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diff --git a/42194-0.txt b/42194-0.txt index c7daf97..b3e9d25 100644 --- a/42194-0.txt +++ b/42194-0.txt @@ -1,23 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42194 *** Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was @@ -4329,365 +4310,4 @@ motherhood: "Oh--but my child!" 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS 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!" - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - -***** This file should be named 42194-8.txt or 42194-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/9/42194/ - -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) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS 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 etagere 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? _Ca 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 epater 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 _allee_ 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 -wunderschoenen 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 elegante_. 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 manquee_; 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 habitue of a crowded -salon. Her salon was anything but crowded; he soon had numbered its -habitues. 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 Angelique, 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 Depressier, 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 Crecy came -also, dignified, middle-aged, interested in _le mouvement feministe_, 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 Theatre Francais,--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 ame 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 Depressier, 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-Elysees--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, _a 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 etes 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-Elysees, 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 regime, 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 evidence_ 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 naivete,--"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--_tres 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 Orfeo'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 declassee, I am -declassee, 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 -Depressier, 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 _bete_--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 _legerete_ 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 ca 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-a-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 -mesalliance--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 simplicite!_ 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 quatrieme_. 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 denouement? 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--_tres -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 -_menage a 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 garcon -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 anaesthesia 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-mache -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'embetait 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 lache, vous savez._" - -"Try, Claire, to deserve such touching _lachete_." - -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 -Angelique'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 Angelique 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!" - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - -***** This file should be named 42194.txt or 42194.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/9/42194/ - -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) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS 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!" - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - -***** This file should be named 42194-8.txt or 42194-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/9/42194/ - -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) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS 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) - - - - - - -</pre> - -<hr class="full" /> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="353" height="550" alt="bookcover" title="bookcover" /> -</a> -</p> - -<p class="cb"><span class="eng">The Rescue</span></p> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<a href="images/frontispiece_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width="361" height="550" -class="figcenterbrd" -alt="frontispiece" title="frontispiece" /></a> -</p> - -<div class="boxx"> -<div class="boxxx"> -<h1>The Rescue</h1> - -<p> </p> - -<p class="cb">BY<br /> -<span class="eng"><big>Anne Douglas Sedgwick</big></span><br /> -<small>AUTHOR OF “THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIAâ€<br /> -“THE DULL MISS ARCHINARDâ€</small><br /> -<br /><br /><br /> -<img src="images/colophon.png" -width="100" -height="100" -alt="colophon" -/><br /> -<br /><br /><br /> -NEW YORK<br /> -<span class="eng">The Century Co.</span><br /> -1902</p> -</div> -</div> - -<p> </p> - -<p class="c"> -<small>Copyright, 1901, 1902, by<br /> -T<small>HE</small> C<small>ENTURY</small> C<small>O</small>.<br /> -——<br /> -<i>Published May, 1902</i><br /> -<br /> -<span class="sans">THE DEVINNE PRESS.</span></small> -</p> - -<p> </p> - -<p class="cb"> -TO<br /> -G. S. S.<br /> -AND<br /> -M. D. S.</p> - -<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a> </p> - -<p><a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> </p> - -<p class="c"> -<a href="#I"><b>Chapter: I, </b></a> -<a href="#II"><b>II, </b></a> -<a href="#III"><b>III, </b></a> -<a href="#IV"><b>IV, </b></a> -<a href="#V"><b>V, </b></a> -<a href="#VI"><b>VI, </b></a> -<a href="#VII"><b>VII, </b></a> -<a href="#VIII"><b>VIII, </b></a> -<a href="#IX"><b>IX, </b></a> -<a href="#X"><b>X, </b></a> -<a href="#XI"><b>XI, </b></a> -<a href="#XII"><b>XII, </b></a> -<a href="#XIII"><b>XIII, </b></a> -<a href="#XIV"><b>XIV, </b></a> -<a href="#XV"><b>XV, </b></a> -<a href="#XVI"><b>XVI, </b></a> -<a href="#XVII"><b>XVII, </b></a> -<a href="#XVIII"><b>XVIII, </b></a> -<a href="#XIX"><b>XIX.</b></a> -</p> - -<p><a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> </p> - -<h1>T H E R E S C U E</h1> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<img src="images/decor.png" width="30" height="18" alt="" title="" /> -</p> - -<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_E.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_E_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="E" -/></span></a>USTACE 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<a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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,<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> 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 <i>mondaine;</i> 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<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a> 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.<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_M.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_M_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="M" -/></span></a>RS. 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<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> 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? <i>Çà sent le temps</i>, 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.</p> - -<p>“Ah, yes. Is she not charming?â€</p> - -<p>“She has charmed me. She is wonderful.â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a> 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 <i>pour -passer le temps</i>—to make the something that was coming come more -quickly. Poor child! it came.â€</p> - -<p>“She married Lord Pemleigh?†Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her -eyes vague with memories.</p> - -<p>“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—<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a>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<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“Oh,†sighed Mrs. Mostyn, “has delicacy ever been a certificate of -safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> 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<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> Vicaud; that is, after all, the only -final explanation of these stories.â€</p> - -<p>“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?</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden, -the effort of difficult recollection on her face.</p> - -<p>“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?<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> This is ‘95, -and that was—oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago.â€</p> - -<p>“So that she would be now?