at that moment. She sat
motionless, expressionless. Only her eyes showed the terror of her
helplessness, her despair."

"Just heavens!" Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a
bewildering aching and despair. "Why did she not leave him?"

"Well," said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing
his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, "there was
the child--they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her
pride--she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need
of her. A few years after their marriage Vicaud took to absinthe, and
drank himself half mad from time to time. Her conceptions of the duties
of marriage, the sacredness of its bond, were, I am sure, very high;
duty, pity, a hopeless loyalty, kept her to him, no doubt. What she went
through no one, I suppose, can imagine.

"I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days--it must have been
more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her
husband in an _allée_ in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone,
his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in
his defiant black cloak. I sha'n't forget them as they walked under the
October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was
still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was
no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with
all her own gracious courtesy--but graciousness a little exaggerated;
she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the life about her, almost
too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of
life.

"I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to
see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did,
realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to
ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent
in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up
flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable
room--its bareness the best thing that could be said of it--at the top
of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp
in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her
music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in
England, and Vicaud's old mother lived with them, a spiteful,
suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud
gave her all the quiet deference that she would have given her had she
been her equal. She had evidently forced from the old woman--forced by
no effort, but by the mere compulsion of her own unflinching courtesy--a
sullen respect. Her husband looked at her, spoke to her, with an odd
mingling of resentment and dependence. He would say constantly, 'Que
dis-tu, Claire?' But he talked, too, with the evident intention of
putting her to shame before her English guest,--seeing how she bore
it,--talked of gallant adventures, of the charms of various females of
his acquaintance. She sat pale, mild, and cold. It was like seeing mud
thrown at a statue of the Madonna.

"When she and I talked together after the supper--one could hardly call
the meal a dinner--she did not make an apologetic reference to the
ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the
friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of
books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence;
she told me about her progress at school, her cleverness, her beauty.
And next to her daughter, reading and music had been her great
resources. I was surprised at her scholarship, at her familiarity with
German philosophy, English poetry, Russian fiction, French and English
literary and social criticism; indeed, on the subjects of social
problems, of human suffering and the various remedies, economic and
ethical, suggested for it, her knowledge was far deeper than my own. But
in all our talk there was not a note of the personal, the confidential,
the regretful; she might have been sitting in an environment absolutely
her own. I never saw her again after that evening. When I was in Paris
some years later I went to the house, and heard that Monsieur Vicaud and
his mother had both died there, and that Madame Vicaud, after nursing
them through their last illnesses, had gone. I have often wondered what
became of her."

Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the
subject of Madame Vicaud and her misfortunes. But that evening he wrote
to Mrs. Mostyn, and asked her if she had not yet obtained for him some
news of his lady of the photograph. The photograph had for him that
night a new look; it still said, "I need you," but "I need you now. Help
me." He was convinced that she lived.

Mrs. Mostyn's reply came in a day, and inclosed a letter of introduction
to Madame Vicaud, Rue B----, Paris. "Sir Molyneux knew nothing of his
sister's whereabouts," Mrs. Mostyn wrote, "and it was from another
source that I found out that Clara still lives, and at the inclosed
address. Do find her, my Don Quixote, and I must make her come and visit
me."

The inclosed letter asked Madame Vicaud to recall an old friend, and to
welcome Mr. Damier for her sake and his own. She had only recently had
news of Madame Vicaud, and so was able, happily, to aid Mr. Damier in
his great wish to make her acquaintance. She hoped, also, that she might
see Madame Vicaud in England soon; would she not pay her a visit--a
long one? It was a long letter, graceful, cordial, affectionate, a rope
of flowers thrown to Damier for his guidance into the labyrinth.




IV


DAMIER, three days afterward, stood in his sitting-room
in a Paris hotel, looking with a certain astonishment at the small sheet
of notepaper he held, upon which was written in a firm, flowing hand--a
hand that seemed, though so gracefully, to contradict any impression of
a cry for help:

     DEAR MR. DAMIER: I shall be very glad to see you to-morrow
     afternoon at four. I well remember Mrs. Mostyn; to hear of her from
     a friend of hers will be a double pleasure.

     Yours sincerely,

     CLARA VICAUD.

It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged
suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he had thought of
her, the young girl leaning on the chair-back in her flowing dress of
silk. She was alive, and he was to see her that afternoon. Damier felt a
chill overtake his eagerness. Was he not about to shatter a charming
experience--one of the sweetest, most tender, most dearly absurd of his
life? Would he not find in the real, middle-aged Clara Vicaud a hard,
uninteresting woman? He had a vision of stoutly corseted robustness in
jetted black cashmere; of a curve of heavy throat under the chin; of
cold eyes looking with wonder, with suspicion even, upon his romantic
quest. He could almost have felt it in him to draw back at the eleventh
hour were he not ashamed to face in himself such cowardice. He took out
the photograph and looked at it, and the eyes of Clara Chanfrey seemed
to smile at him with something of tender irony. "Do not be afraid of me;
I will never disappoint you," they said. After all, what could the mere
passage of years mean to such a face as that? What could the bitter
experiences of a sorrowful life hold in them to tarnish ever the spirit
that looked from it? The reluctance was only superficial, a ripple of
reaction upon the deep tide of his impulse.

At four that afternoon he drove to a long, narrow street near the
Boulevard St. Germain--a street of large, bleak houses showing a sort of
dismantled stateliness. At one of the largest, stateliest, bleakest of
these the fiacre stopped, and Damier, after asking the way of a grimly
respectable concierge with a small knitted shawl of black wool folded
tightly about her shoulders, mounted a wide, uncarpeted stone staircase
to the highest floor, feeling, as he stood outside the door, that,
despite the long ascent, the thick beating of his heart was due more to
emotional than to physical causes.

He rang, and as he stood waiting he heard suddenly within a woman's
voice singing. The voice was beautiful, and the song was Schumann's "Im
wunderschönen Monat Mai." Its pathos, its simplicity, its tenderness,
mingled with Damier's almost tremulous mood, and pierced his very soul.
It was like an awakening in Paradise; there was the remembered sadness
of a long, long past; the strange, melancholy rapture of something
dawning, something unknown and wonderful. Could any music more fitly
usher in the coming meeting?

A middle-aged servant came to the door, conventual in the demure quiet
of her dress and demeanor, and ushered Damier into a bare and spacious
room where the light from scantily curtained windows shone broadly
across the polished floor. A woman rose and came forward from the piano.
Damier's first impression, after the breathless moment in which he saw
that it was not _she_, was one of dazzling beauty.

"I am Mademoiselle Vicaud--Claire Vicaud," this young woman said, "and
you are Mr. Damier. My mother is expecting you; she will be here
directly."

Perhaps he felt, as she smiled gravely upon him, it was the power in her
face, rather than its beauty, that had dazzled him. Already he
discovered something almost repellent in its enchantment. Her eyes were
dark, with a still, an impenetrable darkness; a small mole emphasized
the scarlet curve of her upper lip; the lines of cheek and brow were
wonderfully beautiful. It was, indefinably, in the soft spreading of the
nostrils, in the deeply sunk corners of the mouth, that one felt a
plebeian touch. There was nothing, however, of this quality in the
carriage of her head, with its heavy tiara of dark-red hair, nor in the
dignity and grace of her figure; and nothing in her, except some vague
suggestion in this grace and dignity, reminded him of the photograph;
and he was at once deeply glad of this, glad that Mademoiselle Vicaud
resembled her father--he felt sure she did--and not her mother.

She seated herself, indicating to him a chair near her, and observed him
with the same grave smile, and in an unembarrassed silence, while he
spoke of his pleasure at being in Paris, at finding them there. Damier
himself was not unembarrassed; found it difficult to talk trivialities
to this Hebe while thrilling with expectation; and Mademoiselle Vicaud,
unable otherwise to interpret it, may well have seen in her own radiant
apparition the cause of his slight disturbance.

"But you are not old," she said to him.

"Did you expect that?" he inquired.

"Then you are not a friend of Mamma's--a friend of her youth, I mean? I
don't think that she was quite sure who you were."

"It is only through an old friend of hers that--I hope to become
another," Damier finished, smiling.

"Well, _pour commencer_, you may be our young friend--we have time, you
and I, before we need think of being old ones. I get tired of old
things, myself."

"Even of old friends?" Damier asked, amused at her air of placid
familiarity.

"Ah, that depends."

He observed that Mademoiselle Vicaud, though speaking English with
fluent ease, had in her voice and manner some most un-English qualities.
Her voice was soft, deep, and a little guttural. She had a way, he
noticed later on, of saying "Ah" when one talked to her, a placid little
ejaculation that was curiously characteristic and curiously foreign.

But at the moment further observations were arrested. The door opened,
and rising, as a swift footfall entered the room, Damier found himself
face to face with his lady of the photograph.

He blushed. His emotion showed itself very evidently on his handsome,
sensitive face, so evidently that the strangeness of the meeting made
itself felt as a palpable atmosphere, and made conventional greetings an
effort and something of an absurdity. Madame Vicaud, however, dared the
absurdity, and so successfully that the formal sweetness of her smile,
the vague geniality of her voice, as she said right things to him,
seemed effortless. Damier, through all the tumult of his hurrying
impressions, comparisons, wonders, yet found time to feel that she was a
woman who could make many efforts and seem to make none. Her manner
slid past the stress of the moment; her wonder, if she felt any, was not
visible. All that she showed to her sudden visitor, introducing himself
through a past that must have been long dead to her, was the smile, the
geniality, vague and formal, of the woman of the world.

By contrast to this atmosphere of rule and reticence, the few words he
had exchanged with the daughter seemed suddenly intimate--seemed to make
a bond where the mother's made a barrier. But above all barriers, all
reticences, was the one fact--the wonderful fact--that she was she,
changed so much, yet so much the same that the change was only a
deepening, a subtilizing of her charm.

"Yes, I remember Mrs. Mostyn so well," said Madame Vicaud, "and it is
many years ago now. She must be old. Does she look old? Is she well?
Will she come to Paris one day, do you think? Ah, as for my going to
England to see her, that is a great temptation, a sufficient one were
the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she
really, now, knows it better than I do."

Mademoiselle Vicaud did not meet her mother's glance as it rested upon
her; her eyes were fixed, with their dark placidity, upon Damier, as she
sat sidewise in her chair, her hands--they were large, white,
beautifully formed--loosely interlaced on the chair-back.

"Yes; I know England well," she said--"educational England. I went to
school there. I associate England with all that is formative and
improving; I have been run through the mold so many times."

"Run through?" Damier asked, smiling. "Have you never taken the form,
then?" He was not interested in Mademoiselle Vicaud, although he felt
intimate with her; but her mother's glance brought her between them,
placed her there; one was forced to look at her and to talk to her.

"Do you think I have?" Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that
was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. "I hope not," she added,
"physically, at least. I don't like your English outline, as far as that
is concerned." Damier could but observe that hers was not English. She
was supple, curved--slender, yet robust; one saw her soft breathing; her
waist bent with a lovely flexibility. But the contemplation of these
facts, to which she seemed, with the indifference of perfect assurance,
to draw his attention, emphasized that sense of intimacy in a way that
rather irritated him; Mademoiselle Vicaud, her outline and her exquisite
gowning of it, slightly jarred upon him. He hardly knew how to word his
appreciation of her difference, and after saying that he was glad she
had escaped the more unbecoming influences of his country, added: "I
hope that there were some things you cared to adopt."

"They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid," said Mademoiselle
Vicaud.

Her mother, while they interchanged these slight pleasantries, continued
to look at her daughter.

"You rather exaggerate, do you not, Claire, the coercive nature of your
English experience?" she said. "It was not all school; there was play,
too."

"Play like the kindergarten kind, with a meaning in it. My mother has
always been anxious for me to take the right impressions," said
Mademoiselle Vicaud, her eyes still on Damier; "she has always chosen
them for me."

There was a momentary silence after this--a silence that might, Damier
fancied, have held something of irritation for the mother, though none
showed itself in the calm intelligence of her glance as it rested on her
daughter.

Looking from her before the pause could become significant of anything
like argument or antagonism, she asked Damier for how long he expected
to remain in Paris, and the talk floated easily into cheerful and
familiar channels--concerts, the play, books, and pictures.

She was so much more like the photograph than he had expected, and yet
so different! The figure was the same, almost girlish, more girlish,
really, than Mademoiselle Claire's, though the fall in the line of her
shoulders, the erect poise with which she sat, recalled a girlishness of
another epoch, another tradition.

There was that in the folds of her long silk skirt,--a worn, shining
silk, yet in its antiquity replete with elegance,--in the position of
her narrow foot pointing from beneath its folds, in the way she lightly
folded her arms while she talked to him, that suggested deportment, a
manner trained, and as much a part of her as putting on her shoes was.
She was very mannered and very unaffected; the manner was like the
graceful garment of her perfect ease and naturalness--their protection,
perhaps, and their ornament. As for her face, Damier, looking at it
while they talked, felt its enchantment growing on him, like the gradual
tuning of exquisite instruments preparing him for perfect music. Still,
the face of the photograph, so unchanged that it was startling to feel
how much older it was. The abundant hair was dressed in the same
fashion, but its black was now of an odd grayness that made one just
aware that it was no longer black. The heart-shaped oval was emphasized;
the cheeks were thin, the chin sharply delicate, the lips compressed
when she did not smile--but she frequently smiled--into a line of
endurance, of a patience almost bitter. There were tones of pale mauve
in the faint roses of her lips and cheeks, but Damier felt that this
charming tint must always have been theirs--went with the snow and ebony
of her type. Although her face was little lined,--emotion with her had
been repressed, not demonstrated,--it had a look more aging than
lines--a look of bleakness, of a cold impassivity. The texture of her
skin was like a white rose-petal just fading. And in this faded
whiteness her dark eyes gazed, more stern, more tragic than in youth.
There was in them, and in the straight line of her black brows above
them, a somberness and almost a menace. Damier wondered over the strange
contrast to her frequent smile. He saw that where Mademoiselle Vicaud
was still and grave her mother was light and gay, but the gaiety and
lightness--he traced the impression further--were part of the manner,
the protecting, ornamental manner; were something that had once been
real, and were now put on, like her shoes, again. The daughter showed
herself, or seemed to show herself, imperturbably: the mother was
hidden, masked; her eyes, with their contrasting smile, made him think
of Tragedy glancing among garlands of roses.

Before he went, that day, Damier told Madame Vicaud that his stay in
Paris was to be indefinite; had even let her see, if she wished to, that
she counted among his reasons for staying. He was sure that he was to go
far, but he knew that he must go with discretion. One thing discretion
evidently required of him--to include Mademoiselle Claire with her
mother; her mother constantly included her. It was necessary to invite
them both to drive in the Bois next day. It was then that he learned
that Madame Vicaud and her daughter both gave lessons, mademoiselle in
singing,--she had studied with the best masters,--madame in the harp and
piano. Damier cast a glance upon the harp; the same, no doubt. Hours of
engagements had to be consulted. They could both, however, be free next
day at four.




V


DAMIER was able, while waiting for them in the salon on
the following day, to see more clearly Madame Vicaud's environment, now
that it was empty of her. It was one of work, poverty, and refinement.
Books lined one side of the walls; the furniture was of the scantiest,
simplest description; a row of old prints--after Sir Joshua and
Gainsborough, some of them very good--were hung straightly above the
simple writing-table; on this table stood a small pot of pink flowers,
and on a large table near the center of the room were books, reviews,
and a work-box; the harp and the grand piano dominated the room. The
high windows did not overlook the street, but the branches, flecked
still with gold and russet autumn leaves, of an old garden. Turning
from this outlook, Damier found his attention fixed by a large
photograph that occupied a prominent place in a black frame upon a
sedate cabinet near the window. It was the photograph of a man--of
Monsieur Vicaud, Damier knew at once. He gazed long at the face, still
young, yet showing already touches of decay and degradation in the
poetry and beauty of its youth. Without these touches--of presage more
than actuality--it might have been the face of a Paolo, with tossed-back
hair and superb, unfettered throat. Monsieur Vicaud had evidently been
one of the few men whom a Byronic disarray becomes. Damier saw in the
face the enchantment that had deluded Clara Chanfrey, and hints of the
horror that had wrecked all enchantment. The longer one looked at the
ardent, dreamy eyes, the perfect lips,--helpless, as it were, before
one, and unable in charm of change to divert one's attention from their
essential meaning,--the more one felt cruel selfishness, hard
indifference, and lurking evil. Instinctively he turned and walked away
from Monsieur Vicaud as he heard footsteps outside.

When the mother and daughter came in together, he could infer, even more
clearly than from the bareness of the salon, from Madame Vicaud's shabby
furs and unfashionable wrap, that life, to be kept up at all with
niceness and finish, must be something of a struggle for them; yet, with
her small black bonnet, which she was tying with black gauze ribbons
beneath her chin, her neat gloves, the poise of her shoulders, and her
swift, light step, she was still unmistakably _une élégante_. It was
natural, he supposed,--though feeling some resentment at such
naturalness,--that the struggle should be the mother's mainly; the law
of maternal self-sacrifice perhaps demanded it. Claire was charmingly
dressed, simply, and with a Parisienne's unerring sense of harmony and
fitness. She was neither shabby nor unfashionable; the fashion, too,
expressed her, not itself.

After all, she still, though she was no longer _une toute jeune
fille_,--she must be twenty-seven,--had her life before her, and her
achievement of pretty clothes could hardly be imputed as blame to her.

The early November afternoon in the Bois was misty, with sunlight in the
mist; the air was mild. Madame Vicaud's dark eyes looked down the long
vistas, seeing, perhaps, other figures in them, other pictures. Damier
and Mademoiselle Vicaud talked of Italy. She had never been there, but
she questioned him about Florence and Rome, and Madame Vicaud asked him
if he had heard much of the old church music; and the music had been his
greatest enjoyment. Madame Vicaud was fond of Palestrina, she said; but
she said little of the fondness, and only listened with a half-detached,
half-assenting smile while Claire and the young man went on from Gluck
to Wagner. Mademoiselle Vicaud was full of admiration--though her
admirations were always unemphatic--for the latter; but Madame Vicaud,
though retaining, evidently, no lurking survivals of taste for the
operatic music of her youth, would own only to a tempered liking for the
great opera-master. She mused lightly over Damier's demand for her
preferences, and inclined to think that opera never meant much to her;
it was a form of art that offended her taste almost inevitably; its
appeal to the eye could so rarely justify itself, and the music, of
course, was restricted by its being pinned down to definite descriptive
themes.

