Part 8

"Hideous, hideous that I should speak so to you, and to you I hoped, yet dreaded--You will wonder how I could have hoped it; how, knowing this, I should not have warned you. But at first I did not think it possible, though I knew her charm; at first I did not understand you, and, not understanding, I guarded you. And then I saw your generous, your pitiful heart, and I saw that it understood Claire, that perhaps you understood her better than I did. With you she was her best self; she trusted you, it seemed, so utterly. I hoped that yours was the clearer vision, that I was warped, no longer capable of true seeing. Yet, when the friendship that I rejoiced in grew, as I thought, into love, there was a terrible struggle in me. My strong attachment to you--you who had opened the prison gates that shut me into my misery, who brought me out of a loneliness so long, so bitter--ah! my friend, do not think that I have not seen and felt it all; but I could not speak to you as I might have spoken had it not been for that struggle in me between the justice owed to you--yet that you did not seem to need--and the duty to her--not to withhold, for your sake, a possibility that might redeem her. My mind was fixed in that struggle; of our friendship, yours and mine, I could not think clearly. If you had been ignorant, if she had hidden herself from you, I should have sacrificed her unflinchingly to you; I should have interposed and shown her to you. But she showed herself to you. I knew, from my knowledge of you, that she would not attract you as she attracts most men, not nobly. I saw from her looks with you, her words, that she would make no efforts so to attract you. I must say all to you, since you must understand all. Claire does not love you, but you attract what is best in her. She relies, I have guessed it, upon the very pathos of her moral ugliness to enchant you, to arouse in you the chivalrous, redemptive qualities she sees in you. And I grew to hope that you saw something that I could not see. I even began to feel a blind, groping tenderness for her through your fancied tenderness; and as I allowed myself to hope that you loved her, I allowed myself to have faith in the redeeming power of your love."

She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier, answering them, shook his head.

"Alas, no. It would have been my story over again, the positions reversed, and you without my illusions, had you loved her, married her; and yet, it was because you had no illusions that I hoped."

But Damier could not think of dead hopes.

"What you have suffered!" he said.

"Yes," Madame Vicaud answered, "I have suffered; but do not, in your kindness, your tenderness, exaggerate. I have suffered, but all has not been black. There have been flowers on the uphill road. I don't believe in a woe that is blind to them, or to the sky overhead."

But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.

"Clara," said Damier.

She was a woman of deep understanding, yet even now,--and hardly was it to be wondered at, so lifted through its very intensity was his love for her above love's ordinary manifestations,--even now her name so gravely spoken by him had no further meaning for her than the one openly, proudly, joyously accepted, the meaning of the strange tie that had united them; but, while she accepted it, his look startled her. It showed nothing new, but seemed to interpret newly something she had not recognized before. Smiling faintly, she said:

"You have a right."

"Not the right I would have." He felt no excitement, only the enraptured solemnity that a soul might feel in some quiet dawn of heaven on finding another soul parted from years ago on earth--long sought for, long loved.

She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was already a recognition.

"I love you," said Damier. He had not moved toward her, nor had she moved away. A little distance separated them, and they stood silently looking at each other.

"You mean--" she said at last.

"I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman he worships."

The whirl of her mind mirrored itself in the stricken stupefaction of her wan, beautiful features. She caught at one flashing thought. "And I--her mother! You might have been my son!"

"No; I might not," Damier affirmed.

"By age; I am old enough."

"I know your age; you are forty-seven," said Damier, able to smile at her, "and I am thirty. If you were seventy-seven, the only difference would be that I could have fewer years to spend with you; I should wish to spend them just the same. As it is, your age does not make us ludicrous before the world, if we were to consider that."

At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and her own endurance of it, at such a moment.

"My friend! That this should have happened to you!"

"Can it never happen to you?" he asked.

"I would never allow it to happen to me."

"It would not be to look up at the sky--it would not even be to stoop to a flower?"

"I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black."

He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the worshiper's than the lover's, Eustace said:

"But would you--would you stoop?"

"I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest meadows." Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. "I should be culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool's paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall be an old woman while you are still a young man."

"Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same to me? I have not fallen in love with you--I have found you. When I saw your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine."

"The face of a girl. I was nineteen then."

"Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the girl's face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?"

Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said, "Perhaps."

"And if this were our last moment--if there were no question of age or of going on--then--then would you tell me that you have felt something of my feeling--the finding--the recognition--the rapture--own to it with joy?"