â€</p> - -<p>“She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is -over.â€</p> - -<p>“I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive.â€</p> - -<p>The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more -significant.</p> - -<p>“Could you find out?†he asked presently.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won’t say -dabbler—seeker-after.â€</p> - -<p>“Not after impressions,†said Damier, smiling a little sadly.</p> - -<p>“And have you not found anything?†she asked.<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a></p> - -<p>“No; I don’t think I have.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Ah, I don’t care about a daughter—or about an adventure.â€</p> - -<p>Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled -and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said -presently:</p> - -<p>“Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows -Sir Molyneux<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> Chanfrey, Clara’s brother,—a man I never liked,—and she -could ask him.â€</p> - -<p>“Pray do.â€</p> - -<p>“But I don’t fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject. -He and his sister were never sympathetic.â€</p> - -<p>“I wish you would find out,†Damier repeated.</p> - -<p>“I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever -find her,†smiled Mrs. Mostyn.<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_E.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_E_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="E" -/></span></a>USTACE 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.</p> - -<p>He was amused now, amused and yet<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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,<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> 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.</p> - -<p> </p> - -<p class="nind">O<small>NE</small> 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.<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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?â€</p> - -<p>“Tremendously,†Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that -daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. “Is she alive?†he added.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a> married only a few -years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness.â€</p> - -<p>“In what way?†Damier’s heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>pour épater le bourgeois;</i> 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<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> 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<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> -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.â€</p> - -<p>“Just heavens!†Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a -bewildering aching and despair. “Why did she not leave him?â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>allée</i> 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<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a> life about her, almost -too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of -life.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the -subject of<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> 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.<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_D.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_D_sml.png" -width="75" -height="78" -alt="D" -/></span></a>AMIER, 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:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>D<small>EAR</small> M<small>R</small>. D<small>AMIER</small>: 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.</p> - -<p class="r"> -Yours sincerely, <br /> -C<small>LARA</small> V<small>ICAUD</small>.<br /> -</p> -</div> - -<p>It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged -suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> 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<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> 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?</p> - -<p>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 <i>she</i>, was one of dazzling beauty.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“But you are not old,†she said to him.</p> - -<p>“Did you expect that?†he inquired.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“It is only through an old friend of hers that—I hope to become -another,†Damier finished, smiling.</p> - -<p>“Well, <i>pour commencer</i>, 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.â€</p> - -<p>“Even of old friends?†Damier asked, amused at her air of placid -familiarity.</p> - -<p>“Ah, that depends.â€</p> - -<p>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,<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> -the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she -really, now, knows it better than I do.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“Do you think I have?†Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that -was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. “I<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid,†said Mademoiselle -Vicaud.</p> - -<p>Her mother, while they interchanged these slight pleasantries, continued -to look at her daughter.</p> - -<p>“You rather exaggerate, do you not,<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a> Claire, the coercive nature of your -English experience?†she said. “It was not all school; there was play, -too.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>She was so much more like the photograph than he had expected, and yet -so different! The figure was the same, almost<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> 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<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> 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.<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_D.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_D_sml.png" -width="75" -height="78" -alt="D" -/></span></a>AMIER 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<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a> 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<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> evil. Instinctively he turned and walked away -from Monsieur Vicaud as he heard footsteps outside.</p> - -<p>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 <i>une élégante</i>. 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.</p> - -<p><a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a>After all, she still, though she was no longer <i>une toute jeune -fille</i>,—she must be twenty-seven,—had her life before her, and her -achievement of pretty clothes could hardly be imputed as blame to her.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>artiste manquée</i>; the one, perhaps, -for being my father’s daughter, the other for being my mother’s. She<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> -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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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? <i>hein</i>?—well, that will serve—that she dreads such -tests for me.â€</p> - -<p>Damier now saw that, though Madame Vicaud’s silence kept all its calm, -she very<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>How strangely she was tainted with something really almost <i>canaille</i>; -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.<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_M.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_M_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="M" -/></span></a>ADAME 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<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>madeleines</i> as well as the daily <i>petits beurres</i> that -Damier had been offered on a more informal visit.</p> - -<p>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 <i>le mouvement féministe</i>, a -writer of essays, dark, decisive, a charm in her bright ugliness. There -was a dim, devout, and gentle old Comtesse de Comprailles.<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> played to them—and -played with an ungirl-like mastery and beauty of interpretation—a -ballade, nocturne, or mazurka of Chopin.</p> - -<p>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 <i>abonnement</i> 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.</p> - -<p>As for Claire, she showed little fondness, with one exception, for any -of her<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> 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<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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 -<i>vieille fille</i> cousin in Paris. Damier liked the scholarly artist, his -mild smile and air of weary unexpectancy.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a>’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.