Claire hummed out, in a melancholy, emotional contralto, a phrase from
"Tristan." "I can't sing him--none of our French throats can; but he
fills me, sweeps me up; that is all I ask of music. Mamma likes music to
lift her; I like it to carry me away." Among the deep, almost purple
reds of her hair, the tawny luster of her coiling furs, her cheeks, in
the keen, fresh air, glowed dimly. "No, I could not sing Wagner," she
sighed; "but I could sing. I am an _artiste manquée_; the one, perhaps,
for being my father's daughter, the other for being my mother's. She
would rather have me teach--try to force a little of my own energy and
feeling into dough-like souls--than have me sing in public."
Mademoiselle Vicaud's smile had no rancor as she made these statements,
and her mother's distant gaze showed no change, nor did she speak.

"It is a hard and a rather tawdry life, that of an opera-singer," said
Damier; "and, I fancy, almost an impossible one in Paris."

"Ah, but I am tawdry," Claire observed. If antagonism there had ever
been on this subject, it had evidently long since left behind it the
stage of discussion. Claire made no appeal or protest--merely stated
facts.

"You see," she went on, very much as if she and Damier were alone
together, "if it were not for that artist nature, Mamma would not,
perhaps, mind so much. It is because I am not--what shall we call
it?--respectable? _hein_?--well, that will serve--that she dreads such
tests for me."

Damier now saw that, though Madame Vicaud's silence kept all its calm,
she very slightly flushed. He felt in her a something, proud and
shrinking, that steeled itself to hear the jarring note of her
daughter's jest; and was it a jest? Again the contrast in the two faces
struck him, this time with something of fundamental alienation in the
contrast. It occupied his mind after Madame Vicaud, very unemphatically,
not at all as if she felt that it needed turning, took the lead of the
conversation, and while Claire, leaning back in her corner, listened
with, when she was particularly addressed, her indolent "Ah!" It was,
indeed, like going from one world to another to look from her mother's
face to hers. Already he felt for her a mingling of irritation and pity
that was to grow as he knew her better.

How strangely she was tainted with something really almost _canaille_;
the soft depth of her voice reeked with it. And how strangely blind must
the affection of the mother be that could bridge the chasm that
separated her from her daughter, unconscious--her evident devotion to
her proved that--of its very existence.




VI


MADAME and Mademoiselle Vicaud were at home on Tuesdays,
and Damier felt that he would always receive a courteously cordial
welcome on these formal occasions; but he felt, too, for some weeks,
that the courtesy, the pleasant graciousness of his reception, did not
grow in warmth. He was accepted, but no more. Madame Vicaud treated him
as she might have treated him had he been but one habitué of a crowded
salon. Her salon was anything but crowded; he soon had numbered its
habitués. There was a monotony about these Tuesday reunions; they were
rather thin and colorless; thin only in quantity, not in quality, for
that was excellent--reminded him of Madame Vicaud's black silk dresses
with their white lawn cuffs and collars, a quality worn but
irreproachable. Damier came to find a flavor, an unusualness, in the
cool cheerfulness of the Tuesday teas.

The salon in the Rue B---- on these occasions had some vases of flowers,
and the tea, brought in by the monastic Angélique, boasted bread and
butter and _madeleines_ as well as the daily _petits beurres_ that
Damier had been offered on a more informal visit.

To the teas came old Madame Dépressier, who was of an impoverished
Huguenot family, and who spent her time in works of charity, a serene
woman with a large white face--a woman, Damier found on talking to her,
of character and learning. She and Madame Vicaud talked of books,
lectures, and poor people, and smiled much together. Madame Crécy came
also, dignified, middle-aged, interested in _le mouvement féministe_, a
writer of essays, dark, decisive, a charm in her bright ugliness. There
was a dim, devout, and gentle old Comtesse de Comprailles. She had
known Madame Vicaud for years, from before her marriage, and her piety
had lifted her above the realization of the secular troubles of her
friend, and had, indeed, kept their relation a softly superficial one.
With the comtesse came sometimes a tall, thin priest, her cousin, also
dim, devout, and gentle in these social relations with heretics.

There was a young Polish art-student, a girl with a thin, ardent face,
and an attire manlike from its deficiency of adornment rather than from
any pose. She wore very short cloth skirts,--shortened by several years
of wear and mending, our acutely sympathetic young man guessed,--a
knotted handkerchief around her throat, and a soft felt hat. To this
young woman, who, Damier heard, had great talent and was miserably poor,
Madame Vicaud showed a peculiar tenderness. Sophie Labrinska had a look
at once weary and keen. She seldom spoke, but her face lighted up with a
smile for her hostess, and on Tuesdays she always played to them--and
played with an ungirl-like mastery and beauty of interpretation--a
ballade, nocturne, or mazurka of Chopin.

Lady Vibert and her daughter came too. They lived in a tiny flat near
the Bois, finding poverty in Paris more genial and resourceful than in
England. Miss Vibert, a fresh-colored young woman with prominent teeth,
studied art also, and for years had gone daily to a studio from which,
each week, she brought back to the tiny flat a life-size torso, very
neatly painted. She and her mother were cheerful, eager people, taking
their Paris, their _abonnement_ at the Théâtre Français,--a rite they
religiously fulfilled,--their bi-weekly lecture at the Ecole de France,
with a pleasant seriousness. Madame Vicaud lifted her eyebrows and
smiled a little, though very kindly, over Miss Vibert's artistic
progress; but she was fond of her.

As for Claire, she showed little fondness, with one exception, for any
of her mother's guests. Miss Vibert talked to her in clear, high tones,
but Claire spoke little to her, and only answered with her most
slumberous smiles. For Sophie she had neither smiles nor words. She
ignored her--but not with an effect of intentional ignoring; it was
merely that the little Polish girl made no advances, and unless she were
advanced to, Claire, in her mother's salon, maintained an air of
indolent detachment--except for one member of it, the only one who could
be said to recall, definitely, what there was of bohemia in Madame
Vicaud's past. Monsieur Claude Daunay did no more than recall it, for
his bohemianism was of a most tempered quality, consisting in a kindly
indifference to smallnesses, a half-humorous choice of the
unconventional rather than an ignorant imprisonment in it. He was a man
of about fifty, and his massive gray head, Jovian hair and beard, his
kindly, wearied eyes and stooping yet stalwart figure, made him a
distinguished apparition at Madame Vicaud's teas. She placed him,
sketched him for Damier in a few words, the most open that her reserve
had yet allowed her, and it was then only after a good many Tuesdays:
"He knew my husband, and was very kind to him, and to me, when we were
in need of kindness. He has no genius,--he, too, is a painter, you
know,--but a vast appreciation, and a vast generosity in the expression
of it, and much distinction of mind and talent."

Monsieur Daunay was married, but his marriage was an unfortunate one.
Madame Daunay had been the reverse of a model wife; she lived, an
invalid, a life of retirement in the country, and was supposed to make
much bitterness in the existence of her husband, who had his home with a
_vieille fille_ cousin in Paris. Damier liked the scholarly artist, his
mild smile and air of weary unexpectancy.

It was with Monsieur Daunay that Claire was her most vivid self, with
him and with their new "young" friend--though, when Monsieur Daunay was
present, Damier's relegation to the background bespoke an excellent
loyalty to older ties. There was something very nearly filial in her
graceful and affectionate solicitude for Monsieur Daunay. She would
sweep, in trailing gowns, always a little over-perfumed,--it was the
point where her taste seemed to fail her,--and always late, into the
salon, and, if Monsieur Daunay were there, go at once to him after a
formal acknowledgment of the other presences in the room. She did not
talk much with him,--she talked more to Damier,--but while he talked to
her she smiled at him, an encouraging, responsive smile.

Monsieur Daunay spoke to Damier of Madame Vicaud as _une âme exquise_,
and of Claire as _une charmante enfant_, a term emphasizing his almost
paternal attitude, an emphasis made more noticeable by his more formal
relations with the mother. Damier saw that he was very fond of Claire,
but that between him and Madame Vicaud there were no bonds closer than
a courteous understanding and regard. On Tuesday, after tea and talk,
music would be brought out, candles lighted at the piano, Claire would
sing while Monsieur Daunay accompanied her on the piano or her mother on
the harp, Sophie would play her Polish music, and Monsieur Daunay and
Madame Vicaud give a solo each or a duet. There was not a trace of the
amateur in these performances; the pleasure was great, and, for Damier,
the charm too deep for analysis, in this listening with her, or to her,
in the quiet room, among these quiet, subdued, rather sad people.

He was still, in a sense, outside the barrier, but they all were, he
fancied, in the sense he meant. These Tuesdays were the nearest, really,
that any of them ever came to her. Yet they were more definitely
accepted as friends: he was still the onlooker.

It was only humorously that he resented his slow advance to a more
individual standing. He could hardly himself measure it; and yet he
felt that he was being observed, weighed, thought over, and, almost
imperceptibly, that her smile for him gained in meaning.




VII


IT was through a book they spoke of, a book which he
said he would bring to her, that they came at last face to face, and,
for the first time really, alone together. He found her in the firelit
room; her last pupil had gone, and she was sitting before her harp, her
hands in her lap, her eyes looking vaguely in front of her. There had
been a fall of snow, and the chill February afternoon outside was
desolate in its white and gray and black. Within there was the serenity,
the flicker of firelight, Madame Vicaud, and her silent harp.

She turned her head with her smile of welcome, and, as he drew a chair
near hers, lightly touched a harp-string. The throb of the vibrant note
echoed in the young man's heart. For the first time, after a winter of
patient waiting, he was alone with his mystery, alone with the woman he
adored; for that he adored this cold, sweet, faded woman, with her
fragrant life blossoming on its black background, was as much a fact of
his existence as that he had seen her photograph on that distant sunny
day.

"My work is over," she said. "I am feeling indolent. Ah, you have
brought the book; thank you. Will you read it now to me--a little?" She
leaned back, smiling still; her eyes, he felt, studying him more openly,
yet more kindly, than ever before. "Will you ring for the candles then,
or would you rather sit on for a little while in this blindman's
holiday?"

"I would rather sit on, and have you play to me, if you are not too
tired."

"I am tired of teaching--of listening, not of playing." She at once
adjusted her foot, stretched her arms, bending to the instrument, and
played an old and plaintive melody.

"Exquisite," said Damier, when it ended. "It is so staid in form, yet so
melancholy in feeling."

"Yes; like the melancholy of a sad heart, whispering its sorrow to
itself under the lace and brocade of a long-dead epoch." She went on to
a joyous little pastoral, and said, smiling at him, that that was like a
bank of primroses; and, after the next, "And that all innocent solemnity
and sweetness, like a nun's prayer." And when she had finished they sat
in silence for some time.

"Have you always played?" he asked her at last, seeing her suddenly as a
young girl in a white dress, with a green ribbon around her waist, an
emerald locket at her throat, sitting at her harp.

"Always; I learned when I was a child." The unspoken sadness of the past
seemed to steal about them; he seemed to hear the "sad heart whispering
to itself" as they sat there in the firelight.

"I have often thought," Madame Vicaud said, turning suddenly toward him
and smiling with a touch of constraint, "that it was very nice of you to
seek us out like this. I have often wanted to speak to you about it. For
it was you rather than Mrs. Mostyn who sought, was it not? What made you
think of it?" she asked, her smile growing in sweetness as his eyes
dwelt on hers.

"It was a very romantic reason," Damier said; "or, no, I won't belittle
my reason by that trivial term; it was a very serious reason, rather, a
very real one. I saw your photograph in an album belonging to Mrs.
Mostyn, and then I wanted to see you."

She looked at him in silence.

"How very strange!" she presently said. "Wanted enough for that?"

"To seek you? Quite enough; more." He smiled. "Yes, it was strange--is
strange. I did not know whether you were alive or dead, nor did Mrs.
Mostyn."

"And you set out in quest of me?"

"Yes, after a time. At first Mrs. Mostyn could hear nothing of you. I
met another old acquaintance of yours--Sir Henry Quarle. He talked to
me about you, too, and immediately afterward I got your address from
Mrs. Mostyn and her letter to you. Then I set out at once."

Madame Vicaud looked at him with a grave, speculating look for some
silent moments, before saying, turning her eyes away and once more
showing constraint in her voice:

"You heard that I had been unfortunate--unhappy? You were sorry for
that?"

"Yes; but had you been very fortunate, very happy, I should still have
looked for you."

"But why? Did you like my face so much?"

"So much. I felt that I should have known you long ago, and that, having
missed you for so long through the stupid accident of the years, I must
know you always in the future. I should have felt it had you been dead."
His charming eyes dwelling on her with a perfect candor and simplicity,
for it was easy at last to speak these familiar thoughts to her, he
added: "I needed you; I had always needed you. And so, it seemed to me,
you needed me; your eyes in the photograph called to me."

At this she looked swiftly at him with an astonishment that slowly
softened to a smile. "You are a strange, a good friend," she said.

"You accept me as such?"

"Ah, yes," she replied, "I accept you as such--gratefully. I don't call
you. Those days are over."

She rose, pushing the harp aside, and walked slowly down the room,
pausing at the window and looking out. He divined that she was much
touched, even that there were tears in her eyes. He feared to show her
the depths of his feeling for her, his longing to enter her life, help
her, if it might be, in it; but, rising too, he said in a slightly
trembling voice: "You don't need my friendship, but I need yours. Let
that be my claim."

"Your claim to what?" she asked, her face still turned from him.

"To the hope that I may grow into your confidence--the hope that you
will lean on me, trust me completely, and that, with time, I may,
perhaps, mean something to you of what you mean to me."

Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of
wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.

"What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don't know me."

"Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to
you--that you don't know me?" he smiled.

"Ah, don't think that I am so hard and stupid!" she said quickly. "Don't
think that I am fencing with you, trying to ward off a friendship I
can't appreciate. Don't think that I have no need of a friend. I have; I
have--only I had forgotten to feel it. I do not say that I have no
friends; you know that I have, and good ones--only you do not wish to
rank with them. Isn't it so?" She smiled swiftly, from her gravity, at
him. "There is good Madame Dépressier, and the comtesse, and little
Sophie,--who needs me, poor child, in her struggle and loneliness,--and
the others, true and good all; but none near. You would be near,--would
you not?--and have me share pain with you--lean on you, you say." His
fine young face, stern with eagerness, followed her words in silent
assent. "But it would be difficult for me to have such a friend. I have
never had such a friend. It is difficult, painful to me to show myself,
be myself. I am a hard, I fear a spoiled, stunted nature. You heard--of
course you must have heard; it is the one thing that anybody must hear
who hears at all of me--that my marriage was very unhappy. It warped me;
it froze me. There was no one to help me when I needed help, or to hear
me, even had I not been too proud to call, and I lost the power of
appeal or self-expression. If I had been gentler, less bitter in my
despair, less rebellious, I might have kept more in touch with life,
been more natural, more responsive. As it is, I can still feel--deeply,
deeply; but it is hard for me to respond. I am old enough to be your
mother. No? Well, almost." She smiled slightly at his exactitude. "I am
very different from the girl in the photograph whose eyes called to
you--prophetic eyes they must have been! You must not expect fine things
of me; you must not idealize me." She put her hand gently, maternally on
his shoulder. "Never idealize me. That is a dangerous--a terrible thing
to do."

"Can you look at me," he asked, putting his hand on hers--"can you look
at me and think that I could idealize you?--see you as anything else
than you are? Don't you feel that, indeed, I can see you much more
clearly than you see yourself--the girl in the photograph, and the woman
old enough, almost old enough, to be my mother? You are shut into your
present. I see you in it--and in all your past."

She stood looking gravely into his eyes as he looked into hers. In hers
there was--not seen by him and hardly felt by herself--a swiftly
passing, an immense regret, an immense sadness. It was like the sweeping
shadow of a flying wing, and left only the limpidity of sweetest, most
candid acquiescence. In his eyes, too, there was regret--passionate
regret; and he felt it, and felt that she could not understand or read
it, nor the vague, strong hope that so strangely informed it.

"So I have a friend, a new yet an old friend," said Madame Vicaud. "You
perplex me, but I believe in all you say. You give me great happiness."

He lifted the hand under his and bent his lips to it. She looked down at
his bowed head with a smile that was a benediction.

On that first day of their friendship, as they sat together, she again
before her harp, it was, oddly, he who leaned and confided. Almost
boyishly, under her comprehending eyes, he unfolded for her his life,
its deepest efforts and its deepest disappointments. Madame Vicaud,
while he talked and she questioned, drew her fingers softly, from time
to time, across her harp-strings. He never forgot the hour, nor the
sense of communion that the silvery ripple of the harp-strings made
paradisiacal.

"And will you not marry? Have you not thought of marrying?" she asked.

He considered her with what he knew to be a whimsical smile at her
unconsciousness.

"I have been too great a coward ever to get further than thinking of it.
My love-affairs have rarely passed the speculative stage. My ideals of
marriage are of a most exacting nature."

"Ah, that is well," she said. "Never lower them to fit some reality
that, for the moment, appeals. I hope," she added, "that you will some
day find the woman who realizes them."

No, the silly accident oi the years too much blinded her, Damier felt,
for her to see, yet, that she was the woman. He himself was too much
dazzled to see beyond the fact itself. Any question of love or marriage
seemed irrelevant, did not enter at all into this wonderful and happy
place where her harp rippled, her eyes smiled, where she understood that
he had found her.




VIII


AFTER this there was no more the feeling of a barrier.
It was gone; and with perfect graciousness and trust she admitted him to
the personal standing and nearness he had asked for. She was all
confidence now, although she made no confidences. He felt that her trust
in him hid nothing from him, and yet that her pride made her past
sorrows so poignantly intimate that they must be understood between her
friend and herself, not spoken of.

The nearer intimacy with the mother did not bring Damier into nearer
intimacy with the daughter, for the simple reason that he was already so
intimate. From the first Damier had felt that he understood Claire
Vicaud. He could not yet clearly define what he understood, but she
could have no revelations for him. Her father explained her, and her
mother reclaimed her. That was her history, and he imagined that neither
she nor her mother was aware of the history, but the mother less than
she. Indeed, he fancied, at times, that he saw her far more clearly than
did the mother--hoped that the mother had not his direct vision.

