AFTER this there was no more the feeling of a barrier.
It was gone; and with perfect graciousness and trust she admitted him to
the personal standing and nearness he had asked for. She was all
confidence now, although she made no confidences. He felt that her trust
in him hid nothing from him, and yet that her pride made her past
sorrows so poignantly intimate that they must be understood between her
friend and herself, not spoken of.
The nearer intimacy with the mother did not bring Damier into nearer
intimacy with the daughter, for the simple reason that he was already so
intimate. From the first Damier had felt that he understood Claire
Vicaud. He could not yet clearly define what he understood, but she
could have no revelations for him. Her father explained her, and her
mother reclaimed her. That was her history, and he imagined that neither
she nor her mother was aware of the history, but the mother less than
she. Indeed, he fancied, at times, that he saw her far more clearly than
did the mother--hoped that the mother had not his direct vision.
He was rather fond of Claire, with a fondness tolerant, humorous, and
pitying. What he saw in her were thwarted energies, well thwarted, yet
pathetic in their enforced composure; he saw voiceless rebellion, and
the dumb discomfort of a creature reared in an environment not its own.
This simile might have cast a reproach upon the mother had it conjured
up the vision of an unkindly caged pantheress; but the simile so seen
was too poetical for Claire. It was not the wild, fine, free thing of
nature that circumstance had caged, but the product of over-civilized
senses--senses only, and corrupt senses. There was the point that made
her piteous and repellent.
Claire's claim on life was not a high one. Hers was not even an esthetic
fastidiousness of sense nor a romantic coloring of emotion; there was
nothing delicate or warm or eager about her. Her wishes were not
yearnings; they were steadfast inclinations toward all the evident, the
palpable, perhaps the baser pleasures of life, pleasures that would most
certainly have been hers had not fate--in the shape of a mother to whom
these pleasures were non-existent rather than despicable--lifted her
above the possible grasp at them: jewels, clothes, magnificent
establishments, riotous living. She was cold, but she would welcome
passively the warmth of admiration about her. She had not her father's
genius to transmute the tawdry cravings of her inheritance from him. She
had his quick, clear intelligence, and it seemed only to make harder,
more decisive, her centering in self.
Damier could see her as the painted prima donna (never as the sincere
and serious artist), bowing her languorous triumph before the curtain;
could see her laughing in ugly mirth at Gallic jests among a crowd of
clever _rapins_; could horribly image her--most horribly when one
remembered who was her mother--rolling in a lightly swung carriage down
the Avenue des Acacias, a modern Cleopatra in her barge, alluring in
indifference under her parasol, and dressed with the consummate and
conscious art that does not flower in the sound soil of respectability.
These were, indeed, horrid thoughts, and as absurd as horrid when the
mother stood beside them. Even to think them seemed to put a dagger into
a heart already many times stabbed. Yet separate mother and
daughter,--it was ominously easy so to separate them,--and nothing in
Claire reproached and contradicted such images. Inevitably they arose,
and, as inevitably, the companion picture of the mother, like a
transfixed Mater Dolorosa.
To the mother he felt that in giving interest and attention to Claire
he rendered a service more grateful to her than any homage. He proposed
that he should take Claire for walks sometimes, and he felt something of
the staidness of the girl's upbringing in Madame Vicaud's acquiescence,
in its implied trust--a trust that waived a custom in his favor. It
expressed the mother's attitude against all that was lax or undignified
in life. Claire could go with him, their friend, but, Claire told him
with a light laugh, she seldom went out alone. "Only sometimes with
Monsieur Daunay--but he is like a father, almost; and to the
dressmaker's; and almost always Mamma is with me--we are such
companions, you know." Damier could not quite determine as to possible
irony in her placid tones. He looked upon these walks with Claire--they
would cross the Seine, looking up at Carpeaux's jocund group on the
Pavillon de Flore, and pace sedately in the Tuileries Gardens or up the
Champs-Elysées--as expressions of his identification of himself with
Madame Vicaud's interests, for he always felt that it pleased her that
he should ask Claire to go; yet, after each one of them, he could not
defend himself from the strange sensation that he had been in an
atmosphere disloyal to his friend. The atmosphere was so different, yet
so subtly different, when Claire was alone with him, or with him and her
mother. So subtle was the difference that any remonstrance on his part
might constitute a stupid rebuff to her unconsciousness; yet so
different were her tones, her look, her laugh, so different the quality
of her frankness, its _gaillardise_, as it were, and its familiarity,
almost insolent in its assurance--so different were all these that he
could hardly believe her unconscious of the change. He did understand
her; that was the trouble: for she acted as if he did, and as if all
pretenses were unnecessary between them, and free breathing a relief to
both after a burdensome atmosphere. Damier, while they walked, showed a
grave kindliness, listened to her, assented or dissented with a careful
accuracy that amused himself. He was not quite sure why, with Claire, he
seldom felt it safe to be flexible or flippant; some dim instinct of
self-protection before this embryotic soul and quick intelligence made
him guard himself against all misinterpretations, made him scrupulous in
defining the differences between them. Claire referred little to her
mother, and then, at least in the beginnings of their intercourse, in
the tones of commonplace respect, with something of the effect, he more
and more realized, of shuffling aside an excellence that they both took
for granted but hardly cared to linger over--she certainly did not,
though he might have odd, pretty tastes for the past and done with.
