Later, when Damier told him of Madame Vicaud’s knowledge of the situation, Monsieur Daunay heaved another, not regretful, sigh.
“It is as well. I will say to her what I have said to you. She will be generous; she will understand.”
Damier felt oddly, when he parted with him, that he might trust Monsieur Daunay, but that he trusted Claire less than ever.
NEXT day, as Damier waited near the Porte Dauphine for Claire, he could reflect on his really parental situation, but feeling more the irritation than the humor of it. After all, where was his authority for this meddling? Why should they submit to it? and why, as a result, should he submit to the hearing of Claire’s coming self-justification? He could spare Madame Vicaud nothing by it, since she knew all that there was to know—and since it was better that she should know it. He had written to her the night before, on reaching his hotel, and told her of the talk with Monsieur Daunay and of the impression it had made upon him. He wondered if she had, meanwhile, had an equally appeasing talk with Claire.
This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings—like a Valkyrie’s summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed no wish to beat about the bush.
“You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn’t feel for him,pas grand comme ça d’amour.” Claire indicated the smallness she negatived by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. “And I think I can soon satisfy you, too,” she added. “He told you everything?”
“Everything.”
“And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take money from a married man who is in lovewith her? Must I assure you that our relations are absolutely innocent?”
In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first statement or the coolness of her second remark—its forestalling of a suspicion she took for granted in him—were the more striking. Both statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were still half ironic, half defiant.
“I do so assure you.”
“I did not need the assurance.” Damier found his voice, but it was hoarse.
Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a very false note.
“And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose.Que voulez-vous?Only don’t be too much shockedby my frankness; don’t be prudish. A man may be propriety itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don’t know), and that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don’t know it before a man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does suggest a situation usually described as immoral.”
Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush of anger—it was more anger than shame—still on her cheek.
“I must tell you,” he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy, “that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur Daunay’s kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything.”
“What did he tell you, then?” she asked, stopping short in the path and fixingher eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian, note.
“That he adored you, and that he could be trusted.”
“Well, he can be!” She broke into a hard laugh. “Le cher bon Daunay!I thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told you.”
Damier made no reply.
“You are furious, are you not?”
“I am disgusted, but not for that reason only.”
“You think I am in love with him!” She stopped again in the narrow path. “I swear to you that I am not!” He would have interrupted her, but her volubility swept past his attempt. “If he had been free I would have married him—I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him. I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that subject. I could have found noother man in this country willing to marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, amariage d’amour; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur Daunay?”
“I should say certainly not,”—Damier waited with a cold patience until she had finished,—“but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him.”
At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.
“Ah!—c’est trop fort!You can’t make me believe that you want me to love him.”
“I don’t want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be more to your credit if you did.”
Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.
“Ah, it is the money, then—that I should accept it!”
“Can I make no appeal to you for yourmother’s sake—for the sake of your own dignity?”
“I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier.” The relief was showing in her quieter voice, her fading flush. “I see how angry you are—and only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a pittance left to her, a year or so after my father’s death, by some relations, and that, since then, has been our onlypied-à-terre. She would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her family wished to make her. I don’t want to blame her; I know how you feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish of her; she should have thought more of me—the luckless result of her mésalliance—and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always atschool during my father’s life—she avoidedthatsoil for me, you may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she did not pay the debt.” Claire had been looking before her as she talked, but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring, in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not serving her. “Don’t imagine, now, that I am complaining—ungrateful,” she said a little petulantly. “I know—as well as you do—what a good mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not altogether blameless—that she is responsible, in more ways than one, for me—for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty, labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to enjoy work, shabby clothes,grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking—that was her idea of happiness for me!” Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in her voice. “I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people in horrid places—expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one should wish to devote one’s self tobonnes-œuvres;but for me,ah, par exemple!” Claire gave a coarse laugh. “I had not quite come to that! She gave me the best she had—all she had, you will say; I own it: but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me to enjoy—should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only endured. Again,—I am not unjust,—it was not all high thinking; she had her schemes for my amusement—d’une simplicité!Really, for such a clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a right—you know it—tolevrai grand monde. You know it, and you are trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little management she might have regained her place in it; but no—her pride again! She seemed to think thatshewasle grand monde, and that I ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it strange—disgusting—that when I saw that Daunay—le pauvre!—was in love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is dull—though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money, she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value; she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and stockings—as I understand shoes and stockings!” Claire laughed. “This dress that I have on—Mamma imaginesit is made by a little dressmaker whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet.” There was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire’s voice. “And I have always considered myself amply excusable,” she went on, “in accepting the small pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much that I have been able to accept—though he would willingly—and he is not rich—give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared attempt—nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I can see her face!”
So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to Claire, physically brutal—to strike her to the dust where she dragged the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice quiet enough: “You must tell her now; you must tell her everything.”
Claire stopped short in the path. “Tell her!”
“You must, indeed.” The full rigor of his eyes met the astonishment of hers.
“Never!” said Claire, and in French, as if for a more personal and intimate emphasis, she repeated: “Jamais!”
“I will, then; it is an outrage not to tell her.”
Their eyes measured each other’s resolution.
