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 yetclearly 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 paintedprima 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 cleverrapins; 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 interestand 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 himselfwith 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, itsgaillardise, 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, assentedor 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 proposde bottes, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with acela-va-sans-direexpression 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 requiredan 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 hisconvenances, 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.
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 liftingof 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 allieswith 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 instantassumption 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, afterall, 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.”
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 ofpassive, 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 fromdim 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 conspicuouslyen évidenceup 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 thejeune 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 whichhe 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.”
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 reallyun mauvais cœur. I would willingly dotSophie, 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 youtout comprendreis nottout pardonner.”
“By no means,” Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.
“Well, I would far rather have you understandme 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 hehad 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 tothat 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.
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 ofher 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 wasnow 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 Vicaudasked 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 hisfriends 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 LadySurfex; 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 havea 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 myhusband,—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 athim, 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 thatprimitive 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.”
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 hermother’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 touchmatters 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, whenshe 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 anddreaming 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 yetreproachful 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, afterthe 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 flusheddeeply. 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 sobête—Monsieur Daunay—to have forgotten that you were out there.”
“I must tell you that your motherguessed 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 havenone,” 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 herlégèretéin 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.”