She turned to him now and looked at him, at his eager, solemn face, the supplication and worship of his clasped hands, looked for a long time, without speaking. But her face, though she was so white and so grave, seemed, as she looked, to reflect, with a growing radiance, the youth in his.

"I have felt it," she said at last, "but I have hardly known that I felt it."

"You know now?"

"Yes, I know now."

"You could own to it--with joy?"

"If this were our last moment.--Ah, my friend!" He had taken her into his arms.

The long years drifted away like illusions before an awakening. Her girl-hood--but weighted with such dreams of sorrow and loneliness!--seemed with her again. She was helpless, though her heart reproached him and herself, yet could not wholly reproach--helpless in a happiness poignant and exquisite. They kissed each other gently, and, his arms around her, they looked earnestly at each other. Speechlessly they looked the finding, the recognition, the rapture.

The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be counted with.

XV

AS they heard the tinkle of the entrance-bell, Claire's voice, her step outside, Madame Vicaud moved away from Damier. She was seated in a chair near the table, and the young man stood beside her, when Claire entered.

Claire paused in the doorway and looked sullenly, yet hardly suspiciously, at them. She had never worn a mask for Damier, yet he saw in her flushed and somber face something new to him, saw that she lacked some quality--was it confidence, indifference, placidity?--that he had always found in her. He guessed in a moment that her interview with Monsieur Daunay had not been a propitious one.

"I did not expect to see you so soon again, and under such suddenly changed circumstances," she said to him. "What are you talking about? Me?" She took off her hat,--the day was sultry,--pushed up her thick hair, and dropped her length of ruffled, clinging white into a chair. "So; I have seen Monsieur Daunay. He lost no time, it seems. He asked my hand of you first, I hear, Mamma, in proper form--_très convenablement_."

"Yes," Madame Vicaud assented with composure.

"It seems that you discouraged him."

"I could not encourage him from what you had told me, but from what he told me it seems that you did not discourage him," the mother answered.

"I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility," said Claire.

Madame Vicaud, in silence, and with something of a lion-tamer's calm intentness of eye, looked at her daughter; and Claire, after meeting the look with one frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.

"And it seems that you, last night, did not discourage Monsieur Daunay's hopes; he spoke of you with gratitude. What have you to say to it all now?"

"I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair--yours and his."

"You made it yours, it seems to me!"

"Unwillingly."

"Oh--unwillingly!" Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. "I don't understand you, Mr. Damier--I began not to understand you this morning"; and, as he made no reply:

"Your present silence doesn't accord with your past interference."

"My silence? What do you expect me to say?" Damier asked, with real wonder, forgetting the mother's intimations.

"Can you deny that--apart from your feelings of angered propriety--you were pitifully jealous last night and this morning? I had to assure you again and again that I did not love him--the truth, as it happens."

This speech now opened such vistas of interpretation to the past--of interrogation to the future--that Damier could only, speechlessly, look his wonder at her.

"Were you not jealous?" she demanded.

"Not in the faintest degree."

Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.

"And what, then, was your motive for prying, meddling, cross-questioning as you did? You had a motive?"

"I have always had an interest in your welfare, Claire, but your mother was my motive for meddling and cross-questioning, as you put it."

"Oh--my mother!" Claire tossed her a look where she sat, her arms folded, near the table. "You were afraid for my honor since hers was involved in it? Was that it?"

"Perhaps that was it--and for the same reason I beg you to spare your mother now."

Claire leaned back in her chair and fixed upon him a heavy stare above her heavy flush. "Come," she said, "I have never had pretenses with you--I have always been frank. Do you intend to marry me? There it is clearly; I have no false delicacy, and, bon Dieu! you have given me every right to ask the question."

Madame Vicaud, soundless at the table, now leaned her elbows upon it and covered her face with her hands. "Come," Claire repeated, casting another look upon her; "for Mamma's sake, you owe me an answer. Spare her the shame--she feels it bitterly, you observe--of seeing my outrageous uncertainty prolonged. Haven't you spent all your time with me? Haven't you taken upon yourself a position of authority toward me--made my affairs your own? Aren't you going to--how would Mamma put it?--redeem me--lift me? Or are you going to let my soul suffer a little longer?"

"You could hardly speak so, Claire, if you spoke sincerely," said Damier; "you may once have misinterpreted my friendship for you, but you no longer misinterpret it. I have never intended to marry you. It is you, remember, who force me into this ugly attitude. I could not face you in it, were I not sure that your feeling for me has always been as free from anything amorous as mine for you."