“If you do,” said Claire, “shall I tell you with what I retaliate? I will run away with Monsieur Daunay. Yes; I speak seriously. I would prefer not to be pushed to that extremity, but I sometimes think that I am getting a little tired of respectabilityau quatrième. It isn’t good enough, as you English say; I get no interest on my investment. To tell her! Now, of all times, when I so need the money, when the small gaieties and pleasures you have brought into my life depend on my having it, making an appearance! She would not let me takeit. She would be glacial—and firm. Oh, I have had scenes with her! I could not stand any more.”
For once Claire was fully vehement, her cheeks flaming, her eyes at once threatening and appealing. He could hardly believe her serious, and yet she silenced him—indeed, she terrified him. Claire read the terror in his wide eyes and whitening lips. Her look suddenly grew soft, humorous. She slipped her hand inside his arm.
Involuntarily he started from her, then, repenting, for even while he so loathed her he had never found her so piteous, “I beg your pardon—but you horrify me too much.”
“Come, come,” she said, and, unresentfully, though with some determination, she secured his arm, “don’t take meau pied de la lettre. I am not really in earnest; you know that; I had to use a threat—had to frighten you. Come.” That she had been able so thoroughly to frighten him seemed to have restored in her her oldair of complacent mastery. “You are wide-minded, clever, kind. Don’t misjudge me. Don’t push me to the wall. Don’t apply impossible standards to me. See me as I am. By nature, by temperament, I am simply a bohemian. It isn’t my fault if my mother happens to be a saint, and a horribly well-bred saint; it really isn’t my fault if she has handed on to me neither of those qualities. I am perfectly frank with you. From the first I felt that I could be frank with you; I felt that you understood me; don’t tell me now that I was mistaken.”
“I do understand you,” said Damier, “but you horrify me none the less.”
“I horrify you because I am a creature thwarted, distorted; nothing is more ugly or repulsive—but if I had had a chance!”
“What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be noble and loving and happy—yes, happy.”
“But not in my own way!—not in myown way!” she cried, and now she clasped both hands on his arm and leaned against his shoulder as she looked into his face. “I needed power and wealth—all the real foundations of happiness and nobility. Then—ah, then I should have blossomed. Or else, failing them, I needed liberty and joy—the life of a bohemian. I have had neither the one nor the other, and if I seem almost wicked to you it is because of that; for, to me, wickedness means going against one’s nature. I have always been forced to go against mine; I have never had a chance.”
Damier gave a mirthless laugh. “On the contrary, to me wickedness means going with one’s nature.”
“Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand.”
Again he had that feeling of perplexity and irritation. Her eyes, the clasp of her hands upon his arm, irked and troubled him, and without, now, any sense of glamour in the trouble and irritation. She seemed to make too great a claimupon his understanding, and to rely too much upon some conviction of her own charm that could dare any frankness just because it was so sure of triumph. He felt that at the moment he did not understand her; he felt, too, that he did not want to—that he was tired of understanding her.
“You are an unhappy creature, Claire,” he said. They were nearing the Porte Dauphine, and while he spoke with a full yet distant gravity, Damier looked about for a fiacre. “An unhappy creature with an unawakened soul.”
“Will you try to wake it, the poor thing?” asked Claire. She still held his arm, though he had tried to disengage it, and though she spoke softly, there was a vague hardness in her eyes, as though she felt the new hardness in him, though as yet not quite interpreting its finality.
“I shouldn’t know how to: I am helpless before it. It should be made to suffer,” he said. A cab had answered his summons, and he handed her into it. “No,I cannot go home with you,” he said. “Are you going home?”
“I am going to lunch with old Mademoiselle Daunay, and see Monsieur Daunay there. I had no chance to speak to him last night.” Claire, sitting straightly in the open cab, had an expression of perplexity and of growing resentment on her face; but as he merely bowed and was about to turn away, she started forward and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Are you going to make it suffer?” she asked. He looked into her eyes. He did not understand her, but he saw in them a demand at once alluring and threatening. His one instinct was to deny strongly whatever she demanded, though he did not know what that was.
“I have no mission toward your soul, Claire,” he said. For another moment the eyes that threatened and allured dwelt on his; then, calling out the address to the cabman, she was driven away.
ON Damier’s return to his hotel early in the afternoon, he found a note from Madame Vicaud awaiting him. “Monsieur Daunay has just been here,” it said, “and destiny has strangely brought this matter to a crisis. His wife is dead, and he has asked me for Claire’s hand, feeling that his false position toward me demanded an immediate reparation. He hopes and believes that she loves him; but this, as both you and I must know, is impossible. I am saddened and confused by the whole situation. I do not blame them, but to me it is all displeasing, even shocking—this haste to profit by the wife’s opportune death most of all. Will you come and see me? Claire is lunching at his cousin’s, and hewill find her there. I told him to speak to her himself, as I felt that to act the maternal part of intermediary between them would now be mere formalism and affectation; so I am alone. You will want to speak to me, I know.”
Damier, as he drove to the Rue B——, speculated on the rather mystifying significance of the last sentence. He always wanted to speak to her: that she must know; but why now in particular? Since his interview with Claire that morning he had felt almost too shaken by pity for the mother to trust himself with her. He would not be able to help her with counsel and consolation; he would not be able to think of Claire; and at this turning-point in Claire’s life it was for that that the mother needed him.
He found her standing in the salon, evidently pausing to meet him, in a restless pacing to and fro. Her eyes dwelt on him gently and very gravely while she took his hand.