He was rather fond of Claire, with a fondness tolerant, humorous, and
pitying. What he saw in her were thwarted energies, well thwarted, yet
pathetic in their enforced composure; he saw voiceless rebellion, and
the dumb discomfort of a creature reared in an environment not its own.
This simile might have cast a reproach upon the mother had it conjured
up the vision of an unkindly caged pantheress; but the simile so seen
was too poetical for Claire. It was not the wild, fine, free thing of
nature that circumstance had caged, but the product of over-civilized
senses--senses only, and corrupt senses. There was the point that made
her piteous and repellent.

Claire's claim on life was not a high one. Hers was not even an esthetic
fastidiousness of sense nor a romantic coloring of emotion; there was
nothing delicate or warm or eager about her. Her wishes were not
yearnings; they were steadfast inclinations toward all the evident, the
palpable, perhaps the baser pleasures of life, pleasures that would most
certainly have been hers had not fate--in the shape of a mother to whom
these pleasures were non-existent rather than despicable--lifted her
above the possible grasp at them: jewels, clothes, magnificent
establishments, riotous living. She was cold, but she would welcome
passively the warmth of admiration about her. She had not her father's
genius to transmute the tawdry cravings of her inheritance from him. She
had his quick, clear intelligence, and it seemed only to make harder,
more decisive, her centering in self.

Damier could see her as the painted prima donna (never as the sincere
and serious artist), bowing her languorous triumph before the curtain;
could see her laughing in ugly mirth at Gallic jests among a crowd of
clever _rapins_; could horribly image her--most horribly when one
remembered who was her mother--rolling in a lightly swung carriage down
the Avenue des Acacias, a modern Cleopatra in her barge, alluring in
indifference under her parasol, and dressed with the consummate and
conscious art that does not flower in the sound soil of respectability.
These were, indeed, horrid thoughts, and as absurd as horrid when the
mother stood beside them. Even to think them seemed to put a dagger into
a heart already many times stabbed. Yet separate mother and
daughter,--it was ominously easy so to separate them,--and nothing in
Claire reproached and contradicted such images. Inevitably they arose,
and, as inevitably, the companion picture of the mother, like a
transfixed Mater Dolorosa.

To the mother he felt that in giving interest and attention to Claire
he rendered a service more grateful to her than any homage. He proposed
that he should take Claire for walks sometimes, and he felt something of
the staidness of the girl's upbringing in Madame Vicaud's acquiescence,
in its implied trust--a trust that waived a custom in his favor. It
expressed the mother's attitude against all that was lax or undignified
in life. Claire could go with him, their friend, but, Claire told him
with a light laugh, she seldom went out alone. "Only sometimes with
Monsieur Daunay--but he is like a father, almost; and to the
dressmaker's; and almost always Mamma is with me--we are such
companions, you know." Damier could not quite determine as to possible
irony in her placid tones. He looked upon these walks with Claire--they
would cross the Seine, looking up at Carpeaux's jocund group on the
Pavillon de Flore, and pace sedately in the Tuileries Gardens or up the
Champs-Elysées--as expressions of his identification of himself with
Madame Vicaud's interests, for he always felt that it pleased her that
he should ask Claire to go; yet, after each one of them, he could not
defend himself from the strange sensation that he had been in an
atmosphere disloyal to his friend. The atmosphere was so different, yet
so subtly different, when Claire was alone with him, or with him and her
mother. So subtle was the difference that any remonstrance on his part
might constitute a stupid rebuff to her unconsciousness; yet so
different were her tones, her look, her laugh, so different the quality
of her frankness, its _gaillardise_, as it were, and its familiarity,
almost insolent in its assurance--so different were all these that he
could hardly believe her unconscious of the change. He did understand
her; that was the trouble: for she acted as if he did, and as if all
pretenses were unnecessary between them, and free breathing a relief to
both after a burdensome atmosphere. Damier, while they walked, showed a
grave kindliness, listened to her, assented or dissented with a careful
accuracy that amused himself. He was not quite sure why, with Claire, he
seldom felt it safe to be flexible or flippant; some dim instinct of
self-protection before this embryotic soul and quick intelligence made
him guard himself against all misinterpretations, made him scrupulous in
defining the differences between them. Claire referred little to her
mother, and then, at least in the beginnings of their intercourse, in
the tones of commonplace respect, with something of the effect, he more
and more realized, of shuffling aside an excellence that they both took
for granted but hardly cared to linger over--she certainly did not,
though he might have odd, pretty tastes for the past and done with.

What to him was poetry--for, to a certain extent, she seemed to
appreciate his attitude toward her mother--was to her the mere furniture
of life. Damier resented, but for some time was helpless; she gave him
no occasion for declaration or defense. Once or twice, when, _à propos
de bottes_, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of
his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a
_cela-va-sans-dire_ expression vastly baffling. Only by degrees, and
only after some definite sharpnesses on his side, did she seem to
realize that, in including him in her own casual attitude toward her
mother, she not only misinterpreted but irritated and antagonized him.
After that realization she never so offended again. Indeed, with an air
of honoring his fantastic sensitiveness, yet with gravity, as if to show
him that she, too, could appreciate moral charm, the pathos of defeat
and finality, she often alluded to her mother's fine and gracious
qualities; but, in spite of this concession, Damier was still aware of
the indefinable difference that made the atmosphere seem disloyal.

She said one day: "You have really decided to live in Paris--for ever
and ever--_hein_? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us
interesting?"

"Very," replied Damier.

"But the world is full of so many more interesting people," said Claire,
"than two ladies, one almost old and one rapidly leaving her youth
behind her, who live the narrowest of lives and give lessons to make
butter for their bread."

"I have not met many more interesting."

"Then it is--to study us?" Her sleepy smile was upon him.

Damier had certainly no intention of confiding in Claire the reasons for
his stay in Paris, feeling suddenly, indeed, that the young woman
herself formed a rather serious problem in all practical considerations
of these reasons; yet the attitude implied in her question demanded a
negative. "No, it isn't because I am studying you; it is because I am
fond of you," he said, bringing out the words with a touch of
awkwardness, feeling their simplicity to be almost crude.

Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he
knew, though he was not looking at her.

"_Vous êtes un original_," she said at last, with quite the manner of
her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some
specimen of British eccentricity.

On another day a little incident occurred, slight, yet destined to
impress Damier with a deeper sense of Claire's unsoundness. They were
walking down the Champs-Elysées, in the windy brightness of a March
afternoon, when, in the distance, near the Rond Point, they discerned
the easily recognizable figure of Monsieur Daunay. Claire, as this old
friend appeared upon the field of vision, put her hand in Damier's arm
and, drawing him toward one of the smaller streets that slope down to
the spacious avenue, said, smiling unemphatically: "Don't let us meet
him."

"Why not?" Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of
a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous
evasion.

"He hasn't seen us--come," she insisted, though the insistence was still
veiled in humor.

"Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him."

Her eyes measured Monsieur Daunay's distance before she said, with
something of impatience at his slowness of comprehension: "He will be
shocked--think it improper--our walking out alone like this." Damier
stared at her, stolidly resistant to the soft pull of her hand.

"Improper? Your mother consenting--you an Englishwoman, I an
Englishman?"

"He is a Frenchman, and I am half French; you seem to forget that, both
you and Mamma, at times." If she was irritated with him she successfully
controlled her irritation, and Monsieur Daunay was so near that flight
before his misinterpretation was impossible. She evidently resigned
herself to the situation of Damier's making--let him feel, with a shrug
of her shoulders, that it was of his making indeed, but, by a
half-indifferent, half-ironic smile, that he was forgiven; he must be
strong enough for both of them, the smile said.

Monsieur Daunay approached, doffing his hat, and Damier at once
perceived that there was certainly in his eye a cogitation very
courteous, but altogether out of keeping, he thought, with the
importance of its cause. He himself felt absent-minded, his thoughts
engaged more with the analysis of the new and disagreeable sensation
Claire had given him than with the sensations she might have given
Monsieur Daunay. He replied somewhat vaguely to Monsieur Daunay's
salutations, and, not so vaguely, heard Claire saying, "Mamma has sent
us out for a walk."

"Fine weather for walking," Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from
the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive
day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.

"You often walk here?" he continued pleasantly.

"Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr.
Damier takes us out sometimes."

"Madame Vicaud is at home?"

"Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us."

"She is well, I trust?"

"Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?" Claire laid a gently
urgent hand upon his arm. "I have been practising the Gluck. I think you
will be pleased with it. You will come?"

"With great pleasure, as always," said the Frenchman, but still with
something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.

They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.

"He was shocked," said Claire, mildly.

Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he
himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that
wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.

"We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us," he
said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took;
it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier's
part to express displeasure.

"There was no necessity for him to know that," she returned, adding,
with a laugh: "Now I have shocked both of you--he in his _convenances_,
you in your English veracity. I don't mind fibbing in the least, I must
tell you."

"Don't you?" His displeasure was now determined to show its definite
coolness.

"Not in the least," said Claire, with perfect good humor, "in myself or
in others"; and she added, with a little laugh at herself, "unless other
people's fibs interfere with mine; but I think that I mind their fibs
interfering less than their truths."

Damier resigned himself to feeling that, after all, he was thoroughly
prepared for any such developments in Claire; it was the tragedy in the
thought of the other Clara that was knocking at his heart.




IX


THE arrival in Paris, where she was to pass some months,
of a friend of Damier's, Lady Surfex, a charming, capable woman whose
husband was his nearest friend, was the means of casting a further and
still more lurid light upon Claire's character and Madame Vicaud's past.

Damier wished to bring Madame Vicaud and Lady Surfex together. He had
plans, and was vastly amused to realize that they were of a quite
paternal character. These plans did not go beyond the thought that a
widening of Claire's life might be an excellent thing for her, and, as a
result, a happy thing for her mother. To see Claire well, safely,
happily married, would not this be the lifting of a problem from the
mother's heart? As yet he had not gone further and told himself that it
would leave the mother's heart freer for the contemplation of other
problems. Now Claire's chances of a prosperous marriage would certainly
be multiplied if he could bring around her and her mother a few such
friends as Lady Surfex. He spoke to her, on his first visit to her, of
the Vicauds, and of his wish that they might meet. "The charming Clara
Chanfrey!" Lady Surfex said. (With what a chime all allusions to Clara
Chanfrey always began, to end with such funereal tolling!) "Ah, you make
me feel how old I am becoming, for how often in my girlhood I heard my
mother speak of her! She always spoke severely. Mother belonged to the
old régime, you know--saw things steadily, and saw them whole, perhaps,
but rather narrowly, and only one thing at a time. She couldn't take in,
as it were, the extenuations of circumstance. And she was a great friend
of Lady Chanfrey's. Lady Chanfrey infected all her allies with her own
bitterness. But the memory of the daughter's charm came through it. She
was like her father, not like her mother. I never liked the little I
remember of Lady Chanfrey. But I have heard of Madame Vicaud since I
used to hear of her from mother, and, I am sorry to say, more and more
sadly."

"All I hear of her is sad," said Damier. "Every echo from her past is a
groan!"

"Poor woman!" Lady Surfex mused. "First the awful husband, and then the,
to say the least of it, trying daughter."

Damier's heart stiffened. "Trying? In what way--I may ask?"

"Of course you may--you know them so well; and, as I see, your sympathy
is all with the mother. Well, I am afraid she is altogether trying, but
the instance of which I was thinking deserves a severer adjective. Some
friends of mine in Cheshire, nice, quiet people, had always kept more or
less in touch with Madame Vicaud during her stormy life. They did not
meet, but they sometimes wrote. Mrs. Barnett and she had been friends
in girlhood. Claire, when she grew up, went to stay with them. Very
beautiful, very clever, singing wonderfully, yet, from the beginning,
she struck a false note. And then there was the ugly little story: a
young man, Captain Dauncey, fell madly in love with her; they were
engaged; and, within hardly a month's time, she jilted him openly and
brazenly for a better match. That was only the beginning. Sir Everard
Comber was madly in love, too, but Mrs. Barnett told me that they felt
that he knew there was no good metal under her glamour; the glamour was
so great that he hoodwinked himself. It was tragic to see him trying not
to see. And one day he and Mrs. Barnett found Mademoiselle Vicaud
engaged in a flirtation in an arbor, indolently allowing an adoring
young man to kiss her hand, his arm around her waist. Mrs. Barnett said
that it was the most unpleasant of situations--poor Sir Everard's face,
the girl's look of dismay, followed by an instant assumption of
coolness. She was able, almost at once, to show a humorous, half-vexed,
half-tolerant smile, and to pretend that she expected them to share her
playful anger against the hugely embarrassed culprit. She behaved,
afterward, very badly about Sir Everard's breaking off the engagement,
which he did most delicately and generously. She had no dignity; she was
furious, and showed that she was. She even hinted once--only once, but
it was enough--at a breach-of-promise suit and damages.

"Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a
moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there
must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud
carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not
save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is
the story," said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a
whitened face, kept a sick silence--"only the story, after all, of a
vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.

"I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know,
nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the
girl could be married off to somebody who understood--and didn't mind.
Don't you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?"

Damier could not think just now of Claire's future; he was thinking,
persistently, of Madame Vicaud--seeing her as a white flower sunken up
to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her
daughter--greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the
tortured mother's heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her
proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her
silences, her reserves!

In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible
atonement to Madame Vicaud.

"Have I been wrong in telling you--ungenerous?" asked Lady Surfex.

"No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel
where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one
can help her."

"We will lift her!" said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed
face. "And then, if we do,--right out of the mother's life,--what will
she do alone?"

"She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life."

"Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her
husband."

"Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!"

"Not so much to find one--she is enchanting in appearance, I hear--as to
keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you,
Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her
mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?"

He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.

"Quite so absorbing."




X


YET that very evening Damier was to have his freshly
emphasized disgust unsettled, as theories are so constantly unsettled by
new developments of fact. Claire did not show him a new fact about
herself; she merely explained herself a little further, and made it
evident that one could not label her "vulgar" and so dispose of her.

It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all
his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon,
sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window--opened on the
warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture,
the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something
of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could
love--even--even--he had wondered over it more and more of late--her
mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the
desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an
inner shrine of sorrow.

His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a
clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting
his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or
hear.

That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little
Sophie; and Claire's gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor
Sophie's ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the
theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen
the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object
the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet,
sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from
dim tree-tops outside to Claire's white form and splendid head, he felt
that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did
not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart
was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her
beauty to his eye.

"The chief thing," said Claire,--they had been talking in a desultory
fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its
transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look,
adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,--"the chief thing is to know
what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what
they want, you know--unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic."
(Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very
pregnant.) "You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted;
therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint
well--you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?--though Mamma, you
see, has his photograph conspicuously _en évidence_ up there, lest I
should think too ill of him--or guess how ill she thinks of him herself.
I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very
bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he
did. You know his pictures. I don't care about pictures, but I suppose
there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg
canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never
really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices--the
prejudices of the _jeune fille anglaise_. I"--she smiled a little at
him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had
evoked in his expression--"I have a very restricted field for choice;
but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with
me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many
pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as
determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma--yes, I am
coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly
good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too;
but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked--the latter,
probably, for she has a strong will."

"Perhaps," said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms
folded and knees crossed, listening to her--"perhaps you underestimate
her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own
nature."

"I don't think it is at all splendid," said Claire, composedly; "some
wickedness is, I grant you; but do I strike you as affecting that kind?"

"I must own that you don't."

"Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?" she
pursued.

Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.

"Ah, that is well. I should not like you to misinterpret me," said
Claire. "I make no poses." And after a slight pause in which he
wondered anew over her, she added: "I merely like enjoyment better than
anything else in the world."

"Yours, you know, is a very old philosophy--a universe of will and
enjoyment; but one must have a great deal of the former to attain the
latter in a world of so many clashing aims," said Damier.

"Yes, one must."

"And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible
one."

"Do you think so?" Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.

"Don't you?"

"No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one's aims; it is
all beautiful, even the suffering--if one avoids suffering one's self."

"You are an esthete--

            While safe beneath the roof,
    To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain."

"Oh, better than rain--the tempest!"

"And how can one avoid suffering, pray?"

"_Mais_,"--Claire had a tolerant smile for his naïveté,--"by staying
under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be
darting out continually into the storm."

"Bringing other people back to shelter."

"And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us
wet!" smiled Claire. "For a case in point--don't you find Sophie a bore?
She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss
Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit--her
last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have
been a wise thing. Don't be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I
mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will
ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more
clearly her higher wants. And--I don't want to seem more ungenerous than
I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don't look so
stony; I am not really _un mauvais coeur_. I would willingly dot
Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but
husbands and houses and money wouldn't make Sophie comfortable, and I
don't really see that much is gained by making two people less so in
order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole."

"I need hardly tell you that I don't share the ruthless materialism of
that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie's
unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to
survival?"

Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet
rueful.

"How often you surprise me," she said, "and how often you make me feel
that I don't, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to
realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid.
With you _tout comprendre_ is not _tout pardonner_."

"By no means," Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.

"Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if
you can't forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have:
I never pretend to be better than I am."

"And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you
know." Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he
spoke.

Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:

"Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral
perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so
because I won't suffer, won't go out of my life into other people's. You
asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is
very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: _to suffer with_--why
should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if
one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one's
self--to bring things to one's self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma
will not understand in me."

Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had
expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother
for her own benefit as well as his, went on:

"She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a
different way. She is always striving--against things; I wait. Even if
she can't see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at
something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at."

"What things do you aim at?" he now asked.

"Oh--you know; things that Mamma despises--things that you too despise,
perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand." He could not quite
interpret the glance that rested upon him. "And Mamma's aims--I suppose
you don't care to hear what I think of them?"

"On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has
aimed at. What has she attained?"

He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for
the one evident, the one tragic failure.

"Well,"--Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the
window,--"for one thing, she has kept herself--she hasn't attained it:
that wasn't needful--_très grande dame_. She has always made herself a
social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she
would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma's
spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in
which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the
soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and
ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and
beneficent."

Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with
more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that
had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was
one. It was touching--meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his
attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could
paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new
revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a
mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his
impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that,
too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world
was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in
him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere
flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm
and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of
being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil
of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy
braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful
beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in
one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling,
with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from
her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new
impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very
gentle kindliness, he said to her: "Strong enough to make you flower
some day, let us believe"; and, as silently she still gazed upon him:
"That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know."

Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him,
Claire now said: "I owe that flower, not to her, but to you."

He stared for a moment, not comprehending.

"You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my
appreciation?"

"Yes--in a sense, I mean that."

"But," said Damier, smiling, "you owe it to her that there is something
beautiful to see."

He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.