"I don't speak of my feeling for you!" Claire cried in a voice suddenly loud, leaning forward with her elbows on the arms of her chair, "but of yours for me! It is not there now--I see it plainly, and I see plainly why! She--_she_--has been talking to you against me!--telling you about some childish follies in my life!--making you believe that I would not be a fit wife for you! Ah, yes!--I know her!" Claire pointed a shaking finger at her mother. "She would think it her duty to protect you against me--I know her!"

"Be still," said Damier in his voice of steel.

Claire, for a moment, sank back, panting, defiant, but silent before it.

"You are conscious of your own falsehood, but you can scarcely be conscious of how base and vile you are. Your mother, when I came to-day, was hoping that I had come to ask her for your hand; she believed that I loved you, and hoped it."

Claire, in her sullen recoil, still remained sunken and panting in her chair.

"Well, then! And what have you got to say to us both, then, if you gave us both cause for such a supposition? What have you meant by it all?"

"What I meant from the beginning I can best define by telling you that to-day I asked your mother to marry me."

Claire sat speechless and motionless. The words seemed to have arrested thought, and to have nailed her to her chair. Damier looked at Madame Vicaud. Her hands had dropped from her face, and she met his eyes.

"The truth was allowed me?" he said.

"It is always allowed," she answered.

Her face was so stricken, so ghastly, that Damier, almost forgetting in his great solicitude the hateful presence in the room, leaned over her, taking her hand.

"Bear it. It is better to have it all over. And, in a sense, it is my own fault. I should have spoken to you sooner--defined what I meant from the first."

"So," Claire said suddenly. Her smoldering eyes, while they spoke, had gone from one to the other. "So; this is what it all meant! Indeed, I cannot blame myself for not having guessed it. You in love with my mother! Or, shall we not more truthfully say, she in love with you?--the explanation, as a rule, you know, of these odd amorous episodes. I begin to understand. I did not suspect a rival in my own mother. Clever Mamma!"

"Let this cease now," said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. "All has been said that it is necessary to say."

"Indeed, no!" cried Claire. She sprang to her feet, braving Damier's menacing look, and stood before them with folded arms, defiantly, "All has not been said! I am to marry the middle-aged, middle-class man of small fortune, and you are to marry the _prince charmant_! Ah, don't think that I am in love with you, _prince charmant_, though I might have loved you had not my mother had such a keen eye for her own interests, and kept mine so dexterously in the background. I might have loved you had you been allowed to fall in love with me. Oh, I know what you would say!" Her voice rose to a shout as she interrupted his effort to speak. "How base, how vile, and how vulgar--_n'est-ce pas_? A girl clamoring over the loss of a husband! Shocking! Well, I own to my vulgarity. I did want to marry you. You have money, position--all the things I never hid from you that I liked; and you interested me, and I liked you, and I could be myself with you. My mother has always been too dainty to secure a husband for me--arrange my future: I have had to do all the ugly work myself; and I liked you because--just because I had to do no ugly work with you. And I clamor now--not because I have lost you--no, it's not that; but because she--_she_ has made her goodness serve her so!--has made it pay where my frankness failed. She is good, if you will; but I tell you that I prefer my vulgarity--my baseness--my vileness to her clever virtue; or is it an unconquerable passion with you, Mamma?--is it to be a _mariage d'amour_ rather than a _mariage de convenance_?"

While Claire spoke, her mother, as if mesmerized by her fury, sat looking at her with dilated eyes and a fixed face--a face too fixed to show anguish. Rather it was as if, with an intense, spellbound interest, she hung upon her daughter's words, hardly feeling, hardly flinching before her insults, hardly conscious of each whip-like lash that struck her face to a more death-like whiteness. Now, drawing a breath that was almost a gasp, she leaned forward over the table, stretching her arms upon it and clasping her hands. "Claire, Claire!" she said, with a hurried, staccato utterance, "I see it all with your eyes--I understand. You have had something really dear taken from you--not love, perhaps, but a true friendship; that is so, isn't it? He seems to have turned against you,--isn't it so?--and through me. There is in you an anger that seems righteous to you. How cruel to have our best turned against us! I see all that. Ah, no, no! Let me speak to her!" For, Claire keeping the hardened insolence of her stare upon her, Damier, full of a passionate, protecting resentment, put his arm around her shoulders, took her hand. She threw off the hand, the arm, almost cruelly. "Let me speak to my child! Don't come between us now--now when we may come together, she and I. Yes, Claire, he loves me,--you see it,--too much, perhaps, to be just to you, though he has been so just--more just than I have been, perhaps; he has been so truly your friend. But now I am just. I am your mother. I can understand. I love him, Claire, yes, I love him; but I understand you. I will never do anything to part us further--understand me! I will never marry him against your will. Oh, Claire, try to understand me--try to trust me--try to love me!" She rose to her feet, her face ardent with the upsurging of all her longing motherhood, its sudden flaming into desperate hope through the deep driftings of ashen hopelessness; and as if swayed forward by this flame of hope, this longing of love, this ardor, she leaned toward her child, stretched out her arms toward her face of heavy impassivity. At the gesture, at her mother's last words, Claire's impassivity flickered into a half-ironic, half-pitying smile. But she did not advance to the outstretched arms. Merely looking at her with this searing pity, she said:

"You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn't you?--you would, as usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual, your radiance would shine against my dark. Poor, magnanimous Mamma! No, no, no!" She turned and walked up and down the room. "No, no! I am tired of all this--tired of you; and you are tired of me. You will marry Mr. Damier. Why not, after all? Don't let scruples of conscience interfere, especially none on my account. It would not separate us: we are separated; we have always been separated, and that we are gives me no pain. But don't expect me either to live with you when you are married, or to marry my antique lover and settle down to the respectable, tepid joys he offers me. No, and no again. I will not marry him. I leave the respectability to you two excellent people." The glance she shot at them now as they stood together was pure irony. Her mother's pale and beautiful face still kept its look of frozen appeal, as though, while she made the appeal, she had been shot through the heart. Its beauty seemed to sting Claire where the appeal did not touch, and, too, Damier's look, bent on her with a quiet that defied her and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.

"My poor chances can't compete with yours, Mamma," she muttered. "Let me tell you that despair becomes you." She took up her hat.

"Where are you going, Claire?" Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.

"Don't be alarmed. Not to the Seine. I am going to a tea with Mrs. Wallingham. I shall be back to dinner. You will admit me?"

"I shall always admit you."

"Good." Claire was putting in her hat-pins before the mirror. "That is reassuring. Console her, Mr. Damier. Try to atone to her for me--bad as I am, I am sure that you can do so. Ah, I don't harmonize with a love-scene!--it was one I interrupted, I suppose. Let me take my baseness--my vileness--from before you." Her hand on the door, she paused, fixing a last look upon them; then, with a short laugh, she said, "Accept my blessing," and was gone.

XVI

MADAME VICAUD said nothing. She drew her hand from Damier's and sank again into the chair from which she had risen. Hope, ardor, and love, forever perhaps, were dead within her. She had hated her daughter, but under the hatred had been, always, the hidden flame, not, perhaps, of love, but of longing to love. She hated no longer, and the flame was quenched. Even in his nearness to her, Damier could not look with her at that slain longing. Walking away from her, he stood for a long time, gazing unseeingly over the garden, in silence. At last he turned and came to her. Her arm leaned on the table and her head upon her hand. With unutterable weariness she looked up at him.

"And now," she said, "you must go, my friend."

"Go?" Damier repeated.

Years of resolute endurance looked from her eyes; the weariness was not a wavering. Her face seemed sinking back into the abyss from which he had rescued it.

"Yes, you must go."

"And leave you with her!"

"And leave me with her," she assented monotonously.

"Never--never!"

She passed her hand over her brow, pressing her eyelids, as if in the effort to dispel her deep fatigue and find words with which to answer his harassing protest.

"Yet you must. I have the wonder, the treasure of your love for me. I will keep it always. I will never forget you. But it is impossible, even the friendship, now. We must not drag what is dear to us in the mire. I could not keep you as my friend under her eyes. I must live with her, and for her; that is the only life possible for me. I made it for myself. Whatever her cruelty, whatever her baseness, I have only to remember that I am responsible for her, that I am her only chance. And after this her presence in my life makes yours wrong. She knows now that you are not a friend only, and as a husband you could not remain. Such a _ménage à trois_ would be as detestable as it would be grotesque."

"She will marry!" cried Damier. "She must marry Monsieur Daunay."

"I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but as friend, as friend only."

Damier burst out into a smothered invective:

"And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that creature--who has no love for you--whom you cannot love! What can you do for her? You can never change or soften her."

He felt that the vehemence of his despair and rebellion dashed itself against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on with the same monotonous patience:

"I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can pity her, most piteous creature--whose mother has no love for her."