EUSTACE DAMIER was susceptible and fastidious,
idealistic and skeptical. He was not weak, for he rarely yielded to his
impressions; but his strength, since nothing had come into his life that
called for decisive action, was mainly negative. Perfection haunted him,
and seen beside that inner standard, most experience was tawdry. He was
quite incapable of loving what he had if he could not have what he
loved. The vacancy had once been filled, but since his mother's, his
sister's death, it had yawned, oppressive, unresponsive, about him. He
was no cynic, but he was melancholy. He had gone through life
alternating between ardor and despondency.
He was amused now, amused and yet amazed, by the extraordinary
impression that the old photograph had made upon him. More than once he
had drawn back on the verge of a great passion,--drawn back he could
hardly have said why,--feeling that the woman, or he himself, lacked
something of the qualities that could make them lastingly need each
other. And now it really seemed to him that he needed, and would need
lastingly, this woman of thirty years ago; and surely she needed him.
She called to him, and he answered. He understood her; he loved her.
It was whimsical, absurd, pathetic. He could smile over it, yet under
the smile some deeper self seemed to smile another smile--the smile of a
mystery speaking at last in words that he could not understand, but in a
voice that he could hear.
Mrs. Mostyn had yielded the photograph to his determined
claim,--laughing at his impudence,--and he kept it always beside him in
the weeks that followed his departure from ----shire. During those
weeks, that lengthened into months, no news came, and the eagerness of
his feeling died away. The feeling was still there, but it was like an
awakened and living memory of an old, dead love. He thought of her as
dead; it was best so, for he could imagine with repulsion the
degradation that a harried life in the slimier walks of bohemia might
have wrought in her had she lived. The sense of half-humorous,
half-tragic pathos remained with him. He smiled at the photograph every
day. It represented just what a memory, deep and still, would have
represented. It said to him, "We have found each other. Now we will
never part." And absurdly, deliciously, he felt--with an instinct that
fluttered wings high above any net of reason, singing, almost
invisible--that what he had missed was waiting for him somewhere.
* * * * *
One day in late autumn, when he had returned to London, something
happened which changed the character of this unsubstantial romance. He
met at his club another old friend, a contemporary of Mrs. Mostyn's.
Sir Henry Quarle was a writer of pleasant reminiscences, a garrulous and
companionable man about town, who had kept careful pace with the times,
who, indeed, flattered himself that he usually kept a step or two ahead
of them: he was prophetic as well as reminiscent; had firm opinions and
facile appreciations.
He and Damier spoke of Mrs. Mostyn,--Sir Henry, too, had seen her
recently,--of Paris, and of her connection with it. "And by the way,"
said Sir Henry, "she told me that you were tremendously interested in
what she told you about Madame Vicaud--Clara Chanfrey that was. Now I
know a good deal about that unhappy history, and can, indeed, carry it
on to a further chapter; the first did interest you?"
"Tremendously," Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that
daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. "Is she alive?" he added.
"That I don't know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I
went to Vicaud's studio one day. They had been married only a few
years; she was a mere girl even then. I never saw such wretchedness."
"In what way?" Damier's heart now beat with a strange self-reproach.
"Oh--not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt
most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but
white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already
poverty-stricken, but clean--grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed
the floor herself. Four or five artists were there--clever, well-known
men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally
realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted
pictures _pour épater le bourgeois;_ grossly materialistic, cynically
skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to
it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best
bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all
that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of
antagonism to the conformist, the bourgeois attitude. But the
bohemianism of her husband and his comrades could only turn her to ice.
It was strange to see her fear, and yet her strength, in these
surroundings. They saw it, too; her chill gentleness, her inflexible
face, cowed them, made them silly rather than vicious. Only, at that
time, she had not cowed her husband; at all events, he seemed to take a
pleasure in showing his mastery over her, his indifference to her
attitude. He was a genius, with the face of a poet and the soul of a
satyr. She had charmed him by her unusualness; he had determined to have
her, to snatch her, the fine, delicate creature, from another world, as
it were, and to make her part of his experience of life in very much the
same sense as he would have tried a new kind of sin for the sake of its
novelty. Then, too, he hoped, of course, for advancement, pecuniary and
social; the disappointment of that hope must have roused the fiend in
him. Of course he loved her--if one can turn the word to such base
uses. What man would not have loved her? He loved her as he might have
loved one of his mistresses; and I remember that on that day he
dared--as perhaps he would not have dared had they been alone--to go to
her before us all, fondle her cheek, and, putting his arm around her,
kiss her. We all, I think, felt the ugly bravado of it, and I know that
I never detested a man as I detested him at that moment. She sat
motionless, expressionless. Only her eyes showed the terror of her
helplessness, her despair."