</p> - -<p>Monsieur Daunay spoke to Damier of Madame Vicaud as <i>une âme exquise</i>, -and of Claire as <i>une charmante enfant</i>, 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<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>It was only humorously that he resented his slow advance to a more -individual<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> 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.<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_I.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_O_sml.png" -width="75" -height="74" -alt="I" -/></span></a>T 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“I would rather sit on, and have you play to me, if you are not too -tired.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a></p> - -<p>“Exquisite,†said Damier, when it ended. “It is so staid in form, yet so -melancholy in feeling.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“I have often thought,†Madame Vicaud said, turning suddenly toward him<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> -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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>She looked at him in silence.</p> - -<p>“How very strange!†she presently said. “Wanted enough for that?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“And you set out in quest of me?â€</p> - -<p>“Yes, after a time. At first Mrs. Mostyn could hear nothing of you. I -met<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“You heard that I had been unfortunate—unhappy? You were sorry for -that?â€</p> - -<p>“Yes; but had you been very fortunate, very happy, I should still have -looked for you.â€</p> - -<p>“But why? Did you like my face so much?â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“You accept me as such?â€</p> - -<p>“Ah, yes,†she replied, “I accept you as such—gratefully. I don’t call -you. Those days are over.â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Your claim to what?†she asked, her face still turned from him.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of -wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.</p> - -<p>“What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don’t know me.â€</p> - -<p>“Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to -you—that you don’t know me?†he smiled.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> 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<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“And will you not marry? Have you not thought of marrying?†she asked.</p> - -<p>He considered her with what he knew to be a whimsical smile at her -unconsciousness.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>No, the silly accident oi the years too much blinded her, Damier felt, -for her to<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> 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.<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_A.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_A_sml.png" -width="75" -height="74" -alt="A" -/></span></a>FTER 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> There was the point that made -her piteous and repellent.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Damier could see her as the painted<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> 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 <i>rapins</i>; 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.</p> - -<p>To the mother he felt that in giving interest<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> 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<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> 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 <i>gaillardise</i>, 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<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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, <i>à propos<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> -de bottes</i>, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of -his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a -<i>cela-va-sans-dire</i> 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.</p> - -<p>She said one day: “You have really decided to live in Paris—for ever -and ever—<i>hein</i>? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us -interesting?â€</p> - -<p>“Very,†replied Damier.<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a></p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“I have not met many more interesting.â€</p> - -<p>“Then it is—to study us?†Her sleepy smile was upon him.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he -knew, though he was not looking at her.<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a></p> - -<p>“<i>Vous êtes un original</i>,†she said at last, with quite the manner of -her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some -specimen of British eccentricity.</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“Why not?†Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of -a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous -evasion.</p> - -<p>“He hasn’t seen us—come,†she insisted, though the insistence was still -veiled in humor.<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a></p> - -<p>“Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Improper? Your mother consenting—you an Englishwoman, I an -Englishman?â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a></p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“You often walk here?†he continued pleasantly.</p> - -<p>“Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr. -Damier takes us out sometimes.â€</p> - -<p>“Madame Vicaud is at home?<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us.â€</p> - -<p>“She is well, I trust?â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“With great pleasure, as always,†said the Frenchman, but still with -something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.</p> - -<p>They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.</p> - -<p>“He was shocked,†said Claire, mildly.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a> an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier’s -part to express displeasure.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>convenances</i>, -you in your English veracity. I don’t mind fibbing in the least, I must -tell you.â€</p> - -<p>“Don’t you?†His displeasure was now determined to show its definite -coolness.</p> - -<p>“Not in the least,†said Claire, with perfect good humor, “in myself or -in othersâ€; 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.â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_T.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_T_sml.png" -width="75" -height="76" -alt="T" -/></span></a>HE 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> 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<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“All I hear of her is sad,†said Damier. “Every echo from her past is a -groan!â€</p> - -<p>“Poor woman!†Lady Surfex mused. “First the awful husband, and then the, -to say the least of it, trying daughter.â€</p> - -<p>Damier’s heart stiffened. “Trying? In what way—I may ask?â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> 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<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> all, of a -vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>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!</p> - -<p>In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible -atonement to Madame Vicaud.</p> - -<p>“Have I been wrong in telling you—ungenerous?†asked Lady Surfex.<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a></p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life.â€</p> - -<p>“Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her -husband.â€</p> - -<p>“Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.</p> - -<p>“Quite so absorbing.<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a>â€</p> - -<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_Y.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_Y_sml.png" -width="75" -height="76" -alt="Y" -/></span></a>ET 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a> -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.</p> - -<p>“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?<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a>—though Mamma, you -see, has his photograph conspicuously <i>en évidence</i> 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 <i>jeune fille anglaise</i>. 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;<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“I must own that you don’t.â€</p> - -<p>“Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?†she -pursued.</p> - -<p>Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> he -wondered anew over her, she added: “I merely like enjoyment better than -anything else in the world.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“Yes, one must.â€</p> - -<p>“And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible -one.