DAMIER was well aware that some trivial and purely
subjective fancy or emotion may oddly color and distort reality for one,
and he was not quite able to decide whether change there really were in
Madame Vicaud, or whether it was only in his imagination that the
difference he had fancied in her on that evening was continued during
the following days. She seemed, in her relations with him, more intimate
and yet more effaced; and he was almost sure--or was it only the
reflection of his own solicitude cast upon her?--that she watched him,
speculated upon him, more than at any time in their friendship, and
always with that controlled agitation. It was almost as if she guessed
his new knowledge and understanding of her sorrows and humiliations; as
if she wondered how much he knew, and how much he was going to let her
see that he knew. And if she seemed more intimate yet more effaced,
Claire, for a little while at all events, was less intimate yet more in
evidence. He had the rather uncomfortable feeling that Claire had
implied on that evening more than he had been able to understand; that
she had laid upon him some responsibility that he really never had
undertaken to accept: but she did not emphasize it further, seemed
content to let it remain indefinitely apprehended by him, and the slight
discomfort and perplexity he had felt passed from his mind, leaving only
in a half-conscious undercurrent the mood of vague doubt and withdrawal,
mingling with a deeper pity, a deeper desire to help--for her own sake
now as well as for her mother's.
It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a
greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the
foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all
talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her
hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and
her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her
mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background--a
mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things--she smiled more
tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though
expecting him to understand more than she could look.
And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on
unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly
tinted difference over all the mental landscape.
It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found
himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her
guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back
to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her
solitude.
Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new
book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things
back in their places, closing the piano--a little restless in her
restoration of composure to the room.
Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book.
"Always friends, you know," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and
speaking lightly, almost incidentally.
"Why not?" Damier asked, looking up at her.
"Indeed, why not?" she returned, smiling. "Nothing, I hope, would ever
change our friendship."
"Nothing could." She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at
him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: "You will tell me if you
are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so
little?"
"Oh, yes; I will tell you," she answered, still with the lightness that
contrasted with the tremor of Damier's voice.
Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire's
singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung Orféo's
song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying
her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire's
interpretation of the song. Claire's voice had thrown an enchantment
around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.
"Her voice is glorious," he said.
"The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera," said
Madame Vicaud; "that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through
horror."
"Ah," was on Damier's lips, "you have said what she could not sing"; but
he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure
he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He
therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands
clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her
calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp
with its plain green shade: "Do you think Claire's life very gray--very
dreary?"
The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter's upbringing,
seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its
chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was,
perhaps, Claire's gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly
clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious,
dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed
the mitigating supposition. Claire's life was really neither gray nor
dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: "From her
point of view it probably is."
"I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more
opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as
she does. Not that Claire complains."
"You have given her your best. How could she complain?" Damier was not
able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire
complaining.
"Ah, I could not blame her if she did," said Madame Vicaud, her quiet
eyes on her work, "for mothers personify circumstance to children; we
are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very
naturally, we are fate's whipping-boys: and when one is a young and
talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons,
in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem
to deserve blows."
Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,--of which she must be so
ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,--longed to throw himself
at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he
had--not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her
superiority--thought her unconscious of Claire's pathos.
"You deepen your shadows too much," he said; "for a daughter more like
yourself your life would not be a narrow one." He paused, for, though
she did not lift her eyes, a faint flush passed over Madame Vicaud's
face.
"I see all your efforts to widen it," he went on, hurrying away from
what he felt to have been an unfortunate comparison, "the flowers you
strew: intellectual, artistic interests, friends that you hope she may
find congenial, your delightful teas."
"Oh--our teas!" Madame Vicaud interrupted, smiling with a rather
satirical playfulness. "No; our delightful and 'cultured' little teas
can hardly atone to Claire. She should have the gaiety, the variety, the
colored experience that I had in my youth. I can well imagine that to
Claire's palate the nourishment I offer her is rather tasteless. She
needs excitement, admiration, appreciation, an outlet for her energy,
her intelligence."
Damier seized the opportunity--it was, he thought, very
propitious--again to ask her when he might bring some of his friends in
Paris to see her, suggesting that so Claire's social diet might be
pleasantly diversified. Madame Vicaud had more than once
evaded--gracefully, kindly, and decisively--all question of renewing
broken ties with her country-people, or making new ones, and now, again,
she slightly flushed, as though for a moment finding him tactless and
inopportune; but only for a moment: when she lifted her eyes to him, it
was with all their quiet confidence of gaze.
"I hardly know that that would be for Claire's happiness or good. One
must have the means of widening one's environment if it is to be with
comfort to one's self. Our means are too limited to be diffused over a
larger area. You must not forget, my friend, that we are very poor. I do
not like accepting where I can offer nothing."
