The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Rescue

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe RescueThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world 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 atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The RescueAuthor: Anne Douglas SedgwickRelease date: February 25, 2013 [eBook #42194]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world 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 atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The RescueAuthor: Anne Douglas SedgwickRelease date: February 25, 2013 [eBook #42194]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

Title: The Rescue

Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Release date: February 25, 2013 [eBook #42194]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

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

The Rescue

frontispiece

The RescueBYAnne Douglas SedgwickAUTHOR OF “THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIA”“THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD”colophonNEW YORKThe Century Co.1902

BYAnne Douglas SedgwickAUTHOR OF “THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIA”“THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD”colophonNEW YORKThe Century Co.1902

TOG. S. S.ANDM. D. S.

Chapter: I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII,IX,X,XI,XII,XIII,XIV,XV,XVI,XVII,XVIII,XIX.

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 presentin 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, andhimself: 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 littlemondaine;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 leaningbust 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.

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 forefingerbetween 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 beautymade 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 talkpour 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 theyoffered 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 wasconventional; 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 JulesVicaud; 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 MolyneuxChanfrey, 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.

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 yetamazed, 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.

ONEday 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 beenmarried 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 picturespour 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 antagonismto 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 baseuses. 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 marriageVicaud 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 analléein 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 thelife 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 deferencethat 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 toldme 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 ofMadame 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 Englandsoon; 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.

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:

DEARMR. 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,CLARAVICAUD.

DEARMR. 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,CLARAVICAUD.

It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, hehad 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 lifehold 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 almosttremulous 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 notshe, 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 somethingalmost 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 thisHebe 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 makenone. 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 werethe 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. “Ihope 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, almostgirlish, 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 abundanthair 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 contrastto 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 inthe 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.

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 andrusset 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 lurkingevil. 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 unmistakablyune 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 longerune 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 survivalsof 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 anartiste manquée; the one, perhaps, for being my father’s daughter, the other for being my mother’s. Shewould 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 veryslightly 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 almostcanaille; 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.

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 withtheir 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 andmadeleinesas well as the dailypetits beurresthat 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 inle 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 alwaysplayed 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, theirabonnementat 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 hermother’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. Sheplaced 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 avieille fillecousin 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 asune âme exquise, and of Claire asune 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 bondscloser 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 individualstanding. 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.

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 theyoung 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 himand 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 metanother 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 candorand 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, fromher 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 keptmore 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 hislife, 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 tosee, 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.

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