Part 6

That Claire felt this, he doubted, or even that, if felt, she would mind; but that Madame Vicaud felt it he now agonized in knowing. And she had asked for her daughter neither eminence nor a luminous match; she had, he now saw, been glad to shield her with obscurity. That she might become notorious, fulfil herself completely in so becoming, would be the bitterest drop in her cup that fate could reserve for her.

If she dreaded it, she kept, at all events, a stoic's calm above the dread. And her restrictions, delicate, subtle, unemphasized, were about Claire on every side; her unobtrusive watchfulness was constantly upon her. With a cheerful firmness she held Claire to her duty of earning, as Claire had said, "the butter for her bread," and thwarted, without seeming to thwart, many of her social opportunities. Damier saw, though only faintly, under the surface of appearance her dexterity kept smooth, the constant drama of the conflict, a conflict that never became open or avowed. He saw that Madame Vicaud's cleverness was so great that even Claire hardly knew that there was a conflict; but after what he had seen in the mother's eyes on the night of the dance, he understood, at least, for what she was fighting.

Damier still felt the subtle change in his relations with Claire and Madame Vicaud, and he had by this time adapted himself to it--adapted himself to seeing Claire more constantly, seeing Madame Vicaud more rarely alone, encouraged as he was in this sacrifice by the strong impression that in so doing he was pleasing her, and was emphasizing that silent, yet growing, nearness and intimacy.

The silence was part of her extreme delicacy, and of her fineness of perception; it showed that his brotherly attitude toward Claire was what she had hoped for, and it was almost maternal in its sweetness of recognition to him, its loyalty of speechlessness toward the other child, the child that--he knew it so clearly now--could only give her profoundest pain; such a silence would a mother keep with the child that gave her happiness.

He had never more strongly felt this queer medley of influences than on one warm summer evening when he and Madame Vicaud sat outside the salon on the high balcony that overlooked the garden. They had dined,--he and Monsieur Daunay, and Claire and her mother,--and now Claire and Monsieur Daunay had established themselves at the piano in the distant end of the salon, the pale radiance of two candles enveloping them and deepening the half-gloom in the room's wide spaces.

Outside the twilight lingered, though beneath them the June foliage made mysteries of gloom; the warm breathing of the summer ascended in fragrance from still branches; the faint stars above shone in a pale sky.

They were both very silent, Damier looking at her, and she with eyes musingly downcast to the trees. Her face, he thought, showed a peculiarly deep contentment; more than that, perhaps: for he still felt the whisper of a mystery; still felt, in all the peace between them, a hint of perplexity; still divined that, though she was tranquil, her tranquillity had been wrested from some struggle,--a struggle that she had hidden from him,--as though she had yielded something with pain, even though, now, she was satisfied. Patience as much as tranquillity was upon her lips and brow; and yet he knew that, insensibly, she had come to lean upon the new strength he brought into her life; that she depended upon him, though she confided so little; that soon, very soon, her eyes must answer the unspoken question in his, and solve, in the answer, all mysteries. Indeed, he said to himself that, Claire's harassing problem all unsolved, he could not wait much longer; he must know just where he stood with her, and tell her where he wished to stand. Now, as they sat there, listening to Claire's richly emotional voice,--a voice that expressed so much more than it felt,--it was Claire's voice, just as it was the thought of Claire, that disturbed the peace, jarred upon the aspiration of his thoughts. Its beauty seemed to embroider the chaste and dreaming stillness with an arabesque of opulent curves and flaunting tendrils. Our imaginative young man could almost see a whiteness invaded by urgent waves of purple and rose and gold. He stirred, shifted his position involuntarily and uneasily--wished Claire would stop singing; her voice curiously irritated him.

