Part 4

What to him was poetry--for, to a certain extent, she seemed to appreciate his attitude toward her mother--was to her the mere furniture of life. Damier resented, but for some time was helpless; she gave him no occasion for declaration or defense. Once or twice, when, _à propos de bottes_, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a _cela-va-sans-dire_ expression vastly baffling. Only by degrees, and only after some definite sharpnesses on his side, did she seem to realize that, in including him in her own casual attitude toward her mother, she not only misinterpreted but irritated and antagonized him. After that realization she never so offended again. Indeed, with an air of honoring his fantastic sensitiveness, yet with gravity, as if to show him that she, too, could appreciate moral charm, the pathos of defeat and finality, she often alluded to her mother's fine and gracious qualities; but, in spite of this concession, Damier was still aware of the indefinable difference that made the atmosphere seem disloyal.

She said one day: "You have really decided to live in Paris--for ever and ever--_hein_? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us interesting?"

"Very," replied Damier.

"But the world is full of so many more interesting people," said Claire, "than two ladies, one almost old and one rapidly leaving her youth behind her, who live the narrowest of lives and give lessons to make butter for their bread."

"I have not met many more interesting."

"Then it is--to study us?" Her sleepy smile was upon him.

Damier had certainly no intention of confiding in Claire the reasons for his stay in Paris, feeling suddenly, indeed, that the young woman herself formed a rather serious problem in all practical considerations of these reasons; yet the attitude implied in her question demanded a negative. "No, it isn't because I am studying you; it is because I am fond of you," he said, bringing out the words with a touch of awkwardness, feeling their simplicity to be almost crude.

Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he knew, though he was not looking at her.

"_Vous êtes un original_," she said at last, with quite the manner of her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some specimen of British eccentricity.

On another day a little incident occurred, slight, yet destined to impress Damier with a deeper sense of Claire's unsoundness. They were walking down the Champs-Elysées, in the windy brightness of a March afternoon, when, in the distance, near the Rond Point, they discerned the easily recognizable figure of Monsieur Daunay. Claire, as this old friend appeared upon the field of vision, put her hand in Damier's arm and, drawing him toward one of the smaller streets that slope down to the spacious avenue, said, smiling unemphatically: "Don't let us meet him."

"Why not?" Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous evasion.

"He hasn't seen us--come," she insisted, though the insistence was still veiled in humor.

"Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him."

Her eyes measured Monsieur Daunay's distance before she said, with something of impatience at his slowness of comprehension: "He will be shocked--think it improper--our walking out alone like this." Damier stared at her, stolidly resistant to the soft pull of her hand.

"Improper? Your mother consenting--you an Englishwoman, I an Englishman?"

"He is a Frenchman, and I am half French; you seem to forget that, both you and Mamma, at times." If she was irritated with him she successfully controlled her irritation, and Monsieur Daunay was so near that flight before his misinterpretation was impossible. She evidently resigned herself to the situation of Damier's making--let him feel, with a shrug of her shoulders, that it was of his making indeed, but, by a half-indifferent, half-ironic smile, that he was forgiven; he must be strong enough for both of them, the smile said.

Monsieur Daunay approached, doffing his hat, and Damier at once perceived that there was certainly in his eye a cogitation very courteous, but altogether out of keeping, he thought, with the importance of its cause. He himself felt absent-minded, his thoughts engaged more with the analysis of the new and disagreeable sensation Claire had given him than with the sensations she might have given Monsieur Daunay. He replied somewhat vaguely to Monsieur Daunay's salutations, and, not so vaguely, heard Claire saying, "Mamma has sent us out for a walk."

"Fine weather for walking," Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.

"You often walk here?" he continued pleasantly.

"Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr. Damier takes us out sometimes."

"Madame Vicaud is at home?"

"Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us."

"She is well, I trust?"

"Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?" Claire laid a gently urgent hand upon his arm. "I have been practising the Gluck. I think you will be pleased with it. You will come?"

"With great pleasure, as always," said the Frenchman, but still with something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.

They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.

"He was shocked," said Claire, mildly.

Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.

"We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us," he said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took; it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier's part to express displeasure.

"There was no necessity for him to know that," she returned, adding, with a laugh: "Now I have shocked both of you--he in his _convenances_, you in your English veracity. I don't mind fibbing in the least, I must tell you."

