Part 5

Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was one. It was touching--meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that, too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling, with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very gentle kindliness, he said to her: "Strong enough to make you flower some day, let us believe"; and, as silently she still gazed upon him: "That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know."

Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him, Claire now said: "I owe that flower, not to her, but to you."

He stared for a moment, not comprehending.

"You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my appreciation?"

"Yes--in a sense, I mean that."

"But," said Damier, smiling, "you owe it to her that there is something beautiful to see."

He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.

Claire, without moving, turned her eyes on the door. "Here she is," she said; and as her mother entered, she added, in the lowest voice above a whisper, so vaguely that it was like a fragrant perturbing influence breathing from the twilight and the spring air:

"I like to owe all my flowers to you."

Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.

Madame Vicaud, in her black dress, with flowing white about her wrists and throat,--a throat erect and beautiful,--had closed the door softly behind her, and as she came toward him, Damier, involuntarily carrying further his Venusberg simile of some moments before, thought of an Elizabeth bringing peace and radiance; yet there was, too, a gravity in her gaze, a quick intentness that went swiftly from her daughter to him. Then the smile and the lightness masked her. She took his hand.

"Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?"

"Of life, and how to live it," laughed Damier.

"Wise young people! Was it a contest of sublimities?" Madame Vicaud laid down the evening wrap she had brought in, and, it seemed to Damier, averted her face from him as she took up a box of matches.

"Do I ever fight under the banner of sublimity, Mamma?" Claire inquired, looking out of the window, showing once more her accustomed lassitude and detachment. "I leave those becoming colors to you--and to Mr. Damier."

"But don't, even in jest, my dear, assume always the unbecoming ones," Madame Vicaud replied, still with all her lightness, and bending, her face still averted, to strike a match. "You have discovered, have you not, Mr. Damier, that it is difficult for Claire to assume the virtues that she has?"

She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on the cabinet where her husband's portrait stood; and Damier, watching the swift blackness of her girlish figure, the slender white of her uplifted hand,--the black more black, the white more white, as the radiance slowly grew in the dim room,--still fancied that she was mastering some emotion, hiding from him some sudden agitation. There was a faint flush on her face as she turned, gaily and sweetly, blowing out and tossing away her match, to welcome Sophie.

XI

DAMIER was well aware that some trivial and purely subjective fancy or emotion may oddly color and distort reality for one, and he was not quite able to decide whether change there really were in Madame Vicaud, or whether it was only in his imagination that the difference he had fancied in her on that evening was continued during the following days. She seemed, in her relations with him, more intimate and yet more effaced; and he was almost sure--or was it only the reflection of his own solicitude cast upon her?--that she watched him, speculated upon him, more than at any time in their friendship, and always with that controlled agitation. It was almost as if she guessed his new knowledge and understanding of her sorrows and humiliations; as if she wondered how much he knew, and how much he was going to let her see that he knew. And if she seemed more intimate yet more effaced, Claire, for a little while at all events, was less intimate yet more in evidence. He had the rather uncomfortable feeling that Claire had implied on that evening more than he had been able to understand; that she had laid upon him some responsibility that he really never had undertaken to accept: but she did not emphasize it further, seemed content to let it remain indefinitely apprehended by him, and the slight discomfort and perplexity he had felt passed from his mind, leaving only in a half-conscious undercurrent the mood of vague doubt and withdrawal, mingling with a deeper pity, a deeper desire to help--for her own sake now as well as for her mother's.

It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background--a mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things--she smiled more tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though expecting him to understand more than she could look.

And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly tinted difference over all the mental landscape.

It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her solitude.

Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things back in their places, closing the piano--a little restless in her restoration of composure to the room.

Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book. "Always friends, you know," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and speaking lightly, almost incidentally.

"Why not?" Damier asked, looking up at her.

"Indeed, why not?" she returned, smiling. "Nothing, I hope, would ever change our friendship."

"Nothing could." She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: "You will tell me if you are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so little?"