Madame Vicaud sat with her back to the open window, and Damier, beside her, could not see into the room without turning his head. He did happen, however, to turn his head during a humming pause. Monsieur Daunay's hands were still held on the last chord, while, as Damier thought, he demonstrated to Claire some improvement in her rendering of the note that had just soared above it. But as he turned lazily to glance at them, Damier saw a strange, an unexpected thing, a thing poignantly disagreeable to him. Monsieur Daunay's face, vividly illuminated, was upturned to Claire's; he was speaking below his breath, under cover of the humming chord, and with a look of humble yet reproachful entreaty. Claire, a swift finger on her lips as she bent to the music, had a glance for the window, and Damier's eyes of astonishment and dismay met hers. He looked away abruptly--too abruptly for a successful controlling of the dismay and astonishment, for he found Madame Vicaud's eyes upon him, and he saw in a moment that they had been upon him during the swift incident--eyes filled with wonder and with an ignorant yet intense fear. Memories of another scene, hand-kissings in an arbor, flashed upon him, and he knew her thoughts. She met his look--as empty as he could make it--for a long moment; but after it she did not, also, glance into the room, where the song now flowed with an almost exaggerated spirit. Wrapping her arms more closely in her light shawl, she sat quite silent, the effort to control, to master the crowding of her surmises apparent in her rigidly still profile. Damier guessed that the surmises must, inevitably, suspect Claire, not Monsieur Daunay. In justice to Claire, after the involuntary silence of his dismay, he could not longer be silent. After all, and he drew a long breath in realizing it, Claire's past shadowed perhaps too deeply her present; after all, the fact was not so alarming.

"Have you never suspected," he said, "that Monsieur Daunay cares for Claire?"

She did not reply; turning a wan face upon him, her eyes still averted, she shook her head in a helpless negation of all such knowledge.

"Don't be distressed," said Damier, terribly afraid that he too much showed his own distress; "it is unfortunate for him, and wrong of him to keep such feeling from you; I happened just now to see its revelation in his face as he looked at Claire."

Madame Vicaud, for another moment, said nothing, struggling, he knew, with those awakened memories--or were they not always awake, clutching at her?

"He may care for Claire," she then said faintly, "but she cannot care for him; that--you know--is impossible."

"Only enough, I am sure, to wish to shield him."

"I could never have suspected. He is an old friend, a trusted friend. I must speak to him."

"Let me speak to him--may I? I will walk home with him to-night."

A certain relief in Madame Vicaud was taking a long, deep breath, and nothing could more clearly have assured him of the position he held in her eyes than the half-hesitating yet half-assenting consideration she gave to his rather odd proposal.

"But," she said, "will he not wonder--by what right--"

"I speak? By the right of my fondness for you."

"And for Claire, yes," said Madame Vicaud, thoughtfully.

Damier had not at all intended to imply this amendment, especially at a moment when he was so sure of not being at all fond of Claire; yet the trust of her inclusion was so unconscious of possible contradiction that he could not trouble it.

"But what will you say?" she went on. "Any reproach should come from me; and what reproach could you make? I cannot think he is more than piteous; people fall in love with Claire--often."

Damier was feeling that if, by chance, Monsieur Daunay were more than piteous, he must stand between Madame Vicaud and the discovery.

"I will be all discretion--all delicacy. I will only say that I was the unsuspecting, the involuntary witness of the incident; and that, as your friend, almost, I might say,"--he hesitated, seeking a forcible word in place of the one he dared not use,--"your son, I must ask him how much Claire knows of it--how far it should interfere with your confidence in him."

She was silent for a long moment, her head still turned from him to a silhouetted profile against the sky; it was now so much darker that he could see little more than its vague black and white, yet he thought that, in her stillness, she flushed deeply. In her voice, when she spoke, there was the steadiness that nerves itself over a tremor, yet there was, too, a greater relief. "Well," she said. The word assented to all he asked. She did not look at him again, and presently, as the music had ceased, rose and went into the room. Claire was pointing out to Monsieur Daunay a picture in a magazine, apparently all placidity; but in a moment near the parting, while Madame Vicaud, with an equal calm, stood speaking to Monsieur Daunay near the piano, Claire said to Damier, quietly but intently:

"You have not betrayed me to Mamma?"

"Betrayed you?" Damier questioned, ice in his voice.

