Must see you at once, on most important matter concerning Madame V.
Must see you at once, on most important matter concerning Madame V.
“Wait for me here,” Damier said to Monsieur Daunay. “This may concern you as well as me.”
He found Lady Surfex in the drearilygaudy salon, her face ominous of ill tidings.
“My dear Eustace,” she said,—they were alone, yet her voice was discreetly low,—“a horrid thing has happened—or is going to. I thought it best to come to you at once. Claire Vicaud runs away to-night with Lord Epsil.”
And, as he stared at her in stricken silence:
“I found it out by chance. I was at Mrs. Wallingham’s. They were there—Mademoiselle Vicaud and Lord Epsil. I watched them, indeed, with some uneasiness, as they sat, with ostentatious retirement, in a dim corner. I saw them go out together. Do you know, Eustace, my distrust of that girl and of that man—in justice to her, I must say it—was so great that I really was on the point of following them—asking her to let me drive her home; but I hesitated, people I knew came in, I had to speak to them, and so some time went by. Then, about half an hour after they were gone, Mrs. Wallinghamcame to me and whispered that a maid—a discreet English person who was dispensing tea in the dining-room—had overheard Lord Epsil saying to Mademoiselle Vicaud that they would take the night train to Dinard, and that his yacht was there. The woman came at once to her mistress. And now, Eustace, what can be done to saveher?” They both knew to whom the pronoun referred; a conventional saving of Claire had significance only in reference to her mother.
Damier was steadying his thoughts.
“The night train.” He looked at his watch. “There is time,” he said.
“For what, Eustace?”
“There is only one chance. One can’t appeal to her heart, or conscience—or even, it seems, to her ambition; but one might to her greed—offer her some firmer, surer competence. I had thought of it dimly before. I could catch that Dinard train—go with them—find some opportunity for seeing her alone before they reach Dinard—or before they reach the yacht.”
“But, Eustace,” her helpless wonder reproached his baseless optimism, “whatcouldyou do? You can’t beard the man; she is of age—goes willingly. What a situation!”
“I could offer her half of my income for life, if she would consent to return with me, and to marry a man who is devoted to her—who, I think, would forgive anything.”
“Eustace, it would leave you almost poor!”
“Not quite, since the half is large enough, I trust, to tempt her! The whole would not be too much to give to saveherfrom this final blow.”
“But can you—this man—will he?”
“He is up-stairs. I will see him, and start at once.”
“And, Eustace—wait; can’t we keep it from her—can’t we think of some good lie?”
He had almost to smile at her intently thoughtful face.
“What possible lie can we think of? Claire will not come back to-night—she must know, sooner or later.”
“But it is for to-night I want to spare her. Ah, I have it—no lie, either. I merely send a telegram, ‘Claire may not return to-night: will explain to-morrow,’ signed with my name; she will think Claire is passing the night with me; and then, you know, the girl may, at the last moment, decide not to go.”
Damier had to yield to her eagerness. Up-stairs the words he had with Daunay were short, bitter, decisive. Averting his eyes from the unfortunate man’s face, he put the case before him. He turned his back on him when he had spoken, went to the window, left him to an unobserved quaffing of the poisonous cup.
Monsieur Daunay’s first words showed that he had quaffed it bravely and that his reason still stood firm.
“She must be mad,” he said; “it is not like her.”
“No, it is not like her. And I may tell you that I suspect revenge to be in part her motive. She had a terrible quarrel with her mother this afternoon.”
Damier turned now and faced him.
“And now, Monsieur Daunay, are you willing to save her?”
“I am ready,” the Frenchman said quietly; “with your help, I am ready to save her.”
“I go at once, and with that assurance, then?”
“Yes; I am ready. Tell her that. Tell her, too, that if her mother will not receive her, she will find a home at my cousin’s until our marriage can take place.”
“Her mother will receive her,” said Damier. “As you have forgiven, so she will forgive.”