“Who could have expected this swiftdénouement? But it is best,” she said, “and I pitied him very deeply.”
“Pitied him—for the past, you mean?” Damier questioned.
“Oh, for the future more!”
Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her smile.
“I saw Claire this morning,” he said. “We talked over the matter; she wished to see me.”
Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. “Ah, yes; I understand,” she said.
“She certainly told me that she did not love him,” Damier went on, “and yet—“ He paused, not quite knowing how to put to her his hope that Claire now would reconsider the situation, his hope that she would marry Monsieur Daunay.
It would be the solution of all difficulties, the best solution possible, and the situation could then be defined anew in terms that he more and more deeply longed for. He hardly dared, even yet, before her unconsciousness, define it, andturning away from her, he walked down the room, urging himself to a courage great enough to enable him now to speak to her what was in his heart. Madame Vicaud was watching him thoughtfully when he faced her again at the end of the room, and with still that look of controlled emotion.
“I, also, have something to tell you,” he said.
“Yes,” she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced, steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.
“Can you guess?” he asked.
She was standing now, strangely, in the attitude of the little photograph—leaning on the back of a high chair; and her eyes recalled yet more strangely the intentness of the picture’s eyes as she said: “You have come to tell me that you love my daughter?”
He was so deeply astonished, so completely thrown back upon himself, that for a long moment he could only gaze helplessly into the eyes’ insolubility.
“No,” he said at last; “I did not come to tell you that.”
“But you do love her?” Madame Vicaud inquired, with something of gentle urgency in her voice, as though she helped his shyness. “Be frank with me, my friend; I have guessed so much more, seen so much more, than you told me or showed me. Even with all that saddens you, that pains you, you do love her—enough to overlook the pain and sadness?”
“No,” said Damier, still facing her from his distance, “I do not love her. I have never needed to overlook anything.”
Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.
“But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?”
“You, only, have been my meaning.”
He saw that her thought, in its disarray, could not pause upon his interpretation of these words. She had straightened herself, both hands on the chair-back, and her wide gaze, her parted lips, and thevivid wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.
“You have, from the first, been so much with her—seemed to take so much interest in her—seemed so to understand her; she was so open—so intimate—“
“She is your daughter.”
“But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love my daughter—“
He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and, suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.
“I don’t, in the very least, love Claire; I have never, in the very least, loved her; I have only been sorry for her.”
“Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been sorry, too?”
“But I not for that,” said Damier, “not for that; but because she made me so sorry for you; because”—and he looked at her—“because you do not love her.”
He was still at a distance from her, andacross it her look met his in a long silence.
Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with her hands.
“Forgive me!” Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication, and all the others—ah, the others?—the years and years of them that rolled between them!—in a full and final confession. “Forgive me for seeing—it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness—“
She made no reply.
“You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every fiber of you. There is nothing in her that doesnot hurt you,” Damier said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had come for it.
Madame Vicaud lifted her head.
“I do understand her,” she said. She did not look at him. Straightening her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced from her as it had been from him, “And I hate her.”
Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the light, he was able to say: “I even guessed that—almost.”
“Yet you do not hate her,” she said, after a pause of some moments, speaking without moving or turning her head.
Damier paused too. “I have not your reasons,” he said at last.
“Ah, my reasons! Yes.” She turned to him now, as though she saw in him an accusing world, and faced it in an attitude of desperate self-justification.
“They began with her father,” said Damier.
“I hated him,” she said. Her eyes looked through him, fixed on the abyss of the past. “I hated him. He was abhorrent to me. I lived with him for fifteen years—fifteen long, long years. I bore his brutality, his wickedness—I am not the woman to use the word prudishly—I can make allowances—wide ones—for temperament, environment, all the mitigating causes: but my husband’s wickedness was unimaginably vile; to see it stained one’s thoughts.” The memory of it, as she spoke, had chilled her to a drawn and frozen pallor; it was as though the blighting breath of the past went across her face, aging it, emptying it of life.
