Part 1

Chapter 14,135 wordsPublic domain

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The Rescue

BY Anne Douglas Sedgwick AUTHOR OF "THE CONFOUNDING OF CAMELIA" "THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD"

NEW YORK The Century Co. 1902

_Published May, 1902_

THE DEVINNE PRESS.

G. S. S.

AND

M. D. S.

THE RESCUE

EUSTACE DAMIER bent his long, melancholy profile over the photograph-album. It was an old-fashioned album; its faded morocco cover, its gilt clasp loosened with age, went with the quiet old-fashioned little room, that had no intentions, made no efforts, and yet was full of meaning, with the charm of an epoch near enough to be easily understood, yet with a grace and a pathos in its modern antiquity deeper than that possessed by a more romantic remoteness. It was the sort of little drawing-room where one's mother might have accepted one's father: one could not quite see one's present in it, but one saw a near and a dear past. The gray wall-paper with its flecked gold flower, the curved lines of the sedately ornamental chairs and sofas, the crisp yet faded chintzes, the wedded vases on the marble mantelpiece, the books, well worn, on stands, the group of family silhouettes on the wall, the cheerful floral carpet--all made a picture curiously unlike the early nineties, and fully characteristic of the sixties. There were many flowers about the room, arranged with a cheerful regularity; the very roses looked old-fashioned in their closely grouped bunches; and in a corner stood a tall étagère bearing potted plants in rows that narrowed to an apex. Between curtains, carefully drawn, of white lace and green rep, one saw a strip of garden brilliantly illuminated with sunlight.

It was in just such a room and in such surroundings that Damier had imagined seeing again his old friend, and his mother's friend, Mrs. Mostyn. He always associated her with a sprightly conservatism. With a genial, yet detached, appreciation of modern taste, she would be placidly faithful to the taste of her girlhood. The house, he remembered, had been her mother's, and its contents had probably remained as they were when her mother's death put her in possession of it. He remembered Mrs. Mostyn's caps, her cameos, her rings, her bracelet with the plaited hair in it, her jests, too, and her gaieties--all with a perfume of potpourri, with a niceness and exactitude of simile that had not attempted to keep pace with the complexities, the allusiveness and elusiveness, of modern humor.

Mrs. Mostyn had lived for many years in this small country house; she had entered it as a childless widow after a life of some color and movement, her husband having been a promising diplomat, whose death in early middle age had cut short a career that had not yet found an opportunity of rising from promise to any large achievement. After his death Mrs. Mostyn devoted herself to books, to her garden, her poor people, and her friends. Her house was not adapted to a large hospitality, but one of these friends was usually with her. Damier, however, was only paying a call. He had never visited Mrs. Mostyn; she had visited his mother in London, and since his mother had died he had been little in England. Now he was staying with the Halbournes, eight miles away.

The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm, fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural to see there his mother's gentle, thoughtful face--first of a round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair; natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face was not that of a French-woman. One's first impression--not too superficial, either--was of a finished little _mondaine;_ but finished, poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty--indeed, as Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long. Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen, and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped in this sensation--of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from the past, of something mysterious and urgent--when Mrs. Mostyn came in.

MRS. MOSTYN had changed little since he had last seen her five years ago in London. Her hair, under the laces of her cap, was whiter; her rosiness and plumpness--her little hands were especially fat--more accentuated: but the gaiety and kindness were the same. As much as in the past she entered into all his interests: asked questions about his three years at the English embassy in Rome, about his recent travels, what he had done, what he intended to do. When all reminiscences were over, all plans discussed, and when Mrs. Mostyn had sketched for him, with her crisp, nipping definitiveness, the people of the neighborhood, Damier, who during all the talk had kept the album in his hand, his forefinger between the leaves at the place where the enchanted photograph had looked at him, said, opening the book: "I have been immersing myself in the past. Is anything so full of its feeling as an old photograph-album? _Çà sent le temps_, and I have made a discovery there. Who is this?" He held out the opened page to her, and Mrs. Mostyn, adjusting her eye-glasses, looked.

"Ah, yes. Is she not charming?"