Claire, without moving, turned her eyes on the door. "Here she is," she
said; and as her mother entered, she added, in the lowest voice above a
whisper, so vaguely that it was like a fragrant perturbing influence
breathing from the twilight and the spring air:

"I like to owe all my flowers to you."

Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.

Madame Vicaud, in her black dress, with flowing white about her wrists
and throat,--a throat erect and beautiful,--had closed the door softly
behind her, and as she came toward him, Damier, involuntarily carrying
further his Venusberg simile of some moments before, thought of an
Elizabeth bringing peace and radiance; yet there was, too, a gravity in
her gaze, a quick intentness that went swiftly from her daughter to him.
Then the smile and the lightness masked her. She took his hand.

"Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?"

"Of life, and how to live it," laughed Damier.

"Wise young people! Was it a contest of sublimities?" Madame Vicaud laid
down the evening wrap she had brought in, and, it seemed to Damier,
averted her face from him as she took up a box of matches.

"Do I ever fight under the banner of sublimity, Mamma?" Claire inquired,
looking out of the window, showing once more her accustomed lassitude
and detachment. "I leave those becoming colors to you--and to Mr.
Damier."

"But don't, even in jest, my dear, assume always the unbecoming ones,"
Madame Vicaud replied, still with all her lightness, and bending, her
face still averted, to strike a match. "You have discovered, have you
not, Mr. Damier, that it is difficult for Claire to assume the virtues
that she has?"

She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on
the cabinet where her husband's portrait stood; and Damier, watching
the swift blackness of her girlish figure, the slender white of her
uplifted hand,--the black more black, the white more white, as the
radiance slowly grew in the dim room,--still fancied that she was
mastering some emotion, hiding from him some sudden agitation. There was
a faint flush on her face as she turned, gaily and sweetly, blowing out
and tossing away her match, to welcome Sophie.




XI


DAMIER was well aware that some trivial and purely
subjective fancy or emotion may oddly color and distort reality for one,
and he was not quite able to decide whether change there really were in
Madame Vicaud, or whether it was only in his imagination that the
difference he had fancied in her on that evening was continued during
the following days. She seemed, in her relations with him, more intimate
and yet more effaced; and he was almost sure--or was it only the
reflection of his own solicitude cast upon her?--that she watched him,
speculated upon him, more than at any time in their friendship, and
always with that controlled agitation. It was almost as if she guessed
his new knowledge and understanding of her sorrows and humiliations; as
if she wondered how much he knew, and how much he was going to let her
see that he knew. And if she seemed more intimate yet more effaced,
Claire, for a little while at all events, was less intimate yet more in
evidence. He had the rather uncomfortable feeling that Claire had
implied on that evening more than he had been able to understand; that
she had laid upon him some responsibility that he really never had
undertaken to accept: but she did not emphasize it further, seemed
content to let it remain indefinitely apprehended by him, and the slight
discomfort and perplexity he had felt passed from his mind, leaving only
in a half-conscious undercurrent the mood of vague doubt and withdrawal,
mingling with a deeper pity, a deeper desire to help--for her own sake
now as well as for her mother's.

It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a
greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the
foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all
talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her
hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and
her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her
mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background--a
mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things--she smiled more
tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though
expecting him to understand more than she could look.

And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on
unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly
tinted difference over all the mental landscape.

It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found
himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her
guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back
to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her
solitude.

Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new
book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things
back in their places, closing the piano--a little restless in her
restoration of composure to the room.

Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book.
"Always friends, you know," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and
speaking lightly, almost incidentally.

"Why not?" Damier asked, looking up at her.

"Indeed, why not?" she returned, smiling. "Nothing, I hope, would ever
change our friendship."

"Nothing could." She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at
him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: "You will tell me if you
are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so
little?"

"Oh, yes; I will tell you," she answered, still with the lightness that
contrasted with the tremor of Damier's voice.

Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire's
singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung Orféo's
song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying
her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire's
interpretation of the song. Claire's voice had thrown an enchantment
around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.

"Her voice is glorious," he said.

"The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera," said
Madame Vicaud; "that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through
horror."

"Ah," was on Damier's lips, "you have said what she could not sing"; but
he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure
he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He
therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands
clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her
calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp
with its plain green shade: "Do you think Claire's life very gray--very
dreary?"

The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter's upbringing,
seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its
chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was,
perhaps, Claire's gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly
clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious,
dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed
the mitigating supposition. Claire's life was really neither gray nor
dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: "From her
point of view it probably is."

"I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more
opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as
she does. Not that Claire complains."

"You have given her your best. How could she complain?" Damier was not
able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire
complaining.

"Ah, I could not blame her if she did," said Madame Vicaud, her quiet
eyes on her work, "for mothers personify circumstance to children; we
are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very
naturally, we are fate's whipping-boys: and when one is a young and
talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons,
in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem
to deserve blows."

Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,--of which she must be so
ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,--longed to throw himself
at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he
had--not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her
superiority--thought her unconscious of Claire's pathos.

"You deepen your shadows too much," he said; "for a daughter more like
yourself your life would not be a narrow one." He paused, for, though
she did not lift her eyes, a faint flush passed over Madame Vicaud's
face.

"I see all your efforts to widen it," he went on, hurrying away from
what he felt to have been an unfortunate comparison, "the flowers you
strew: intellectual, artistic interests, friends that you hope she may
find congenial, your delightful teas."

"Oh--our teas!" Madame Vicaud interrupted, smiling with a rather
satirical playfulness. "No; our delightful and 'cultured' little teas
can hardly atone to Claire. She should have the gaiety, the variety, the
colored experience that I had in my youth. I can well imagine that to
Claire's palate the nourishment I offer her is rather tasteless. She
needs excitement, admiration, appreciation, an outlet for her energy,
her intelligence."

Damier seized the opportunity--it was, he thought, very
propitious--again to ask her when he might bring some of his friends in
Paris to see her, suggesting that so Claire's social diet might be
pleasantly diversified. Madame Vicaud had more than once
evaded--gracefully, kindly, and decisively--all question of renewing
broken ties with her country-people, or making new ones, and now, again,
she slightly flushed, as though for a moment finding him tactless and
inopportune; but only for a moment: when she lifted her eyes to him, it
was with all their quiet confidence of gaze.

"I hardly know that that would be for Claire's happiness or good. One
must have the means of widening one's environment if it is to be with
comfort to one's self. Our means are too limited to be diffused over a
larger area. You must not forget, my friend, that we are very poor. I do
not like accepting where I can offer nothing."

"That is a false though a charming delicacy," said Damier. "You give
yourself; and I hope you won't refuse to now, for I have almost promised
you to Lady Surfex; she is very anxious to meet you."

Madame Vicaud was silent for some moments, her eyes downcast to the work
where she put firm, rapid stitches; then, in a voice that had suddenly
grown icy, "Her mother did not recognize me one day, years ago, when she
met me walking with my husband," she said.

It was now Damier's turn to flush. He nerved himself, after a moment, to
say:

"But this is not the mother."

"No; and my husband is dead: otherwise the wish to meet me would not
overcome that disability."

"You are a little unjust, my dearest friend," said the young man.

"I know the world," she replied; but she raised her eyes in saying it,
and looked at him with a sad kindness that separated him from the world
she knew. "I don't judge it--only see it as it is. It seeks happiness,
it avoids unhappiness. To be unfortunate is to be lost, in its eyes--to
sink from sight. To be fortunate is to have a radiance around one; and
the world seeks radiance."

After looking at him she again bent her eyes, and still sewed on while
she spoke. "When I needed it, it abandoned me. When I was in the dark,
it did not look for me. I strayed--through stubborn folly, perhaps;
perhaps, too, through generous ignorance--into a quicksand, and not a
hand was held out to me. I was allowed to sink; I was déclassée, I am
déclassée, in the eyes of all of those who were of my world." The cold
flame of a long resentment burned in her steady voice. "I have tested
average human nature," she resumed, after a slight pause, in which he
saw her breast heave slowly. "It is a severe test, I own; but, after it,
it is with difficulty that I can trust again. I have no wish to know
people who, if I were in dire straits, would pass over on the other side
of the way. The few friends I have I have proved--the comtesse, Madame
Dépressier, Lady Vibert, Monsieur Daunay,--who had much to bear from my
husband,--Sophie; there are a few more, very few; and then, you, my
friend."

She stopped sewing--the rapid movements of her hand had been almost
automatic--and looked at him, her work falling to her knee. "Come here,"
she said, holding out her hand to him, "come here. Have I seemed harsh
to you?" Her sudden smile dwelt on him with a divine sweetness. "I am
harsh--but not to you."

Damier, with an eagerness almost pathetically boyish, had sprung to her
side, and she took his hand, smiling up at him. "Not to you. You have
enlarged my trust--need I say how much? Don't ask me to alloy it with
dubious admixtures."

His love for her was yet so founded on a sort of sacred fear that at
this moment of delicious happiness he did not dare to stoop and confess
all with a lover's kiss upon her hair, did not even dare to look a
confession of more than a responsive affection.

She pressed his hand, still smiling at him, and then, resuming her
sewing, "Sit near me," she said, "so I can see that you are not fancying
that I am harsh with you!"

At such moments he could see in her eyes, that caressed one, made
sweetest amends to one, touches of what must once have been enchanting
roguishness.

"But I am still going to risk your harshness," he said; "I am still
going to ask you to let your trust in me include my friend. She would
stand tests. Won't you take my word for it?"

"I believe that I would take your word for anything."

"And," said Damier, looking his thanks, "all you say is true. I don't
want to justify man's ways to man; and yet ordinary human nature, with
its almost inevitable self-regarding instinct, its climb toward
happiness, its ugly struggle for successful attainment of it, is more
forgetful than cruel toward unhappiness. One must be patient with it;
one must remember that only the exceptional natures can rise above that
primitive instinct. To take the other road is to embrace the sacrifice
of all the second-rate joys--the only real joys to the average human
being. One must either yield to the instinct or fight it, and most
people are too lazy, too skeptical of other than apparent good, to do
that. And then you must remember--I must, for how often I have struggled
with these thoughts!--that misfortune is a mask, a disguise. One can't
be recognized and known when one wears it; one can't show one's self; if
one could there would perhaps be responses. People are base--most of
them are base, perhaps; but sometimes they are only blind or stupid."

"I sometimes think that I am all three," said Madame Vicaud, after a
little pause. "Misfortune's distorting mask has become in me an
actuality. I am perhaps blinded; certainly, as I told you, warped and
hardened. I used not to be so; it was, I suppose, latent in me: I could
not bear the fiery ordeal; the good shriveled and the dross remained."

She spoke with a full gravity, no hint of plaintive self-pity, no appeal
for contradiction, in her voice; yet, on raising her saddened eyes, she
had to smile when she met his look.

"I see," she said, "that you are determined to take me at your own
valuation, not at mine."

She turned the talk after that; she could seldom be led to talk of
herself, and not until dinner was over, not until, after it, he had read
to her for an hour, did she return to its subject. Then it was when he
rose to go that, giving him her hand in farewell, she said:

"Bring your friend; I shall be glad to see her."




XII


IT was as a result of this new friendship, which rapidly
spread into half a dozen, that Damier, who seemed to himself to be
walking among echoes of the past and whispered prophecies of the future,
received yet another hint, another faint yet significant revelation, of
Madame Vicaud's attitude toward her daughter.

In the more or less fluctuating social world of English Paris, the
beautiful and distinguished mother and her beautiful and effective
daughter struck a novel and quite resounding note,--too resounding for
Madame Vicaud's taste, Damier at once felt,--a note well sustained by a
harmony so decisive as Lady Surfex, Mrs. Wallingham (another new
friend), and Damier himself. That Madame Vicaud disliked feeling
herself a note sustained by any harmony, Damier guessed. That she
mastered the dislike for his sake, he knew. He knew that she would do a
great deal for his sake--a great deal for Lady Surfex, too. She and Lady
Surfex liked each other absolutely. But it was through Lady Surfex, and
her secret alliance with Damier, that the problem of Claire, instead of
being unraveled, was the more deeply involved. Claire evidently enjoyed
this new phase of life. She had now quite frequent opportunities for
displaying her gowns and her voice and her dancing at receptions and
balls. Yet, already, among her new entourage, she had shown her affinity
with its less desirable members. A rich, fashionable, and rather tawdry
Englishwoman took a great fancy to her; and Mrs. Jefferies was the
sister of a fashionable and tawdry brother, Lord Epsil, who at once
manifested a decided interest in the red-haired beauty, pronounced her
to be like Sodoma's Judith, and made her mother's withdrawal of her
from his company the more noticeable by his persistent seeking of hers.

"It is really too bad," Lady Surfex said to Damier. "She flirts
outrageously with the man--if one can call that indolent tolerance
flirting. I hope that she realizes that he is a bad lot. From a purely
worldly point of view he can be of no advantage to her. He is married
and has not a nice reputation."

"She may not realize it, she may be indifferent to it; but her mother
realizes and is not indifferent."

"And we wanted to spare her such watchfulness!" sighed Lady Surfex.

"It seems that we can spare her nothing," Damier replied. At the same
time he felt that Claire could be accused of nothing worse than too
great a tolerance. Once or twice she spoke to him of Lord Epsil with
half-mocking insight. "He is not like you," she said; "the difference
amuses me." Claire's intelligence was, after all, her best safeguard in
all that did not touch matters of delicate taste, and Damier's only way
of helping her mother was to watch with her--to constitute himself a
sort of elder brother in his attitude toward Claire, and to try, by
being much with Claire himself, to make Lord Epsil's wish to be with her
less able to manifest itself.

The faint yet significant hint of what Madame Vicaud's real feelings
toward her daughter were came to him one evening at a dance, when she
sat beside Lady Surfex, more beautiful, with her white face, her thick
gray hair, in the dignity of her black dress, than any other woman
there. He then saw on her face, as, fanning herself slowly, her head a
little bent, she watched Claire dance, a concentration of the somberness
it sometimes showed. It was a moment only of unconscious revelation; in
another she had turned, with her quiet and facile gaiety, to a laughing
comment of her companion's. But Damier, following that momentary
brooding look, saw in a flash its interpretation on the daughter's face.
Claire was dancing, exquisitely dressed, calm, competent, complacent,
as noticeable and as graceful a figure as any in the room. And yet--he
had felt it from the first, but never so clearly, so tragically, as
through that somber maternal gaze--Claire was ill-bred. It was that her
mother should see her so that made the revelation.

The somberness was not a fear of what others thought; she was, he knew,
almost arrogantly indifferent to what people thought: it was what she
herself thought that had gloomed her brow. And that she should see,
should recognize, that affection should not mercifully have blinded her,
filled Damier with a sort of consternation. Again all the ugly visions
of Claire crossed his mind, and now, indeed, the mother stood transfixed
beside them, for she, too, saw such visions. Ill-bred was a trivial,
mitigating word.

He realized that this very quality--call it what one would--in Claire
was the cause of her effectiveness, the reason, too, that his hopes for
her would probably remain unfulfilled.

She was a woman upon whom, when she entered a room, all men's eyes
turned. Her beauty was like the deep, half-triumphant, half-ominous note
of brazen instruments. But she was not a woman that men of Madame
Vicaud's world, of Lady Surfex's world, would care to marry. Had she
been an heiress,--and she was of the type that one associates with
unfragrant and recent wealth,--had it not been for her poverty, her
essential obscurity, she would no doubt have been enrolled among the
powerful young women who are watched with admiring envy as they advance
toward a luminous match. Claire had quite the manner of placid advance,
quite the manner (and how detestable to her mother the manner must be!)
of a young woman bent upon "getting on." But though her indolent
self-assurance made people give way before her, made her talked of and
something of a personage, she was, as a result of her launching, far
more likely to become notorious than eminent. Any success of Claire's
must, like herself, be ill-bred, tainted.

That Claire felt this, he doubted, or even that, if felt, she would
mind; but that Madame Vicaud felt it he now agonized in knowing. And she
had asked for her daughter neither eminence nor a luminous match; she
had, he now saw, been glad to shield her with obscurity. That she might
become notorious, fulfil herself completely in so becoming, would be the
bitterest drop in her cup that fate could reserve for her.

If she dreaded it, she kept, at all events, a stoic's calm above the
dread. And her restrictions, delicate, subtle, unemphasized, were about
Claire on every side; her unobtrusive watchfulness was constantly upon
her. With a cheerful firmness she held Claire to her duty of earning, as
Claire had said, "the butter for her bread," and thwarted, without
seeming to thwart, many of her social opportunities. Damier saw, though
only faintly, under the surface of appearance her dexterity kept smooth,
the constant drama of the conflict, a conflict that never became open or
avowed. He saw that Madame Vicaud's cleverness was so great that even
Claire hardly knew that there was a conflict; but after what he had seen
in the mother's eyes on the night of the dance, he understood, at least,
for what she was fighting.

Damier still felt the subtle change in his relations with Claire and
Madame Vicaud, and he had by this time adapted himself to it--adapted
himself to seeing Claire more constantly, seeing Madame Vicaud more
rarely alone, encouraged as he was in this sacrifice by the strong
impression that in so doing he was pleasing her, and was emphasizing
that silent, yet growing, nearness and intimacy.

The silence was part of her extreme delicacy, and of her fineness of
perception; it showed that his brotherly attitude toward Claire was what
she had hoped for, and it was almost maternal in its sweetness of
recognition to him, its loyalty of speechlessness toward the other
child, the child that--he knew it so clearly now--could only give her
profoundest pain; such a silence would a mother keep with the child that
gave her happiness.

He had never more strongly felt this queer medley of influences than on
one warm summer evening when he and Madame Vicaud sat outside the salon
on the high balcony that overlooked the garden. They had dined,--he and
Monsieur Daunay, and Claire and her mother,--and now Claire and Monsieur
Daunay had established themselves at the piano in the distant end of the
salon, the pale radiance of two candles enveloping them and deepening
the half-gloom in the room's wide spaces.

Outside the twilight lingered, though beneath them the June foliage made
mysteries of gloom; the warm breathing of the summer ascended in
fragrance from still branches; the faint stars above shone in a pale
sky.

