Part 2

"When she and I talked together after the supper--one could hardly call the meal a dinner--she did not make an apologetic reference to the ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence; she told me about her progress at school, her cleverness, her beauty. And next to her daughter, reading and music had been her great resources. I was surprised at her scholarship, at her familiarity with German philosophy, English poetry, Russian fiction, French and English literary and social criticism; indeed, on the subjects of social problems, of human suffering and the various remedies, economic and ethical, suggested for it, her knowledge was far deeper than my own. But in all our talk there was not a note of the personal, the confidential, the regretful; she might have been sitting in an environment absolutely her own. I never saw her again after that evening. When I was in Paris some years later I went to the house, and heard that Monsieur Vicaud and his mother had both died there, and that Madame Vicaud, after nursing them through their last illnesses, had gone. I have often wondered what became of her."

Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the subject of Madame Vicaud and her misfortunes. But that evening he wrote to Mrs. Mostyn, and asked her if she had not yet obtained for him some news of his lady of the photograph. The photograph had for him that night a new look; it still said, "I need you," but "I need you now. Help me." He was convinced that she lived.

Mrs. Mostyn's reply came in a day, and inclosed a letter of introduction to Madame Vicaud, Rue B----, Paris. "Sir Molyneux knew nothing of his sister's whereabouts," Mrs. Mostyn wrote, "and it was from another source that I found out that Clara still lives, and at the inclosed address. Do find her, my Don Quixote, and I must make her come and visit me."

The inclosed letter asked Madame Vicaud to recall an old friend, and to welcome Mr. Damier for her sake and his own. She had only recently had news of Madame Vicaud, and so was able, happily, to aid Mr. Damier in his great wish to make her acquaintance. She hoped, also, that she might see Madame Vicaud in England soon; would she not pay her a visit--a long one? It was a long letter, graceful, cordial, affectionate, a rope of flowers thrown to Damier for his guidance into the labyrinth.

IV

DAMIER, three days afterward, stood in his sitting-room in a Paris hotel, looking with a certain astonishment at the small sheet of notepaper he held, upon which was written in a firm, flowing hand--a hand that seemed, though so gracefully, to contradict any impression of a cry for help:

DEAR MR. DAMIER: I shall be very glad to see you to-morrow afternoon at four. I well remember Mrs. Mostyn; to hear of her from a friend of hers will be a double pleasure.

Yours sincerely,

CLARA VICAUD.

It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he had thought of her, the young girl leaning on the chair-back in her flowing dress of silk. She was alive, and he was to see her that afternoon. Damier felt a chill overtake his eagerness. Was he not about to shatter a charming experience--one of the sweetest, most tender, most dearly absurd of his life? Would he not find in the real, middle-aged Clara Vicaud a hard, uninteresting woman? He had a vision of stoutly corseted robustness in jetted black cashmere; of a curve of heavy throat under the chin; of cold eyes looking with wonder, with suspicion even, upon his romantic quest. He could almost have felt it in him to draw back at the eleventh hour were he not ashamed to face in himself such cowardice. He took out the photograph and looked at it, and the eyes of Clara Chanfrey seemed to smile at him with something of tender irony. "Do not be afraid of me; I will never disappoint you," they said. After all, what could the mere passage of years mean to such a face as that? What could the bitter experiences of a sorrowful life hold in them to tarnish ever the spirit that looked from it? The reluctance was only superficial, a ripple of reaction upon the deep tide of his impulse.

At four that afternoon he drove to a long, narrow street near the Boulevard St. Germain--a street of large, bleak houses showing a sort of dismantled stateliness. At one of the largest, stateliest, bleakest of these the fiacre stopped, and Damier, after asking the way of a grimly respectable concierge with a small knitted shawl of black wool folded tightly about her shoulders, mounted a wide, uncarpeted stone staircase to the highest floor, feeling, as he stood outside the door, that, despite the long ascent, the thick beating of his heart was due more to emotional than to physical causes.

