"Of course you may--you know them so well; and, as I see, your sympathy
is all with the mother. Well, I am afraid she is altogether trying, but
the instance of which I was thinking deserves a severer adjective. Some
friends of mine in Cheshire, nice, quiet people, had always kept more or
less in touch with Madame Vicaud during her stormy life. They did not
meet, but they sometimes wrote. Mrs. Barnett and she had been friends
in girlhood. Claire, when she grew up, went to stay with them. Very
beautiful, very clever, singing wonderfully, yet, from the beginning,
she struck a false note. And then there was the ugly little story: a
young man, Captain Dauncey, fell madly in love with her; they were
engaged; and, within hardly a month's time, she jilted him openly and
brazenly for a better match. That was only the beginning. Sir Everard
Comber was madly in love, too, but Mrs. Barnett told me that they felt
that he knew there was no good metal under her glamour; the glamour was
so great that he hoodwinked himself. It was tragic to see him trying not
to see. And one day he and Mrs. Barnett found Mademoiselle Vicaud
engaged in a flirtation in an arbor, indolently allowing an adoring
young man to kiss her hand, his arm around her waist. Mrs. Barnett said
that it was the most unpleasant of situations--poor Sir Everard's face,
the girl's look of dismay, followed by an instant assumption of
coolness. She was able, almost at once, to show a humorous, half-vexed,
half-tolerant smile, and to pretend that she expected them to share her
playful anger against the hugely embarrassed culprit. She behaved,
afterward, very badly about Sir Everard's breaking off the engagement,
which he did most delicately and generously. She had no dignity; she was
furious, and showed that she was. She even hinted once--only once, but
it was enough--at a breach-of-promise suit and damages.
"Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a
moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there
must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud
carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not
save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is
the story," said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a
whitened face, kept a sick silence--"only the story, after all, of a
vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.
"I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know,
nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the
girl could be married off to somebody who understood--and didn't mind.
Don't you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?"
Damier could not think just now of Claire's future; he was thinking,
persistently, of Madame Vicaud--seeing her as a white flower sunken up
to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her
daughter--greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the
tortured mother's heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her
proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her
silences, her reserves!
In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible
atonement to Madame Vicaud.
"Have I been wrong in telling you--ungenerous?" asked Lady Surfex.
"No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel
where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one
can help her."
"We will lift her!" said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed
face. "And then, if we do,--right out of the mother's life,--what will
she do alone?"
"She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life."
"Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her
husband."
"Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!"
"Not so much to find one--she is enchanting in appearance, I hear--as to
keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you,
Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her
mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?"
He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.
"Quite so absorbing."
X
YET that very evening Damier was to have his freshly
emphasized disgust unsettled, as theories are so constantly unsettled by
new developments of fact. Claire did not show him a new fact about
herself; she merely explained herself a little further, and made it
evident that one could not label her "vulgar" and so dispose of her.
It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all
his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon,
sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window--opened on the
warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture,
the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something
of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could
love--even--even--he had wondered over it more and more of late--her
mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the
desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an
inner shrine of sorrow.
His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a
clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting
his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or
hear.
That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little
Sophie; and Claire's gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor
Sophie's ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the
theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen
the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object
the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet,
sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from
dim tree-tops outside to Claire's white form and splendid head, he felt
that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did
not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart
was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her
beauty to his eye.
"The chief thing," said Claire,--they had been talking in a desultory
fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its
transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look,
adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,--"the chief thing is to know
what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what
they want, you know--unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic."
(Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very
pregnant.) "You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted;
therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint
well--you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?--though Mamma, you
see, has his photograph conspicuously _en évidence_ up there, lest I
should think too ill of him--or guess how ill she thinks of him herself.
I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very
bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he
did. You know his pictures. I don't care about pictures, but I suppose
there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg
canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never
really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices--the
prejudices of the _jeune fille anglaise_. I"--she smiled a little at
him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had
evoked in his expression--"I have a very restricted field for choice;
but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with
me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many
pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as
determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma--yes, I am
coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly
good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too;
but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked--the latter,
probably, for she has a strong will."
"Perhaps," said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms
folded and knees crossed, listening to her--"perhaps you underestimate
her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own
nature."
"I don't think it is at all splendid," said Claire, composedly; "some
wickedness is, I grant you; but do I strike you as affecting that kind?"
"I must own that you don't."
"Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?" she
pursued.
Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.
"Ah, that is well. I should not like you to misinterpret me," said
Claire. "I make no poses." And after a slight pause in which he
wondered anew over her, she added: "I merely like enjoyment better than
anything else in the world."
"Yours, you know, is a very old philosophy--a universe of will and
enjoyment; but one must have a great deal of the former to attain the
latter in a world of so many clashing aims," said Damier.