They were both very silent, Damier looking at her, and she with eyes
musingly downcast to the trees. Her face, he thought, showed a
peculiarly deep contentment; more than that, perhaps: for he still felt
the whisper of a mystery; still felt, in all the peace between them, a
hint of perplexity; still divined that, though she was tranquil, her
tranquillity had been wrested from some struggle,--a struggle that she
had hidden from him,--as though she had yielded something with pain,
even though, now, she was satisfied. Patience as much as tranquillity
was upon her lips and brow; and yet he knew that, insensibly, she had
come to lean upon the new strength he brought into her life; that she
depended upon him, though she confided so little; that soon, very soon,
her eyes must answer the unspoken question in his, and solve, in the
answer, all mysteries. Indeed, he said to himself that, Claire's
harassing problem all unsolved, he could not wait much longer; he must
know just where he stood with her, and tell her where he wished to
stand. Now, as they sat there, listening to Claire's richly emotional
voice,--a voice that expressed so much more than it felt,--it was
Claire's voice, just as it was the thought of Claire, that disturbed the
peace, jarred upon the aspiration of his thoughts. Its beauty seemed to
embroider the chaste and dreaming stillness with an arabesque of
opulent curves and flaunting tendrils. Our imaginative young man could
almost see a whiteness invaded by urgent waves of purple and rose and
gold. He stirred, shifted his position involuntarily and
uneasily--wished Claire would stop singing; her voice curiously
irritated him.

Madame Vicaud sat with her back to the open window, and Damier, beside
her, could not see into the room without turning his head. He did
happen, however, to turn his head during a humming pause. Monsieur
Daunay's hands were still held on the last chord, while, as Damier
thought, he demonstrated to Claire some improvement in her rendering of
the note that had just soared above it. But as he turned lazily to
glance at them, Damier saw a strange, an unexpected thing, a thing
poignantly disagreeable to him. Monsieur Daunay's face, vividly
illuminated, was upturned to Claire's; he was speaking below his breath,
under cover of the humming chord, and with a look of humble yet
reproachful entreaty. Claire, a swift finger on her lips as she bent to
the music, had a glance for the window, and Damier's eyes of
astonishment and dismay met hers. He looked away abruptly--too abruptly
for a successful controlling of the dismay and astonishment, for he
found Madame Vicaud's eyes upon him, and he saw in a moment that they
had been upon him during the swift incident--eyes filled with wonder and
with an ignorant yet intense fear. Memories of another scene,
hand-kissings in an arbor, flashed upon him, and he knew her thoughts.
She met his look--as empty as he could make it--for a long moment; but
after it she did not, also, glance into the room, where the song now
flowed with an almost exaggerated spirit. Wrapping her arms more closely
in her light shawl, she sat quite silent, the effort to control, to
master the crowding of her surmises apparent in her rigidly still
profile. Damier guessed that the surmises must, inevitably, suspect
Claire, not Monsieur Daunay. In justice to Claire, after the
involuntary silence of his dismay, he could not longer be silent. After
all, and he drew a long breath in realizing it, Claire's past shadowed
perhaps too deeply her present; after all, the fact was not so alarming.

"Have you never suspected," he said, "that Monsieur Daunay cares for
Claire?"

She did not reply; turning a wan face upon him, her eyes still averted,
she shook her head in a helpless negation of all such knowledge.

"Don't be distressed," said Damier, terribly afraid that he too much
showed his own distress; "it is unfortunate for him, and wrong of him to
keep such feeling from you; I happened just now to see its revelation in
his face as he looked at Claire."

Madame Vicaud, for another moment, said nothing, struggling, he knew,
with those awakened memories--or were they not always awake, clutching
at her?

"He may care for Claire," she then said faintly, "but she cannot care
for him; that--you know--is impossible."

"Only enough, I am sure, to wish to shield him."

"I could never have suspected. He is an old friend, a trusted friend. I
must speak to him."

"Let me speak to him--may I? I will walk home with him to-night."

A certain relief in Madame Vicaud was taking a long, deep breath, and
nothing could more clearly have assured him of the position he held in
her eyes than the half-hesitating yet half-assenting consideration she
gave to his rather odd proposal.

"But," she said, "will he not wonder--by what right--"

"I speak? By the right of my fondness for you."

"And for Claire, yes," said Madame Vicaud, thoughtfully.

Damier had not at all intended to imply this amendment, especially at a
moment when he was so sure of not being at all fond of Claire; yet the
trust of her inclusion was so unconscious of possible contradiction that
he could not trouble it.

"But what will you say?" she went on. "Any reproach should come from me;
and what reproach could you make? I cannot think he is more than
piteous; people fall in love with Claire--often."

Damier was feeling that if, by chance, Monsieur Daunay were more than
piteous, he must stand between Madame Vicaud and the discovery.

"I will be all discretion--all delicacy. I will only say that I was the
unsuspecting, the involuntary witness of the incident; and that, as your
friend, almost, I might say,"--he hesitated, seeking a forcible word in
place of the one he dared not use,--"your son, I must ask him how much
Claire knows of it--how far it should interfere with your confidence in
him."

She was silent for a long moment, her head still turned from him to a
silhouetted profile against the sky; it was now so much darker that he
could see little more than its vague black and white, yet he thought
that, in her stillness, she flushed deeply. In her voice, when she
spoke, there was the steadiness that nerves itself over a tremor, yet
there was, too, a greater relief. "Well," she said. The word assented to
all he asked. She did not look at him again, and presently, as the music
had ceased, rose and went into the room. Claire was pointing out to
Monsieur Daunay a picture in a magazine, apparently all placidity; but
in a moment near the parting, while Madame Vicaud, with an equal calm,
stood speaking to Monsieur Daunay near the piano, Claire said to Damier,
quietly but intently:

"You have not betrayed me to Mamma?"

"Betrayed you?" Damier questioned, ice in his voice.

"Him, rather," she amended. "Not that there is anything to betray, only
Mamma would find it so shocking that a married man should be in love
with me; he is so _bête_--Monsieur Daunay--to have forgotten that you
were out there."

"I must tell you that your mother guessed that I had seen something. I
told her what I had seen, that he loved you, though not that you seemed
to accept his love."

For a moment she gazed into his eyes, at first with a gravity that
studied him, and then with a light effrontery. "Accept it! _par
exemple!_" she exclaimed, and she put her hand on his arm with a
half-caressing reassurance. "Set your mind at rest! I am only sorry for
him. Meet me to-morrow morning at ten at the Porte Dauphine; we can have
a little walk in the Bois. I want to tell you all about it."

Monsieur Daunay was going, and Damier, as he turned from Claire, met
Madame Vicaud's eyes. Their wide, dark gaze was, for the instant in
which she let him see it, piteous and almost wild. He interpreted their
fear, though he could not quite define their question. All the mother
was in them. Did he despise her child, as others did? He mustered his
bravest, most gravely confident smile, in answer to them, as he pressed
her hand in parting. For another instant they met his, saw his smile,
and answered it with a look tragically grateful in one so proud. He had
never stood so near her as at that moment.

Damier went out with the Frenchman, and once in the cool, dim street, he
dashed at the subject: "Monsieur Daunay, I must at once tell you that
inadvertently this evening, through your own indiscretion, I discovered
your secret. You are a married man; you are Madame Vicaud's trusted
friend; and you love her daughter."

Monsieur Daunay stopped short in the street, exasperation rather than
embarrassment in his face. He fixed Damier with very steady and very
hostile eyes.

"And what then?" he asked.

"You have a perfect right," said Damier, "to ask what business it is of
mine, and I can only answer that I, too, am a trusted friend of Madame
Vicaud's, and, Monsieur Daunay, a friend whom she can trust."

"Ah, Monsieur Damier, you have--I do not deny it--more rights than I,
who have none," said Daunay, in a voice the bitterness of which was a
revelation to Damier. "I have no rights, only misfortunes. Why not add
that you are Madame Vicaud's trusted friend, and that you, too, love her
daughter?"

Damier felt a relief disproportionate, he realized, to any suspicions he
had allowed himself to recognize. The atmosphere, after the unexpected
thunderclap, was immensely cleared. Monsieur Daunay was jealous, and
Monsieur Daunay was evidently piteous only. With all the vigor of a
sudden release from bondage, he exclaimed: "You are utterly mistaken; I
have no such rights: I do not love Mademoiselle Vicaud."

"What do you say?" Monsieur Daunay's astonishment was almost blank.

"I do not love her in the very least."

"Then," stammered the Frenchman, "we are not rivals? You can then pity
me--I am jealous with none of the rights of jealousy."

"None of the rights?" Damier eyed him.

"None, monsieur; Madame Vicaud's trust in me is not unfounded," said
Monsieur Daunay, with something of a slightly ludicrous grandiloquence.

"Yet Mademoiselle Vicaud knows of your attachment."

"I never declared it; she guessed it, perhaps inevitably." They were
walking on again, and he shrugged his shoulders. "_Que voulez-vous?_ She
has a certain tenderness for me that gives perception, and I adore
her--but adore her, you understand." Damier was understanding and not at
all disliking this victim of the glamour--or, was it not deeper than
that? Something in the Frenchman's voice touched him. Would Claire ever
arouse a deeper affection than this? Not only had she cast her glamour
upon him: he evidently loved her--"but adore her, you understand," as he
had said in his expressive French.

His hands clasped behind him, Monsieur Daunay, with now a reminiscent
confidence, shook his head and sighed profoundly. "_Que voulez-vous?_"
he repeated. "Since her girlhood it has been with me a hidden passion.
_Ce que j'ai souffert!_" He showed no antagonism now, no resentment;
Damier could but be grateful.

"Claire has not suffered through me," he went on. "She allows me to love
her, but she knows that she is free. What can I claim?--an honorable
man, and shackled. Yet--I have always hoped that she might, generously
and nobly, keep an unclaimed faith with me. I have claimed none, and yet
she has assured me that, as yet, she loves no other. I have needed the
assurance of late--I confess it. Your apparent courtship I could not
reproach her with,--though it tore my heart,--but her permission of this
ill-omened Lord Epsil's attentions filled me with consternation; I have
felt myself justified in reproaching her for her _légèreté_ in regard to
this."

"But," said Damier, after a slight pause, "this unclaimed faith--how do
you expect her to keep it?"

There was a touch of embarrassment in Monsieur Daunay's voice as he
answered: "My wife and I have, for years, been on most unfortunate
terms; I have no reproaches to address myself on her account. She is a
confirmed invalid, and of late her condition has been critical. One must
not hope for certain contingencies--one must not, indeed, admit the
thought of them too often; but--if they did arise--"

"I see," said Damier, gravely; "you could claim her. It is, indeed, a
most unpleasant contingency. Would it not be for Claire's happiness if
you were not to see her again until it arose?"

"Ah, no," said Daunay, with something of weariness; "ah, no; her
happiness is not involved. Claire--I speak frankly; my affection for her
has never blinded me--Claire is not easily made unhappy by her
sympathies. It is only myself I hurt by remaining near her, by seeing
her, as I constantly imagine, on the point of abandoning me. But to
leave her--you ask of me more than I am capable of doing."

Later, when Damier told him of Madame Vicaud's knowledge of the
situation, Monsieur Daunay heaved another, not regretful, sigh.

"It is as well. I will say to her what I have said to you. She will be
generous; she will understand."

Damier felt oddly, when he parted with him, that he might trust Monsieur
Daunay, but that he trusted Claire less than ever.




XIII


NEXT day, as Damier waited near the Porte Dauphine for
Claire, he could reflect on his really parental situation, but feeling
more the irritation than the humor of it. After all, where was his
authority for this meddling? Why should they submit to it? and why, as a
result, should he submit to the hearing of Claire's coming
self-justification? He could spare Madame Vicaud nothing by it, since
she knew all that there was to know--and since it was better that she
should know it. He had written to her the night before, on reaching his
hotel, and told her of the talk with Monsieur Daunay and of the
impression it had made upon him. He wondered if she had, meanwhile, had
an equally appeasing talk with Claire.

This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace
along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering
purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her
as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings--like a
Valkyrie's summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind
her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with
something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed
no wish to beat about the bush.

"You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she
talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn't feel for him, _pas
grand comme ça d'amour_." Claire indicated the smallness she negatived
by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. "And I think I can soon satisfy
you, too," she added. "He told you everything?"

"Everything."

"And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take
money from a married man who is in love with her? Must I assure you
that our relations are absolutely innocent?"

In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first
statement or the coolness of her second remark--its forestalling of a
suspicion she took for granted in him--were the more striking. Both
statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than
even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than
stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more
outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were
still half ironic, half defiant.

"I do so assure you."

"I did not need the assurance." Damier found his voice, but it was
hoarse.

Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a
very false note.

"And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded
and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. _Que voulez-vous?_ Only don't be too
much shocked by my frankness; don't be prudish. A man may be propriety
itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that
I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with
such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don't know), and
that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don't know it before a
man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face
of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does
suggest a situation usually described as immoral."

Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as
she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush
of anger--it was more anger than shame--still on her cheek.

"I must tell you," he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy,
"that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur
Daunay's kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything."

"What did he tell you, then?" she asked, stopping short in the path and
fixing her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian,
note.

"That he adored you, and that he could be trusted."

"Well, he can be!" She broke into a hard laugh. "_Le cher bon Daunay!_ I
thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And
now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the
world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told
you."

Damier made no reply.

"You are furious, are you not?"

"I am disgusted, but not for that reason only."

"You think I am in love with him!" She stopped again in the narrow path.
"I swear to you that I am not!" He would have interrupted her, but her
volubility swept past his attempt. "If he had been free I would have
married him--I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him.
I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that
subject. I could have found no other man in this country willing to
marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a _mariage
d'amour_; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more
desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur
Daunay?"

"I should say certainly not,"--Damier waited with a cold patience until
she had finished,--"but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted
not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him."

At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.

"Ah!--_c'est trop fort!_ You can't make me believe that you want me to
love him."

"I don't want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be
more to your credit if you did."

Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.

"Ah, it is the money, then--that I should accept it!"

"Can I make no appeal to you for your mother's sake--for the sake of
your own dignity?"

"I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier." The relief was showing
in her quieter voice, her fading flush. "I see how angry you are--and
only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never
pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to
do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a
pittance left to her, a year or so after my father's death, by some
relations, and that, since then, has been our only _pied-à-terre_. She
would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her
family wished to make her. I don't want to blame her; I know how you
feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish
of her; she should have thought more of me--the luckless result of her
mésalliance--and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she
brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always
at school during my father's life--she avoided _that_ soil for me, you
may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard
to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she
did not pay the debt." Claire had been looking before her as she talked,
but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring,
in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not
serving her. "Don't imagine, now, that I am complaining--ungrateful,"
she said a little petulantly. "I know--as well as you do--what a good
mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not
altogether blameless--that she is responsible, in more ways than one,
for me--for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young
girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty,
labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared
for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to
enjoy work, shabby clothes, grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at
all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking--that was her
idea of happiness for me!" Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in
her voice. "I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people
in horrid places--expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put
a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one
should wish to devote one's self to _bonnes-oeuvres;_ but for me, _ah,
par exemple!_" Claire gave a coarse laugh. "I had not quite come to
that! She gave me the best she had--all she had, you will say; I own it:
but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me
to enjoy--should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only
endured. Again,--I am not unjust,--it was not all high thinking; she had
her schemes for my amusement--_d'une simplicité!_ Really, for such a
clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a
right--you know it--to _le vrai grand monde_. You know it, and you are
trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little
management she might have regained her place in it; but no--her pride
again! She seemed to think that _she_ was _le grand monde_, and that I
ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it
strange--_disgusting_--that when I saw that Daunay--_le pauvre!_--was in
love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that
he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is
dull--though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money,
she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value;
she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of
our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my
clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and
stockings--as I understand shoes and stockings!" Claire laughed. "This
dress that I have on--Mamma imagines it is made by a little dressmaker
whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on
the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet." There
was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire's voice. "And I have always
considered myself amply excusable," she went on, "in accepting the small
pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much
that I have been able to accept--though he would willingly--and he is
not rich--give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared
attempt--nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For
Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I
can see her face!"

So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to
Claire, physically brutal--to strike her to the dust where she dragged
the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice
quiet enough: "You must tell her now; you must tell her everything."

Claire stopped short in the path. "Tell her!"

"You must, indeed." The full rigor of his eyes met the astonishment of
hers.

"Never!" said Claire, and in French, as if for a more personal and
intimate emphasis, she repeated: "_Jamais!_"

"I will, then; it is an outrage not to tell her."

Their eyes measured each other's resolution.

"If you do," said Claire, "shall I tell you with what I retaliate? I
will run away with Monsieur Daunay. Yes; I speak seriously. I would
prefer not to be pushed to that extremity, but I sometimes think that I
am getting a little tired of respectability _au quatrième_. It isn't
good enough, as you English say; I get no interest on my investment. To
tell her! Now, of all times, when I so need the money, when the small
gaieties and pleasures you have brought into my life depend on my having
it, making an appearance! She would not let me take it. She would be
glacial--and firm. Oh, I have had scenes with her! I could not stand any
more."

For once Claire was fully vehement, her cheeks flaming, her eyes at once
threatening and appealing. He could hardly believe her serious, and yet
she silenced him--indeed, she terrified him. Claire read the terror in
his wide eyes and whitening lips. Her look suddenly grew soft, humorous.
She slipped her hand inside his arm.

Involuntarily he started from her, then, repenting, for even while he so
loathed her he had never found her so piteous, "I beg your pardon--but
you horrify me too much."

"Come, come," she said, and, unresentfully, though with some
determination, she secured his arm, "don't take me _au pied de la
lettre_. I am not really in earnest; you know that; I had to use a
threat--had to frighten you. Come." That she had been able so thoroughly
to frighten him seemed to have restored in her her old air of
complacent mastery. "You are wide-minded, clever, kind. Don't misjudge
me. Don't push me to the wall. Don't apply impossible standards to me.
See me as I am. By nature, by temperament, I am simply a bohemian. It
isn't my fault if my mother happens to be a saint, and a horribly
well-bred saint; it really isn't my fault if she has handed on to me
neither of those qualities. I am perfectly frank with you. From the
first I felt that I could be frank with you; I felt that you understood
me; don't tell me now that I was mistaken."

"I do understand you," said Damier, "but you horrify me none the less."

"I horrify you because I am a creature thwarted, distorted; nothing is
more ugly or repulsive--but if I had had a chance!"

"What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be
noble and loving and happy--yes, happy."