"Just heavens!" Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a
bewildering aching and despair. "Why did she not leave him?"
"Well," said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing
his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, "there was
the child--they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her
pride--she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need
of her. A few years after their marriage Vicaud took to absinthe, and
drank himself half mad from time to time. Her conceptions of the duties
of marriage, the sacredness of its bond, were, I am sure, very high;
duty, pity, a hopeless loyalty, kept her to him, no doubt. What she went
through no one, I suppose, can imagine.
"I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days--it must have been
more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her
husband in an _allée_ in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone,
his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in
his defiant black cloak. I sha'n't forget them as they walked under the
October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was
still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was
no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with
all her own gracious courtesy--but graciousness a little exaggerated;
she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the life about her, almost
too ineffably the lady. She had to keep, consciously, the perfume of
life.
"I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to
see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did,
realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to
ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent
in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up
flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable
room--its bareness the best thing that could be said of it--at the top
of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp
in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her
music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in
England, and Vicaud's old mother lived with them, a spiteful,
suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud
gave her all the quiet deference that she would have given her had she
been her equal. She had evidently forced from the old woman--forced by
no effort, but by the mere compulsion of her own unflinching courtesy--a
sullen respect. Her husband looked at her, spoke to her, with an odd
mingling of resentment and dependence. He would say constantly, 'Que
dis-tu, Claire?' But he talked, too, with the evident intention of
putting her to shame before her English guest,--seeing how she bore
it,--talked of gallant adventures, of the charms of various females of
his acquaintance. She sat pale, mild, and cold. It was like seeing mud
thrown at a statue of the Madonna.
"When she and I talked together after the supper--one could hardly call
the meal a dinner--she did not make an apologetic reference to the
ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the
friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of
books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence;
she told me about her progress at school, her cleverness, her beauty.
And next to her daughter, reading and music had been her great
resources. I was surprised at her scholarship, at her familiarity with
German philosophy, English poetry, Russian fiction, French and English
literary and social criticism; indeed, on the subjects of social
problems, of human suffering and the various remedies, economic and
ethical, suggested for it, her knowledge was far deeper than my own. But
in all our talk there was not a note of the personal, the confidential,
the regretful; she might have been sitting in an environment absolutely
her own. I never saw her again after that evening. When I was in Paris
some years later I went to the house, and heard that Monsieur Vicaud and
his mother had both died there, and that Madame Vicaud, after nursing
them through their last illnesses, had gone. I have often wondered what
became of her."
Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the
subject of Madame Vicaud and her misfortunes. But that evening he wrote
to Mrs. Mostyn, and asked her if she had not yet obtained for him some
news of his lady of the photograph. The photograph had for him that
night a new look; it still said, "I need you," but "I need you now. Help
me." He was convinced that she lived.
Mrs. Mostyn's reply came in a day, and inclosed a letter of introduction
to Madame Vicaud, Rue B----, Paris. "Sir Molyneux knew nothing of his
sister's whereabouts," Mrs. Mostyn wrote, "and it was from another
source that I found out that Clara still lives, and at the inclosed
address. Do find her, my Don Quixote, and I must make her come and visit
me."
The inclosed letter asked Madame Vicaud to recall an old friend, and to
welcome Mr. Damier for her sake and his own. She had only recently had
news of Madame Vicaud, and so was able, happily, to aid Mr. Damier in
his great wish to make her acquaintance. She hoped, also, that she might
see Madame Vicaud in England soon; would she not pay her a visit--a
long one? It was a long letter, graceful, cordial, affectionate, a rope
of flowers thrown to Damier for his guidance into the labyrinth.