"She has charmed me. She is wonderful."

"Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me, too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time. I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss Chanfrey--Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know. Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her, and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to Paris, where Clara's beauty made a furor--she was thought lovelier than the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries--she wore a white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was, report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk _pour passer le temps_--to make the something that was coming come more quickly. Poor child! it came."

"She married Lord Pemleigh?" Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her eyes vague with memories.

"No; don't you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan--but only after years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing--a dreadful thing. She eloped--ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted Clara's portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of Manet; a full-length portrait--I saw it--of Clara in a white lawn dress with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant, dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible story;--a violet dragged in the mud."

Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, "I cannot associate her with the gutter," he said, "nor can I understand this violet stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment dazzled by a shoddy bohemian."

"Oh," sighed Mrs. Mostyn, "has delicacy ever been a certificate of safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional; but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant--far more ignorant than a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least, more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,--I well remember him,--an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the match had already embittered her relations with her mother--Lady Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then--and then--she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only final explanation of these stories."

"And she ceased to love him?" He seemed now to interpret the gaze more fully. Did it not foresee? Did it not entreat--though so proudly?

"Ah, I don't know. All I know is that she stuck to him, and that she was miserable. Poor, poor child!" Mrs. Mostyn repeated.

"And is she dead?" he asked after a little pause in which it seemed to him that they had thrown flowers on a long-forgotten grave.

Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden, the effort of difficult recollection on her face.

"I really don't know--I really can't remember. So soon afterward my husband died; Lady Chanfrey died; I came here to live. I heard from time to time of her misfortunes--of her death I don't think I heard; but for years now I have heard nothing. How many years ago is it? This is '95, and that was--oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago."

"So that she would be now?"

"She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is over."

"I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive."

The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more significant.

"Could you find out?" he asked presently.

Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in their own epoch.

"My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won't say dabbler--seeker-after."

"Not after impressions," said Damier, smiling a little sadly.

"And have you not found anything?" she asked.

"No; I don't think I have."

"Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!" smiled Mrs. Mostyn. "You have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by--how many years?--fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,--the daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,--and you might find there an adventure of the heart."

"Ah, I don't care about a daughter--or about an adventure."

Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said presently:

"Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara's brother,--a man I never liked,--and she could ask him."

"Pray do."

"But I don't fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject. He and his sister were never sympathetic."

"I wish you would find out," Damier repeated.

"I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever find her," smiled Mrs. Mostyn.

III

EUSTACE DAMIER was susceptible and fastidious, idealistic and skeptical. He was not weak, for he rarely yielded to his impressions; but his strength, since nothing had come into his life that called for decisive action, was mainly negative. Perfection haunted him, and seen beside that inner standard, most experience was tawdry. He was quite incapable of loving what he had if he could not have what he loved. The vacancy had once been filled, but since his mother's, his sister's death, it had yawned, oppressive, unresponsive, about him. He was no cynic, but he was melancholy. He had gone through life alternating between ardor and despondency.

He was amused now, amused and yet amazed, by the extraordinary impression that the old photograph had made upon him. More than once he had drawn back on the verge of a great passion,--drawn back he could hardly have said why,--feeling that the woman, or he himself, lacked something of the qualities that could make them lastingly need each other. And now it really seemed to him that he needed, and would need lastingly, this woman of thirty years ago; and surely she needed him. She called to him, and he answered. He understood her; he loved her.

It was whimsical, absurd, pathetic. He could smile over it, yet under the smile some deeper self seemed to smile another smile--the smile of a mystery speaking at last in words that he could not understand, but in a voice that he could hear.

Mrs. Mostyn had yielded the photograph to his determined claim,--laughing at his impudence,--and he kept it always beside him in the weeks that followed his departure from ----shire. During those weeks, that lengthened into months, no news came, and the eagerness of his feeling died away. The feeling was still there, but it was like an awakened and living memory of an old, dead love. He thought of her as dead; it was best so, for he could imagine with repulsion the degradation that a harried life in the slimier walks of bohemia might have wrought in her had she lived. The sense of half-humorous, half-tragic pathos remained with him. He smiled at the photograph every day. It represented just what a memory, deep and still, would have represented. It said to him, "We have found each other. Now we will never part." And absurdly, deliciously, he felt--with an instinct that fluttered wings high above any net of reason, singing, almost invisible--that what he had missed was waiting for him somewhere.