"But not in my own way!--not in my own way!" she cried, and now she
clasped both hands on his arm and leaned against his shoulder as she
looked into his face. "I needed power and wealth--all the real
foundations of happiness and nobility. Then--ah, then I should have
blossomed. Or else, failing them, I needed liberty and joy--the life of
a bohemian. I have had neither the one nor the other, and if I seem
almost wicked to you it is because of that; for, to me, wickedness means
going against one's nature. I have always been forced to go against
mine; I have never had a chance."

Damier gave a mirthless laugh. "On the contrary, to me wickedness means
going with one's nature."

"Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand."

Again he had that feeling of perplexity and irritation. Her eyes, the
clasp of her hands upon his arm, irked and troubled him, and without,
now, any sense of glamour in the trouble and irritation. She seemed to
make too great a claim upon his understanding, and to rely too much
upon some conviction of her own charm that could dare any frankness just
because it was so sure of triumph. He felt that at the moment he did not
understand her; he felt, too, that he did not want to--that he was tired
of understanding her.

"You are an unhappy creature, Claire," he said. They were nearing the
Porte Dauphine, and while he spoke with a full yet distant gravity,
Damier looked about for a fiacre. "An unhappy creature with an
unawakened soul."

"Will you try to wake it, the poor thing?" asked Claire. She still held
his arm, though he had tried to disengage it, and though she spoke
softly, there was a vague hardness in her eyes, as though she felt the
new hardness in him, though as yet not quite interpreting its finality.

"I shouldn't know how to: I am helpless before it. It should be made to
suffer," he said. A cab had answered his summons, and he handed her into
it. "No, I cannot go home with you," he said. "Are you going home?"

"I am going to lunch with old Mademoiselle Daunay, and see Monsieur
Daunay there. I had no chance to speak to him last night." Claire,
sitting straightly in the open cab, had an expression of perplexity and
of growing resentment on her face; but as he merely bowed and was about
to turn away, she started forward and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Are you going to make it suffer?" she asked. He looked into her eyes.
He did not understand her, but he saw in them a demand at once alluring
and threatening. His one instinct was to deny strongly whatever she
demanded, though he did not know what that was.

"I have no mission toward your soul, Claire," he said. For another
moment the eyes that threatened and allured dwelt on his; then, calling
out the address to the cabman, she was driven away.




XIV


ON Damier's return to his hotel early in the afternoon,
he found a note from Madame Vicaud awaiting him. "Monsieur Daunay has
just been here," it said, "and destiny has strangely brought this matter
to a crisis. His wife is dead, and he has asked me for Claire's hand,
feeling that his false position toward me demanded an immediate
reparation. He hopes and believes that she loves him; but this, as both
you and I must know, is impossible. I am saddened and confused by the
whole situation. I do not blame them, but to me it is all displeasing,
even shocking--this haste to profit by the wife's opportune death most
of all. Will you come and see me? Claire is lunching at his cousin's,
and he will find her there. I told him to speak to her himself, as I
felt that to act the maternal part of intermediary between them would
now be mere formalism and affectation; so I am alone. You will want to
speak to me, I know."

Damier, as he drove to the Rue B----, speculated on the rather
mystifying significance of the last sentence. He always wanted to speak
to her: that she must know; but why now in particular? Since his
interview with Claire that morning he had felt almost too shaken by pity
for the mother to trust himself with her. He would not be able to help
her with counsel and consolation; he would not be able to think of
Claire; and at this turning-point in Claire's life it was for that that
the mother needed him.

He found her standing in the salon, evidently pausing to meet him, in a
restless pacing to and fro. Her eyes dwelt on him gently and very
gravely while she took his hand.

"Who could have expected this swift dénouement? But it is best," she
said, "and I pitied him very deeply."

"Pitied him--for the past, you mean?" Damier questioned.

"Oh, for the future more!"

Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her
smile.

"I saw Claire this morning," he said. "We talked over the matter; she
wished to see me."

Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. "Ah, yes;
I understand," she said.

"She certainly told me that she did not love him," Damier went on, "and
yet--" He paused, not quite knowing how to put to her his hope that
Claire now would reconsider the situation, his hope that she would marry
Monsieur Daunay.

It would be the solution of all difficulties, the best solution
possible, and the situation could then be defined anew in terms that he
more and more deeply longed for. He hardly dared, even yet, before her
unconsciousness, define it, and turning away from her, he walked down
the room, urging himself to a courage great enough to enable him now to
speak to her what was in his heart. Madame Vicaud was watching him
thoughtfully when he faced her again at the end of the room, and with
still that look of controlled emotion.

"I, also, have something to tell you," he said.

"Yes," she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced,
steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.

"Can you guess?" he asked.

She was standing now, strangely, in the attitude of the little
photograph--leaning on the back of a high chair; and her eyes recalled
yet more strangely the intentness of the picture's eyes as she said:
"You have come to tell me that you love my daughter?"

He was so deeply astonished, so completely thrown back upon himself,
that for a long moment he could only gaze helplessly into the eyes'
insolubility.

"No," he said at last; "I did not come to tell you that."

"But you do love her?" Madame Vicaud inquired, with something of gentle
urgency in her voice, as though she helped his shyness. "Be frank with
me, my friend; I have guessed so much more, seen so much more, than you
told me or showed me. Even with all that saddens you, that pains you,
you do love her--enough to overlook the pain and sadness?"

"No," said Damier, still facing her from his distance, "I do not love
her. I have never needed to overlook anything."

Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.

"But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?"

"You, only, have been my meaning."

He saw that her thought, in its disarray, could not pause upon his
interpretation of these words. She had straightened herself, both hands
on the chair-back, and her wide gaze, her parted lips, and the vivid
wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.

"You have, from the first, been so much with her--seemed to take so much
interest in her--seemed so to understand her; she was so open--so
intimate--"

"She is your daughter."

"But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love
my daughter--"

He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and,
suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.

"I don't, in the very least, love Claire; I have never, in the very
least, loved her; I have only been sorry for her."

"Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been
sorry, too?"

"But I not for that," said Damier, "not for that; but because she made
me so sorry for you; because"--and he looked at her--"because you do not
love her."

He was still at a distance from her, and across it her look met his in
a long silence.

Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her
flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly
rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long
before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with
her hands.

"Forgive me!" Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came
to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did
not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication,
and all the others--ah, the others?--the years and years of them that
rolled between them!--in a full and final confession. "Forgive me for
seeing--it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness--"

She made no reply.

"You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every
fiber of you. There is nothing in her that does not hurt you," Damier
said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had
come for it.

Madame Vicaud lifted her head.

"I do understand her," she said. She did not look at him. Straightening
her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the
window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced
from her as it had been from him, "And I hate her."

Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its
strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the
light, he was able to say: "I even guessed that--almost."

"Yet you do not hate her," she said, after a pause of some moments,
speaking without moving or turning her head.

Damier paused too. "I have not your reasons," he said at last.

"Ah, my reasons! Yes." She turned to him now, as though she saw in him
an accusing world, and faced it in an attitude of desperate
self-justification.

"They began with her father," said Damier.

"I hated him," she said. Her eyes looked through him, fixed on the abyss
of the past. "I hated him. He was abhorrent to me. I lived with him for
fifteen years--fifteen long, long years. I bore his brutality, his
wickedness--I am not the woman to use the word prudishly--I can make
allowances--wide ones--for temperament, environment, all the mitigating
causes: but my husband's wickedness was unimaginably vile; to see it
stained one's thoughts." The memory of it, as she spoke, had chilled her
to a drawn and frozen pallor; it was as though the blighting breath of
the past went across her face, aging it, emptying it of life.

"I bore the ruin he brought; that was nothing--a spur to love, had love
been possible. I bore his serene, inflexible selfishness. The only thing
I would not bear"--and she still looked full at Damier, but with the
same unseeing largeness of gaze--"was his love. _His_ love!" She turned
and walked across the room. Damier felt his own flesh shudder as he
looked behind the curtain her words lifted, felt his own heart freeze in
the aching sympathy of its comprehension. He could not speak to her. It
seemed to him that she stood at a great distance from him and would not
hear him. Her voice, when she spoke again, had less of its haunting
terror, but it still thrilled with a deep and tragic note: "All this, as
thousands of women have done, because it was my duty--to help him--to
uphold him--to stand by him unflinchingly, and--because he was _her_
father. You said that my reasons for hating her began with him. Ah, but
he was my reason for loving her so desperately--with such a longing to
atone to her for him. I gave her all the love he had crushed out of me.
You see his picture there; I have schooled myself, so that she may not
feel the smirch of him through my horror, to bear the sight of him, to
say to myself every day, 'That is the face I loved.' Oh, what
madness!--what madness!" She pressed her hands hard upon her eyes. "Some
day, perhaps,--since I tell you everything,--I will tell you that story,
too--my love-story. The memory of it is like a block of lead upon my
heart." Her hands fell, but the memory made her silent, and for a long
moment she stood looking down. "But all was hidden from her: the
dread,--that soon passed--I was the stronger, he came to feel it, dread
fell from me,--the hate that followed it, and the final, the terrible
pity,--for I came to pity him when he hung about my life, helpless, like
a torn and dirty rag,--all that was hidden from her. I kept her lifted
out of the mud he dragged us down to; she never saw its depths. While he
lived, and while he was dying,--and horrible to see and hear,--she was
at a school. Those days!" She paused and turned away, and then went on:
"It was in the winter. Lessons fell away; there was the school, the
doctor, all the expenses of an illness to be met. I went into the
streets of nights, a man carrying my harp, and sang for money; I had a
voice till then, and I braved more than the snow and the night to do it:
I was still beautiful. This that you may see how I loved her, how I
struggled for her, how like any mother, though now I seem so hard--so
hideously unnatural. Ah, I fought--I cannot tell you, you cannot guess,
how I fought for her. And then, he died, and then there was for me peace
and the blossoming of delicious hope. She and I together, saved from the
wreck. It seemed to me that I had battled through waves, past rocks and
whirlpools, holding her to my breast, and had reached the shore at
last--she alive for me, and I for her. And then--ah, then! The
shipwreck, the years of struggle, were crude tragedy to my gradual
realizing of the subtle disaster that was to poison my life forever.
Year by year I saw it coming--I saw him creeping into her. I saw the
grave purpose settle round her lips--the steady greed for self. I saw
his smile in her eyes; his eyes were beautiful like hers: when I first
looked at them, I thought them full of splendid dreams, noble strength.
She was not cruel, or brutal, or vicious, as he had been. She submitted
placidly; she submitted, and I hoped for happiness. I could not make her
happy or unhappy. I meant nothing to her except the thing that fed and
clothed her. She took what I could give, and waited for what I could not
give. She lied only when the truth would not serve her purpose better;
so, often, she was frank with me. Her grave laugh maddened me, and her
indifferent adapting of herself to me--for expediency, not for love. If
only she had become a gentle and beautiful animal, to guard from its own
instincts! but she is an animal of such hideous intelligence; she knows
when I try to guard her, and evades me. Like him, she is corrupt to the
core of her; not--do not misunderstand me--that she would do wrong in a
conventional sense--and that it is conventional wrong-doing that I
dread she has always pretended to read into my horror of evil, making a
plaster saint of me so that she may more easily evade the deeply
understanding woman of flesh and blood. Hers is the worse corruption,
that calculates chances, chooses and manages. It is there in her, I
know, though, in its worst forms, latent still--I think."

Damier, white already, felt himself blanch before the rapid glance, like
a sword-stroke across his face, that she cast upon him. She guessed at
all his knowledge.

Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.

"Hideous, hideous that I should speak so to you, and to you I hoped, yet
dreaded--You will wonder how I could have hoped it; how, knowing this, I
should not have warned you. But at first I did not think it possible,
though I knew her charm; at first I did not understand you, and, not
understanding, I guarded you. And then I saw your generous, your
pitiful heart, and I saw that it understood Claire, that perhaps you
understood her better than I did. With you she was her best self; she
trusted you, it seemed, so utterly. I hoped that yours was the clearer
vision, that I was warped, no longer capable of true seeing. Yet, when
the friendship that I rejoiced in grew, as I thought, into love, there
was a terrible struggle in me. My strong attachment to you--you who had
opened the prison gates that shut me into my misery, who brought me out
of a loneliness so long, so bitter--ah! my friend, do not think that I
have not seen and felt it all; but I could not speak to you as I might
have spoken had it not been for that struggle in me between the justice
owed to you--yet that you did not seem to need--and the duty to her--not
to withhold, for your sake, a possibility that might redeem her. My mind
was fixed in that struggle; of our friendship, yours and mine, I could
not think clearly. If you had been ignorant, if she had hidden herself
from you, I should have sacrificed her unflinchingly to you; I should
have interposed and shown her to you. But she showed herself to you. I
knew, from my knowledge of you, that she would not attract you as she
attracts most men, not nobly. I saw from her looks with you, her words,
that she would make no efforts so to attract you. I must say all to you,
since you must understand all. Claire does not love you, but you attract
what is best in her. She relies, I have guessed it, upon the very pathos
of her moral ugliness to enchant you, to arouse in you the chivalrous,
redemptive qualities she sees in you. And I grew to hope that you saw
something that I could not see. I even began to feel a blind, groping
tenderness for her through your fancied tenderness; and as I allowed
myself to hope that you loved her, I allowed myself to have faith in the
redeeming power of your love."

She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier,
answering them, shook his head.

"Alas, no. It would have been my story over again, the positions
reversed, and you without my illusions, had you loved her, married her;
and yet, it was because you had no illusions that I hoped."

But Damier could not think of dead hopes.

"What you have suffered!" he said.

"Yes," Madame Vicaud answered, "I have suffered; but do not, in your
kindness, your tenderness, exaggerate. I have suffered, but all has not
been black. There have been flowers on the uphill road. I don't believe
in a woe that is blind to them, or to the sky overhead."

But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.

"Clara," said Damier.

She was a woman of deep understanding, yet even now,--and hardly was it
to be wondered at, so lifted through its very intensity was his love for
her above love's ordinary manifestations,--even now her name so gravely
spoken by him had no further meaning for her than the one openly,
proudly, joyously accepted, the meaning of the strange tie that had
united them; but, while she accepted it, his look startled her. It
showed nothing new, but seemed to interpret newly something she had not
recognized before. Smiling faintly, she said:

"You have a right."

"Not the right I would have." He felt no excitement, only the enraptured
solemnity that a soul might feel in some quiet dawn of heaven on finding
another soul parted from years ago on earth--long sought for, long
loved.

She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was
already a recognition.

"I love you," said Damier. He had not moved toward her, nor had she
moved away. A little distance separated them, and they stood silently
looking at each other.

"You mean--" she said at last.

"I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman
he worships."

The whirl of her mind mirrored itself in the stricken stupefaction of
her wan, beautiful features. She caught at one flashing thought. "And
I--her mother! You might have been my son!"

"No; I might not," Damier affirmed.

"By age; I am old enough."

"I know your age; you are forty-seven," said Damier, able to smile at
her, "and I am thirty. If you were seventy-seven, the only difference
would be that I could have fewer years to spend with you; I should wish
to spend them just the same. As it is, your age does not make us
ludicrous before the world, if we were to consider that."

At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and
her own endurance of it, at such a moment.

"My friend! That this should have happened to you!"

"Can it never happen to you?" he asked.

"I would never allow it to happen to me."

"It would not be to look up at the sky--it would not even be to stoop to
a flower?"

"I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had
looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black."

He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through
tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the
worshiper's than the lover's, Eustace said:

"But would you--would you stoop?"

"I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has
led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest
meadows." Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran
down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. "I should be
culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool's
paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall
be an old woman while you are still a young man."

"Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same
to me? I have not fallen in love with you--I have found you. When I saw
your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine."

"The face of a girl. I was nineteen then."

"Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the
girl's face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That
struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in
part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you
thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?"

Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said,
"Perhaps."

"And if this were our last moment--if there were no question of age or
of going on--then--then would you tell me that you have felt something
of my feeling--the finding--the recognition--the rapture--own to it with
joy?"

She turned to him now and looked at him, at his eager, solemn face, the
supplication and worship of his clasped hands, looked for a long time,
without speaking. But her face, though she was so white and so grave,
seemed, as she looked, to reflect, with a growing radiance, the youth in
his.

"I have felt it," she said at last, "but I have hardly known that I felt
it."

"You know now?"

"Yes, I know now."

"You could own to it--with joy?"

"If this were our last moment.--Ah, my friend!" He had taken her into
his arms.

The long years drifted away like illusions before an awakening. Her
girl-hood--but weighted with such dreams of sorrow and loneliness!--seemed
with her again. She was helpless, though her heart reproached him and
herself, yet could not wholly reproach--helpless in a happiness poignant
and exquisite. They kissed each other gently, and, his arms around her,
they looked earnestly at each other. Speechlessly they looked the
finding, the recognition, the rapture.

The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be
counted with.




XV


AS they heard the tinkle of the entrance-bell, Claire's
voice, her step outside, Madame Vicaud moved away from Damier. She was
seated in a chair near the table, and the young man stood beside her,
when Claire entered.

Claire paused in the doorway and looked sullenly, yet hardly
suspiciously, at them. She had never worn a mask for Damier, yet he saw
in her flushed and somber face something new to him, saw that she lacked
some quality--was it confidence, indifference, placidity?--that he had
always found in her. He guessed in a moment that her interview with
Monsieur Daunay had not been a propitious one.

"I did not expect to see you so soon again, and under such suddenly
changed circumstances," she said to him. "What are you talking about?
Me?" She took off her hat,--the day was sultry,--pushed up her thick
hair, and dropped her length of ruffled, clinging white into a chair.
"So; I have seen Monsieur Daunay. He lost no time, it seems. He asked my
hand of you first, I hear, Mamma, in proper form--_très
convenablement_."

"Yes," Madame Vicaud assented with composure.

"It seems that you discouraged him."

"I could not encourage him from what you had told me, but from what he
told me it seems that you did not discourage him," the mother answered.

"I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility,"
said Claire.

Madame Vicaud, in silence, and with something of a lion-tamer's calm
intentness of eye, looked at her daughter; and Claire, after meeting the
look with one frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.

"And it seems that you, last night, did not discourage Monsieur Daunay's
hopes; he spoke of you with gratitude. What have you to say to it all
now?"

"I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair--yours and
his."

"You made it yours, it seems to me!"

"Unwillingly."

"Oh--unwillingly!" Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. "I don't understand
you, Mr. Damier--I began not to understand you this morning"; and, as he
made no reply:

"Your present silence doesn't accord with your past interference."

"My silence? What do you expect me to say?" Damier asked, with real
wonder, forgetting the mother's intimations.