He rang, and as he stood waiting he heard suddenly within a woman's voice singing. The voice was beautiful, and the song was Schumann's "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai." Its pathos, its simplicity, its tenderness, mingled with Damier's almost tremulous mood, and pierced his very soul. It was like an awakening in Paradise; there was the remembered sadness of a long, long past; the strange, melancholy rapture of something dawning, something unknown and wonderful. Could any music more fitly usher in the coming meeting?

A middle-aged servant came to the door, conventual in the demure quiet of her dress and demeanor, and ushered Damier into a bare and spacious room where the light from scantily curtained windows shone broadly across the polished floor. A woman rose and came forward from the piano. Damier's first impression, after the breathless moment in which he saw that it was not _she_, was one of dazzling beauty.

"I am Mademoiselle Vicaud--Claire Vicaud," this young woman said, "and you are Mr. Damier. My mother is expecting you; she will be here directly."

Perhaps he felt, as she smiled gravely upon him, it was the power in her face, rather than its beauty, that had dazzled him. Already he discovered something almost repellent in its enchantment. Her eyes were dark, with a still, an impenetrable darkness; a small mole emphasized the scarlet curve of her upper lip; the lines of cheek and brow were wonderfully beautiful. It was, indefinably, in the soft spreading of the nostrils, in the deeply sunk corners of the mouth, that one felt a plebeian touch. There was nothing, however, of this quality in the carriage of her head, with its heavy tiara of dark-red hair, nor in the dignity and grace of her figure; and nothing in her, except some vague suggestion in this grace and dignity, reminded him of the photograph; and he was at once deeply glad of this, glad that Mademoiselle Vicaud resembled her father--he felt sure she did--and not her mother.

She seated herself, indicating to him a chair near her, and observed him with the same grave smile, and in an unembarrassed silence, while he spoke of his pleasure at being in Paris, at finding them there. Damier himself was not unembarrassed; found it difficult to talk trivialities to this Hebe while thrilling with expectation; and Mademoiselle Vicaud, unable otherwise to interpret it, may well have seen in her own radiant apparition the cause of his slight disturbance.

"But you are not old," she said to him.

"Did you expect that?" he inquired.

"Then you are not a friend of Mamma's--a friend of her youth, I mean? I don't think that she was quite sure who you were."

"It is only through an old friend of hers that--I hope to become another," Damier finished, smiling.

"Well, _pour commencer_, you may be our young friend--we have time, you and I, before we need think of being old ones. I get tired of old things, myself."

"Even of old friends?" Damier asked, amused at her air of placid familiarity.

"Ah, that depends."

He observed that Mademoiselle Vicaud, though speaking English with fluent ease, had in her voice and manner some most un-English qualities. Her voice was soft, deep, and a little guttural. She had a way, he noticed later on, of saying "Ah" when one talked to her, a placid little ejaculation that was curiously characteristic and curiously foreign.

But at the moment further observations were arrested. The door opened, and rising, as a swift footfall entered the room, Damier found himself face to face with his lady of the photograph.

He blushed. His emotion showed itself very evidently on his handsome, sensitive face, so evidently that the strangeness of the meeting made itself felt as a palpable atmosphere, and made conventional greetings an effort and something of an absurdity. Madame Vicaud, however, dared the absurdity, and so successfully that the formal sweetness of her smile, the vague geniality of her voice, as she said right things to him, seemed effortless. Damier, through all the tumult of his hurrying impressions, comparisons, wonders, yet found time to feel that she was a woman who could make many efforts and seem to make none. Her manner slid past the stress of the moment; her wonder, if she felt any, was not visible. All that she showed to her sudden visitor, introducing himself through a past that must have been long dead to her, was the smile, the geniality, vague and formal, of the woman of the world.