“I bore the ruin he brought; that was nothing—a spur to love, had love been possible. I bore his serene, inflexible selfishness. The only thing I would not bear”—and she still looked full at Damier, but with the same unseeing largenessof gaze—“was his love.Hislove!” She turned and walked across the room. Damier felt his own flesh shudder as he looked behind the curtain her words lifted, felt his own heart freeze in the aching sympathy of its comprehension. He could not speak to her. It seemed to him that she stood at a great distance from him and would not hear him. Her voice, when she spoke again, had less of its haunting terror, but it still thrilled with a deep and tragic note: “All this, as thousands of women have done, because it was my duty—to help him—to uphold him—to stand by him unflinchingly, and—because he washerfather. You said that my reasons for hating her began with him. Ah, but he was my reason for loving her so desperately—with such a longing to atone to her for him. I gave her all the love he had crushed out of me. You see his picture there; I have schooled myself, so that she may not feel the smirch of him through my horror, to bear the sight of him, to say to myself every day,‘That is the face I loved.’ Oh, what madness!—what madness!” She pressed her hands hard upon her eyes. “Some day, perhaps,—since I tell you everything,—I will tell you that story, too—my love-story. The memory of it is like a block of lead upon my heart.” Her hands fell, but the memory made her silent, and for a long moment she stood looking down. “But all was hidden from her: the dread,—that soon passed—I was the stronger, he came to feel it, dread fell from me,—the hate that followed it, and the final, the terrible pity,—for I came to pity him when he hung about my life, helpless, like a torn and dirty rag,—all that was hidden from her. I kept her lifted out of the mud he dragged us down to; she never saw its depths. While he lived, and while he was dying,—and horrible to see and hear,—she was at a school. Those days!” She paused and turned away, and then went on: “It was in the winter. Lessons fell away; there was the school, the doctor, all the expensesof an illness to be met. I went into the streets of nights, a man carrying my harp, and sang for money; I had a voice till then, and I braved more than the snow and the night to do it: I was still beautiful. This that you may see how I loved her, how I struggled for her, how like any mother, though now I seem so hard—so hideously unnatural. Ah, I fought—I cannot tell you, you cannot guess, how I fought for her. And then, he died, and then there was for me peace and the blossoming of delicious hope. She and I together, saved from the wreck. It seemed to me that I had battled through waves, past rocks and whirlpools, holding her to my breast, and had reached the shore at last—she alive for me, and I for her. And then—ah, then! The shipwreck, the years of struggle, were crude tragedy to my gradual realizing of the subtle disaster that was to poison my life forever. Year by year I saw it coming—I saw him creeping into her. I saw the grave purpose settle round her lips—thesteady greed for self. I saw his smile in her eyes; his eyes were beautiful like hers: when I first looked at them, I thought them full of splendid dreams, noble strength. She was not cruel, or brutal, or vicious, as he had been. She submitted placidly; she submitted, and I hoped for happiness. I could not make her happy or unhappy. I meant nothing to her except the thing that fed and clothed her. She took what I could give, and waited for what I could not give. She lied only when the truth would not serve her purpose better; so, often, she was frank with me. Her grave laugh maddened me, and her indifferent adapting of herself to me—for expediency, not for love. If only she had become a gentle and beautiful animal, to guard from its own instincts! but she is an animal of such hideous intelligence; she knows when I try to guard her, and evades me. Like him, she is corrupt to the core of her; not—do not misunderstand me—that she would do wrong in a conventional sense—and that it is conventional wrong-doing that I dread she has always pretended to read into my horror of evil, making a plaster saint of me so that she may more easily evade the deeply understanding woman of flesh and blood. Hers is the worse corruption, that calculates chances, chooses and manages. It is there in her, I know, though, in its worst forms, latent still—I think.”
Damier, white already, felt himself blanch before the rapid glance, like a sword-stroke across his face, that she cast upon him. She guessed at all his knowledge.
Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.
“Hideous, hideous that I should speak so to you, and to you I hoped, yet dreaded—You will wonder how I could have hoped it; how, knowing this, I should not have warned you. But at first I did not think it possible, though I knew her charm; at first I did not understand you, and, not understanding, I guarded you.And then I saw your generous, your pitiful heart, and I saw that it understood Claire, that perhaps you understood her better than I did. With you she was her best self; she trusted you, it seemed, so utterly. I hoped that yours was the clearer vision, that I was warped, no longer capable of true seeing. Yet, when the friendship that I rejoiced in grew, as I thought, into love, there was a terrible struggle in me. My strong attachment to you—you who had opened the prison gates that shut me into my misery, who brought me out of a loneliness so long, so bitter—ah! my friend, do not think that I have not seen and felt it all; but I could not speak to you as I might have spoken had it not been for that struggle in me between the justice owed to you—yet that you did not seem to need—and the duty to her—not to withhold, for your sake, a possibility that might redeem her. My mind was fixed in that struggle; of our friendship, yours and mine, I could not think clearly. If you had been ignorant,if she had hidden herself from you, I should have sacrificed her unflinchingly to you; I should have interposed and shown her to you. But she showed herself to you. I knew, from my knowledge of you, that she would not attract you as she attracts most men, not nobly. I saw from her looks with you, her words, that she would make no efforts so to attract you. I must say all to you, since you must understand all. Claire does not love you, but you attract what is best in her. She relies, I have guessed it, upon the very pathos of her moral ugliness to enchant you, to arouse in you the chivalrous, redemptive qualities she sees in you. And I grew to hope that you saw something that I could not see. I even began to feel a blind, groping tenderness for her through your fancied tenderness; and as I allowed myself to hope that you loved her, I allowed myself to have faith in the redeeming power of your love.”
She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier, answering them, shook his head.
“Alas, no. It would have been my story over again, the positions reversed, and you without my illusions, had you loved her, married her; and yet, it was because you had no illusions that I hoped.”
But Damier could not think of dead hopes.
“What you have suffered!” he said.
“Yes,” Madame Vicaud answered, “I have suffered; but do not, in your kindness, your tenderness, exaggerate. I have suffered, but all has not been black. There have been flowers on the uphill road. I don’t believe in a woe that is blind to them, or to the sky overhead.”
But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.
“Clara,” said Damier.
She was a woman of deep understanding, yet even now,—and hardly was it to be wondered at, so lifted through its very intensity was his love for her above love’s ordinary manifestations,—even now her name so gravely spoken by him had no further meaning for her than the oneopenly, proudly, joyously accepted, the meaning of the strange tie that had united them; but, while she accepted it, his look startled her. It showed nothing new, but seemed to interpret newly something she had not recognized before. Smiling faintly, she said:
“You have a right.”