"Him, rather," she amended. "Not that there is anything to betray, only Mamma would find it so shocking that a married man should be in love with me; he is so _bête_--Monsieur Daunay--to have forgotten that you were out there."

"I must tell you that your mother guessed that I had seen something. I told her what I had seen, that he loved you, though not that you seemed to accept his love."

For a moment she gazed into his eyes, at first with a gravity that studied him, and then with a light effrontery. "Accept it! _par exemple!_" she exclaimed, and she put her hand on his arm with a half-caressing reassurance. "Set your mind at rest! I am only sorry for him. Meet me to-morrow morning at ten at the Porte Dauphine; we can have a little walk in the Bois. I want to tell you all about it."

Monsieur Daunay was going, and Damier, as he turned from Claire, met Madame Vicaud's eyes. Their wide, dark gaze was, for the instant in which she let him see it, piteous and almost wild. He interpreted their fear, though he could not quite define their question. All the mother was in them. Did he despise her child, as others did? He mustered his bravest, most gravely confident smile, in answer to them, as he pressed her hand in parting. For another instant they met his, saw his smile, and answered it with a look tragically grateful in one so proud. He had never stood so near her as at that moment.

Damier went out with the Frenchman, and once in the cool, dim street, he dashed at the subject: "Monsieur Daunay, I must at once tell you that inadvertently this evening, through your own indiscretion, I discovered your secret. You are a married man; you are Madame Vicaud's trusted friend; and you love her daughter."

Monsieur Daunay stopped short in the street, exasperation rather than embarrassment in his face. He fixed Damier with very steady and very hostile eyes.

"And what then?" he asked.

"You have a perfect right," said Damier, "to ask what business it is of mine, and I can only answer that I, too, am a trusted friend of Madame Vicaud's, and, Monsieur Daunay, a friend whom she can trust."

"Ah, Monsieur Damier, you have--I do not deny it--more rights than I, who have none," said Daunay, in a voice the bitterness of which was a revelation to Damier. "I have no rights, only misfortunes. Why not add that you are Madame Vicaud's trusted friend, and that you, too, love her daughter?"

Damier felt a relief disproportionate, he realized, to any suspicions he had allowed himself to recognize. The atmosphere, after the unexpected thunderclap, was immensely cleared. Monsieur Daunay was jealous, and Monsieur Daunay was evidently piteous only. With all the vigor of a sudden release from bondage, he exclaimed: "You are utterly mistaken; I have no such rights: I do not love Mademoiselle Vicaud."

"What do you say?" Monsieur Daunay's astonishment was almost blank.

"I do not love her in the very least."

"Then," stammered the Frenchman, "we are not rivals? You can then pity me--I am jealous with none of the rights of jealousy."

"None of the rights?" Damier eyed him.

"None, monsieur; Madame Vicaud's trust in me is not unfounded," said Monsieur Daunay, with something of a slightly ludicrous grandiloquence.

"Yet Mademoiselle Vicaud knows of your attachment."

"I never declared it; she guessed it, perhaps inevitably." They were walking on again, and he shrugged his shoulders. "_Que voulez-vous?_ She has a certain tenderness for me that gives perception, and I adore her--but adore her, you understand." Damier was understanding and not at all disliking this victim of the glamour--or, was it not deeper than that? Something in the Frenchman's voice touched him. Would Claire ever arouse a deeper affection than this? Not only had she cast her glamour upon him: he evidently loved her--"but adore her, you understand," as he had said in his expressive French.

His hands clasped behind him, Monsieur Daunay, with now a reminiscent confidence, shook his head and sighed profoundly. "_Que voulez-vous?_" he repeated. "Since her girlhood it has been with me a hidden passion. _Ce que j'ai souffert!_" He showed no antagonism now, no resentment; Damier could but be grateful.

"Claire has not suffered through me," he went on. "She allows me to love her, but she knows that she is free. What can I claim?--an honorable man, and shackled. Yet--I have always hoped that she might, generously and nobly, keep an unclaimed faith with me. I have claimed none, and yet she has assured me that, as yet, she loves no other. I have needed the assurance of late--I confess it. Your apparent courtship I could not reproach her with,--though it tore my heart,--but her permission of this ill-omened Lord Epsil's attentions filled me with consternation; I have felt myself justified in reproaching her for her _légèreté_ in regard to this."