By contrast to this atmosphere of rule and reticence, the few words he had exchanged with the daughter seemed suddenly intimate--seemed to make a bond where the mother's made a barrier. But above all barriers, all reticences, was the one fact--the wonderful fact--that she was she, changed so much, yet so much the same that the change was only a deepening, a subtilizing of her charm.

"Yes, I remember Mrs. Mostyn so well," said Madame Vicaud, "and it is many years ago now. She must be old. Does she look old? Is she well? Will she come to Paris one day, do you think? Ah, as for my going to England to see her, that is a great temptation, a sufficient one were the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she really, now, knows it better than I do."

Mademoiselle Vicaud did not meet her mother's glance as it rested upon her; her eyes were fixed, with their dark placidity, upon Damier, as she sat sidewise in her chair, her hands--they were large, white, beautifully formed--loosely interlaced on the chair-back.

"Yes; I know England well," she said--"educational England. I went to school there. I associate England with all that is formative and improving; I have been run through the mold so many times."

"Run through?" Damier asked, smiling. "Have you never taken the form, then?" He was not interested in Mademoiselle Vicaud, although he felt intimate with her; but her mother's glance brought her between them, placed her there; one was forced to look at her and to talk to her.

"Do you think I have?" Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. "I hope not," she added, "physically, at least. I don't like your English outline, as far as that is concerned." Damier could but observe that hers was not English. She was supple, curved--slender, yet robust; one saw her soft breathing; her waist bent with a lovely flexibility. But the contemplation of these facts, to which she seemed, with the indifference of perfect assurance, to draw his attention, emphasized that sense of intimacy in a way that rather irritated him; Mademoiselle Vicaud, her outline and her exquisite gowning of it, slightly jarred upon him. He hardly knew how to word his appreciation of her difference, and after saying that he was glad she had escaped the more unbecoming influences of his country, added: "I hope that there were some things you cared to adopt."

"They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid," said Mademoiselle Vicaud.

Her mother, while they interchanged these slight pleasantries, continued to look at her daughter.

"You rather exaggerate, do you not, Claire, the coercive nature of your English experience?" she said. "It was not all school; there was play, too."

"Play like the kindergarten kind, with a meaning in it. My mother has always been anxious for me to take the right impressions," said Mademoiselle Vicaud, her eyes still on Damier; "she has always chosen them for me."

There was a momentary silence after this--a silence that might, Damier fancied, have held something of irritation for the mother, though none showed itself in the calm intelligence of her glance as it rested on her daughter.

Looking from her before the pause could become significant of anything like argument or antagonism, she asked Damier for how long he expected to remain in Paris, and the talk floated easily into cheerful and familiar channels--concerts, the play, books, and pictures.

She was so much more like the photograph than he had expected, and yet so different! The figure was the same, almost girlish, more girlish, really, than Mademoiselle Claire's, though the fall in the line of her shoulders, the erect poise with which she sat, recalled a girlishness of another epoch, another tradition.

There was that in the folds of her long silk skirt,--a worn, shining silk, yet in its antiquity replete with elegance,--in the position of her narrow foot pointing from beneath its folds, in the way she lightly folded her arms while she talked to him, that suggested deportment, a manner trained, and as much a part of her as putting on her shoes was. She was very mannered and very unaffected; the manner was like the graceful garment of her perfect ease and naturalness--their protection, perhaps, and their ornament. As for her face, Damier, looking at it while they talked, felt its enchantment growing on him, like the gradual tuning of exquisite instruments preparing him for perfect music. Still, the face of the photograph, so unchanged that it was startling to feel how much older it was. The abundant hair was dressed in the same fashion, but its black was now of an odd grayness that made one just aware that it was no longer black. The heart-shaped oval was emphasized; the cheeks were thin, the chin sharply delicate, the lips compressed when she did not smile--but she frequently smiled--into a line of endurance, of a patience almost bitter. There were tones of pale mauve in the faint roses of her lips and cheeks, but Damier felt that this charming tint must always have been theirs--went with the snow and ebony of her type. Although her face was little lined,--emotion with her had been repressed, not demonstrated,--it had a look more aging than lines--a look of bleakness, of a cold impassivity. The texture of her skin was like a white rose-petal just fading. And in this faded whiteness her dark eyes gazed, more stern, more tragic than in youth. There was in them, and in the straight line of her black brows above them, a somberness and almost a menace. Damier wondered over the strange contrast to her frequent smile. He saw that where Mademoiselle Vicaud was still and grave her mother was light and gay, but the gaiety and lightness--he traced the impression further--were part of the manner, the protecting, ornamental manner; were something that had once been real, and were now put on, like her shoes, again. The daughter showed herself, or seemed to show herself, imperturbably: the mother was hidden, masked; her eyes, with their contrasting smile, made him think of Tragedy glancing among garlands of roses.