â€</p> - -<p>“Do you think so?†Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.</p> - -<p>“Don’t you?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“You are an esthete—</p> - -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i6">While safe beneath the roof,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain.â€<br /></span> -</div></div> - -<p>“Oh, better than rain—the tempest!â€</p> - -<p>“And how can one avoid suffering, pray?<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“<i>Mais</i>,‗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.â€</p> - -<p>“Bringing other people back to shelter.â€</p> - -<p>“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 <i>un mauvais cÅ“ur</i>. I would willingly dot<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> -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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet -rueful.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>tout comprendre</i> is not <i>tout pardonner</i>.â€</p> - -<p>“By no means,†Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.</p> - -<p>“Well, I would far rather have you understand<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:</p> - -<p>“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: <i>to suffer with</i>—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.<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“What things do you aim at?†he now asked.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has -aimed at. What has she attained?â€</p> - -<p>He asked himself the question, indeed,<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> with an inner lamentation for -the one evident, the one tragic failure.</p> - -<p>“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—<i>très grande dame</i>. 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.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> 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<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> 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 believeâ€; and, as silently she still gazed upon him: -“That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>He stared for a moment, not comprehending.</p> - -<p>“You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my -appreciation?â€</p> - -<p>“Yes—in a sense, I mean that.â€</p> - -<p>“But,†said Damier, smiling, “you owe it to her that there is something -beautiful to see.â€</p> - -<p>He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a></p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“I like to owe all my flowers to you.â€</p> - -<p>Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Of life, and how to live it,†laughed Damier.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on -the cabinet where her husband’s portrait stood;<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> 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.<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_D.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_D_sml.png" -width="75" -height="78" -alt="D" -/></span></a>AMIER 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<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> asked the young man to share her -solitude.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Why not?†Damier asked, looking up at her.</p> - -<p>“Indeed, why not?†she returned, smiling. “Nothing, I hope, would ever -change our friendship.â€</p> - -<p>“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?<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Oh, yes; I will tell you,†she answered, still with the lightness that -contrasted with the tremor of Damier’s voice.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Her voice is glorious,†he said.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Ah,†was on Damier’s lips, “you have said what she could not singâ€; 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,<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> 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?â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“You deepen your shadows too much,<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>†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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier seized the opportunity—it was, he thought, very -propitious—again to ask her when he might bring some of his<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a> Surfex; she is very anxious to meet you.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>It was now Damier’s turn to flush. He nerved himself, after a moment, to -say:</p> - -<p>“But this is not the mother.â€</p> - -<p>“No; and my husband is dead: otherwise the wish to meet me would not -overcome that disability.â€</p> - -<p>“You are a little unjust, my dearest friend,†said the young man.</p> - -<p>“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 name="page_122" id="page_122"></a> a radiance around one; and -the world seeks radiance.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> -husband,—Sophie; there are a few more, very few; and then, you, my -friend.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>She pressed his hand, still smiling at<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> 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!â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“I believe that I would take your word for anything.â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a> -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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“I see,†she said, “that you are determined to take me at your own -valuation, not at mine.â€</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“Bring your friend; I shall be glad to see her.<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>â€</p> - -<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_I.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_I_sml.png" -width="75" -height="74" -alt="I" -/></span></a>T 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.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> 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<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> mother’s withdrawal of her -from his company the more noticeable by his persistent seeking of hers.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“She may not realize it, she may be indifferent to it; but her mother -realizes and is not indifferent.â€</p> - -<p>“And we wanted to spare her such watchfulness!†sighed Lady Surfex.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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,<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a> -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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>She was a woman upon whom, when<a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a> 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.<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a></p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>’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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a></p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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;<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> 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<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> -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<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“Have you never suspected,†he said, “that Monsieur Daunay cares for -Claire?â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Madame Vicaud, for another moment, said nothing, struggling, he knew, -with those awakened memories—or were they not always awake, clutching -at her?</p> - -<p>“He may care for Claire,†she then said faintly, “but she cannot care -for him; that—you know—is impossible.<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Only enough, I am sure, to wish to shield him.â€</p> - -<p>“I could never have suspected. He is an old friend, a trusted friend. I -must speak to him.â€</p> - -<p>“Let me speak to him—may I? I will walk home with him to-night.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“But,†she said, “will he not wonder—by what right—“</p> - -<p>“I speak? By the right of my fondness for you.â€</p> - -<p>“And for Claire, yes,†said Madame Vicaud, thoughtfully.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a></p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier was feeling that if, by chance, Monsieur Daunay were more than -piteous, he must stand between Madame Vicaud and the discovery.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a> 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:</p> - -<p>“You have not betrayed me to Mamma?â€</p> - -<p>“Betrayed you?†Damier questioned, ice in his voice.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>bête</i>—Monsieur Daunay—to have forgotten that you -were out there.