THE long, hot, rushing hours had passed, for Damier, in a sort of stupor, the anæsthesia of one fixed idea. In the stuffy railway-carriage, his eyes on the dark square of the open window, where one saw vaguely the starlit depths of a midsummer night, he thought, with the odd detachment of a crisis, of the past day: the sunny morning walk with Claire—green leaves, purple shadows; the afternoon’s supreme moment—a deep pulse of wonder in his heart, hardly to be seen in images; Lady Surfex among the palms and monstrous gilded pottery of the hotel salon; Monsieur Daunay’s quiet, white face; the crowded Paris railway-station, and the glimpse he had caught in it of Claire and Lord Epsil.This most recent impression was also the most vivid, threw all the others into a blurred background where, with a new look of woe, only Madame Vicaud’s face glimmered clearly.
The enforced pause at the height of his resolution made both the past and the future half illusory. The present, with not its usual flashing impermanence, had, for hours, been the same, had stopped, as it were, at an instant of vigilant alertness, and held him in it rigidly. Until the object of that vigilance, that alertness, were attained, he could not look forward or make projects. The chance for seeing Claire alone could not come, probably, until Dinard was reached. There, in the hurry of arrival, he might snatch a word with her. It would only be necessary to speak the word, to put the alternative before her. Entreaty would be useless; all the argument possible was the chink of gold in two hands; all the hope, that his chink might be the louder.
Shortly after ten o’clock the train drewup in the Rennes station. Damier had let no such opportunity escape him, and he again stepped from his compartment and stood looking toward the part of the train where he knew were Claire and her cavalier. As he looked he saw the tall figure of the Englishman stroll across the platform to the refreshment-buffet. The light fell full on his long, smooth, pink face,—a papier-mâché pink,—on his long, high nose and whity-brown mustache. Damier darted forward. In an instant he was at the door, still ajar, of the compartment that Lord Epsil had just left. He saw, under the yellow glare of the lamp, a confusion of traveling-bags, rugs, bandboxes (Claire had evidently shopped), newspapers and magazines; a large box of bonbons lay on a seat, its contents half rifled, its papers strewing the floor; and, settled back in a corner, her shoulders huddled together in a graceful sleepiness, was Claire. A long silk traveling-cloak fell over her white dress; the winged white hat of the morning was pushed a little toone side as her head leaned against the cushioned carriage; a drooping curve of loosened hair, shining in the light like molten brass, fell over her cheek and neck; her profile, half hidden, was at once petulant and relaxed with drowsiness.
Damier did not hesitate. He sprang into the carriage. Not touching the girl, he leaned over her. “Claire,” he said.
In an instant she had started into erectness, staring stupefied, too stupefied for shame or anger.
“I have only a moment,” said Damier, speaking with a clear-cut dryness of utterance. “If you will come back with me, and marry Monsieur Daunay,—he knows all and will marry you,—half of my income is yours for life.”
After the first stare she had blinked in opening her eyes to the light and to the sudden apparition; the eyes were now fixed widely on him; they looked like two deep, black holes.
“It is a bribe,” she said.
“Call it so if you will.”
“It shows your scorn for me.”
“Comprehension of you, rather.”
“And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t I will challenge this man—and fight him. I am an excellent fencer, an excellent shot.”
She looked at him, half scoffing, yet half believing. “Englishmen don’t fight duels.”
“This one will.”
“He might kill you.”
“I might kill him; you would have to take the risk.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Bien!I understand, too. I will fulfil myself.” She half rose, then sank again. “How much?” He mentioned the sum—not a small one. “Make it two thirds,” said Claire, keeping her dilated eyes upon him with an effect of final and defiant revelation.
“Two thirds, then,” he assented, in the steadied voice of one who does not dare hurry indecision. Yet, even now, she did not rise.
“One more condition, please. I do not see my mother again. Let us say, if you like, that I am ashamed to meet her.”
“She has not been told—of this.”
“Yes, she has,” said Claire. “I wrote and told her.” There was the satisfaction of achievement in the way she said it. “Oh, yes; she knows.”
“Yet, even after that,—your vengeance, I suppose,—I hardly dare make the promise for her,—she can forgive—even this.”