Before he went, that day, Damier told Madame Vicaud that his stay in Paris was to be indefinite; had even let her see, if she wished to, that she counted among his reasons for staying. He was sure that he was to go far, but he knew that he must go with discretion. One thing discretion evidently required of him--to include Mademoiselle Claire with her mother; her mother constantly included her. It was necessary to invite them both to drive in the Bois next day. It was then that he learned that Madame Vicaud and her daughter both gave lessons, mademoiselle in singing,--she had studied with the best masters,--madame in the harp and piano. Damier cast a glance upon the harp; the same, no doubt. Hours of engagements had to be consulted. They could both, however, be free next day at four.

V

DAMIER was able, while waiting for them in the salon on the following day, to see more clearly Madame Vicaud's environment, now that it was empty of her. It was one of work, poverty, and refinement. Books lined one side of the walls; the furniture was of the scantiest, simplest description; a row of old prints--after Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, some of them very good--were hung straightly above the simple writing-table; on this table stood a small pot of pink flowers, and on a large table near the center of the room were books, reviews, and a work-box; the harp and the grand piano dominated the room. The high windows did not overlook the street, but the branches, flecked still with gold and russet autumn leaves, of an old garden. Turning from this outlook, Damier found his attention fixed by a large photograph that occupied a prominent place in a black frame upon a sedate cabinet near the window. It was the photograph of a man--of Monsieur Vicaud, Damier knew at once. He gazed long at the face, still young, yet showing already touches of decay and degradation in the poetry and beauty of its youth. Without these touches--of presage more than actuality--it might have been the face of a Paolo, with tossed-back hair and superb, unfettered throat. Monsieur Vicaud had evidently been one of the few men whom a Byronic disarray becomes. Damier saw in the face the enchantment that had deluded Clara Chanfrey, and hints of the horror that had wrecked all enchantment. The longer one looked at the ardent, dreamy eyes, the perfect lips,--helpless, as it were, before one, and unable in charm of change to divert one's attention from their essential meaning,--the more one felt cruel selfishness, hard indifference, and lurking evil. Instinctively he turned and walked away from Monsieur Vicaud as he heard footsteps outside.

When the mother and daughter came in together, he could infer, even more clearly than from the bareness of the salon, from Madame Vicaud's shabby furs and unfashionable wrap, that life, to be kept up at all with niceness and finish, must be something of a struggle for them; yet, with her small black bonnet, which she was tying with black gauze ribbons beneath her chin, her neat gloves, the poise of her shoulders, and her swift, light step, she was still unmistakably _une élégante_. It was natural, he supposed,--though feeling some resentment at such naturalness,--that the struggle should be the mother's mainly; the law of maternal self-sacrifice perhaps demanded it. Claire was charmingly dressed, simply, and with a Parisienne's unerring sense of harmony and fitness. She was neither shabby nor unfashionable; the fashion, too, expressed her, not itself.

After all, she still, though she was no longer _une toute jeune fille_,--she must be twenty-seven,--had her life before her, and her achievement of pretty clothes could hardly be imputed as blame to her.