"Oh, yes; I will tell you," she answered, still with the lightness that contrasted with the tremor of Damier's voice.

Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire's singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung Orféo's song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire's interpretation of the song. Claire's voice had thrown an enchantment around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.

"Her voice is glorious," he said.

"The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera," said Madame Vicaud; "that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through horror."

"Ah," was on Damier's lips, "you have said what she could not sing"; but he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp with its plain green shade: "Do you think Claire's life very gray--very dreary?"

The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter's upbringing, seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was, perhaps, Claire's gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious, dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed the mitigating supposition. Claire's life was really neither gray nor dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: "From her point of view it probably is."

"I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as she does. Not that Claire complains."

"You have given her your best. How could she complain?" Damier was not able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire complaining.

"Ah, I could not blame her if she did," said Madame Vicaud, her quiet eyes on her work, "for mothers personify circumstance to children; we are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very naturally, we are fate's whipping-boys: and when one is a young and talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons, in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem to deserve blows."

Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,--of which she must be so ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,--longed to throw himself at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he had--not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her superiority--thought her unconscious of Claire's pathos.

"You deepen your shadows too much," he said; "for a daughter more like yourself your life would not be a narrow one." He paused, for, though she did not lift her eyes, a faint flush passed over Madame Vicaud's face.

"I see all your efforts to widen it," he went on, hurrying away from what he felt to have been an unfortunate comparison, "the flowers you strew: intellectual, artistic interests, friends that you hope she may find congenial, your delightful teas."

"Oh--our teas!" Madame Vicaud interrupted, smiling with a rather satirical playfulness. "No; our delightful and 'cultured' little teas can hardly atone to Claire. She should have the gaiety, the variety, the colored experience that I had in my youth. I can well imagine that to Claire's palate the nourishment I offer her is rather tasteless. She needs excitement, admiration, appreciation, an outlet for her energy, her intelligence."

Damier seized the opportunity--it was, he thought, very propitious--again to ask her when he might bring some of his friends in Paris to see her, suggesting that so Claire's social diet might be pleasantly diversified. Madame Vicaud had more than once evaded--gracefully, kindly, and decisively--all question of renewing broken ties with her country-people, or making new ones, and now, again, she slightly flushed, as though for a moment finding him tactless and inopportune; but only for a moment: when she lifted her eyes to him, it was with all their quiet confidence of gaze.

"I hardly know that that would be for Claire's happiness or good. One must have the means of widening one's environment if it is to be with comfort to one's self. Our means are too limited to be diffused over a larger area. You must not forget, my friend, that we are very poor. I do not like accepting where I can offer nothing."

"That is a false though a charming delicacy," said Damier. "You give yourself; and I hope you won't refuse to now, for I have almost promised you to Lady Surfex; she is very anxious to meet you."

Madame Vicaud was silent for some moments, her eyes downcast to the work where she put firm, rapid stitches; then, in a voice that had suddenly grown icy, "Her mother did not recognize me one day, years ago, when she met me walking with my husband," she said.

It was now Damier's turn to flush. He nerved himself, after a moment, to say:

"But this is not the mother."

"No; and my husband is dead: otherwise the wish to meet me would not overcome that disability."

"You are a little unjust, my dearest friend," said the young man.

"I know the world," she replied; but she raised her eyes in saying it, and looked at him with a sad kindness that separated him from the world she knew. "I don't judge it--only see it as it is. It seeks happiness, it avoids unhappiness. To be unfortunate is to be lost, in its eyes--to sink from sight. To be fortunate is to have a radiance around one; and the world seeks radiance."