“Ah,” and the hoarse note was in Claire’s voice, “but I can’t take forgiveness from her. I have left the world where such episodes as this need forgiveness. Tolerance is now all that I will endure—and she will never tolerate. No; I will not come with you; I will not return to Monsieur Daunay and to respectability—unless you promise that I shall never see her again.”
“I promise it, then, if it is the condition.”
“You accept?Bien!” Claire sprang up, and ripping an illustration from a magazine,she scribbled on the blank back, “Have decided, after all, that I won’t come,” transfixed it with a hat-pin to the cushioned back of Lord Epsil’s vacated seat, then, as rapidly, reached for two of the bandboxes, pulled them, rattling, from the racks, stooped and jerked a large pasteboard box from under a seat, and, encumbered as she already was, caught up from among the rugs and bags several smaller packages, dexterously holding them to her sides with her elbows.
Damier, who had stared, hardly comprehending, gripped her wrist. “Put them down.” She gazed round in sincere amazement; then, with quite a humorous laugh, dropped the booty. “I really forgot! No, it wouldn’t be fair play, would it?—though, I confess, I should like to take a little vengeance; he has irritated me, been too complacent, too assured. This, too?” She touched the silk traveling-cloak. Damier, without speaking, stripped it off her; then, catching her by the arm, he almost dragged herfrom the carriage, for her feet stumbled among the dressing-cases and the abandoned boxes.
He found, as they almost ran along the dim platform across to the one opposite, and as he pushed her into a compartment of the Paris train that stood there, that she was laughing. The adventure of it, the excitement, Lord Epsil’s discomfiture, appealed, evidently, to her sense of mirth.
There were other occupants of the carriage, and Damier was thankful for it. He did not want to talk to Claire. To reproach her would make him as ridiculous as beating a tin pan in the expectation of response other than a mocking cachinnation; not to reproach might seem to condone by comprehension. Yet, as she sank back into a corner, settled her shoulder in it, he saw that there was emotion under the laughter, that it was not only the tin-pan rattle. He could interpret it as almost a regret—a regret for something against which she had always rebelled, from whichshe had now finally freed herself, a sudden realization that forever she had lost the standing upon which he had found her. Yet, over this trace of emotion and suffering, that, to Damier, was more piteous than anything he had yet seen in her, she smiled at him, with half-dropped lids. It was the look, with her a new one, of brazening a shame. Already her nature had retaliated upon the wrong she had done it by fixing in her face a more apparent ugliness of expression. She glanced round at the sleepy, respectable occupants of the carriage, their sleepiness, however, keeping an eye upon this startling young person in her white dress.
“Before we relapse into an irrevocable silence,” she said, “let me inform you—it will complete your evil opinion of me—that I didn’t really care about him; I cared for his caring about me—though at moments even that fatigued me,il m’embêtait quelquefois; but then, I was glad to be revenged.”
“Upon whom? For what?”
“Upon you both—for making me feel that I was not of your world.”
“We did not make you feel it, Claire.”
For some moments they were silent, as the train moved slowly from the station, and then she said:
“Where will you take me?”
“To his cousin’s, Mademoiselle Daunay’s. I have arranged all with him.”
A look, almost tremulous under its attempt at a light sneer, crossed her face.
“What forgiveness!Il est un peu lâche, vous savez.”
“Try, Claire, to deserve such touchinglâcheté.”
Again Claire was, for some moments, silent; then, yawning slightly, yet, again his acuteness guessed, affectedly, she said, settling her shoulder more decisively in her corner:
“There is the more hope for my deserving it since now I am rich. You may make your mind easy about my future. I have got all that I ever really wanted.” It was the new and brazen note over the newshame; but as he looked at the face that first pretended to sleep, and that eventually did sleep, was not the brass the curious, anomalous shield that nature put around something growing—around a soul that at last, with a faint, half-conscious thrill, felt upon it the awakening breath of suffering?