The early November afternoon in the Bois was misty, with sunlight in the mist; the air was mild. Madame Vicaud's dark eyes looked down the long vistas, seeing, perhaps, other figures in them, other pictures. Damier and Mademoiselle Vicaud talked of Italy. She had never been there, but she questioned him about Florence and Rome, and Madame Vicaud asked him if he had heard much of the old church music; and the music had been his greatest enjoyment. Madame Vicaud was fond of Palestrina, she said; but she said little of the fondness, and only listened with a half-detached, half-assenting smile while Claire and the young man went on from Gluck to Wagner. Mademoiselle Vicaud was full of admiration--though her admirations were always unemphatic--for the latter; but Madame Vicaud, though retaining, evidently, no lurking survivals of taste for the operatic music of her youth, would own only to a tempered liking for the great opera-master. She mused lightly over Damier's demand for her preferences, and inclined to think that opera never meant much to her; it was a form of art that offended her taste almost inevitably; its appeal to the eye could so rarely justify itself, and the music, of course, was restricted by its being pinned down to definite descriptive themes.

Claire hummed out, in a melancholy, emotional contralto, a phrase from "Tristan." "I can't sing him--none of our French throats can; but he fills me, sweeps me up; that is all I ask of music. Mamma likes music to lift her; I like it to carry me away." Among the deep, almost purple reds of her hair, the tawny luster of her coiling furs, her cheeks, in the keen, fresh air, glowed dimly. "No, I could not sing Wagner," she sighed; "but I could sing. I am an _artiste manquée_; the one, perhaps, for being my father's daughter, the other for being my mother's. She would rather have me teach--try to force a little of my own energy and feeling into dough-like souls--than have me sing in public." Mademoiselle Vicaud's smile had no rancor as she made these statements, and her mother's distant gaze showed no change, nor did she speak.

"It is a hard and a rather tawdry life, that of an opera-singer," said Damier; "and, I fancy, almost an impossible one in Paris."

"Ah, but I am tawdry," Claire observed. If antagonism there had ever been on this subject, it had evidently long since left behind it the stage of discussion. Claire made no appeal or protest--merely stated facts.

"You see," she went on, very much as if she and Damier were alone together, "if it were not for that artist nature, Mamma would not, perhaps, mind so much. It is because I am not--what shall we call it?--respectable? _hein_?--well, that will serve--that she dreads such tests for me."

Damier now saw that, though Madame Vicaud's silence kept all its calm, she very slightly flushed. He felt in her a something, proud and shrinking, that steeled itself to hear the jarring note of her daughter's jest; and was it a jest? Again the contrast in the two faces struck him, this time with something of fundamental alienation in the contrast. It occupied his mind after Madame Vicaud, very unemphatically, not at all as if she felt that it needed turning, took the lead of the conversation, and while Claire, leaning back in her corner, listened with, when she was particularly addressed, her indolent "Ah!" It was, indeed, like going from one world to another to look from her mother's face to hers. Already he felt for her a mingling of irritation and pity that was to grow as he knew her better.

How strangely she was tainted with something really almost _canaille_; the soft depth of her voice reeked with it. And how strangely blind must the affection of the mother be that could bridge the chasm that separated her from her daughter, unconscious--her evident devotion to her proved that--of its very existence.

VI

MADAME and Mademoiselle Vicaud were at home on Tuesdays, and Damier felt that he would always receive a courteously cordial welcome on these formal occasions; but he felt, too, for some weeks, that the courtesy, the pleasant graciousness of his reception, did not grow in warmth. He was accepted, but no more. Madame Vicaud treated him as she might have treated him had he been but one habitué of a crowded salon. Her salon was anything but crowded; he soon had numbered its habitués. There was a monotony about these Tuesday reunions; they were rather thin and colorless; thin only in quantity, not in quality, for that was excellent--reminded him of Madame Vicaud's black silk dresses with their white lawn cuffs and collars, a quality worn but irreproachable. Damier came to find a flavor, an unusualness, in the cool cheerfulness of the Tuesday teas.