â€</p> - -<p>“I must tell you that your mother<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>For a moment she gazed into his eyes, at first with a gravity that -studied him, and then with a light effrontery. “Accept it! <i>par -exemple!</i>†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.â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>Monsieur Daunay stopped short in the street, exasperation rather than -embarrassment in his face. He fixed Damier with very steady and very -hostile eyes.</p> - -<p>“And what then?†he asked.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Ah, Monsieur Damier, you have—I do not deny it—more rights than I, -who have<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> 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?â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“What do you say?†Monsieur Daunay’s astonishment was almost blank.</p> - -<p>“I do not love her in the very least.â€</p> - -<p>“Then,†stammered the Frenchman, “we are not rivals? You can then pity -me—I am jealous with none of the rights of jealousy.â€</p> - -<p>“None of the rights?†Damier eyed him.<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a></p> - -<p>“None, monsieur; Madame Vicaud’s trust in me is not unfounded,†said -Monsieur Daunay, with something of a slightly ludicrous grandiloquence.</p> - -<p>“Yet Mademoiselle Vicaud knows of your attachment.â€</p> - -<p>“I never declared it; she guessed it, perhaps inevitably.†They were -walking on again, and he shrugged his shoulders. “<i>Que voulez-vous?</i> 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.</p> - -<p>His hands clasped behind him, Monsieur Daunay, with now a reminiscent -confidence, shook his head and sighed profoundly.<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a> “<i>Que voulez-vous?</i>†-he repeated. “Since her girlhood it has been with me a hidden passion. -<i>Ce que j’ai souffert!</i>†He showed no antagonism now, no resentment; -Damier could but be grateful.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>légèreté</i> in regard to -this.â€</p> - -<p>“But,†said Damier, after a slight pause, “this unclaimed faith—how do -you expect her to keep it?<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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—“</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>â€</p> - -<p>Later, when Damier told him of Madame Vicaud’s knowledge of the -situation, Monsieur Daunay heaved another, not regretful, sigh.</p> - -<p>“It is as well. I will say to her what I have said to you. She will be -generous; she will understand.â€</p> - -<p>Damier felt oddly, when he parted with him, that he might trust Monsieur -Daunay, but that he trusted Claire less than ever.<a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_N.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_N_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="N" -/></span></a>EXT 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.<a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a></p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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, <i>pas -grand comme ça d’amour</i>.†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?â€</p> - -<p>“Everything.â€</p> - -<p>“And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take -money from a married man who is in love<a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a> with her? Must I assure you -that our relations are absolutely innocent?â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“I do so assure you.â€</p> - -<p>“I did not need the assurance.†Damier found his voice, but it was -hoarse.</p> - -<p>Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a -very false note.</p> - -<p>“And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded -and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. <i>Que voulez-vous?</i> Only don’t be too -much shocked<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“What did he tell you, then?†she asked, stopping short in the path and -fixing<a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a> her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian, -note.</p> - -<p>“That he adored you, and that he could be trusted.â€</p> - -<p>“Well, he can be!†She broke into a hard laugh. “<i>Le cher bon Daunay!</i> 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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier made no reply.</p> - -<p>“You are furious, are you not?â€</p> - -<p>“I am disgusted, but not for that reason only.â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a> other man in this country willing to -marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a <i>mariage -d’amour</i>; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more -desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur -Daunay?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.</p> - -<p>“Ah!—<i>c’est trop fort!</i> You can’t make me believe that you want me to -love him.â€</p> - -<p>“I don’t want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be -more to your credit if you did.â€</p> - -<p>Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.</p> - -<p>“Ah, it is the money, then—that I should accept it!â€</p> - -<p>“Can I make no appeal to you for your<a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a> mother’s sake—for the sake of -your own dignity?â€</p> - -<p>“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 <i>pied-à -terre</i>. 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<a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a> school during my father’s life—she avoided <i>that</i> 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,<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> 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 <i>bonnes-Å“uvres;</i> but for me, <i>ah, -par exemple!</i>†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—<i>d’une simplicité!</i> Really, for such a -clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a -right—you know it—to <i>le<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a> vrai grand monde</i>. 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 <i>she</i> was <i>le grand monde</i>, and that I -ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it -strange—<i>disgusting</i>—that when I saw that Daunay—<i>le pauvre!</i>—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<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a> 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!â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>â€</p> - -<p>Claire stopped short in the path. “Tell her!â€</p> - -<p>“You must, indeed.†The full rigor of his eyes met the astonishment of -hers.</p> - -<p>“Never!†said Claire, and in French, as if for a more personal and -intimate emphasis, she repeated: “<i>Jamais!</i>â€</p> - -<p>“I will, then; it is an outrage not to tell her.â€</p> - -<p>Their eyes measured each other’s resolution.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>au quatrième</i>. 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<a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a> it. She would be -glacial—and firm. Oh, I have had scenes with her! I could not stand any -more.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“Come, come,†she said, and, unresentfully, though with some -determination, she secured his arm, “don’t take me <i>au pied de la -lettre</i>. 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<a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“I do understand you,†said Damier, “but you horrify me none the less.â€</p> - -<p>“I horrify you because I am a creature thwarted, distorted; nothing is -more ugly or repulsive—but if I had had a chance!â€</p> - -<p>“What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be -noble and loving and happy—yes, happy.â€</p> - -<p>“But not in my own way!—not in my<a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier gave a mirthless laugh. “On the contrary, to me wickedness means -going with one’s nature.â€</p> - -<p>“Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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,<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a> I cannot go home with you,†he said. “Are you going home?â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_O.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_O_sml.png" -width="75" -height="76" -alt="O" -/></span></a>N 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<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Who could have expected this swift<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a> dénouement? But it is best,†she -said, “and I pitied him very deeply.â€</p> - -<p>“Pitied him—for the past, you mean?†Damier questioned.</p> - -<p>“Oh, for the future more!â€</p> - -<p>Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her -smile.</p> - -<p>“I saw Claire this morning,†he said. “We talked over the matter; she -wished to see me.