"Don't you?" His displeasure was now determined to show its definite coolness.

"Not in the least," said Claire, with perfect good humor, "in myself or in others"; and she added, with a little laugh at herself, "unless other people's fibs interfere with mine; but I think that I mind their fibs interfering less than their truths."

Damier resigned himself to feeling that, after all, he was thoroughly prepared for any such developments in Claire; it was the tragedy in the thought of the other Clara that was knocking at his heart.

IX

THE arrival in Paris, where she was to pass some months, of a friend of Damier's, Lady Surfex, a charming, capable woman whose husband was his nearest friend, was the means of casting a further and still more lurid light upon Claire's character and Madame Vicaud's past.

Damier wished to bring Madame Vicaud and Lady Surfex together. He had plans, and was vastly amused to realize that they were of a quite paternal character. These plans did not go beyond the thought that a widening of Claire's life might be an excellent thing for her, and, as a result, a happy thing for her mother. To see Claire well, safely, happily married, would not this be the lifting of a problem from the mother's heart? As yet he had not gone further and told himself that it would leave the mother's heart freer for the contemplation of other problems. Now Claire's chances of a prosperous marriage would certainly be multiplied if he could bring around her and her mother a few such friends as Lady Surfex. He spoke to her, on his first visit to her, of the Vicauds, and of his wish that they might meet. "The charming Clara Chanfrey!" Lady Surfex said. (With what a chime all allusions to Clara Chanfrey always began, to end with such funereal tolling!) "Ah, you make me feel how old I am becoming, for how often in my girlhood I heard my mother speak of her! She always spoke severely. Mother belonged to the old régime, you know--saw things steadily, and saw them whole, perhaps, but rather narrowly, and only one thing at a time. She couldn't take in, as it were, the extenuations of circumstance. And she was a great friend of Lady Chanfrey's. Lady Chanfrey infected all her allies with her own bitterness. But the memory of the daughter's charm came through it. She was like her father, not like her mother. I never liked the little I remember of Lady Chanfrey. But I have heard of Madame Vicaud since I used to hear of her from mother, and, I am sorry to say, more and more sadly."

"All I hear of her is sad," said Damier. "Every echo from her past is a groan!"

"Poor woman!" Lady Surfex mused. "First the awful husband, and then the, to say the least of it, trying daughter."

Damier's heart stiffened. "Trying? In what way--I may ask?"

"Of course you may--you know them so well; and, as I see, your sympathy is all with the mother. Well, I am afraid she is altogether trying, but the instance of which I was thinking deserves a severer adjective. Some friends of mine in Cheshire, nice, quiet people, had always kept more or less in touch with Madame Vicaud during her stormy life. They did not meet, but they sometimes wrote. Mrs. Barnett and she had been friends in girlhood. Claire, when she grew up, went to stay with them. Very beautiful, very clever, singing wonderfully, yet, from the beginning, she struck a false note. And then there was the ugly little story: a young man, Captain Dauncey, fell madly in love with her; they were engaged; and, within hardly a month's time, she jilted him openly and brazenly for a better match. That was only the beginning. Sir Everard Comber was madly in love, too, but Mrs. Barnett told me that they felt that he knew there was no good metal under her glamour; the glamour was so great that he hoodwinked himself. It was tragic to see him trying not to see. And one day he and Mrs. Barnett found Mademoiselle Vicaud engaged in a flirtation in an arbor, indolently allowing an adoring young man to kiss her hand, his arm around her waist. Mrs. Barnett said that it was the most unpleasant of situations--poor Sir Everard's face, the girl's look of dismay, followed by an instant assumption of coolness. She was able, almost at once, to show a humorous, half-vexed, half-tolerant smile, and to pretend that she expected them to share her playful anger against the hugely embarrassed culprit. She behaved, afterward, very badly about Sir Everard's breaking off the engagement, which he did most delicately and generously. She had no dignity; she was furious, and showed that she was. She even hinted once--only once, but it was enough--at a breach-of-promise suit and damages.

"Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is the story," said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a whitened face, kept a sick silence--"only the story, after all, of a vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.

"I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know, nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the girl could be married off to somebody who understood--and didn't mind. Don't you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?"

Damier could not think just now of Claire's future; he was thinking, persistently, of Madame Vicaud--seeing her as a white flower sunken up to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her daughter--greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the tortured mother's heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her silences, her reserves!