THE morning was still fresh when Damier walked down the Rue B—— next day. Clear early sunlight fell upon the houses opposite Madame Vicaud’s, glittering on their upper windows, gilding their austerity; but the depths of the street were still cool and unshadowed.
The concierge was sweeping out the courtyard, and fixed on Damier a cogitating eye; his early visit and Claire’s absence were, no doubt, to her vigilant curiosity, symptoms of something unusual. The cogitation, though mingled with relief, was repeated at the door above in Angélique’s look. She was plainly glad to see him. Madame Vicaud had sat up all night, she volunteered, quite as if accepting himas a member of the family, privileged to confidences; she thought that madame had hoped for mademoiselle’s return, and she feared that the letter that had arrived from mademoiselle an hour before had much distressed madame. Perhaps Monsieur Damier could persuade her to have some coffee; she had eaten no dinner the night before, nor breakfast this morning. Damier promised to persuade, and Angélique ushered him into the salon.
He had never before seen it flooded with sunlight,—for this was his first morning visit,—and the windows overlooking the garden faced a radiant sky.
His eyes were dazzled, and the dark figure that rose to meet him seemed to waver in the light.
The calamity that had befallen her, at variance with the joyous setting in which he found her, showed in her white face—her eyes, still, as it were, astonished from the shock, dark with misery and a night of watching. On the table near which she had been sitting were a burnt-out candle,Lady Surfex’s telegram of the night before, and a letter, opening its large displayal of vigorous handwriting to the revealing day: Claire’s handwriting, Claire’s letter of farewell. Damier took Madame Vicaud’s hands and looked at her; the astonishment of her eyes hurt him more than their dry misery: after all, then, she had been so unprepared.
“I know all,” she said.
“Not all.”
“She has left me—with that man; she has written to me.”
“Not all,” he repeated.
“Is there more? There cannot be worse.”
“There is better. She is safe.”
“Safe? Do you mean that she did not go?”
Her eyes, with their sudden leap of light, burned him.
“No; she did go. But I followed them; I brought her back.”
“Back to me? She was frightened at what she had done?” she again asked, hereyes still burning, but more dimly, upon him. His eyes dropped before them; looking down at the wasted hands he held, he said:
“No, dearest, not to you—to Monsieur Daunay. She is to marry him. She is with his cousin now.”
Her vigil had evidently been tearless; even the arrival that morning of the fatal letter had not melted her frozen terror. But now, as she looked speechlessly at him, the long rise of a sob heaved her breast; her hands slid from his; she sank into a chair, and resting her crossed arms upon the table, she bent her head upon them and wept and shuddered. In the sunny stillness of the room the young man stood beside her. He felt an alien before this intimate, maternal anguish. She did not weep for long. She presently sat upright, dried her eyes, and pushed back her hair, keeping her hand pressed tightly, for a moment, on her forehead, as if in an effort to regain her long habit of self-control; and as if to gain time, to hide thepainful effort from him, she pointed to Claire’s letter. “Read it,” she said.
It was Claire’s most callous, most ugly self; its passion of hatred and revenge hardly masked itself in the metallic tone of mockery. They were both well rid of her—her dear Mamma and her dear Mamma’s suitor. They were far too good for her, and she justified them by showing them how far too bad she was for them. Pursuit and reproaches were useless. She feared that her dear Mamma’s ermine robe of respectability must be permanently spotted by a daughter notoriously naughty—for she did not intend to hide her new situation. But perhaps the daughter could be lived down as the daughter’s father had been. And on, and on—short phrases, lava-jets from the seething volcano of base vulgarity; Damier felt them burn his own cheek while he read.
Madame Vicaud’s eyes were on his when he raised them; but quickly looking away from him, she said: “It came this morning. Last night I could not understandthat telegram; I could not believe that she would not return. I felt that something was being hidden from me; it was like battling in a stifling black air. And then—this came.” He had laid the letter beside her, and she touched it with her finger, as if it had been a snake. “This—this end of all!”
“She is safe,” Damier repeated rather helplessly.