â€</p> - -<p>Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. “Ah, yes; -I understand,†she said.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“I, also, have something to tell you,†he said.</p> - -<p>“Yes,†she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced, -steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.</p> - -<p>“Can you guess?†he asked.</p> - -<p>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?â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a></p> - -<p>“No,†he said at last; “I did not come to tell you that.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“No,†said Damier, still facing her from his distance, “I do not love -her. I have never needed to overlook anything.â€</p> - -<p>Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.</p> - -<p>“But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?â€</p> - -<p>“You, only, have been my meaning.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a> vivid -wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.</p> - -<p>“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—“</p> - -<p>“She is your daughter.â€</p> - -<p>“But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love -my daughter—“</p> - -<p>He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and, -suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been -sorry, too?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>He was still at a distance from her, and<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> across it her look met his in -a long silence.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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—“</p> - -<p>She made no reply.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a> not hurt you,†Damier -said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had -come for it.</p> - -<p>Madame Vicaud lifted her head.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“Yet you do not hate her,†she said, after a pause of some moments, -speaking without moving or turning her head.</p> - -<p>Damier paused too. “I have not your reasons,†he said at last.</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a></p> - -<p>“They began with her father,†said Damier.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> of gaze—“was his love. <i>His</i> 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 <i>her</i> -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,<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a> ‘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<a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> 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<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> 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<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>—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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a> 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,<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier, -answering them, shook his head.<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a></p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>But Damier could not think of dead hopes.</p> - -<p>“What you have suffered!†he said.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.</p> - -<p>“Clara,†said Damier.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a> 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:</p> - -<p>“You have a right.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was -already a recognition.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“You mean—“ she said at last.</p> - -<p>“I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman -he worships.<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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!â€</p> - -<p>“No; I might not,†Damier affirmed.</p> - -<p>“By age; I am old enough.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and -her own endurance of it, at such a moment.</p> - -<p>“My friend! That this should have happened to you!â€</p> - -<p>“Can it never happen to you?†he asked.</p> - -<p>“I would never allow it to happen to me.<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“It would not be to look up at the sky—it would not even be to stoop to -a flower?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“But would you—would you stoop?â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“The face of a girl. I was nineteen then.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said, -“Perhaps.â€</p> - -<p>“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?<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“I have felt it,†she said at last, “but I have hardly known that I felt -it.â€</p> - -<p>“You know now?â€</p> - -<p>“Yes, I know now.â€</p> - -<p>“You could own to it—with joy?â€</p> - -<p>“If this were our last moment.—Ah, my friend!†He had taken her into -his arms.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a> other. Speechlessly -they looked the finding, the recognition, the rapture.</p> - -<p>The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be -counted with.<a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_A.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_A_sml.png" -width="75" -height="74" -alt="A" -/></span></a>S 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.</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a></p> - -<p>“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—<i>très -convenablement</i>.â€</p> - -<p>“Yes,†Madame Vicaud assented with composure.</p> - -<p>“It seems that you discouraged him.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility,†-said Claire.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> one frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair—yours and -his.â€</p> - -<p>“You made it yours, it seems to me!â€</p> - -<p>“Unwillingly.â€</p> - -<p>“Oh—unwillingly!†Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. “I don’t understand -you, Mr. Damier—I began not to understand you this morningâ€; and, as he -made no reply:</p> - -<p>“Your present silence doesn’t accord with your past interference.â€</p> - -<p>“My silence? What do you expect me to say?†Damier asked, with real -wonder, forgetting the mother’s intimations.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a> that I did not love him—the truth, as it happens.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Were you not jealous?†she demanded.</p> - -<p>“Not in the faintest degree.â€</p> - -<p>Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.</p> - -<p>“And what, then, was your motive for prying, meddling, cross-questioning -as you did? You had a motive?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“Perhaps that was it—and for the<a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a> same reason I beg you to spare your -mother now.â€</p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>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?<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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—<i>she</i>—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!â€</p> - -<p>“Be still,†said Damier in his voice of steel.<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a></p> - -<p>Claire, for a moment, sank back, panting, defiant, but silent before it.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Claire, in her sullen recoil, still remained sunken and panting in her -chair.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“What I meant from the beginning I can best define by telling you that -to-day I asked your mother to marry me.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“The truth was allowed me?†he said.<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a></p> - -<p>“It is always allowed,†she answered.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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!â€</p> - -<p>“Let this cease now,†said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. “All has -been said that it is necessary to say.â€</p> - -<p>“Indeed, no!†cried Claire. She<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> 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 <i>prince charmant</i>! Ah, don’t -think that I am in love with you, <i>prince charmant</i>, 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—<i>n’est-ce pas</i>? 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<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a> 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—<i>she</i> 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 <i>mariage d’amour</i> rather than a <i>mariage de convenance</i>?â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a> 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<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> 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:</p> - -<p>“You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn’t you?