What to him was poetry--for, to a certain extent, she seemed to
appreciate his attitude toward her mother--was to her the mere furniture
of life. Damier resented, but for some time was helpless; she gave him
no occasion for declaration or defense. Once or twice, when, _à propos
de bottes_, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of
his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a
_cela-va-sans-dire_ expression vastly baffling. Only by degrees, and
only after some definite sharpnesses on his side, did she seem to
realize that, in including him in her own casual attitude toward her
mother, she not only misinterpreted but irritated and antagonized him.
After that realization she never so offended again. Indeed, with an air
of honoring his fantastic sensitiveness, yet with gravity, as if to show
him that she, too, could appreciate moral charm, the pathos of defeat
and finality, she often alluded to her mother's fine and gracious
qualities; but, in spite of this concession, Damier was still aware of
the indefinable difference that made the atmosphere seem disloyal.
She said one day: "You have really decided to live in Paris--for ever
and ever--_hein_? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us
interesting?"
"Very," replied Damier.
"But the world is full of so many more interesting people," said Claire,
"than two ladies, one almost old and one rapidly leaving her youth
behind her, who live the narrowest of lives and give lessons to make
butter for their bread."
"I have not met many more interesting."
"Then it is--to study us?" Her sleepy smile was upon him.
Damier had certainly no intention of confiding in Claire the reasons for
his stay in Paris, feeling suddenly, indeed, that the young woman
herself formed a rather serious problem in all practical considerations
of these reasons; yet the attitude implied in her question demanded a
negative. "No, it isn't because I am studying you; it is because I am
fond of you," he said, bringing out the words with a touch of
awkwardness, feeling their simplicity to be almost crude.
Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he
knew, though he was not looking at her.
"_Vous êtes un original_," she said at last, with quite the manner of
her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some
specimen of British eccentricity.
On another day a little incident occurred, slight, yet destined to
impress Damier with a deeper sense of Claire's unsoundness. They were
walking down the Champs-Elysées, in the windy brightness of a March
afternoon, when, in the distance, near the Rond Point, they discerned
the easily recognizable figure of Monsieur Daunay. Claire, as this old
friend appeared upon the field of vision, put her hand in Damier's arm
and, drawing him toward one of the smaller streets that slope down to
the spacious avenue, said, smiling unemphatically: "Don't let us meet
him."
"Why not?" Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of
a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous
evasion.
"He hasn't seen us--come," she insisted, though the insistence was still
veiled in humor.
"Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him."
Her eyes measured Monsieur Daunay's distance before she said, with
something of impatience at his slowness of comprehension: "He will be
shocked--think it improper--our walking out alone like this." Damier
stared at her, stolidly resistant to the soft pull of her hand.
"Improper? Your mother consenting--you an Englishwoman, I an
Englishman?"
"He is a Frenchman, and I am half French; you seem to forget that, both
you and Mamma, at times." If she was irritated with him she successfully
controlled her irritation, and Monsieur Daunay was so near that flight
before his misinterpretation was impossible. She evidently resigned
herself to the situation of Damier's making--let him feel, with a shrug
of her shoulders, that it was of his making indeed, but, by a
half-indifferent, half-ironic smile, that he was forgiven; he must be
strong enough for both of them, the smile said.
Monsieur Daunay approached, doffing his hat, and Damier at once
perceived that there was certainly in his eye a cogitation very
courteous, but altogether out of keeping, he thought, with the
importance of its cause. He himself felt absent-minded, his thoughts
engaged more with the analysis of the new and disagreeable sensation
Claire had given him than with the sensations she might have given
Monsieur Daunay. He replied somewhat vaguely to Monsieur Daunay's
salutations, and, not so vaguely, heard Claire saying, "Mamma has sent
us out for a walk."
"Fine weather for walking," Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from
the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive
day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.
"You often walk here?" he continued pleasantly.
"Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr.
Damier takes us out sometimes."
"Madame Vicaud is at home?"
"Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us."
"She is well, I trust?"
"Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?" Claire laid a gently
urgent hand upon his arm. "I have been practising the Gluck. I think you
will be pleased with it. You will come?"
"With great pleasure, as always," said the Frenchman, but still with
something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.
They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.
"He was shocked," said Claire, mildly.
Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he
himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that
wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.
"We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us," he
said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took;
it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier's
part to express displeasure.
"There was no necessity for him to know that," she returned, adding,
with a laugh: "Now I have shocked both of you--he in his _convenances_,
you in your English veracity. I don't mind fibbing in the least, I must
tell you."
"Don't you?" His displeasure was now determined to show its definite
coolness.
"Not in the least," said Claire, with perfect good humor, "in myself or
in others"; and she added, with a little laugh at herself, "unless other
people's fibs interfere with mine; but I think that I mind their fibs
interfering less than their truths."
Damier resigned himself to feeling that, after all, he was thoroughly
prepared for any such developments in Claire; it was the tragedy in the
thought of the other Clara that was knocking at his heart.