Part 7

"I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier." The relief was showing in her quieter voice, her fading flush. "I see how angry you are--and only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a pittance left to her, a year or so after my father's death, by some relations, and that, since then, has been our only _pied-à-terre_. She would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her family wished to make her. I don't want to blame her; I know how you feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish of her; she should have thought more of me--the luckless result of her mésalliance--and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always at school during my father's life--she avoided _that_ soil for me, you may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she did not pay the debt." Claire had been looking before her as she talked, but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring, in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not serving her. "Don't imagine, now, that I am complaining--ungrateful," she said a little petulantly. "I know--as well as you do--what a good mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not altogether blameless--that she is responsible, in more ways than one, for me--for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty, labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to enjoy work, shabby clothes, grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking--that was her idea of happiness for me!" Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in her voice. "I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people in horrid places--expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one should wish to devote one's self to _bonnes-oeuvres;_ but for me, _ah, par exemple!_" Claire gave a coarse laugh. "I had not quite come to that! She gave me the best she had--all she had, you will say; I own it: but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me to enjoy--should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only endured. Again,--I am not unjust,--it was not all high thinking; she had her schemes for my amusement--_d'une simplicité!_ Really, for such a clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a right--you know it--to _le vrai grand monde_. You know it, and you are trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little management she might have regained her place in it; but no--her pride again! She seemed to think that _she_ was _le grand monde_, and that I ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it strange--_disgusting_--that when I saw that Daunay--_le pauvre!_--was in love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is dull--though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money, she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value; she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and stockings--as I understand shoes and stockings!" Claire laughed. "This dress that I have on--Mamma imagines it is made by a little dressmaker whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet." There was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire's voice. "And I have always considered myself amply excusable," she went on, "in accepting the small pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much that I have been able to accept--though he would willingly--and he is not rich--give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared attempt--nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I can see her face!"

So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to Claire, physically brutal--to strike her to the dust where she dragged the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice quiet enough: "You must tell her now; you must tell her everything."

Claire stopped short in the path. "Tell her!"

"You must, indeed." The full rigor of his eyes met the astonishment of hers.

"Never!" said Claire, and in French, as if for a more personal and intimate emphasis, she repeated: "_Jamais!_"

"I will, then; it is an outrage not to tell her."

Their eyes measured each other's resolution.

"If you do," said Claire, "shall I tell you with what I retaliate? I will run away with Monsieur Daunay. Yes; I speak seriously. I would prefer not to be pushed to that extremity, but I sometimes think that I am getting a little tired of respectability _au quatrième_. It isn't good enough, as you English say; I get no interest on my investment. To tell her! Now, of all times, when I so need the money, when the small gaieties and pleasures you have brought into my life depend on my having it, making an appearance! She would not let me take it. She would be glacial--and firm. Oh, I have had scenes with her! I could not stand any more."

For once Claire was fully vehement, her cheeks flaming, her eyes at once threatening and appealing. He could hardly believe her serious, and yet she silenced him--indeed, she terrified him. Claire read the terror in his wide eyes and whitening lips. Her look suddenly grew soft, humorous. She slipped her hand inside his arm.

Involuntarily he started from her, then, repenting, for even while he so loathed her he had never found her so piteous, "I beg your pardon--but you horrify me too much."

"Come, come," she said, and, unresentfully, though with some determination, she secured his arm, "don't take me _au pied de la lettre_. I am not really in earnest; you know that; I had to use a threat--had to frighten you. Come." That she had been able so thoroughly to frighten him seemed to have restored in her her old air of complacent mastery. "You are wide-minded, clever, kind. Don't misjudge me. Don't push me to the wall. Don't apply impossible standards to me. See me as I am. By nature, by temperament, I am simply a bohemian. It isn't my fault if my mother happens to be a saint, and a horribly well-bred saint; it really isn't my fault if she has handed on to me neither of those qualities. I am perfectly frank with you. From the first I felt that I could be frank with you; I felt that you understood me; don't tell me now that I was mistaken."