In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible atonement to Madame Vicaud.

"Have I been wrong in telling you--ungenerous?" asked Lady Surfex.

"No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one can help her."

"We will lift her!" said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed face. "And then, if we do,--right out of the mother's life,--what will she do alone?"

"She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life."

"Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her husband."

"Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!"

"Not so much to find one--she is enchanting in appearance, I hear--as to keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you, Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?"

He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.

"Quite so absorbing."

X

YET that very evening Damier was to have his freshly emphasized disgust unsettled, as theories are so constantly unsettled by new developments of fact. Claire did not show him a new fact about herself; she merely explained herself a little further, and made it evident that one could not label her "vulgar" and so dispose of her.

It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon, sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window--opened on the warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture, the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could love--even--even--he had wondered over it more and more of late--her mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an inner shrine of sorrow.

His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or hear.

That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little Sophie; and Claire's gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor Sophie's ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet, sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from dim tree-tops outside to Claire's white form and splendid head, he felt that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her beauty to his eye.

"The chief thing," said Claire,--they had been talking in a desultory fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look, adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,--"the chief thing is to know what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what they want, you know--unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic." (Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very pregnant.) "You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted; therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint well--you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?--though Mamma, you see, has his photograph conspicuously _en évidence_ up there, lest I should think too ill of him--or guess how ill she thinks of him herself. I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he did. You know his pictures. I don't care about pictures, but I suppose there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices--the prejudices of the _jeune fille anglaise_. I"--she smiled a little at him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had evoked in his expression--"I have a very restricted field for choice; but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma--yes, I am coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too; but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked--the latter, probably, for she has a strong will."

"Perhaps," said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms folded and knees crossed, listening to her--"perhaps you underestimate her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own nature."

"I don't think it is at all splendid," said Claire, composedly; "some wickedness is, I grant you; but do I strike you as affecting that kind?"

"I must own that you don't."

"Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?" she pursued.

Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.

"Ah, that is well. I should not like you to misinterpret me," said Claire. "I make no poses." And after a slight pause in which he wondered anew over her, she added: "I merely like enjoyment better than anything else in the world."

"Yours, you know, is a very old philosophy--a universe of will and enjoyment; but one must have a great deal of the former to attain the latter in a world of so many clashing aims," said Damier.

"Yes, one must."

"And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible one."

"Do you think so?" Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.

"Don't you?"

"No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one's aims; it is all beautiful, even the suffering--if one avoids suffering one's self."

"You are an esthete--

While safe beneath the roof, To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain."

"Oh, better than rain--the tempest!"

"And how can one avoid suffering, pray?"

"_Mais_,"--Claire had a tolerant smile for his naïveté,--"by staying under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be darting out continually into the storm."

"Bringing other people back to shelter."

"And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us wet!" smiled Claire. "For a case in point--don't you find Sophie a bore? She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit--her last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have been a wise thing. Don't be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more clearly her higher wants. And--I don't want to seem more ungenerous than I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don't look so stony; I am not really _un mauvais coeur_. I would willingly dot Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but husbands and houses and money wouldn't make Sophie comfortable, and I don't really see that much is gained by making two people less so in order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole."

"I need hardly tell you that I don't share the ruthless materialism of that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie's unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to survival?"

Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet rueful.

"How often you surprise me," she said, "and how often you make me feel that I don't, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid. With you _tout comprendre_ is not _tout pardonner_."

"By no means," Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.

"Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if you can't forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have: I never pretend to be better than I am."

"And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you know." Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he spoke.

Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:

"Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so because I won't suffer, won't go out of my life into other people's. You asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: _to suffer with_--why should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one's self--to bring things to one's self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma will not understand in me."

Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother for her own benefit as well as his, went on:

"She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a different way. She is always striving--against things; I wait. Even if she can't see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at."

"What things do you aim at?" he now asked.

"Oh--you know; things that Mamma despises--things that you too despise, perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand." He could not quite interpret the glance that rested upon him. "And Mamma's aims--I suppose you don't care to hear what I think of them?"

"On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has aimed at. What has she attained?"

He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for the one evident, the one tragic failure.

"Well,"--Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the window,--"for one thing, she has kept herself--she hasn't attained it: that wasn't needful--_très grande dame_. She has always made herself a social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma's spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and beneficent."