"Can you deny that--apart from your feelings of angered propriety--you
were pitifully jealous last night and this morning? I had to assure you
again and again that I did not love him--the truth, as it happens."

This speech now opened such vistas of interpretation to the past--of
interrogation to the future--that Damier could only, speechlessly, look
his wonder at her.

"Were you not jealous?" she demanded.

"Not in the faintest degree."

Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.

"And what, then, was your motive for prying, meddling, cross-questioning
as you did? You had a motive?"

"I have always had an interest in your welfare, Claire, but your mother
was my motive for meddling and cross-questioning, as you put it."

"Oh--my mother!" Claire tossed her a look where she sat, her arms
folded, near the table. "You were afraid for my honor since hers was
involved in it? Was that it?"

"Perhaps that was it--and for the same reason I beg you to spare your
mother now."

Claire leaned back in her chair and fixed upon him a heavy stare above
her heavy flush. "Come," she said, "I have never had pretenses with
you--I have always been frank. Do you intend to marry me? There it is
clearly; I have no false delicacy, and, bon Dieu! you have given me
every right to ask the question."

Madame Vicaud, soundless at the table, now leaned her elbows upon it and
covered her face with her hands. "Come," Claire repeated, casting
another look upon her; "for Mamma's sake, you owe me an answer. Spare
her the shame--she feels it bitterly, you observe--of seeing my
outrageous uncertainty prolonged. Haven't you spent all your time with
me? Haven't you taken upon yourself a position of authority toward
me--made my affairs your own? Aren't you going to--how would Mamma put
it?--redeem me--lift me? Or are you going to let my soul suffer a little
longer?"

"You could hardly speak so, Claire, if you spoke sincerely," said
Damier; "you may once have misinterpreted my friendship for you, but you
no longer misinterpret it. I have never intended to marry you. It is
you, remember, who force me into this ugly attitude. I could not face
you in it, were I not sure that your feeling for me has always been as
free from anything amorous as mine for you."

"I don't speak of my feeling for you!" Claire cried in a voice suddenly
loud, leaning forward with her elbows on the arms of her chair, "but of
yours for me! It is not there now--I see it plainly, and I see plainly
why! She--_she_--has been talking to you against me!--telling you about
some childish follies in my life!--making you believe that I would not
be a fit wife for you! Ah, yes!--I know her!" Claire pointed a shaking
finger at her mother. "She would think it her duty to protect you
against me--I know her!"

"Be still," said Damier in his voice of steel.

Claire, for a moment, sank back, panting, defiant, but silent before it.

"You are conscious of your own falsehood, but you can scarcely be
conscious of how base and vile you are. Your mother, when I came to-day,
was hoping that I had come to ask her for your hand; she believed that I
loved you, and hoped it."

Claire, in her sullen recoil, still remained sunken and panting in her
chair.

"Well, then! And what have you got to say to us both, then, if you gave
us both cause for such a supposition? What have you meant by it all?"

"What I meant from the beginning I can best define by telling you that
to-day I asked your mother to marry me."

Claire sat speechless and motionless. The words seemed to have arrested
thought, and to have nailed her to her chair. Damier looked at Madame
Vicaud. Her hands had dropped from her face, and she met his eyes.

"The truth was allowed me?" he said.

"It is always allowed," she answered.

Her face was so stricken, so ghastly, that Damier, almost forgetting in
his great solicitude the hateful presence in the room, leaned over her,
taking her hand.

"Bear it. It is better to have it all over. And, in a sense, it is my
own fault. I should have spoken to you sooner--defined what I meant from
the first."

"So," Claire said suddenly. Her smoldering eyes, while they spoke, had
gone from one to the other. "So; this is what it all meant! Indeed, I
cannot blame myself for not having guessed it. You in love with my
mother! Or, shall we not more truthfully say, she in love with you?--the
explanation, as a rule, you know, of these odd amorous episodes. I begin
to understand. I did not suspect a rival in my own mother. Clever
Mamma!"

"Let this cease now," said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. "All has
been said that it is necessary to say."

"Indeed, no!" cried Claire. She sprang to her feet, braving Damier's
menacing look, and stood before them with folded arms, defiantly, "All
has not been said! I am to marry the middle-aged, middle-class man of
small fortune, and you are to marry the _prince charmant_! Ah, don't
think that I am in love with you, _prince charmant_, though I might have
loved you had not my mother had such a keen eye for her own interests,
and kept mine so dexterously in the background. I might have loved you
had you been allowed to fall in love with me. Oh, I know what you would
say!" Her voice rose to a shout as she interrupted his effort to speak.
"How base, how vile, and how vulgar--_n'est-ce pas_? A girl clamoring
over the loss of a husband! Shocking! Well, I own to my vulgarity. I did
want to marry you. You have money, position--all the things I never hid
from you that I liked; and you interested me, and I liked you, and I
could be myself with you. My mother has always been too dainty to secure
a husband for me--arrange my future: I have had to do all the ugly work
myself; and I liked you because--just because I had to do no ugly work
with you. And I clamor now--not because I have lost you--no, it's not
that; but because she--_she_ has made her goodness serve her so!--has
made it pay where my frankness failed. She is good, if you will; but I
tell you that I prefer my vulgarity--my baseness--my vileness to her
clever virtue; or is it an unconquerable passion with you, Mamma?--is it
to be a _mariage d'amour_ rather than a _mariage de convenance_?"

While Claire spoke, her mother, as if mesmerized by her fury, sat
looking at her with dilated eyes and a fixed face--a face too fixed to
show anguish. Rather it was as if, with an intense, spellbound interest,
she hung upon her daughter's words, hardly feeling, hardly flinching
before her insults, hardly conscious of each whip-like lash that struck
her face to a more death-like whiteness. Now, drawing a breath that was
almost a gasp, she leaned forward over the table, stretching her arms
upon it and clasping her hands. "Claire, Claire!" she said, with a
hurried, staccato utterance, "I see it all with your eyes--I understand.
You have had something really dear taken from you--not love, perhaps,
but a true friendship; that is so, isn't it? He seems to have turned
against you,--isn't it so?--and through me. There is in you an anger
that seems righteous to you. How cruel to have our best turned against
us! I see all that. Ah, no, no! Let me speak to her!" For, Claire
keeping the hardened insolence of her stare upon her, Damier, full of a
passionate, protecting resentment, put his arm around her shoulders,
took her hand. She threw off the hand, the arm, almost cruelly. "Let me
speak to my child! Don't come between us now--now when we may come
together, she and I. Yes, Claire, he loves me,--you see it,--too much,
perhaps, to be just to you, though he has been so just--more just than I
have been, perhaps; he has been so truly your friend. But now I am
just. I am your mother. I can understand. I love him, Claire, yes, I
love him; but I understand you. I will never do anything to part us
further--understand me! I will never marry him against your will. Oh,
Claire, try to understand me--try to trust me--try to love me!" She rose
to her feet, her face ardent with the upsurging of all her longing
motherhood, its sudden flaming into desperate hope through the deep
driftings of ashen hopelessness; and as if swayed forward by this flame
of hope, this longing of love, this ardor, she leaned toward her child,
stretched out her arms toward her face of heavy impassivity. At the
gesture, at her mother's last words, Claire's impassivity flickered into
a half-ironic, half-pitying smile. But she did not advance to the
outstretched arms. Merely looking at her with this searing pity, she
said:

"You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn't you?--you would, as
usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual, your radiance would shine
against my dark. Poor, magnanimous Mamma! No, no, no!" She turned and
walked up and down the room. "No, no! I am tired of all this--tired of
you; and you are tired of me. You will marry Mr. Damier. Why not, after
all? Don't let scruples of conscience interfere, especially none on my
account. It would not separate us: we are separated; we have always been
separated, and that we are gives me no pain. But don't expect me either
to live with you when you are married, or to marry my antique lover and
settle down to the respectable, tepid joys he offers me. No, and no
again. I will not marry him. I leave the respectability to you two
excellent people." The glance she shot at them now as they stood
together was pure irony. Her mother's pale and beautiful face still kept
its look of frozen appeal, as though, while she made the appeal, she had
been shot through the heart. Its beauty seemed to sting Claire where the
appeal did not touch, and, too, Damier's look, bent on her with a quiet
that defied her and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.

"My poor chances can't compete with yours, Mamma," she muttered. "Let me
tell you that despair becomes you." She took up her hat.

"Where are you going, Claire?" Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.

"Don't be alarmed. Not to the Seine. I am going to a tea with Mrs.
Wallingham. I shall be back to dinner. You will admit me?"

"I shall always admit you."

"Good." Claire was putting in her hat-pins before the mirror. "That is
reassuring. Console her, Mr. Damier. Try to atone to her for me--bad as
I am, I am sure that you can do so. Ah, I don't harmonize with a
love-scene!--it was one I interrupted, I suppose. Let me take my
baseness--my vileness--from before you." Her hand on the door, she
paused, fixing a last look upon them; then, with a short laugh, she
said, "Accept my blessing," and was gone.




XVI


MADAME VICAUD said nothing. She drew her hand from
Damier's and sank again into the chair from which she had risen. Hope,
ardor, and love, forever perhaps, were dead within her. She had hated
her daughter, but under the hatred had been, always, the hidden flame,
not, perhaps, of love, but of longing to love. She hated no longer, and
the flame was quenched. Even in his nearness to her, Damier could not
look with her at that slain longing. Walking away from her, he stood for
a long time, gazing unseeingly over the garden, in silence. At last he
turned and came to her. Her arm leaned on the table and her head upon
her hand. With unutterable weariness she looked up at him.

"And now," she said, "you must go, my friend."

"Go?" Damier repeated.

Years of resolute endurance looked from her eyes; the weariness was not
a wavering. Her face seemed sinking back into the abyss from which he
had rescued it.

"Yes, you must go."

"And leave you with her!"

"And leave me with her," she assented monotonously.

"Never--never!"

She passed her hand over her brow, pressing her eyelids, as if in the
effort to dispel her deep fatigue and find words with which to answer
his harassing protest.

"Yet you must. I have the wonder, the treasure of your love for me. I
will keep it always. I will never forget you. But it is impossible, even
the friendship, now. We must not drag what is dear to us in the mire. I
could not keep you as my friend under her eyes. I must live with her,
and for her; that is the only life possible for me. I made it for
myself. Whatever her cruelty, whatever her baseness, I have only to
remember that I am responsible for her, that I am her only chance. And
after this her presence in my life makes yours wrong. She knows now that
you are not a friend only, and as a husband you could not remain. Such a
_ménage à trois_ would be as detestable as it would be grotesque."

"She will marry!" cried Damier. "She must marry Monsieur Daunay."

"I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could
not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but
as friend, as friend only."

Damier burst out into a smothered invective:

"And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that
creature--who has no love for you--whom you cannot love! What can you do
for her? You can never change or soften her."

He felt that the vehemence of his despair and rebellion dashed itself
against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her
hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on
with the same monotonous patience:

"I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a
sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time
for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age
and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never
soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her
the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can
pity her, most piteous creature--whose mother has no love for her."

"Ah, you do not love me!" cried Damier, and all his youth was in the
cry. "You sacrifice _me_ with such composure! You give yourself to have
your life sucked out of you by this vampire shape of the past. And it is
me you rob! It is my life you immolate, as well as your own! What of my
claim on life--my claim on you? You have no conception of what you are
to me, or you could not speak of shutting me out from you; you could not
think of sending me away! You could not speak so--think so--if you loved
me!"

From her chair she now looked up at him, not with weariness, with a look
curiously vivid and tender. "You speak like a boy," she said.

Damier flung himself on his knees beside her. "And you think that I can
leave you when you can look at me like that--love me like that!"

"Because I do." She let him take her hands, and went on, almost smiling
at him: "Because I love you like that, and because you love me like
that, and because I am so much older than you--can't you feel it? how
like a little boy--passionate, unruly in his grief--you seem to me! And
because, in spite of my age and your boyishness, we do yet love each
other so greatly that the very greatness of our love makes the question
of our being together or apart really of not such significance."

"Of not such significance!" poor Damier cried. "I am to find you in
heaven, then!"

"Probably." She did smile now, but he guessed that it was the brave
smile she could summon over anguish. He guessed that her feeling of his
boyishness was less apparent to her than her feeling of his power over
her, his right to her. She might never yield to the power, never own to
the right, but to guess that she felt them was assurance enough for the
moment, and the pallor of the face that smiled at him was a reproach to
him.

"No, no," he said; "I shall keep you there--and I shall keep you here,
too. I will rescue you. I will find out the way. And I will leave you
now and give you peace for a little while. You are terribly tired."

"Terribly," she assented. "It is kind and generous of you to go now."

"But my going is to be taken as no token of submission. I will return."

"To say good-by."

"So you say."

"So you will do." And she still smiled, all tenderness, all
inflexibility.

"Never, never, never!" said Damier.




XVII


DAMIER, for his own part, felt no need of peace. A
passionate protestation, a passionate determination, filled him. At his
hotel, as if in answer to vague plans and projects, the figure of
Monsieur Daunay, rising from a chair, confronted him. From Monsieur
Daunay's relief and alacrity he guessed that he had been waiting there
for some time--ever since, he further guessed, his conversation with
Claire.

"You have heard?" asked Monsieur Daunay, and a host of questions looked
from his eyes.

"That you have proposed to Mademoiselle Vicaud, yes; and that she has
answered you, I fear, not favorably; yes, I have heard."

"You have seen her?"

"I was with her mother, speaking with her of it, when Claire came."

"I have intruded thus upon you," said Monsieur Daunay, "in the faint
hope that you might be able, after seeing her, to give me some
encouragement, since from her I could elicit none. She was sullen,
silent, reproached me for my haste. After all these years!" Monsieur
Daunay groaned, and dropped again into his chair, folding his arms and
bowing his head in a despairing acquiescence to fate's cruelty. "After
all these years!" he repeated.

Damier saw down a long vista of them, sunny with the encouraging smiles
of the charming Claire.

"You have assured me," Daunay presently said, "that you were not the
cause of this change in Claire."

It was a rather perplexing question, but Damier was able truthfully to
answer it with: "I can again assure you that it is only through her
relation with her mother that Claire interests me."

"And so she has assured me, again and again, and that all her affection
was for me. And yet, now that I can claim her--now that I come, trusting
and hoping, she turns from me; she mutters that I am too old; not rich
enough. Ah, _mon Dieu_!"

Claire, clearly, Damier also saw, had never endangered her certain hold
upon Monsieur Daunay's usefulness by confessing to him her expectation
of larger achievements. She would evade him, and hold him, as long as
she had need of him.

Part of her anger to-day had, no doubt, been due to the fact that the
sudden crisis had forced her into a decisive attitude toward him while
yet uncertain that she could with safety give him up. Yet, indeed, she
had been able to avoid absolute decisiveness--so Monsieur Daunay's next
words proved:

"She told me that all her affection was still mine, but owned to higher
ambitions; she had never, she said, hidden from me that she was
ambitious, and life now was opening new possibilities to her. Could
affection and ambition be combined, had I a large fortune to gild my
middle age and my unimportance, she would at once marry me."

"She is utterly unworthy of you," said Damier.

At this a faint, ironic smile crossed the Frenchman's face. "Ah, _mon
ami_," he said, "you need not tell me that. If I love Claire, do not
imagine, as I told you last night, that I am blinded by my love. I love
her _d'un amour fou_--and I recognize it. She possesses me; she can do
what she will with me; I should forgive her anything. But I know that I
am a captive--and to no noble captor."

"Just heavens!" Damier broke out, indifferent, in his indignant pity, to
his own interests, "shake off this obsession--and her with it! Leave
her; go away; do not see her again. What misery if you were to marry
her!"

"What will you? I adore her!" His helplessness seemed final. He
presently went on: "But I came to-day to ask for your help. You occupy
a peculiar position toward Madame Vicaud and her daughter; you have
influence with them both. Use it in my favor, I beg of you. Intercede
for me."

"Any influence I have shall, I promise you, be devoted to that purpose.
I can hardly hope that your hopes will be realized; their realization
could not be for your happiness. Pardon me, but have you never suspected
that Claire is like her father--that she, too, is a miserable creature?"

For a long moment Daunay looked at him.

"She is like her father," he then said; "but have you never suspected,
or, rather, do you not now see, that, because of that, my claim is all
the stronger? What man not knowing it, marrying her in ignorance of it,
would not repent? I should never repent. She is like him, if you will,
but she is, irrevocably, the woman I love. More than that, she is the
child I love; I have watched her grow up. From the beginning, she has
been _ma petite Claire_; so she will be to the end--whatever that end
may be."

Monsieur Daunay spoke with a profound feeling, a profound sincerity that
the emotional tremor of his voice, the emotional tears in his eyes, only
made the more characteristic and touching to Damier. He got up and
grasped the Frenchman's hand in silence.

A knock at the door broke upon this compact of sympathy; a garçon
brought a card to Damier and said that the lady waited for him in the
salon below. The card was Lady Surfex's, and on it was written:

     Must see you at once, on most important matter concerning Madame V.

"Wait for me here," Damier said to Monsieur Daunay. "This may concern
you as well as me."

He found Lady Surfex in the drearily gaudy salon, her face ominous of
ill tidings.

"My dear Eustace," she said,--they were alone, yet her voice was
discreetly low,--"a horrid thing has happened--or is going to. I thought
it best to come to you at once. Claire Vicaud runs away to-night with
Lord Epsil."

And, as he stared at her in stricken silence:

"I found it out by chance. I was at Mrs. Wallingham's. They were
there--Mademoiselle Vicaud and Lord Epsil. I watched them, indeed, with
some uneasiness, as they sat, with ostentatious retirement, in a dim
corner. I saw them go out together. Do you know, Eustace, my distrust of
that girl and of that man--in justice to her, I must say it--was so
great that I really was on the point of following them--asking her to
let me drive her home; but I hesitated, people I knew came in, I had to
speak to them, and so some time went by. Then, about half an hour after
they were gone, Mrs. Wallingham came to me and whispered that a maid--a
discreet English person who was dispensing tea in the dining-room--had
overheard Lord Epsil saying to Mademoiselle Vicaud that they would take
the night train to Dinard, and that his yacht was there. The woman came
at once to her mistress. And now, Eustace, what can be done to save
_her_?" They both knew to whom the pronoun referred; a conventional
saving of Claire had significance only in reference to her mother.

Damier was steadying his thoughts.

"The night train." He looked at his watch. "There is time," he said.