* * * * *

One day in late autumn, when he had returned to London, something happened which changed the character of this unsubstantial romance. He met at his club another old friend, a contemporary of Mrs. Mostyn's. Sir Henry Quarle was a writer of pleasant reminiscences, a garrulous and companionable man about town, who had kept careful pace with the times, who, indeed, flattered himself that he usually kept a step or two ahead of them: he was prophetic as well as reminiscent; had firm opinions and facile appreciations.

He and Damier spoke of Mrs. Mostyn,--Sir Henry, too, had seen her recently,--of Paris, and of her connection with it. "And by the way," said Sir Henry, "she told me that you were tremendously interested in what she told you about Madame Vicaud--Clara Chanfrey that was. Now I know a good deal about that unhappy history, and can, indeed, carry it on to a further chapter; the first did interest you?"

"Tremendously," Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. "Is she alive?" he added.

"That I don't know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I went to Vicaud's studio one day. They had been married only a few years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness."

"In what way?" Damier's heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.

"Oh--not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already poverty-stricken, but clean--grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed the floor herself. Four or five artists were there--clever, well-known men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted pictures _pour épater le bourgeois;_ grossly materialistic, cynically skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of antagonism to the conformist, the bourgeois attitude. But the bohemianism of her husband and his comrades could only turn her to ice. It was strange to see her fear, and yet her strength, in these surroundings. They saw it, too; her chill gentleness, her inflexible face, cowed them, made them silly rather than vicious. Only, at that time, she had not cowed her husband; at all events, he seemed to take a pleasure in showing his mastery over her, his indifference to her attitude. He was a genius, with the face of a poet and the soul of a satyr. She had charmed him by her unusualness; he had determined to have her, to snatch her, the fine, delicate creature, from another world, as it were, and to make her part of his experience of life in very much the same sense as he would have tried a new kind of sin for the sake of its novelty. Then, too, he hoped, of course, for advancement, pecuniary and social; the disappointment of that hope must have roused the fiend in him. Of course he loved her--if one can turn the word to such base uses. What man would not have loved her? He loved her as he might have loved one of his mistresses; and I remember that on that day he dared--as perhaps he would not have dared had they been alone--to go to her before us all, fondle her cheek, and, putting his arm around her, kiss her. We all, I think, felt the ugly bravado of it, and I know that I never detested a man as I detested him at that moment. She sat motionless, expressionless. Only her eyes showed the terror of her helplessness, her despair."

"Just heavens!" Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a bewildering aching and despair. "Why did she not leave him?"

"Well," said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, "there was the child--they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her pride--she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need of her. A few years after their marriage Vicaud took to absinthe, and drank himself half mad from time to time. Her conceptions of the duties of marriage, the sacredness of its bond, were, I am sure, very high; duty, pity, a hopeless loyalty, kept her to him, no doubt. What she went through no one, I suppose, can imagine.

"I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days--it must have been more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her husband in an _allée_ in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone, his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in his defiant black cloak. I sha'n't forget them as they walked under the October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with all her own gracious courtesy--but graciousness a little exaggerated; she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the life about her, almost too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of life.

"I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did, realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable room--its bareness the best thing that could be said of it--at the top of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in England, and Vicaud's old mother lived with them, a spiteful, suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud gave her all the quiet deference that she would have given her had she been her equal. She had evidently forced from the old woman--forced by no effort, but by the mere compulsion of her own unflinching courtesy--a sullen respect. Her husband looked at her, spoke to her, with an odd mingling of resentment and dependence. He would say constantly, 'Que dis-tu, Claire?' But he talked, too, with the evident intention of putting her to shame before her English guest,--seeing how she bore it,--talked of gallant adventures, of the charms of various females of his acquaintance. She sat pale, mild, and cold. It was like seeing mud thrown at a statue of the Madonna.