—you would, as -usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual,<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> 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<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a> her and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.</p> - -<p>“My poor chances can’t compete with yours, Mamma,†she muttered. “Let me -tell you that despair becomes you.†She took up her hat.</p> - -<p>“Where are you going, Claire?†Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“I shall always admit you.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_M.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_M_sml.png" -width="75" -height="75" -alt="M" -/></span></a>ADAME 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.<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a></p> - -<p>“And now,†she said, “you must go, my friend.â€</p> - -<p>“Go?†Damier repeated.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Yes, you must go.â€</p> - -<p>“And leave you with her!â€</p> - -<p>“And leave me with her,†she assented monotonously.</p> - -<p>“Never—never!â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a> 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 -<i>ménage à trois</i> would be as detestable as it would be grotesque.â€</p> - -<p>“She will marry!†cried Damier. “She must marry Monsieur Daunay.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>Damier burst out into a smothered invective:</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>He felt that the vehemence of his<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a> 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:</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Ah, you do not love me!†cried Damier, and all his youth was in the -cry. “You sacrifice <i>me</i> 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!<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> 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!â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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!â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a> of our love makes the question -of our being together or apart really of not such significance.â€</p> - -<p>“Of not such significance!†poor Damier cried. “I am to find you in -heaven, then!â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Terribly,†she assented. “It is kind and generous of you to go now.<a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“But my going is to be taken as no token of submission. I will return.â€</p> - -<p>“To say good-by.â€</p> - -<p>“So you say.â€</p> - -<p>“So you will do.†And she still smiled, all tenderness, all -inflexibility.</p> - -<p>“Never, never, never!†said Damier.<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_D.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_D_sml.png" -width="75" -height="78" -alt="D" -/></span></a>AMIER, 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.</p> - -<p>“You have heard?†asked Monsieur Daunay, and a host of questions looked -from his eyes.</p> - -<p>“That you have proposed to Mademoiselle Vicaud, yes; and that she has -answered you, I fear, not favorably; yes, I have heard.<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“You have seen her?â€</p> - -<p>“I was with her mother, speaking with her of it, when Claire came.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>Damier saw down a long vista of them, sunny with the encouraging smiles -of the charming Claire.</p> - -<p>“You have assured me,†Daunay presently said, “that you were not the -cause of this change in Claire.â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“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, <i>mon Dieu</i>!â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“She is utterly unworthy of you,†said Damier.</p> - -<p>At this a faint, ironic smile crossed the Frenchman’s face. “Ah, <i>mon -ami</i>,†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 <i>d’un amour fou</i>—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.â€</p> - -<p>“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!â€</p> - -<p>“What will you? I adore her!†His helplessness seemed final. He -presently<a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>For a long moment Daunay looked at him.</p> - -<p>“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;<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a> I have watched her grow up. From the beginning, she has -been <i>ma petite Claire</i>; so she will be to the end—whatever that end -may be.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Must see you at once, on most important matter concerning Madame V.</p></div> - -<p>“Wait for me here,†Damier said to Monsieur Daunay. “This may concern -you as well as me.â€</p> - -<p>He found Lady Surfex in the drearily<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a> gaudy salon, her face ominous of -ill tidings.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>And, as he stared at her in stricken silence:</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> 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 -<i>her</i>?†They both knew to whom the pronoun referred; a conventional -saving of Claire had significance only in reference to her mother.</p> - -<p>Damier was steadying his thoughts.</p> - -<p>“The night train.†He looked at his watch. “There is time,†he said.</p> - -<p>“For what, Eustace?â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“But, Eustace,†her helpless wonder reproached his baseless optimism, -“what <i>could</i> you do? You can’t beard the man; she is of age—goes -willingly. What a situation!â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Eustace, it would leave you almost poor!â€</p> - -<p>“Not quite, since the half is large enough, I trust, to tempt her! The -whole would not be too much to give to save <i>her</i> from this final blow.â€</p> - -<p>“But can you—this man—will he?â€</p> - -<p>“He is up-stairs. I will see him, and start at once.â€</p> - -<p>“And, Eustace—wait; can’t we keep it from her—can’t we think of some -good lie?â€</p> - -<p>He had almost to smile at her intently thoughtful face.</p> - -<p>“What possible lie can we think of? Claire will not come back -to-night—she must know, sooner or later.<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Monsieur Daunay’s first words showed that he had quaffed it bravely and -that his reason still stood firm.</p> - -<p>“She must be mad,†he said; “it is not like her.â€</p> - -<p>“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.<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a>â€</p> - -<p>Damier turned now and faced him.</p> - -<p>“And now, Monsieur Daunay, are you willing to save her?â€</p> - -<p>“I am ready,†the Frenchman said quietly; “with your help, I am ready to -save her.â€</p> - -<p>“I go at once, and with that assurance, then?â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Her mother will receive her,†said Damier. “As you have forgiven, so -she will forgive.<a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a>â€</p> - -<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_T.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_T_sml.png" -width="75" -height="76" -alt="T" -/></span></a>HE 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.<a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Shortly after ten o’clock the train drew<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a> 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<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>Damier did not hesitate. He sprang into the carriage. Not touching the -girl, he leaned over her. “Claire,†he said.</p> - -<p>In an instant she had started into erectness, staring stupefied, too -stupefied for shame or anger.</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“It is a bribe,†she said.</p> - -<p>“Call it so if you will.<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“It shows your scorn for me.â€</p> - -<p>“Comprehension of you, rather.â€</p> - -<p>“And if I don’t?â€</p> - -<p>“If you don’t I will challenge this man—and fight him. I am an -excellent fencer, an excellent shot.â€</p> - -<p>She looked at him, half scoffing, yet half believing. “Englishmen don’t -fight duels.â€</p> - -<p>“This one will.â€</p> - -<p>“He might kill you.â€</p> - -<p>“I might kill him; you would have to take the risk.â€</p> - -<p>She shrugged her shoulders. “<i>Bien!</i> 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.</p> - -<p>“Two thirds, then,†he assented, in the steadied voice of one who does -not dare hurry indecision. Yet, even now, she did not rise.<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a></p> - -<p>“One more condition, please. I do not see my mother again. Let us say, -if you like, that I am ashamed to meet her.â€</p> - -<p>“She has not been told—of this.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“Yet, even after that,—your vengeance, I suppose,—I hardly dare make -the promise for her,—she can forgive—even this.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“I promise it, then, if it is the condition.â€</p> - -<p>“You accept? <i>Bien!