"But," said Damier, after a slight pause, "this unclaimed faith--how do you expect her to keep it?"

There was a touch of embarrassment in Monsieur Daunay's voice as he answered: "My wife and I have, for years, been on most unfortunate terms; I have no reproaches to address myself on her account. She is a confirmed invalid, and of late her condition has been critical. One must not hope for certain contingencies--one must not, indeed, admit the thought of them too often; but--if they did arise--"

"I see," said Damier, gravely; "you could claim her. It is, indeed, a most unpleasant contingency. Would it not be for Claire's happiness if you were not to see her again until it arose?"

"Ah, no," said Daunay, with something of weariness; "ah, no; her happiness is not involved. Claire--I speak frankly; my affection for her has never blinded me--Claire is not easily made unhappy by her sympathies. It is only myself I hurt by remaining near her, by seeing her, as I constantly imagine, on the point of abandoning me. But to leave her--you ask of me more than I am capable of doing."

Later, when Damier told him of Madame Vicaud's knowledge of the situation, Monsieur Daunay heaved another, not regretful, sigh.

"It is as well. I will say to her what I have said to you. She will be generous; she will understand."

Damier felt oddly, when he parted with him, that he might trust Monsieur Daunay, but that he trusted Claire less than ever.

XIII

NEXT day, as Damier waited near the Porte Dauphine for Claire, he could reflect on his really parental situation, but feeling more the irritation than the humor of it. After all, where was his authority for this meddling? Why should they submit to it? and why, as a result, should he submit to the hearing of Claire's coming self-justification? He could spare Madame Vicaud nothing by it, since she knew all that there was to know--and since it was better that she should know it. He had written to her the night before, on reaching his hotel, and told her of the talk with Monsieur Daunay and of the impression it had made upon him. He wondered if she had, meanwhile, had an equally appeasing talk with Claire.

This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings--like a Valkyrie's summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed no wish to beat about the bush.

"You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn't feel for him, _pas grand comme ça d'amour_." Claire indicated the smallness she negatived by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. "And I think I can soon satisfy you, too," she added. "He told you everything?"

"Everything."

"And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take money from a married man who is in love with her? Must I assure you that our relations are absolutely innocent?"

In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first statement or the coolness of her second remark--its forestalling of a suspicion she took for granted in him--were the more striking. Both statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were still half ironic, half defiant.

"I do so assure you."

"I did not need the assurance." Damier found his voice, but it was hoarse.

Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a very false note.

"And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. _Que voulez-vous?_ Only don't be too much shocked by my frankness; don't be prudish. A man may be propriety itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don't know), and that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don't know it before a man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does suggest a situation usually described as immoral."

Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush of anger--it was more anger than shame--still on her cheek.

"I must tell you," he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy, "that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur Daunay's kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything."

"What did he tell you, then?" she asked, stopping short in the path and fixing her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian, note.

"That he adored you, and that he could be trusted."

"Well, he can be!" She broke into a hard laugh. "_Le cher bon Daunay!_ I thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told you."

Damier made no reply.

"You are furious, are you not?"

"I am disgusted, but not for that reason only."

"You think I am in love with him!" She stopped again in the narrow path. "I swear to you that I am not!" He would have interrupted her, but her volubility swept past his attempt. "If he had been free I would have married him--I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him. I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that subject. I could have found no other man in this country willing to marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a _mariage d'amour_; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur Daunay?"

"I should say certainly not,"--Damier waited with a cold patience until she had finished,--"but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him."

At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.

"Ah!--_c'est trop fort!_ You can't make me believe that you want me to love him."

"I don't want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be more to your credit if you did."

Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.

"Ah, it is the money, then--that I should accept it!"

"Can I make no appeal to you for your mother's sake--for the sake of your own dignity?"