“Not the right I would have.” He felt no excitement, only the enraptured solemnity that a soul might feel in some quiet dawn of heaven on finding another soul parted from years ago on earth—long sought for, long loved.
She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was already a recognition.
“I love you,” said Damier. He had not moved toward her, nor had she moved away. A little distance separated them, and they stood silently looking at each other.
“You mean—“ she said at last.
“I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman he worships.”
The whirl of her mind mirrored itself in the stricken stupefaction of her wan, beautiful features. She caught at one flashing thought. “And I—her mother! You might have been my son!”
“No; I might not,” Damier affirmed.
“By age; I am old enough.”
“I know your age; you are forty-seven,” said Damier, able to smile at her, “and I am thirty. If you were seventy-seven, the only difference would be that I could have fewer years to spend with you; I should wish to spend them just the same. As it is, your age does not make us ludicrous before the world, if we were to consider that.”
At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and her own endurance of it, at such a moment.
“My friend! That this should have happened to you!”
“Can it never happen to you?” he asked.
“I would never allow it to happen to me.”
“It would not be to look up at the sky—it would not even be to stoop to a flower?”
“I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black.”
He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the worshiper’s than the lover’s, Eustace said:
“But would you—would you stoop?”
“I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest meadows.” Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. “I should be culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool’s paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall be an old woman while you are still a young man.”
“Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same to me? I have not fallen in love with you—I have found you. When I saw your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine.”
“The face of a girl. I was nineteen then.”
“Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the girl’s face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?”
Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said, “Perhaps.”
“And if this were our last moment—if there were no question of age or of going on—then—then would you tell me that you have felt something of my feeling—the finding—the recognition—the rapture—own to it with joy?”
She turned to him now and looked at him, at his eager, solemn face, the supplication and worship of his clasped hands, looked for a long time, without speaking. But her face, though she was so white and so grave, seemed, as she looked, to reflect, with a growing radiance, the youth in his.
“I have felt it,” she said at last, “but I have hardly known that I felt it.”
“You know now?”
“Yes, I know now.”
“You could own to it—with joy?”
“If this were our last moment.—Ah, my friend!” He had taken her into his arms.
The long years drifted away like illusions before an awakening. Her girl-hood—but weighted with such dreams of sorrow and loneliness!—seemed with her again. She was helpless, though her heart reproached him and herself, yet could not wholly reproach—helpless in a happiness poignant and exquisite. They kissed each other gently, and, his arms around her, they looked earnestly at eachother. Speechlessly they looked the finding, the recognition, the rapture.
The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be counted with.
AS they heard the tinkle of the entrance-bell, Claire’s voice, her step outside, Madame Vicaud moved away from Damier. She was seated in a chair near the table, and the young man stood beside her, when Claire entered.
Claire paused in the doorway and looked sullenly, yet hardly suspiciously, at them. She had never worn a mask for Damier, yet he saw in her flushed and somber face something new to him, saw that she lacked some quality—was it confidence, indifference, placidity?—that he had always found in her. He guessed in a moment that her interview with Monsieur Daunay had not been a propitious one.
“I did not expect to see you so soon again, and under such suddenly changed circumstances,” she said to him. “What are you talking about? Me?” She took off her hat,—the day was sultry,—pushed up her thick hair, and dropped her length of ruffled, clinging white into a chair. “So; I have seen Monsieur Daunay. He lost no time, it seems. He asked my hand of you first, I hear, Mamma, in proper form—très convenablement.”
“Yes,” Madame Vicaud assented with composure.
“It seems that you discouraged him.”
“I could not encourage him from what you had told me, but from what he told me it seems that you did not discourage him,” the mother answered.
“I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility,” said Claire.
Madame Vicaud, in silence, and with something of a lion-tamer’s calm intentness of eye, looked at her daughter; and Claire, after meeting the look withone frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.
“And it seems that you, last night, did not discourage Monsieur Daunay’s hopes; he spoke of you with gratitude. What have you to say to it all now?”
“I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair—yours and his.”
“You made it yours, it seems to me!”
“Unwillingly.”
“Oh—unwillingly!” Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Damier—I began not to understand you this morning”; and, as he made no reply:
“Your present silence doesn’t accord with your past interference.”
“My silence? What do you expect me to say?” Damier asked, with real wonder, forgetting the mother’s intimations.
“Can you deny that—apart from your feelings of angered propriety—you were pitifully jealous last night and this morning? I had to assure you again and againthat I did not love him—the truth, as it happens.”
This speech now opened such vistas of interpretation to the past—of interrogation to the future—that Damier could only, speechlessly, look his wonder at her.
“Were you not jealous?” she demanded.
“Not in the faintest degree.”
Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.
“And what, then, was your motive for prying, meddling, cross-questioning as you did? You had a motive?”
“I have always had an interest in your welfare, Claire, but your mother was my motive for meddling and cross-questioning, as you put it.”
“Oh—my mother!” Claire tossed her a look where she sat, her arms folded, near the table. “You were afraid for my honor since hers was involved in it? Was that it?”
“Perhaps that was it—and for thesame reason I beg you to spare your mother now.”
Claire leaned back in her chair and fixed upon him a heavy stare above her heavy flush. “Come,” she said, “I have never had pretenses with you—I have always been frank. Do you intend to marry me? There it is clearly; I have no false delicacy, and, bon Dieu! you have given me every right to ask the question.”