After looking at him she again bent her eyes, and still sewed on while she spoke. "When I needed it, it abandoned me. When I was in the dark, it did not look for me. I strayed--through stubborn folly, perhaps; perhaps, too, through generous ignorance--into a quicksand, and not a hand was held out to me. I was allowed to sink; I was déclassée, I am déclassée, in the eyes of all of those who were of my world." The cold flame of a long resentment burned in her steady voice. "I have tested average human nature," she resumed, after a slight pause, in which he saw her breast heave slowly. "It is a severe test, I own; but, after it, it is with difficulty that I can trust again. I have no wish to know people who, if I were in dire straits, would pass over on the other side of the way. The few friends I have I have proved--the comtesse, Madame Dépressier, Lady Vibert, Monsieur Daunay,--who had much to bear from my husband,--Sophie; there are a few more, very few; and then, you, my friend."

She stopped sewing--the rapid movements of her hand had been almost automatic--and looked at him, her work falling to her knee. "Come here," she said, holding out her hand to him, "come here. Have I seemed harsh to you?" Her sudden smile dwelt on him with a divine sweetness. "I am harsh--but not to you."

Damier, with an eagerness almost pathetically boyish, had sprung to her side, and she took his hand, smiling up at him. "Not to you. You have enlarged my trust--need I say how much? Don't ask me to alloy it with dubious admixtures."

His love for her was yet so founded on a sort of sacred fear that at this moment of delicious happiness he did not dare to stoop and confess all with a lover's kiss upon her hair, did not even dare to look a confession of more than a responsive affection.

She pressed his hand, still smiling at him, and then, resuming her sewing, "Sit near me," she said, "so I can see that you are not fancying that I am harsh with you!"

At such moments he could see in her eyes, that caressed one, made sweetest amends to one, touches of what must once have been enchanting roguishness.

"But I am still going to risk your harshness," he said; "I am still going to ask you to let your trust in me include my friend. She would stand tests. Won't you take my word for it?"

"I believe that I would take your word for anything."

"And," said Damier, looking his thanks, "all you say is true. I don't want to justify man's ways to man; and yet ordinary human nature, with its almost inevitable self-regarding instinct, its climb toward happiness, its ugly struggle for successful attainment of it, is more forgetful than cruel toward unhappiness. One must be patient with it; one must remember that only the exceptional natures can rise above that primitive instinct. To take the other road is to embrace the sacrifice of all the second-rate joys--the only real joys to the average human being. One must either yield to the instinct or fight it, and most people are too lazy, too skeptical of other than apparent good, to do that. And then you must remember--I must, for how often I have struggled with these thoughts!--that misfortune is a mask, a disguise. One can't be recognized and known when one wears it; one can't show one's self; if one could there would perhaps be responses. People are base--most of them are base, perhaps; but sometimes they are only blind or stupid."

"I sometimes think that I am all three," said Madame Vicaud, after a little pause. "Misfortune's distorting mask has become in me an actuality. I am perhaps blinded; certainly, as I told you, warped and hardened. I used not to be so; it was, I suppose, latent in me: I could not bear the fiery ordeal; the good shriveled and the dross remained."

She spoke with a full gravity, no hint of plaintive self-pity, no appeal for contradiction, in her voice; yet, on raising her saddened eyes, she had to smile when she met his look.

"I see," she said, "that you are determined to take me at your own valuation, not at mine."

She turned the talk after that; she could seldom be led to talk of herself, and not until dinner was over, not until, after it, he had read to her for an hour, did she return to its subject. Then it was when he rose to go that, giving him her hand in farewell, she said:

"Bring your friend; I shall be glad to see her."

XII

IT was as a result of this new friendship, which rapidly spread into half a dozen, that Damier, who seemed to himself to be walking among echoes of the past and whispered prophecies of the future, received yet another hint, another faint yet significant revelation, of Madame Vicaud's attitude toward her daughter.