"For what, Eustace?"

"There is only one chance. One can't appeal to her heart, or
conscience--or even, it seems, to her ambition; but one might to her
greed--offer her some firmer, surer competence. I had thought of it
dimly before. I could catch that Dinard train--go with them--find some
opportunity for seeing her alone before they reach Dinard--or before
they reach the yacht."

"But, Eustace," her helpless wonder reproached his baseless optimism,
"what _could_ you do? You can't beard the man; she is of age--goes
willingly. What a situation!"

"I could offer her half of my income for life, if she would consent to
return with me, and to marry a man who is devoted to her--who, I think,
would forgive anything."

"Eustace, it would leave you almost poor!"

"Not quite, since the half is large enough, I trust, to tempt her! The
whole would not be too much to give to save _her_ from this final blow."

"But can you--this man--will he?"

"He is up-stairs. I will see him, and start at once."

"And, Eustace--wait; can't we keep it from her--can't we think of some
good lie?"

He had almost to smile at her intently thoughtful face.

"What possible lie can we think of? Claire will not come back
to-night--she must know, sooner or later."

"But it is for to-night I want to spare her. Ah, I have it--no lie,
either. I merely send a telegram, 'Claire may not return to-night: will
explain to-morrow,' signed with my name; she will think Claire is
passing the night with me; and then, you know, the girl may, at the last
moment, decide not to go."

Damier had to yield to her eagerness. Up-stairs the words he had with
Daunay were short, bitter, decisive. Averting his eyes from the
unfortunate man's face, he put the case before him. He turned his back
on him when he had spoken, went to the window, left him to an unobserved
quaffing of the poisonous cup.

Monsieur Daunay's first words showed that he had quaffed it bravely and
that his reason still stood firm.

"She must be mad," he said; "it is not like her."

"No, it is not like her. And I may tell you that I suspect revenge to be
in part her motive. She had a terrible quarrel with her mother this
afternoon."

Damier turned now and faced him.

"And now, Monsieur Daunay, are you willing to save her?"

"I am ready," the Frenchman said quietly; "with your help, I am ready to
save her."

"I go at once, and with that assurance, then?"

"Yes; I am ready. Tell her that. Tell her, too, that if her mother will
not receive her, she will find a home at my cousin's until our marriage
can take place."

"Her mother will receive her," said Damier. "As you have forgiven, so
she will forgive."




XVIII


THE long, hot, rushing hours had passed, for Damier, in
a sort of stupor, the anæsthesia of one fixed idea. In the stuffy
railway-carriage, his eyes on the dark square of the open window, where
one saw vaguely the starlit depths of a midsummer night, he thought,
with the odd detachment of a crisis, of the past day: the sunny morning
walk with Claire--green leaves, purple shadows; the afternoon's supreme
moment--a deep pulse of wonder in his heart, hardly to be seen in
images; Lady Surfex among the palms and monstrous gilded pottery of the
hotel salon; Monsieur Daunay's quiet, white face; the crowded Paris
railway-station, and the glimpse he had caught in it of Claire and Lord
Epsil. This most recent impression was also the most vivid, threw all
the others into a blurred background where, with a new look of woe, only
Madame Vicaud's face glimmered clearly.

The enforced pause at the height of his resolution made both the past
and the future half illusory. The present, with not its usual flashing
impermanence, had, for hours, been the same, had stopped, as it were, at
an instant of vigilant alertness, and held him in it rigidly. Until the
object of that vigilance, that alertness, were attained, he could not
look forward or make projects. The chance for seeing Claire alone could
not come, probably, until Dinard was reached. There, in the hurry of
arrival, he might snatch a word with her. It would only be necessary to
speak the word, to put the alternative before her. Entreaty would be
useless; all the argument possible was the chink of gold in two hands;
all the hope, that his chink might be the louder.

Shortly after ten o'clock the train drew up in the Rennes station.
Damier had let no such opportunity escape him, and he again stepped from
his compartment and stood looking toward the part of the train where he
knew were Claire and her cavalier. As he looked he saw the tall figure
of the Englishman stroll across the platform to the refreshment-buffet.
The light fell full on his long, smooth, pink face,--a papier-mâché
pink,--on his long, high nose and whity-brown mustache. Damier darted
forward. In an instant he was at the door, still ajar, of the
compartment that Lord Epsil had just left. He saw, under the yellow
glare of the lamp, a confusion of traveling-bags, rugs, bandboxes
(Claire had evidently shopped), newspapers and magazines; a large box of
bonbons lay on a seat, its contents half rifled, its papers strewing the
floor; and, settled back in a corner, her shoulders huddled together in
a graceful sleepiness, was Claire. A long silk traveling-cloak fell over
her white dress; the winged white hat of the morning was pushed a little
to one side as her head leaned against the cushioned carriage; a
drooping curve of loosened hair, shining in the light like molten brass,
fell over her cheek and neck; her profile, half hidden, was at once
petulant and relaxed with drowsiness.

Damier did not hesitate. He sprang into the carriage. Not touching the
girl, he leaned over her. "Claire," he said.

In an instant she had started into erectness, staring stupefied, too
stupefied for shame or anger.

"I have only a moment," said Damier, speaking with a clear-cut dryness
of utterance. "If you will come back with me, and marry Monsieur
Daunay,--he knows all and will marry you,--half of my income is yours
for life."

After the first stare she had blinked in opening her eyes to the light
and to the sudden apparition; the eyes were now fixed widely on him;
they looked like two deep, black holes.

"It is a bribe," she said.

"Call it so if you will."

"It shows your scorn for me."

"Comprehension of you, rather."

"And if I don't?"

"If you don't I will challenge this man--and fight him. I am an
excellent fencer, an excellent shot."

She looked at him, half scoffing, yet half believing. "Englishmen don't
fight duels."

"This one will."

"He might kill you."

"I might kill him; you would have to take the risk."

She shrugged her shoulders. "_Bien!_ I understand, too. I will fulfil
myself." She half rose, then sank again. "How much?" He mentioned the
sum--not a small one. "Make it two thirds," said Claire, keeping her
dilated eyes upon him with an effect of final and defiant revelation.

"Two thirds, then," he assented, in the steadied voice of one who does
not dare hurry indecision. Yet, even now, she did not rise.

"One more condition, please. I do not see my mother again. Let us say,
if you like, that I am ashamed to meet her."

"She has not been told--of this."

"Yes, she has," said Claire. "I wrote and told her." There was the
satisfaction of achievement in the way she said it. "Oh, yes; she
knows."

"Yet, even after that,--your vengeance, I suppose,--I hardly dare make
the promise for her,--she can forgive--even this."

"Ah," and the hoarse note was in Claire's voice, "but I can't take
forgiveness from her. I have left the world where such episodes as this
need forgiveness. Tolerance is now all that I will endure--and she will
never tolerate. No; I will not come with you; I will not return to
Monsieur Daunay and to respectability--unless you promise that I shall
never see her again."

"I promise it, then, if it is the condition."

"You accept? _Bien!_" Claire sprang up, and ripping an illustration from
a magazine, she scribbled on the blank back, "Have decided, after all,
that I won't come," transfixed it with a hat-pin to the cushioned back
of Lord Epsil's vacated seat, then, as rapidly, reached for two of the
bandboxes, pulled them, rattling, from the racks, stooped and jerked a
large pasteboard box from under a seat, and, encumbered as she already
was, caught up from among the rugs and bags several smaller packages,
dexterously holding them to her sides with her elbows.

Damier, who had stared, hardly comprehending, gripped her wrist. "Put
them down." She gazed round in sincere amazement; then, with quite a
humorous laugh, dropped the booty. "I really forgot! No, it wouldn't be
fair play, would it?--though, I confess, I should like to take a little
vengeance; he has irritated me, been too complacent, too assured. This,
too?" She touched the silk traveling-cloak. Damier, without speaking,
stripped it off her; then, catching her by the arm, he almost dragged
her from the carriage, for her feet stumbled among the dressing-cases
and the abandoned boxes.

He found, as they almost ran along the dim platform across to the one
opposite, and as he pushed her into a compartment of the Paris train
that stood there, that she was laughing. The adventure of it, the
excitement, Lord Epsil's discomfiture, appealed, evidently, to her sense
of mirth.

There were other occupants of the carriage, and Damier was thankful for
it. He did not want to talk to Claire. To reproach her would make him as
ridiculous as beating a tin pan in the expectation of response other
than a mocking cachinnation; not to reproach might seem to condone by
comprehension. Yet, as she sank back into a corner, settled her shoulder
in it, he saw that there was emotion under the laughter, that it was not
only the tin-pan rattle. He could interpret it as almost a regret--a
regret for something against which she had always rebelled, from which
she had now finally freed herself, a sudden realization that forever she
had lost the standing upon which he had found her. Yet, over this trace
of emotion and suffering, that, to Damier, was more piteous than
anything he had yet seen in her, she smiled at him, with half-dropped
lids. It was the look, with her a new one, of brazening a shame. Already
her nature had retaliated upon the wrong she had done it by fixing in
her face a more apparent ugliness of expression. She glanced round at
the sleepy, respectable occupants of the carriage, their sleepiness,
however, keeping an eye upon this startling young person in her white
dress.

"Before we relapse into an irrevocable silence," she said, "let me
inform you--it will complete your evil opinion of me--that I didn't
really care about him; I cared for his caring about me--though at
moments even that fatigued me, _il m'embêtait quelquefois_; but then, I
was glad to be revenged."

"Upon whom? For what?"

"Upon you both--for making me feel that I was not of your world."

"We did not make you feel it, Claire."

For some moments they were silent, as the train moved slowly from the
station, and then she said:

"Where will you take me?"

"To his cousin's, Mademoiselle Daunay's. I have arranged all with him."

A look, almost tremulous under its attempt at a light sneer, crossed her
face.

"What forgiveness! _Il est un peu lâche, vous savez._"

"Try, Claire, to deserve such touching _lâcheté_."

Again Claire was, for some moments, silent; then, yawning slightly, yet,
again his acuteness guessed, affectedly, she said, settling her shoulder
more decisively in her corner:

"There is the more hope for my deserving it since now I am rich. You may
make your mind easy about my future. I have got all that I ever really
wanted." It was the new and brazen note over the new shame; but as he
looked at the face that first pretended to sleep, and that eventually
did sleep, was not the brass the curious, anomalous shield that nature
put around something growing--around a soul that at last, with a faint,
half-conscious thrill, felt upon it the awakening breath of suffering?




XIX


THE morning was still fresh when Damier walked down the
Rue B---- next day. Clear early sunlight fell upon the houses opposite
Madame Vicaud's, glittering on their upper windows, gilding their
austerity; but the depths of the street were still cool and unshadowed.

The concierge was sweeping out the courtyard, and fixed on Damier a
cogitating eye; his early visit and Claire's absence were, no doubt, to
her vigilant curiosity, symptoms of something unusual. The cogitation,
though mingled with relief, was repeated at the door above in
Angélique's look. She was plainly glad to see him. Madame Vicaud had sat
up all night, she volunteered, quite as if accepting him as a member of
the family, privileged to confidences; she thought that madame had hoped
for mademoiselle's return, and she feared that the letter that had
arrived from mademoiselle an hour before had much distressed madame.
Perhaps Monsieur Damier could persuade her to have some coffee; she had
eaten no dinner the night before, nor breakfast this morning. Damier
promised to persuade, and Angélique ushered him into the salon.

He had never before seen it flooded with sunlight,--for this was his
first morning visit,--and the windows overlooking the garden faced a
radiant sky.

His eyes were dazzled, and the dark figure that rose to meet him seemed
to waver in the light.

The calamity that had befallen her, at variance with the joyous setting
in which he found her, showed in her white face--her eyes, still, as it
were, astonished from the shock, dark with misery and a night of
watching. On the table near which she had been sitting were a burnt-out
candle, Lady Surfex's telegram of the night before, and a letter,
opening its large displayal of vigorous handwriting to the revealing
day: Claire's handwriting, Claire's letter of farewell. Damier took
Madame Vicaud's hands and looked at her; the astonishment of her eyes
hurt him more than their dry misery: after all, then, she had been so
unprepared.

"I know all," she said.

"Not all."

"She has left me--with that man; she has written to me."

"Not all," he repeated.

"Is there more? There cannot be worse."

"There is better. She is safe."

"Safe? Do you mean that she did not go?"

Her eyes, with their sudden leap of light, burned him.

"No; she did go. But I followed them; I brought her back."

"Back to me? She was frightened at what she had done?" she again asked,
her eyes still burning, but more dimly, upon him. His eyes dropped
before them; looking down at the wasted hands he held, he said:

"No, dearest, not to you--to Monsieur Daunay. She is to marry him. She
is with his cousin now."

Her vigil had evidently been tearless; even the arrival that morning of
the fatal letter had not melted her frozen terror. But now, as she
looked speechlessly at him, the long rise of a sob heaved her breast;
her hands slid from his; she sank into a chair, and resting her crossed
arms upon the table, she bent her head upon them and wept and shuddered.
In the sunny stillness of the room the young man stood beside her. He
felt an alien before this intimate, maternal anguish. She did not weep
for long. She presently sat upright, dried her eyes, and pushed back her
hair, keeping her hand pressed tightly, for a moment, on her forehead,
as if in an effort to regain her long habit of self-control; and as if
to gain time, to hide the painful effort from him, she pointed to
Claire's letter. "Read it," she said.

It was Claire's most callous, most ugly self; its passion of hatred and
revenge hardly masked itself in the metallic tone of mockery. They were
both well rid of her--her dear Mamma and her dear Mamma's suitor. They
were far too good for her, and she justified them by showing them how
far too bad she was for them. Pursuit and reproaches were useless. She
feared that her dear Mamma's ermine robe of respectability must be
permanently spotted by a daughter notoriously naughty--for she did not
intend to hide her new situation. But perhaps the daughter could be
lived down as the daughter's father had been. And on, and on--short
phrases, lava-jets from the seething volcano of base vulgarity; Damier
felt them burn his own cheek while he read.

Madame Vicaud's eyes were on his when he raised them; but quickly
looking away from him, she said: "It came this morning. Last night I
could not understand that telegram; I could not believe that she would
not return. I felt that something was being hidden from me; it was like
battling in a stifling black air. And then--this came." He had laid the
letter beside her, and she touched it with her finger, as if it had been
a snake. "This--this end of all!"

"She is safe," Damier repeated rather helplessly.

"Safe!" the mother echoed. Leaning her head against the chair-back, she
closed her eyes. Lovely and dignified even in her disgrace, nothing
could smirch and nothing could abase her; she had never looked so noble
as at this moment of dreadful defeat and overthrow. "And how have you
saved her?" she asked. "What did Monsieur Daunay have to offer--what did
you have to offer--to bring her back--since it was not repentance? It
was not repentance?"

"No; but I believe that she was glad to come. I--I dowered Claire," said
Damier, after a momentary pause.

Madame Vicaud, still keeping her eyes closed, was silent. He leaned over
her and took her hand. "All that I have is yours. You dowered her, let
us say."

"What do you mean by dowering her?" she asked.

"I have given her two thirds of my income for life."

Her hand in his was chill and passive; he felt in her the cold shudder
of shame.

"Ah," he said, "from me--from me you do not resent such saving?"

"Resent?--from you?" she said gently. "No, no; it is of her I am
thinking. No; you did well, very well to save her--if we may call it
saving. You have washed the spots from my respectability. We both know
the value of such washing; but it is best--best to have us all
respectable,"--a bitter smile touched her lips,--"since it is that we
prize so. And were there no other inducements?"

"There was a condition,"--he had to nerve himself to the speaking of
it,--"that she did not see you again. She has, by her own wish, broken
the bond between you. She has left your life."

Madame Vicaud clenched her hands, and her chin trembled.

"Yet--let me tell you," he said, "I believe that there is more hope for
Claire so left in the evil and abasement she has made about herself than
if she were to have remained with you; all the forces of her nature were
engaged in resistance, or in a pretended submission that bided its time.
Now she must do battle with the world on a level where life will teach
her lessons she can understand. She has severed herself completely from
you--she has completely fulfilled herself. Some new blossoming may
follow; who knows?"

"But no blossoming for me. I shall not see it," said Madame Vicaud. "My
life has been useless."

Useless? He wondered over her past, her long efforts, this wreck.

Could goodness, however clear-sighted, however divine in its
comprehension and pity, prevent evil from working itself out,
fulfilling itself? Was not its working out perhaps its salvation?

"How can you tell?" he said. "You have done your work for her."

"I have done nothing for her. Everything has failed." Still, with closed
eyes, she leaned her head against the chair, and slow tears fell down
her cheeks.

"You have fulfilled yourself toward her; that is not failure. You have
fought your fight. Surely it is the fighting, and not its result, that
makes success. And can you say that everything has failed--when you
still have me to live for? Claire has gone out of your life. She has
shut the door on you. She has left you, and--oh, dearest, dearest, she
has left you to me!"

He stood before her, looking at her with faithful eyes. His love for her
made no menace to her grief; it did not jar upon her sorrow; rather it
was with her in it all, it could not: be separated from it--as he could
not be separated from any part of her life.

"You are alone now," he said, "and I am alone."

"No,"--she put her hand out to him,--"no; we are not alone."

"Then--" The air was golden, and in the open window, white flowers, set
there, dazzled against the sky. This day of sunlight and disaster must
symbolize the past and the future, as her eyes, with their silent,
solemn assent, her face, so sweet and so sorrowful. She rose; he drew
her toward him. But then, as though another consecration than embrace
and kiss were needed for this strange betrothal, she walked with him,
holding his hand, to the window, where the white flowers dazzled in the
sun. She looked at the flowers, at the trees, at the splendid serenity
of the morning sky, softly breathing the clear, radiant air--as though
in "a peace out of pain."

"We will go away," said Damier, who looked at her; and, despite his
sorrowing for her, the day seemed to him full of wings and music. "I do
not want to see Paris again, do you? And this will be our last memory
of it--these flowers, this garden, this sky, that we look at together.
We will think of it so, without pain almost, in a new, new life."

"A new life," she repeated gently and vaguely. Lifting his hand, she
kissed it. "You have rescued me from the old one. You are my angel of
resurrection," she said.

Yet that the future was dim to her, except through his faith in
it,--that, indeed, it could never become an unshadowed brightness,--he
knew, as, leaning against him, needing protection from her bitter
thoughts, she murmured in the anguish of her desolate and bereaved
motherhood: "Oh--but my child!"









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