"That is a false though a charming delicacy," said Damier. "You give
yourself; and I hope you won't refuse to now, for I have almost promised
you to Lady Surfex; she is very anxious to meet you."
Madame Vicaud was silent for some moments, her eyes downcast to the work
where she put firm, rapid stitches; then, in a voice that had suddenly
grown icy, "Her mother did not recognize me one day, years ago, when she
met me walking with my husband," she said.
It was now Damier's turn to flush. He nerved himself, after a moment, to
say:
"But this is not the mother."
"No; and my husband is dead: otherwise the wish to meet me would not
overcome that disability."
"You are a little unjust, my dearest friend," said the young man.
"I know the world," she replied; but she raised her eyes in saying it,
and looked at him with a sad kindness that separated him from the world
she knew. "I don't judge it--only see it as it is. It seeks happiness,
it avoids unhappiness. To be unfortunate is to be lost, in its eyes--to
sink from sight. To be fortunate is to have a radiance around one; and
the world seeks radiance."
After looking at him she again bent her eyes, and still sewed on while
she spoke. "When I needed it, it abandoned me. When I was in the dark,
it did not look for me. I strayed--through stubborn folly, perhaps;
perhaps, too, through generous ignorance--into a quicksand, and not a
hand was held out to me. I was allowed to sink; I was déclassée, I am
déclassée, in the eyes of all of those who were of my world." The cold
flame of a long resentment burned in her steady voice. "I have tested
average human nature," she resumed, after a slight pause, in which he
saw her breast heave slowly. "It is a severe test, I own; but, after it,
it is with difficulty that I can trust again. I have no wish to know
people who, if I were in dire straits, would pass over on the other side
of the way. The few friends I have I have proved--the comtesse, Madame
Dépressier, Lady Vibert, Monsieur Daunay,--who had much to bear from my
husband,--Sophie; there are a few more, very few; and then, you, my
friend."
She stopped sewing--the rapid movements of her hand had been almost
automatic--and looked at him, her work falling to her knee. "Come here,"
she said, holding out her hand to him, "come here. Have I seemed harsh
to you?" Her sudden smile dwelt on him with a divine sweetness. "I am
harsh--but not to you."
Damier, with an eagerness almost pathetically boyish, had sprung to her
side, and she took his hand, smiling up at him. "Not to you. You have
enlarged my trust--need I say how much? Don't ask me to alloy it with
dubious admixtures."
His love for her was yet so founded on a sort of sacred fear that at
this moment of delicious happiness he did not dare to stoop and confess
all with a lover's kiss upon her hair, did not even dare to look a
confession of more than a responsive affection.
She pressed his hand, still smiling at him, and then, resuming her
sewing, "Sit near me," she said, "so I can see that you are not fancying
that I am harsh with you!"
At such moments he could see in her eyes, that caressed one, made
sweetest amends to one, touches of what must once have been enchanting
roguishness.
"But I am still going to risk your harshness," he said; "I am still
going to ask you to let your trust in me include my friend. She would
stand tests. Won't you take my word for it?"
"I believe that I would take your word for anything."
"And," said Damier, looking his thanks, "all you say is true. I don't
want to justify man's ways to man; and yet ordinary human nature, with
its almost inevitable self-regarding instinct, its climb toward
happiness, its ugly struggle for successful attainment of it, is more
forgetful than cruel toward unhappiness. One must be patient with it;
one must remember that only the exceptional natures can rise above that
primitive instinct. To take the other road is to embrace the sacrifice
of all the second-rate joys--the only real joys to the average human
being. One must either yield to the instinct or fight it, and most
people are too lazy, too skeptical of other than apparent good, to do
that. And then you must remember--I must, for how often I have struggled
with these thoughts!--that misfortune is a mask, a disguise. One can't
be recognized and known when one wears it; one can't show one's self; if
one could there would perhaps be responses. People are base--most of
them are base, perhaps; but sometimes they are only blind or stupid."
"I sometimes think that I am all three," said Madame Vicaud, after a
little pause. "Misfortune's distorting mask has become in me an
actuality. I am perhaps blinded; certainly, as I told you, warped and
hardened. I used not to be so; it was, I suppose, latent in me: I could
not bear the fiery ordeal; the good shriveled and the dross remained."
She spoke with a full gravity, no hint of plaintive self-pity, no appeal
for contradiction, in her voice; yet, on raising her saddened eyes, she
had to smile when she met his look.
"I see," she said, "that you are determined to take me at your own
valuation, not at mine."
She turned the talk after that; she could seldom be led to talk of
herself, and not until dinner was over, not until, after it, he had read
to her for an hour, did she return to its subject. Then it was when he
rose to go that, giving him her hand in farewell, she said:
"Bring your friend; I shall be glad to see her."