In the more or less fluctuating social world of English Paris, the beautiful and distinguished mother and her beautiful and effective daughter struck a novel and quite resounding note,--too resounding for Madame Vicaud's taste, Damier at once felt,--a note well sustained by a harmony so decisive as Lady Surfex, Mrs. Wallingham (another new friend), and Damier himself. That Madame Vicaud disliked feeling herself a note sustained by any harmony, Damier guessed. That she mastered the dislike for his sake, he knew. He knew that she would do a great deal for his sake--a great deal for Lady Surfex, too. She and Lady Surfex liked each other absolutely. But it was through Lady Surfex, and her secret alliance with Damier, that the problem of Claire, instead of being unraveled, was the more deeply involved. Claire evidently enjoyed this new phase of life. She had now quite frequent opportunities for displaying her gowns and her voice and her dancing at receptions and balls. Yet, already, among her new entourage, she had shown her affinity with its less desirable members. A rich, fashionable, and rather tawdry Englishwoman took a great fancy to her; and Mrs. Jefferies was the sister of a fashionable and tawdry brother, Lord Epsil, who at once manifested a decided interest in the red-haired beauty, pronounced her to be like Sodoma's Judith, and made her mother's withdrawal of her from his company the more noticeable by his persistent seeking of hers.

"It is really too bad," Lady Surfex said to Damier. "She flirts outrageously with the man--if one can call that indolent tolerance flirting. I hope that she realizes that he is a bad lot. From a purely worldly point of view he can be of no advantage to her. He is married and has not a nice reputation."

"She may not realize it, she may be indifferent to it; but her mother realizes and is not indifferent."

"And we wanted to spare her such watchfulness!" sighed Lady Surfex.

"It seems that we can spare her nothing," Damier replied. At the same time he felt that Claire could be accused of nothing worse than too great a tolerance. Once or twice she spoke to him of Lord Epsil with half-mocking insight. "He is not like you," she said; "the difference amuses me." Claire's intelligence was, after all, her best safeguard in all that did not touch matters of delicate taste, and Damier's only way of helping her mother was to watch with her--to constitute himself a sort of elder brother in his attitude toward Claire, and to try, by being much with Claire himself, to make Lord Epsil's wish to be with her less able to manifest itself.

The faint yet significant hint of what Madame Vicaud's real feelings toward her daughter were came to him one evening at a dance, when she sat beside Lady Surfex, more beautiful, with her white face, her thick gray hair, in the dignity of her black dress, than any other woman there. He then saw on her face, as, fanning herself slowly, her head a little bent, she watched Claire dance, a concentration of the somberness it sometimes showed. It was a moment only of unconscious revelation; in another she had turned, with her quiet and facile gaiety, to a laughing comment of her companion's. But Damier, following that momentary brooding look, saw in a flash its interpretation on the daughter's face. Claire was dancing, exquisitely dressed, calm, competent, complacent, as noticeable and as graceful a figure as any in the room. And yet--he had felt it from the first, but never so clearly, so tragically, as through that somber maternal gaze--Claire was ill-bred. It was that her mother should see her so that made the revelation.

The somberness was not a fear of what others thought; she was, he knew, almost arrogantly indifferent to what people thought: it was what she herself thought that had gloomed her brow. And that she should see, should recognize, that affection should not mercifully have blinded her, filled Damier with a sort of consternation. Again all the ugly visions of Claire crossed his mind, and now, indeed, the mother stood transfixed beside them, for she, too, saw such visions. Ill-bred was a trivial, mitigating word.

He realized that this very quality--call it what one would--in Claire was the cause of her effectiveness, the reason, too, that his hopes for her would probably remain unfulfilled.

She was a woman upon whom, when she entered a room, all men's eyes turned. Her beauty was like the deep, half-triumphant, half-ominous note of brazen instruments. But she was not a woman that men of Madame Vicaud's world, of Lady Surfex's world, would care to marry. Had she been an heiress,--and she was of the type that one associates with unfragrant and recent wealth,--had it not been for her poverty, her essential obscurity, she would no doubt have been enrolled among the powerful young women who are watched with admiring envy as they advance toward a luminous match. Claire had quite the manner of placid advance, quite the manner (and how detestable to her mother the manner must be!) of a young woman bent upon "getting on." But though her indolent self-assurance made people give way before her, made her talked of and something of a personage, she was, as a result of her launching, far more likely to become notorious than eminent. Any success of Claire's must, like herself, be ill-bred, tainted.