"I do understand you," said Damier, "but you horrify me none the less."

"I horrify you because I am a creature thwarted, distorted; nothing is more ugly or repulsive--but if I had had a chance!"

"What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be noble and loving and happy--yes, happy."

"But not in my own way!--not in my own way!" she cried, and now she clasped both hands on his arm and leaned against his shoulder as she looked into his face. "I needed power and wealth--all the real foundations of happiness and nobility. Then--ah, then I should have blossomed. Or else, failing them, I needed liberty and joy--the life of a bohemian. I have had neither the one nor the other, and if I seem almost wicked to you it is because of that; for, to me, wickedness means going against one's nature. I have always been forced to go against mine; I have never had a chance."

Damier gave a mirthless laugh. "On the contrary, to me wickedness means going with one's nature."

"Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand."

Again he had that feeling of perplexity and irritation. Her eyes, the clasp of her hands upon his arm, irked and troubled him, and without, now, any sense of glamour in the trouble and irritation. She seemed to make too great a claim upon his understanding, and to rely too much upon some conviction of her own charm that could dare any frankness just because it was so sure of triumph. He felt that at the moment he did not understand her; he felt, too, that he did not want to--that he was tired of understanding her.

"You are an unhappy creature, Claire," he said. They were nearing the Porte Dauphine, and while he spoke with a full yet distant gravity, Damier looked about for a fiacre. "An unhappy creature with an unawakened soul."

"Will you try to wake it, the poor thing?" asked Claire. She still held his arm, though he had tried to disengage it, and though she spoke softly, there was a vague hardness in her eyes, as though she felt the new hardness in him, though as yet not quite interpreting its finality.

"I shouldn't know how to: I am helpless before it. It should be made to suffer," he said. A cab had answered his summons, and he handed her into it. "No, I cannot go home with you," he said. "Are you going home?"

"I am going to lunch with old Mademoiselle Daunay, and see Monsieur Daunay there. I had no chance to speak to him last night." Claire, sitting straightly in the open cab, had an expression of perplexity and of growing resentment on her face; but as he merely bowed and was about to turn away, she started forward and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Are you going to make it suffer?" she asked. He looked into her eyes. He did not understand her, but he saw in them a demand at once alluring and threatening. His one instinct was to deny strongly whatever she demanded, though he did not know what that was.

"I have no mission toward your soul, Claire," he said. For another moment the eyes that threatened and allured dwelt on his; then, calling out the address to the cabman, she was driven away.

XIV

ON Damier's return to his hotel early in the afternoon, he found a note from Madame Vicaud awaiting him. "Monsieur Daunay has just been here," it said, "and destiny has strangely brought this matter to a crisis. His wife is dead, and he has asked me for Claire's hand, feeling that his false position toward me demanded an immediate reparation. He hopes and believes that she loves him; but this, as both you and I must know, is impossible. I am saddened and confused by the whole situation. I do not blame them, but to me it is all displeasing, even shocking--this haste to profit by the wife's opportune death most of all. Will you come and see me? Claire is lunching at his cousin's, and he will find her there. I told him to speak to her himself, as I felt that to act the maternal part of intermediary between them would now be mere formalism and affectation; so I am alone. You will want to speak to me, I know."

Damier, as he drove to the Rue B----, speculated on the rather mystifying significance of the last sentence. He always wanted to speak to her: that she must know; but why now in particular? Since his interview with Claire that morning he had felt almost too shaken by pity for the mother to trust himself with her. He would not be able to help her with counsel and consolation; he would not be able to think of Claire; and at this turning-point in Claire's life it was for that that the mother needed him.

He found her standing in the salon, evidently pausing to meet him, in a restless pacing to and fro. Her eyes dwelt on him gently and very gravely while she took his hand.