“Safe!” the mother echoed. Leaning her head against the chair-back, she closed her eyes. Lovely and dignified even in her disgrace, nothing could smirch and nothing could abase her; she had never looked so noble as at this moment of dreadful defeat and overthrow. “And how have you saved her?” she asked. “What did Monsieur Daunay have to offer—what did you have to offer—to bring her back—since it was not repentance? It was not repentance?”
“No; but I believe that she was glad to come. I—I dowered Claire,” said Damier, after a momentary pause.
Madame Vicaud, still keeping her eyes closed, was silent. He leaned over her and took her hand. “All that I have is yours. You dowered her, let us say.”
“What do you mean by dowering her?” she asked.
“I have given her two thirds of my income for life.”
Her hand in his was chill and passive; he felt in her the cold shudder of shame.
“Ah,” he said, “from me—from me you do not resent such saving?”
“Resent?—from you?” she said gently. “No, no; it is of her I am thinking. No; you did well, very well to save her—if we may call it saving. You have washed the spots from my respectability. We both know the value of such washing; but it is best—best to have us all respectable,”—a bitter smile touched her lips,—“since it is that we prize so. And were there no other inducements?”
“There was a condition,”—he had to nerve himself to the speaking of it,—“that she did not see you again. Shehas, by her own wish, broken the bond between you. She has left your life.”
Madame Vicaud clenched her hands, and her chin trembled.
“Yet—let me tell you,” he said, “I believe that there is more hope for Claire so left in the evil and abasement she has made about herself than if she were to have remained with you; all the forces of her nature were engaged in resistance, or in a pretended submission that bided its time. Now she must do battle with the world on a level where life will teach her lessons she can understand. She has severed herself completely from you—she has completely fulfilled herself. Some new blossoming may follow; who knows?”
“But no blossoming for me. I shall not see it,” said Madame Vicaud. “My life has been useless.”
Useless? He wondered over her past, her long efforts, this wreck.
Could goodness, however clear-sighted, however divine in its comprehension and pity, prevent evil from working itself out,fulfilling itself? Was not its working out perhaps its salvation?
“How can you tell?” he said. “You have done your work for her.”
“I have done nothing for her. Everything has failed.” Still, with closed eyes, she leaned her head against the chair, and slow tears fell down her cheeks.
“You have fulfilled yourself toward her; that is not failure. You have fought your fight. Surely it is the fighting, and not its result, that makes success. And can you say that everything has failed—when you still have me to live for? Claire has gone out of your life. She has shut the door on you. She has left you, and—oh, dearest, dearest, she has left you to me!”
He stood before her, looking at her with faithful eyes. His love for her made no menace to her grief; it did not jar upon her sorrow; rather it was with her in it all, it could not: be separated from it—as he could not be separated from any part of her life.
“You are alone now,” he said, “and I am alone.”
“No,”—she put her hand out to him,—“no; we are not alone.”
“Then—“ The air was golden, and in the open window, white flowers, set there, dazzled against the sky. This day of sunlight and disaster must symbolize the past and the future, as her eyes, with their silent, solemn assent, her face, so sweet and so sorrowful. She rose; he drew her toward him. But then, as though another consecration than embrace and kiss were needed for this strange betrothal, she walked with him, holding his hand, to the window, where the white flowers dazzled in the sun. She looked at the flowers, at the trees, at the splendid serenity of the morning sky, softly breathing the clear, radiant air—as though in “a peace out of pain.”
“We will go away,” said Damier, who looked at her; and, despite his sorrowing for her, the day seemed to him full of wings and music. “I do not want to see Paris again, do you? And this will be ourlast memory of it—these flowers, this garden, this sky, that we look at together. We will think of it so, without pain almost, in a new, new life.”
“A new life,” she repeated gently and vaguely. Lifting his hand, she kissed it. “You have rescued me from the old one. You are my angel of resurrection,” she said.
Yet that the future was dim to her, except through his faith in it,—that, indeed, it could never become an unshadowed brightness,—he knew, as, leaning against him, needing protection from her bitter thoughts, she murmured in the anguish of her desolate and bereaved motherhood: “Oh—but my child!”
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