MRS. MOSTYN had changed little since he had last seen
her five years ago in London. Her hair, under the laces of her cap, was
whiter; her rosiness and plumpness--her little hands were especially
fat--more accentuated: but the gaiety and kindness were the same. As
much as in the past she entered into all his interests: asked questions
about his three years at the English embassy in Rome, about his recent
travels, what he had done, what he intended to do. When all
reminiscences were over, all plans discussed, and when Mrs. Mostyn had
sketched for him, with her crisp, nipping definitiveness, the people of
the neighborhood, Damier, who during all the talk had kept the album in
his hand, his forefinger between the leaves at the place where the
enchanted photograph had looked at him, said, opening the book: "I have
been immersing myself in the past. Is anything so full of its feeling as
an old photograph-album? _Çà sent le temps_, and I have made a discovery
there. Who is this?" He held out the opened page to her, and Mrs.
Mostyn, adjusting her eye-glasses, looked.
"Ah, yes. Is she not charming?"
"She has charmed me. She is wonderful."
"Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me,
too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time.
I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss
Chanfrey--Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know.
Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an
ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her,
and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to
Paris, where Clara's beauty made a furor--she was thought lovelier than
the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was
far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries--she wore a
white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the
opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was,
report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in
the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness
about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a
waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk _pour
passer le temps_--to make the something that was coming come more
quickly. Poor child! it came."
"She married Lord Pemleigh?" Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her
eyes vague with memories.
"No; don't you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan--but only after
years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing--a dreadful thing.
She eloped--ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no
fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted
Clara's portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of
Manet; a full-length portrait--I saw it--of Clara in a white lawn dress
with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black
hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference
charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made
her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No
explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the
position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say
nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they
loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her
back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married
him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without
ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered
her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only
unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her
all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with
him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found
that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant,
dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible
story;--a violet dragged in the mud."
Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the
album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, "I cannot associate
her with the gutter," he said, "nor can I understand this violet
stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too
intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment
dazzled by a shoddy bohemian."
"Oh," sighed Mrs. Mostyn, "has delicacy ever been a certificate of
safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional;
but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant--far more ignorant than
a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own
was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her
unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought
significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled
herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least,
more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,--I well remember
him,--an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of
her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous
unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and
perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her
English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the
match had already embittered her relations with her mother--Lady
Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then--and
then--she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only
final explanation of these stories."
"And she ceased to love him?" He seemed now to interpret the gaze more
fully. Did it not foresee? Did it not entreat--though so proudly?
"Ah, I don't know. All I know is that she stuck to him, and that she was
miserable. Poor, poor child!" Mrs. Mostyn repeated.
"And is she dead?" he asked after a little pause in which it seemed to
him that they had thrown flowers on a long-forgotten grave.
Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden,
the effort of difficult recollection on her face.
"I really don't know--I really can't remember. So soon afterward my
husband died; Lady Chanfrey died; I came here to live. I heard from time
to time of her misfortunes--of her death I don't think I heard; but for
years now I have heard nothing. How many years ago is it? This is '95,
and that was--oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago."
"So that she would be now?"
"She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is
over."
"I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive."
The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more
significant.
"Could you find out?" he asked presently.
Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like
a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of
night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in
their own epoch.
"My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won't say
dabbler--seeker-after."
"Not after impressions," said Damier, smiling a little sadly.
"And have you not found anything?" she asked.
"No; I don't think I have."
"Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!" smiled Mrs. Mostyn. "You
have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman
of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give
yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have
meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by--how many
years?--fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when
that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,--the
daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,--and you might find there an
adventure of the heart."
"Ah, I don't care about a daughter--or about an adventure."
Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled
and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said
presently:
"Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows
Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara's brother,--a man I never liked,--and she
could ask him."
"Pray do."
"But I don't fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject.
He and his sister were never sympathetic."
"I wish you would find out," Damier repeated.
"I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever
find her," smiled Mrs. Mostyn.