"Who could have expected this swift dénouement? But it is best," she said, "and I pitied him very deeply."

"Pitied him--for the past, you mean?" Damier questioned.

"Oh, for the future more!"

Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her smile.

"I saw Claire this morning," he said. "We talked over the matter; she wished to see me."

Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. "Ah, yes; I understand," she said.

"She certainly told me that she did not love him," Damier went on, "and yet--" He paused, not quite knowing how to put to her his hope that Claire now would reconsider the situation, his hope that she would marry Monsieur Daunay.

It would be the solution of all difficulties, the best solution possible, and the situation could then be defined anew in terms that he more and more deeply longed for. He hardly dared, even yet, before her unconsciousness, define it, and turning away from her, he walked down the room, urging himself to a courage great enough to enable him now to speak to her what was in his heart. Madame Vicaud was watching him thoughtfully when he faced her again at the end of the room, and with still that look of controlled emotion.

"I, also, have something to tell you," he said.

"Yes," she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced, steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.

"Can you guess?" he asked.

She was standing now, strangely, in the attitude of the little photograph--leaning on the back of a high chair; and her eyes recalled yet more strangely the intentness of the picture's eyes as she said: "You have come to tell me that you love my daughter?"

He was so deeply astonished, so completely thrown back upon himself, that for a long moment he could only gaze helplessly into the eyes' insolubility.

"No," he said at last; "I did not come to tell you that."

"But you do love her?" Madame Vicaud inquired, with something of gentle urgency in her voice, as though she helped his shyness. "Be frank with me, my friend; I have guessed so much more, seen so much more, than you told me or showed me. Even with all that saddens you, that pains you, you do love her--enough to overlook the pain and sadness?"

"No," said Damier, still facing her from his distance, "I do not love her. I have never needed to overlook anything."

Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.

"But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?"

"You, only, have been my meaning."

He saw that her thought, in its disarray, could not pause upon his interpretation of these words. She had straightened herself, both hands on the chair-back, and her wide gaze, her parted lips, and the vivid wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.

"You have, from the first, been so much with her--seemed to take so much interest in her--seemed so to understand her; she was so open--so intimate--"

"She is your daughter."

"But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love my daughter--"

He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and, suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.

"I don't, in the very least, love Claire; I have never, in the very least, loved her; I have only been sorry for her."

"Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been sorry, too?"

"But I not for that," said Damier, "not for that; but because she made me so sorry for you; because"--and he looked at her--"because you do not love her."

He was still at a distance from her, and across it her look met his in a long silence.

Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with her hands.

"Forgive me!" Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication, and all the others--ah, the others?--the years and years of them that rolled between them!--in a full and final confession. "Forgive me for seeing--it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness--"

She made no reply.

"You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every fiber of you. There is nothing in her that does not hurt you," Damier said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had come for it.

Madame Vicaud lifted her head.

"I do understand her," she said. She did not look at him. Straightening her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced from her as it had been from him, "And I hate her."

Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the light, he was able to say: "I even guessed that--almost."

"Yet you do not hate her," she said, after a pause of some moments, speaking without moving or turning her head.

Damier paused too. "I have not your reasons," he said at last.

"Ah, my reasons! Yes." She turned to him now, as though she saw in him an accusing world, and faced it in an attitude of desperate self-justification.

"They began with her father," said Damier.

"I hated him," she said. Her eyes looked through him, fixed on the abyss of the past. "I hated him. He was abhorrent to me. I lived with him for fifteen years--fifteen long, long years. I bore his brutality, his wickedness--I am not the woman to use the word prudishly--I can make allowances--wide ones--for temperament, environment, all the mitigating causes: but my husband's wickedness was unimaginably vile; to see it stained one's thoughts." The memory of it, as she spoke, had chilled her to a drawn and frozen pallor; it was as though the blighting breath of the past went across her face, aging it, emptying it of life.