Madame Vicaud, soundless at the table, now leaned her elbows upon it and covered her face with her hands. “Come,” Claire repeated, casting another look upon her; “for Mamma’s sake, you owe me an answer. Spare her the shame—she feels it bitterly, you observe—of seeing my outrageous uncertainty prolonged. Haven’t you spent all your time with me? Haven’t you taken upon yourself a position of authority toward me—made my affairs your own? Aren’t you going to—how would Mamma put it?—redeem me—lift me? Or are you going to let my soul suffer a little longer?”
“You could hardly speak so, Claire, if you spoke sincerely,” said Damier; “you may once have misinterpreted my friendship for you, but you no longer misinterpret it. I have never intended to marry you. It is you, remember, who force me into this ugly attitude. I could not face you in it, were I not sure that your feeling for me has always been as free from anything amorous as mine for you.”
“I don’t speak of my feeling for you!” Claire cried in a voice suddenly loud, leaning forward with her elbows on the arms of her chair, “but of yours for me! It is not there now—I see it plainly, and I see plainly why! She—she—has been talking to you against me!—telling you about some childish follies in my life!—making you believe that I would not be a fit wife for you! Ah, yes!—I know her!” Claire pointed a shaking finger at her mother. “She would think it her duty to protect you against me—I know her!”
“Be still,” said Damier in his voice of steel.
Claire, for a moment, sank back, panting, defiant, but silent before it.
“You are conscious of your own falsehood, but you can scarcely be conscious of how base and vile you are. Your mother, when I came to-day, was hoping that I had come to ask her for your hand; she believed that I loved you, and hoped it.”
Claire, in her sullen recoil, still remained sunken and panting in her chair.
“Well, then! And what have you got to say to us both, then, if you gave us both cause for such a supposition? What have you meant by it all?”
“What I meant from the beginning I can best define by telling you that to-day I asked your mother to marry me.”
Claire sat speechless and motionless. The words seemed to have arrested thought, and to have nailed her to her chair. Damier looked at Madame Vicaud. Her hands had dropped from her face, and she met his eyes.
“The truth was allowed me?” he said.
“It is always allowed,” she answered.
Her face was so stricken, so ghastly, that Damier, almost forgetting in his great solicitude the hateful presence in the room, leaned over her, taking her hand.
“Bear it. It is better to have it all over. And, in a sense, it is my own fault. I should have spoken to you sooner—defined what I meant from the first.”
“So,” Claire said suddenly. Her smoldering eyes, while they spoke, had gone from one to the other. “So; this is what it all meant! Indeed, I cannot blame myself for not having guessed it. You in love with my mother! Or, shall we not more truthfully say, she in love with you?—the explanation, as a rule, you know, of these odd amorous episodes. I begin to understand. I did not suspect a rival in my own mother. Clever Mamma!”
“Let this cease now,” said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. “All has been said that it is necessary to say.”
“Indeed, no!” cried Claire. Shesprang to her feet, braving Damier’s menacing look, and stood before them with folded arms, defiantly, “All has not been said! I am to marry the middle-aged, middle-class man of small fortune, and you are to marry theprince charmant! Ah, don’t think that I am in love with you,prince charmant, though I might have loved you had not my mother had such a keen eye for her own interests, and kept mine so dexterously in the background. I might have loved you had you been allowed to fall in love with me. Oh, I know what you would say!” Her voice rose to a shout as she interrupted his effort to speak. “How base, how vile, and how vulgar—n’est-ce pas? A girl clamoring over the loss of a husband! Shocking! Well, I own to my vulgarity. I did want to marry you. You have money, position—all the things I never hid from you that I liked; and you interested me, and I liked you, and I could be myself with you. My mother has always been too dainty to secure a husband forme—arrange my future: I have had to do all the ugly work myself; and I liked you because—just because I had to do no ugly work with you. And I clamor now—not because I have lost you—no, it’s not that; but because she—shehas made her goodness serve her so!—has made it pay where my frankness failed. She is good, if you will; but I tell you that I prefer my vulgarity—my baseness—my vileness to her clever virtue; or is it an unconquerable passion with you, Mamma?—is it to be amariage d’amourrather than amariage de convenance?”