</i>†Claire sprang up, and ripping an illustration from -a magazine,<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a> from the carriage, for her feet stumbled among the dressing-cases -and the abandoned boxes.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a> -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.</p> - -<p>“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, <i>il m’embêtait quelquefois</i>; but then, I -was glad to be revenged.â€</p> - -<p>“Upon whom? For what?<a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a>â€</p> - -<p>“Upon you both—for making me feel that I was not of your world.â€</p> - -<p>“We did not make you feel it, Claire.â€</p> - -<p>For some moments they were silent, as the train moved slowly from the -station, and then she said:</p> - -<p>“Where will you take me?â€</p> - -<p>“To his cousin’s, Mademoiselle Daunay’s. I have arranged all with him.â€</p> - -<p>A look, almost tremulous under its attempt at a light sneer, crossed her -face.</p> - -<p>“What forgiveness! <i>Il est un peu lâche, vous savez.</i>â€</p> - -<p>“Try, Claire, to deserve such touching <i>lâcheté</i>.â€</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a> 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?<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2> - -<p class="nind"><a href="images/ill_T.png"> -<span class="letra"><img src="images/ill_T_sml.png" -width="75" -height="76" -alt="T" -/></span></a>HE 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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>His eyes were dazzled, and the dark figure that rose to meet him seemed -to waver in the light.</p> - -<p>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,<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a> 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.</p> - -<p>“I know all,†she said.</p> - -<p>“Not all.â€</p> - -<p>“She has left me—with that man; she has written to me.â€</p> - -<p>“Not all,†he repeated.</p> - -<p>“Is there more? There cannot be worse.â€</p> - -<p>“There is better. She is safe.â€</p> - -<p>“Safe? Do you mean that she did not go?â€</p> - -<p>Her eyes, with their sudden leap of light, burned him.</p> - -<p>“No; she did go. But I followed them; I brought her back.â€</p> - -<p>“Back to me? She was frightened at what she had done?†she again asked, -her<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a> eyes still burning, but more dimly, upon him. His eyes dropped -before them; looking down at the wasted hands he held, he said:</p> - -<p>“No, dearest, not to you—to Monsieur Daunay. She is to marry him. She -is with his cousin now.â€</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a> painful effort from him, she pointed to -Claire’s letter. “Read it,†she said.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a> 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!â€</p> - -<p>“She is safe,†Damier repeated rather helplessly.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“No; but I believe that she was glad to come. I—I dowered Claire,†said -Damier, after a momentary pause.<a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a></p> - -<p>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.â€</p> - -<p>“What do you mean by dowering her?†she asked.</p> - -<p>“I have given her two thirds of my income for life.â€</p> - -<p>Her hand in his was chill and passive; he felt in her the cold shudder -of shame.</p> - -<p>“Ah,†he said, “from me—from me you do not resent such saving?â€</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“There was a condition,‗he had to nerve himself to the speaking of -it,—“that she did not see you again. She<a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a> has, by her own wish, broken -the bond between you. She has left your life.â€</p> - -<p>Madame Vicaud clenched her hands, and her chin trembled.</p> - -<p>“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?â€</p> - -<p>“But no blossoming for me. I shall not see it,†said Madame Vicaud. “My -life has been useless.â€</p> - -<p>Useless? He wondered over her past, her long efforts, this wreck.</p> - -<p>Could goodness, however clear-sighted, however divine in its -comprehension and pity, prevent evil from working itself out,<a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a> -fulfilling itself? Was not its working out perhaps its salvation?</p> - -<p>“How can you tell?†he said. “You have done your work for her.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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!â€</p> - -<p>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.<a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a></p> - -<p>“You are alone now,†he said, “and I am alone.â€</p> - -<p>“No,‗she put her hand out to him,—“no; we are not alone.â€</p> - -<p>“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.â€</p> - -<p>“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<a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a> 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.â€</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>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!â€</p> - -<hr class="full" /> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<img src="images/back.jpg" width="347" height="550" alt="backcover" title="backcover" /> -</p> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - -***** This file should be named 42194-h.htm or 42194-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/9/42194/ - -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) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Rescue - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 25, 2013 [EBook #42194] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS 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 etagere 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? _Ca 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 epater 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 _allee_ 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 -wunderschoenen 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 elegante_. 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 manquee_; 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 habitue of a crowded -salon. Her salon was anything but crowded; he soon had numbered its -habitues. 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 Angelique, 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 Depressier, 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 Crecy came -also, dignified, middle-aged, interested in _le mouvement feministe_, 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 Theatre Francais,--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 ame 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 Depressier, 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-Elysees--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, _a 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 etes 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-Elysees, 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 regime, 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 evidence_ 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 naivete,--"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--_tres 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 Orfeo'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 declassee, I am -declassee, 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 -Depressier, 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 _bete_--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 _legerete_ 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 ca 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-a-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 -mesalliance--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 simplicite!_ 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 quatrieme_. 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 denouement? 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--_tres -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 -_menage a 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 garcon -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 anaesthesia 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-mache -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'embetait 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 lache, vous savez._" - -"Try, Claire, to deserve such touching _lachete_." - -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 -Angelique'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 Angelique 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!" - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rescue, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE *** - -***** This file should be named 42194.txt or 42194.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/9/42194/ - -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) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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