"I bore the ruin he brought; that was nothing--a spur to love, had love been possible. I bore his serene, inflexible selfishness. The only thing I would not bear"--and she still looked full at Damier, but with the same unseeing largeness of gaze--"was his love. _His_ love!" She turned and walked across the room. Damier felt his own flesh shudder as he looked behind the curtain her words lifted, felt his own heart freeze in the aching sympathy of its comprehension. He could not speak to her. It seemed to him that she stood at a great distance from him and would not hear him. Her voice, when she spoke again, had less of its haunting terror, but it still thrilled with a deep and tragic note: "All this, as thousands of women have done, because it was my duty--to help him--to uphold him--to stand by him unflinchingly, and--because he was _her_ father. You said that my reasons for hating her began with him. Ah, but he was my reason for loving her so desperately--with such a longing to atone to her for him. I gave her all the love he had crushed out of me. You see his picture there; I have schooled myself, so that she may not feel the smirch of him through my horror, to bear the sight of him, to say to myself every day, 'That is the face I loved.' Oh, what madness!--what madness!" She pressed her hands hard upon her eyes. "Some day, perhaps,--since I tell you everything,--I will tell you that story, too--my love-story. The memory of it is like a block of lead upon my heart." Her hands fell, but the memory made her silent, and for a long moment she stood looking down. "But all was hidden from her: the dread,--that soon passed--I was the stronger, he came to feel it, dread fell from me,--the hate that followed it, and the final, the terrible pity,--for I came to pity him when he hung about my life, helpless, like a torn and dirty rag,--all that was hidden from her. I kept her lifted out of the mud he dragged us down to; she never saw its depths. While he lived, and while he was dying,--and horrible to see and hear,--she was at a school. Those days!" She paused and turned away, and then went on: "It was in the winter. Lessons fell away; there was the school, the doctor, all the expenses of an illness to be met. I went into the streets of nights, a man carrying my harp, and sang for money; I had a voice till then, and I braved more than the snow and the night to do it: I was still beautiful. This that you may see how I loved her, how I struggled for her, how like any mother, though now I seem so hard--so hideously unnatural. Ah, I fought--I cannot tell you, you cannot guess, how I fought for her. And then, he died, and then there was for me peace and the blossoming of delicious hope. She and I together, saved from the wreck. It seemed to me that I had battled through waves, past rocks and whirlpools, holding her to my breast, and had reached the shore at last--she alive for me, and I for her. And then--ah, then! The shipwreck, the years of struggle, were crude tragedy to my gradual realizing of the subtle disaster that was to poison my life forever. Year by year I saw it coming--I saw him creeping into her. I saw the grave purpose settle round her lips--the steady greed for self. I saw his smile in her eyes; his eyes were beautiful like hers: when I first looked at them, I thought them full of splendid dreams, noble strength. She was not cruel, or brutal, or vicious, as he had been. She submitted placidly; she submitted, and I hoped for happiness. I could not make her happy or unhappy. I meant nothing to her except the thing that fed and clothed her. She took what I could give, and waited for what I could not give. She lied only when the truth would not serve her purpose better; so, often, she was frank with me. Her grave laugh maddened me, and her indifferent adapting of herself to me--for expediency, not for love. If only she had become a gentle and beautiful animal, to guard from its own instincts! but she is an animal of such hideous intelligence; she knows when I try to guard her, and evades me. Like him, she is corrupt to the core of her; not--do not misunderstand me--that she would do wrong in a conventional sense--and that it is conventional wrong-doing that I dread she has always pretended to read into my horror of evil, making a plaster saint of me so that she may more easily evade the deeply understanding woman of flesh and blood. Hers is the worse corruption, that calculates chances, chooses and manages. It is there in her, I know, though, in its worst forms, latent still--I think."

Damier, white already, felt himself blanch before the rapid glance, like a sword-stroke across his face, that she cast upon him. She guessed at all his knowledge.

Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.