NEXT day, as Damier waited near the Porte Dauphine for
Claire, he could reflect on his really parental situation, but feeling
more the irritation than the humor of it. After all, where was his
authority for this meddling? Why should they submit to it? and why, as a
result, should he submit to the hearing of Claire's coming
self-justification? He could spare Madame Vicaud nothing by it, since
she knew all that there was to know--and since it was better that she
should know it. He had written to her the night before, on reaching his
hotel, and told her of the talk with Monsieur Daunay and of the
impression it had made upon him. He wondered if she had, meanwhile, had
an equally appeasing talk with Claire.
This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace
along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering
purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her
as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings--like a
Valkyrie's summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind
her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with
something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed
no wish to beat about the bush.
"You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she
talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn't feel for him, _pas
grand comme ça d'amour_." Claire indicated the smallness she negatived
by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. "And I think I can soon satisfy
you, too," she added. "He told you everything?"
"Everything."
"And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take
money from a married man who is in love with her? Must I assure you
that our relations are absolutely innocent?"
In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first
statement or the coolness of her second remark--its forestalling of a
suspicion she took for granted in him--were the more striking. Both
statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than
even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than
stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more
outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were
still half ironic, half defiant.
"I do so assure you."
"I did not need the assurance." Damier found his voice, but it was
hoarse.
Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a
very false note.
"And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded
and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. _Que voulez-vous?_ Only don't be too
much shocked by my frankness; don't be prudish. A man may be propriety
itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that
I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with
such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don't know), and
that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don't know it before a
man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face
of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does
suggest a situation usually described as immoral."
Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as
she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush
of anger--it was more anger than shame--still on her cheek.
"I must tell you," he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy,
"that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur
Daunay's kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything."
"What did he tell you, then?" she asked, stopping short in the path and
fixing her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian,
note.
"That he adored you, and that he could be trusted."
"Well, he can be!" She broke into a hard laugh. "_Le cher bon Daunay!_ I
thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And
now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the
world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told
you."
Damier made no reply.
"You are furious, are you not?"
"I am disgusted, but not for that reason only."
"You think I am in love with him!" She stopped again in the narrow path.
"I swear to you that I am not!" He would have interrupted her, but her
volubility swept past his attempt. "If he had been free I would have
married him--I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him.
I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that
subject. I could have found no other man in this country willing to
marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a _mariage
d'amour_; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more
desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur
Daunay?"
"I should say certainly not,"--Damier waited with a cold patience until
she had finished,--"but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted
not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him."
At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.
"Ah!--_c'est trop fort!_ You can't make me believe that you want me to
love him."
"I don't want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be
more to your credit if you did."
Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.
"Ah, it is the money, then--that I should accept it!"
"Can I make no appeal to you for your mother's sake--for the sake of
your own dignity?"
"I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier." The relief was showing
in her quieter voice, her fading flush. "I see how angry you are--and
only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never
pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to
do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a
pittance left to her, a year or so after my father's death, by some
relations, and that, since then, has been our only _pied-à-terre_. She
would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her
family wished to make her. I don't want to blame her; I know how you
feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish
of her; she should have thought more of me--the luckless result of her
mésalliance--and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she
brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always
at school during my father's life--she avoided _that_ soil for me, you
may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard
to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she
did not pay the debt." Claire had been looking before her as she talked,
but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring,
in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not
serving her. "Don't imagine, now, that I am complaining--ungrateful,"
she said a little petulantly. "I know--as well as you do--what a good
mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not
altogether blameless--that she is responsible, in more ways than one,
for me--for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young
girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty,
labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared
for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to
enjoy work, shabby clothes, grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at
all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking--that was her
idea of happiness for me!" Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in
her voice. "I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people
in horrid places--expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put
a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one
should wish to devote one's self to _bonnes-oeuvres;_ but for me, _ah,
par exemple!_" Claire gave a coarse laugh. "I had not quite come to
that! She gave me the best she had--all she had, you will say; I own it:
but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me
to enjoy--should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only
endured. Again,--I am not unjust,--it was not all high thinking; she had
her schemes for my amusement--_d'une simplicité!_ Really, for such a
clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a
right--you know it--to _le vrai grand monde_. You know it, and you are
trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little
management she might have regained her place in it; but no--her pride
again! She seemed to think that _she_ was _le grand monde_, and that I
ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it
strange--_disgusting_--that when I saw that Daunay--_le pauvre!_--was in
love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that
he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is
dull--though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money,
she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value;
she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of
our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my
clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and
stockings--as I understand shoes and stockings!" Claire laughed. "This
dress that I have on--Mamma imagines it is made by a little dressmaker
whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on
the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet." There
was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire's voice. "And I have always
considered myself amply excusable," she went on, "in accepting the small
pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much
that I have been able to accept--though he would willingly--and he is
not rich--give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared
attempt--nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For
Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I
can see her face!"
So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to
Claire, physically brutal--to strike her to the dust where she dragged
the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice
quiet enough: "You must tell her now; you must tell her everything."