"Yes, one must."
"And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible
one."
"Do you think so?" Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.
"Don't you?"
"No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one's aims; it is
all beautiful, even the suffering--if one avoids suffering one's self."
"You are an esthete--
While safe beneath the roof,
To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain."
"Oh, better than rain--the tempest!"
"And how can one avoid suffering, pray?"
"_Mais_,"--Claire had a tolerant smile for his naïveté,--"by staying
under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be
darting out continually into the storm."
"Bringing other people back to shelter."
"And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us
wet!" smiled Claire. "For a case in point--don't you find Sophie a bore?
She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss
Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit--her
last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have
been a wise thing. Don't be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I
mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will
ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more
clearly her higher wants. And--I don't want to seem more ungenerous than
I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don't look so
stony; I am not really _un mauvais coeur_. I would willingly dot
Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but
husbands and houses and money wouldn't make Sophie comfortable, and I
don't really see that much is gained by making two people less so in
order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole."
"I need hardly tell you that I don't share the ruthless materialism of
that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie's
unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to
survival?"
Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet
rueful.
"How often you surprise me," she said, "and how often you make me feel
that I don't, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to
realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid.
With you _tout comprendre_ is not _tout pardonner_."
"By no means," Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.
"Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if
you can't forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have:
I never pretend to be better than I am."
"And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you
know." Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he
spoke.
Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:
"Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral
perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so
because I won't suffer, won't go out of my life into other people's. You
asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is
very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: _to suffer with_--why
should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if
one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one's
self--to bring things to one's self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma
will not understand in me."
Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had
expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother
for her own benefit as well as his, went on:
"She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a
different way. She is always striving--against things; I wait. Even if
she can't see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at
something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at."
"What things do you aim at?" he now asked.
"Oh--you know; things that Mamma despises--things that you too despise,
perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand." He could not quite
interpret the glance that rested upon him. "And Mamma's aims--I suppose
you don't care to hear what I think of them?"
"On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has
aimed at. What has she attained?"
He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for
the one evident, the one tragic failure.
"Well,"--Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the
window,--"for one thing, she has kept herself--she hasn't attained it:
that wasn't needful--_très grande dame_. She has always made herself a
social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she
would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma's
spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in
which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the
soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and
ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and
beneficent."
Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with
more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that
had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was
one. It was touching--meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his
attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could
paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new
revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a
mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his
impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that,
too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world
was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in
him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere
flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm
and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of
being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil
of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy
braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful
beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in
one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling,
with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from
her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new
impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very
gentle kindliness, he said to her: "Strong enough to make you flower
some day, let us believe"; and, as silently she still gazed upon him:
"That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know."
Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him,
Claire now said: "I owe that flower, not to her, but to you."
He stared for a moment, not comprehending.
"You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my
appreciation?"
"Yes--in a sense, I mean that."
"But," said Damier, smiling, "you owe it to her that there is something
beautiful to see."
He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.
Claire, without moving, turned her eyes on the door. "Here she is," she
said; and as her mother entered, she added, in the lowest voice above a
whisper, so vaguely that it was like a fragrant perturbing influence
breathing from the twilight and the spring air:
"I like to owe all my flowers to you."
Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.
Madame Vicaud, in her black dress, with flowing white about her wrists
and throat,--a throat erect and beautiful,--had closed the door softly
behind her, and as she came toward him, Damier, involuntarily carrying
further his Venusberg simile of some moments before, thought of an
Elizabeth bringing peace and radiance; yet there was, too, a gravity in
her gaze, a quick intentness that went swiftly from her daughter to him.
Then the smile and the lightness masked her. She took his hand.
"Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?"
"Of life, and how to live it," laughed Damier.
"Wise young people! Was it a contest of sublimities?" Madame Vicaud laid
down the evening wrap she had brought in, and, it seemed to Damier,
averted her face from him as she took up a box of matches.
"Do I ever fight under the banner of sublimity, Mamma?" Claire inquired,
looking out of the window, showing once more her accustomed lassitude
and detachment. "I leave those becoming colors to you--and to Mr.
Damier."
"But don't, even in jest, my dear, assume always the unbecoming ones,"
Madame Vicaud replied, still with all her lightness, and bending, her
face still averted, to strike a match. "You have discovered, have you
not, Mr. Damier, that it is difficult for Claire to assume the virtues
that she has?"
She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on
the cabinet where her husband's portrait stood; and Damier, watching
the swift blackness of her girlish figure, the slender white of her
uplifted hand,--the black more black, the white more white, as the
radiance slowly grew in the dim room,--still fancied that she was
mastering some emotion, hiding from him some sudden agitation. There was
a faint flush on her face as she turned, gaily and sweetly, blowing out
and tossing away her match, to welcome Sophie.