While Claire spoke, her mother, as if mesmerized by her fury, sat looking at her with dilated eyes and a fixed face—a face too fixed to show anguish. Rather it was as if, with an intense, spellbound interest, she hung upon her daughter’s words, hardly feeling, hardly flinching before her insults, hardly conscious of each whip-like lash that struck her face to a more death-like whiteness. Now, drawing a breath that was almost a gasp, she leaned forwardover the table, stretching her arms upon it and clasping her hands. “Claire, Claire!” she said, with a hurried, staccato utterance, “I see it all with your eyes—I understand. You have had something really dear taken from you—not love, perhaps, but a true friendship; that is so, isn’t it? He seems to have turned against you,—isn’t it so?—and through me. There is in you an anger that seems righteous to you. How cruel to have our best turned against us! I see all that. Ah, no, no! Let me speak to her!” For, Claire keeping the hardened insolence of her stare upon her, Damier, full of a passionate, protecting resentment, put his arm around her shoulders, took her hand. She threw off the hand, the arm, almost cruelly. “Let me speak to my child! Don’t come between us now—now when we may come together, she and I. Yes, Claire, he loves me,—you see it,—too much, perhaps, to be just to you, though he has been so just—more just than I have been, perhaps; he has been so trulyyour friend. But now I am just. I am your mother. I can understand. I love him, Claire, yes, I love him; but I understand you. I will never do anything to part us further—understand me! I will never marry him against your will. Oh, Claire, try to understand me—try to trust me—try to love me!” She rose to her feet, her face ardent with the upsurging of all her longing motherhood, its sudden flaming into desperate hope through the deep driftings of ashen hopelessness; and as if swayed forward by this flame of hope, this longing of love, this ardor, she leaned toward her child, stretched out her arms toward her face of heavy impassivity. At the gesture, at her mother’s last words, Claire’s impassivity flickered into a half-ironic, half-pitying smile. But she did not advance to the outstretched arms. Merely looking at her with this searing pity, she said:
“You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn’t you?—you would, as usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual,your radiance would shine against my dark. Poor, magnanimous Mamma! No, no, no!” She turned and walked up and down the room. “No, no! I am tired of all this—tired of you; and you are tired of me. You will marry Mr. Damier. Why not, after all? Don’t let scruples of conscience interfere, especially none on my account. It would not separate us: we are separated; we have always been separated, and that we are gives me no pain. But don’t expect me either to live with you when you are married, or to marry my antique lover and settle down to the respectable, tepid joys he offers me. No, and no again. I will not marry him. I leave the respectability to you two excellent people.” The glance she shot at them now as they stood together was pure irony. Her mother’s pale and beautiful face still kept its look of frozen appeal, as though, while she made the appeal, she had been shot through the heart. Its beauty seemed to sting Claire where the appeal did not touch, and, too, Damier’s look, bent on her with a quiet that defiedher and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.
“My poor chances can’t compete with yours, Mamma,” she muttered. “Let me tell you that despair becomes you.” She took up her hat.
“Where are you going, Claire?” Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.
“Don’t be alarmed. Not to the Seine. I am going to a tea with Mrs. Wallingham. I shall be back to dinner. You will admit me?”
“I shall always admit you.”
“Good.” Claire was putting in her hat-pins before the mirror. “That is reassuring. Console her, Mr. Damier. Try to atone to her for me—bad as I am, I am sure that you can do so. Ah, I don’t harmonize with a love-scene!—it was one I interrupted, I suppose. Let me take my baseness—my vileness—from before you.” Her hand on the door, she paused, fixing a last look upon them; then, with a short laugh, she said, “Accept my blessing,” and was gone.
MADAME VICAUD said nothing. She drew her hand from Damier’s and sank again into the chair from which she had risen. Hope, ardor, and love, forever perhaps, were dead within her. She had hated her daughter, but under the hatred had been, always, the hidden flame, not, perhaps, of love, but of longing to love. She hated no longer, and the flame was quenched. Even in his nearness to her, Damier could not look with her at that slain longing. Walking away from her, he stood for a long time, gazing unseeingly over the garden, in silence. At last he turned and came to her. Her arm leaned on the table and her head upon her hand. With unutterable weariness she looked up at him.
“And now,” she said, “you must go, my friend.”
“Go?” Damier repeated.
Years of resolute endurance looked from her eyes; the weariness was not a wavering. Her face seemed sinking back into the abyss from which he had rescued it.
“Yes, you must go.”
“And leave you with her!”
“And leave me with her,” she assented monotonously.
“Never—never!”
She passed her hand over her brow, pressing her eyelids, as if in the effort to dispel her deep fatigue and find words with which to answer his harassing protest.
“Yet you must. I have the wonder, the treasure of your love for me. I will keep it always. I will never forget you. But it is impossible, even the friendship, now. We must not drag what is dear to us in the mire. I could not keep you as my friend under her eyes. I must live with her, and for her; that is the only lifepossible for me. I made it for myself. Whatever her cruelty, whatever her baseness, I have only to remember that I am responsible for her, that I am her only chance. And after this her presence in my life makes yours wrong. She knows now that you are not a friend only, and as a husband you could not remain. Such aménage à troiswould be as detestable as it would be grotesque.”
“She will marry!” cried Damier. “She must marry Monsieur Daunay.”
“I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but as friend, as friend only.”
Damier burst out into a smothered invective:
“And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that creature—who has no love for you—whom you cannot love! What can you do for her? You can never change or soften her.”
He felt that the vehemence of hisdespair and rebellion dashed itself against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on with the same monotonous patience:
“I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can pity her, most piteous creature—whose mother has no love for her.”
“Ah, you do not love me!” cried Damier, and all his youth was in the cry. “You sacrificemewith such composure! You give yourself to have your life sucked out of you by this vampire shape of the past. And it is me you rob! It is my life you immolate, as well as your own!What of my claim on life—my claim on you? You have no conception of what you are to me, or you could not speak of shutting me out from you; you could not think of sending me away! You could not speak so—think so—if you loved me!”
From her chair she now looked up at him, not with weariness, with a look curiously vivid and tender. “You speak like a boy,” she said.
Damier flung himself on his knees beside her. “And you think that I can leave you when you can look at me like that—love me like that!”
“Because I do.” She let him take her hands, and went on, almost smiling at him: “Because I love you like that, and because you love me like that, and because I am so much older than you—can’t you feel it? how like a little boy—passionate, unruly in his grief—you seem to me! And because, in spite of my age and your boyishness, we do yet love each other so greatly that the very greatnessof our love makes the question of our being together or apart really of not such significance.”
“Of not such significance!” poor Damier cried. “I am to find you in heaven, then!”
“Probably.” She did smile now, but he guessed that it was the brave smile she could summon over anguish. He guessed that her feeling of his boyishness was less apparent to her than her feeling of his power over her, his right to her. She might never yield to the power, never own to the right, but to guess that she felt them was assurance enough for the moment, and the pallor of the face that smiled at him was a reproach to him.
“No, no,” he said; “I shall keep you there—and I shall keep you here, too. I will rescue you. I will find out the way. And I will leave you now and give you peace for a little while. You are terribly tired.”
“Terribly,” she assented. “It is kind and generous of you to go now.”
“But my going is to be taken as no token of submission. I will return.”
“To say good-by.”
“So you say.”
“So you will do.” And she still smiled, all tenderness, all inflexibility.
“Never, never, never!” said Damier.
DAMIER, for his own part, felt no need of peace. A passionate protestation, a passionate determination, filled him. At his hotel, as if in answer to vague plans and projects, the figure of Monsieur Daunay, rising from a chair, confronted him. From Monsieur Daunay’s relief and alacrity he guessed that he had been waiting there for some time—ever since, he further guessed, his conversation with Claire.
“You have heard?” asked Monsieur Daunay, and a host of questions looked from his eyes.
“That you have proposed to Mademoiselle Vicaud, yes; and that she has answered you, I fear, not favorably; yes, I have heard.”
“You have seen her?”
“I was with her mother, speaking with her of it, when Claire came.”
“I have intruded thus upon you,” said Monsieur Daunay, “in the faint hope that you might be able, after seeing her, to give me some encouragement, since from her I could elicit none. She was sullen, silent, reproached me for my haste. After all these years!” Monsieur Daunay groaned, and dropped again into his chair, folding his arms and bowing his head in a despairing acquiescence to fate’s cruelty. “After all these years!” he repeated.
Damier saw down a long vista of them, sunny with the encouraging smiles of the charming Claire.
“You have assured me,” Daunay presently said, “that you were not the cause of this change in Claire.”
It was a rather perplexing question, but Damier was able truthfully to answer it with: “I can again assure you that it is only through her relation with her mother that Claire interests me.”
“And so she has assured me, again and again, and that all her affection was for me. And yet, now that I can claim her—now that I come, trusting and hoping, she turns from me; she mutters that I am too old; not rich enough. Ah,mon Dieu!”
Claire, clearly, Damier also saw, had never endangered her certain hold upon Monsieur Daunay’s usefulness by confessing to him her expectation of larger achievements. She would evade him, and hold him, as long as she had need of him.
Part of her anger to-day had, no doubt, been due to the fact that the sudden crisis had forced her into a decisive attitude toward him while yet uncertain that she could with safety give him up. Yet, indeed, she had been able to avoid absolute decisiveness—so Monsieur Daunay’s next words proved:
“She told me that all her affection was still mine, but owned to higher ambitions; she had never, she said, hidden from me that she was ambitious, and life now wasopening new possibilities to her. Could affection and ambition be combined, had I a large fortune to gild my middle age and my unimportance, she would at once marry me.”
“She is utterly unworthy of you,” said Damier.
At this a faint, ironic smile crossed the Frenchman’s face. “Ah,mon ami,” he said, “you need not tell me that. If I love Claire, do not imagine, as I told you last night, that I am blinded by my love. I love herd’un amour fou—and I recognize it. She possesses me; she can do what she will with me; I should forgive her anything. But I know that I am a captive—and to no noble captor.”
“Just heavens!” Damier broke out, indifferent, in his indignant pity, to his own interests, “shake off this obsession—and her with it! Leave her; go away; do not see her again. What misery if you were to marry her!”
“What will you? I adore her!” His helplessness seemed final. He presentlywent on: “But I came to-day to ask for your help. You occupy a peculiar position toward Madame Vicaud and her daughter; you have influence with them both. Use it in my favor, I beg of you. Intercede for me.”
“Any influence I have shall, I promise you, be devoted to that purpose. I can hardly hope that your hopes will be realized; their realization could not be for your happiness. Pardon me, but have you never suspected that Claire is like her father—that she, too, is a miserable creature?”
For a long moment Daunay looked at him.
“She is like her father,” he then said; “but have you never suspected, or, rather, do you not now see, that, because of that, my claim is all the stronger? What man not knowing it, marrying her in ignorance of it, would not repent? I should never repent. She is like him, if you will, but she is, irrevocably, the woman I love. More than that, she is the child I love;I have watched her grow up. From the beginning, she has beenma petite Claire; so she will be to the end—whatever that end may be.”
Monsieur Daunay spoke with a profound feeling, a profound sincerity that the emotional tremor of his voice, the emotional tears in his eyes, only made the more characteristic and touching to Damier. He got up and grasped the Frenchman’s hand in silence.
A knock at the door broke upon this compact of sympathy; a garçon brought a card to Damier and said that the lady waited for him in the salon below. The card was Lady Surfex’s, and on it was written: