XIV

ON Damier's return to his hotel early in the afternoon,

he found a note from Madame Vicaud awaiting him. "Monsieur Daunay has

just been here," it said, "and destiny has strangely brought this matter

to a crisis. His wife is dead, and he has asked me for Claire's hand,

feeling that his false position toward me demanded an immediate

reparation. He hopes and believes that she loves him; but this, as both

you and I must know, is impossible. I am saddened and confused by the

whole situation. I do not blame them, but to me it is all displeasing,

even shocking--this haste to profit by the wife's opportune death most

of all. Will you come and see me? Claire is lunching at his cousin's,

and he will find her there. I told him to speak to her himself, as I

felt that to act the maternal part of intermediary between them would

now be mere formalism and affectation; so I am alone. You will want to

speak to me, I know."

Damier, as he drove to the Rue B----, speculated on the rather

mystifying significance of the last sentence. He always wanted to speak

to her: that she must know; but why now in particular? Since his

interview with Claire that morning he had felt almost too shaken by pity

for the mother to trust himself with her. He would not be able to help

her with counsel and consolation; he would not be able to think of

Claire; and at this turning-point in Claire's life it was for that that

the mother needed him.

He found her standing in the salon, evidently pausing to meet him, in a

restless pacing to and fro. Her eyes dwelt on him gently and very

gravely while she took his hand.

"Who could have expected this swift dénouement? But it is best," she

said, "and I pitied him very deeply."

"Pitied him--for the past, you mean?" Damier questioned.

"Oh, for the future more!"

Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her

smile.

"I saw Claire this morning," he said. "We talked over the matter; she

wished to see me."

Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. "Ah, yes;

I understand," she said.

"She certainly told me that she did not love him," Damier went on, "and

yet--" He paused, not quite knowing how to put to her his hope that

Claire now would reconsider the situation, his hope that she would marry

Monsieur Daunay.

It would be the solution of all difficulties, the best solution

possible, and the situation could then be defined anew in terms that he

more and more deeply longed for. He hardly dared, even yet, before her

unconsciousness, define it, and turning away from her, he walked down

the room, urging himself to a courage great enough to enable him now to

speak to her what was in his heart. Madame Vicaud was watching him

thoughtfully when he faced her again at the end of the room, and with

still that look of controlled emotion.

"I, also, have something to tell you," he said.

"Yes," she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced,

steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.

"Can you guess?" he asked.

She was standing now, strangely, in the attitude of the little

photograph--leaning on the back of a high chair; and her eyes recalled

yet more strangely the intentness of the picture's eyes as she said:

"You have come to tell me that you love my daughter?"

He was so deeply astonished, so completely thrown back upon himself,

that for a long moment he could only gaze helplessly into the eyes'

insolubility.

"No," he said at last; "I did not come to tell you that."

"But you do love her?" Madame Vicaud inquired, with something of gentle

urgency in her voice, as though she helped his shyness. "Be frank with

me, my friend; I have guessed so much more, seen so much more, than you

told me or showed me. Even with all that saddens you, that pains you,

you do love her--enough to overlook the pain and sadness?"

"No," said Damier, still facing her from his distance, "I do not love

her. I have never needed to overlook anything."

Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.

"But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?"

"You, only, have been my meaning."

He saw that her thought, in its disarray, could not pause upon his

interpretation of these words. She had straightened herself, both hands

on the chair-back, and her wide gaze, her parted lips, and the vivid

wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.

"You have, from the first, been so much with her--seemed to take so much

interest in her--seemed so to understand her; she was so open--so

intimate--"

"She is your daughter."

"But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love

my daughter--"

He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and,

suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.

"I don't, in the very least, love Claire; I have never, in the very

least, loved her; I have only been sorry for her."

"Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been

sorry, too?"

"But I not for that," said Damier, "not for that; but because she made

me so sorry for you; because"--and he looked at her--"because you do not

love her."

He was still at a distance from her, and across it her look met his in

a long silence.

Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her

flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly

rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long

before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with

her hands.

"Forgive me!" Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came

to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did

not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication,

and all the others--ah, the others?--the years and years of them that

rolled between them!--in a full and final confession. "Forgive me for

seeing--it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness--"

She made no reply.

"You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every

fiber of you. There is nothing in her that does not hurt you," Damier

said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had

come for it.

Madame Vicaud lifted her head.

"I do understand her," she said. She did not look at him. Straightening

her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the

window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced

from her as it had been from him, "And I hate her."

Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its

strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the

light, he was able to say: "I even guessed that--almost."

"Yet you do not hate her," she said, after a pause of some moments,

speaking without moving or turning her head.

Damier paused too. "I have not your reasons," he said at last.

"Ah, my reasons! Yes." She turned to him now, as though she saw in him

an accusing world, and faced it in an attitude of desperate

self-justification.

"They began with her father," said Damier.

"I hated him," she said. Her eyes looked through him, fixed on the abyss

of the past. "I hated him. He was abhorrent to me. I lived with him for

fifteen years--fifteen long, long years. I bore his brutality, his

wickedness--I am not the woman to use the word prudishly--I can make

allowances--wide ones--for temperament, environment, all the mitigating

causes: but my husband's wickedness was unimaginably vile; to see it

stained one's thoughts." The memory of it, as she spoke, had chilled her

to a drawn and frozen pallor; it was as though the blighting breath of

the past went across her face, aging it, emptying it of life.

"I bore the ruin he brought; that was nothing--a spur to love, had love

been possible. I bore his serene, inflexible selfishness. The only thing

I would not bear"--and she still looked full at Damier, but with the

same unseeing largeness of gaze--"was his love. _His_ love!" She turned

and walked across the room. Damier felt his own flesh shudder as he

looked behind the curtain her words lifted, felt his own heart freeze in

the aching sympathy of its comprehension. He could not speak to her. It

seemed to him that she stood at a great distance from him and would not

hear him. Her voice, when she spoke again, had less of its haunting

terror, but it still thrilled with a deep and tragic note: "All this, as

thousands of women have done, because it was my duty--to help him--to

uphold him--to stand by him unflinchingly, and--because he was _her_

father. You said that my reasons for hating her began with him. Ah, but

he was my reason for loving her so desperately--with such a longing to

atone to her for him. I gave her all the love he had crushed out of me.

You see his picture there; I have schooled myself, so that she may not

feel the smirch of him through my horror, to bear the sight of him, to

say to myself every day, 'That is the face I loved.' Oh, what

madness!--what madness!" She pressed her hands hard upon her eyes. "Some

day, perhaps,--since I tell you everything,--I will tell you that story,

too--my love-story. The memory of it is like a block of lead upon my

heart." Her hands fell, but the memory made her silent, and for a long

moment she stood looking down. "But all was hidden from her: the

dread,--that soon passed--I was the stronger, he came to feel it, dread

fell from me,--the hate that followed it, and the final, the terrible

pity,--for I came to pity him when he hung about my life, helpless, like

a torn and dirty rag,--all that was hidden from her. I kept her lifted

out of the mud he dragged us down to; she never saw its depths. While he

lived, and while he was dying,--and horrible to see and hear,--she was

at a school. Those days!" She paused and turned away, and then went on:

"It was in the winter. Lessons fell away; there was the school, the

doctor, all the expenses of an illness to be met. I went into the

streets of nights, a man carrying my harp, and sang for money; I had a

voice till then, and I braved more than the snow and the night to do it:

I was still beautiful. This that you may see how I loved her, how I

struggled for her, how like any mother, though now I seem so hard--so

hideously unnatural. Ah, I fought--I cannot tell you, you cannot guess,

how I fought for her. And then, he died, and then there was for me peace

and the blossoming of delicious hope. She and I together, saved from the

wreck. It seemed to me that I had battled through waves, past rocks and

whirlpools, holding her to my breast, and had reached the shore at

last--she alive for me, and I for her. And then--ah, then! The

shipwreck, the years of struggle, were crude tragedy to my gradual

realizing of the subtle disaster that was to poison my life forever.

Year by year I saw it coming--I saw him creeping into her. I saw the

grave purpose settle round her lips--the steady greed for self. I saw

his smile in her eyes; his eyes were beautiful like hers: when I first

looked at them, I thought them full of splendid dreams, noble strength.

She was not cruel, or brutal, or vicious, as he had been. She submitted

placidly; she submitted, and I hoped for happiness. I could not make her

happy or unhappy. I meant nothing to her except the thing that fed and

clothed her. She took what I could give, and waited for what I could not

give. She lied only when the truth would not serve her purpose better;

so, often, she was frank with me. Her grave laugh maddened me, and her

indifferent adapting of herself to me--for expediency, not for love. If

only she had become a gentle and beautiful animal, to guard from its own

instincts! but she is an animal of such hideous intelligence; she knows

when I try to guard her, and evades me. Like him, she is corrupt to the

core of her; not--do not misunderstand me--that she would do wrong in a

conventional sense--and that it is conventional wrong-doing that I

dread she has always pretended to read into my horror of evil, making a

plaster saint of me so that she may more easily evade the deeply

understanding woman of flesh and blood. Hers is the worse corruption,

that calculates chances, chooses and manages. It is there in her, I

know, though, in its worst forms, latent still--I think."

Damier, white already, felt himself blanch before the rapid glance, like

a sword-stroke across his face, that she cast upon him. She guessed at

all his knowledge.

Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.

"Hideous, hideous that I should speak so to you, and to you I hoped, yet

dreaded--You will wonder how I could have hoped it; how, knowing this, I

should not have warned you. But at first I did not think it possible,

though I knew her charm; at first I did not understand you, and, not

understanding, I guarded you. And then I saw your generous, your

pitiful heart, and I saw that it understood Claire, that perhaps you

understood her better than I did. With you she was her best self; she

trusted you, it seemed, so utterly. I hoped that yours was the clearer

vision, that I was warped, no longer capable of true seeing. Yet, when

the friendship that I rejoiced in grew, as I thought, into love, there

was a terrible struggle in me. My strong attachment to you--you who had

opened the prison gates that shut me into my misery, who brought me out

of a loneliness so long, so bitter--ah! my friend, do not think that I

have not seen and felt it all; but I could not speak to you as I might

have spoken had it not been for that struggle in me between the justice

owed to you--yet that you did not seem to need--and the duty to her--not

to withhold, for your sake, a possibility that might redeem her. My mind

was fixed in that struggle; of our friendship, yours and mine, I could

not think clearly. If you had been ignorant, if she had hidden herself

from you, I should have sacrificed her unflinchingly to you; I should

have interposed and shown her to you. But she showed herself to you. I

knew, from my knowledge of you, that she would not attract you as she

attracts most men, not nobly. I saw from her looks with you, her words,

that she would make no efforts so to attract you. I must say all to you,

since you must understand all. Claire does not love you, but you attract

what is best in her. She relies, I have guessed it, upon the very pathos

of her moral ugliness to enchant you, to arouse in you the chivalrous,

redemptive qualities she sees in you. And I grew to hope that you saw

something that I could not see. I even began to feel a blind, groping

tenderness for her through your fancied tenderness; and as I allowed

myself to hope that you loved her, I allowed myself to have faith in the

redeeming power of your love."

She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier,

answering them, shook his head.

"Alas, no. It would have been my story over again, the positions

reversed, and you without my illusions, had you loved her, married her;

and yet, it was because you had no illusions that I hoped."

But Damier could not think of dead hopes.

"What you have suffered!" he said.

"Yes," Madame Vicaud answered, "I have suffered; but do not, in your

kindness, your tenderness, exaggerate. I have suffered, but all has not

been black. There have been flowers on the uphill road. I don't believe

in a woe that is blind to them, or to the sky overhead."

But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.

"Clara," said Damier.

She was a woman of deep understanding, yet even now,--and hardly was it

to be wondered at, so lifted through its very intensity was his love for

her above love's ordinary manifestations,--even now her name so gravely

spoken by him had no further meaning for her than the one openly,

proudly, joyously accepted, the meaning of the strange tie that had

united them; but, while she accepted it, his look startled her. It

showed nothing new, but seemed to interpret newly something she had not

recognized before. Smiling faintly, she said:

"You have a right."

"Not the right I would have." He felt no excitement, only the enraptured

solemnity that a soul might feel in some quiet dawn of heaven on finding

another soul parted from years ago on earth--long sought for, long

loved.

She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was

already a recognition.

"I love you," said Damier. He had not moved toward her, nor had she

moved away. A little distance separated them, and they stood silently

looking at each other.

"You mean--" she said at last.

"I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman

he worships."

The whirl of her mind mirrored itself in the stricken stupefaction of

her wan, beautiful features. She caught at one flashing thought. "And

I--her mother! You might have been my son!"

"No; I might not," Damier affirmed.

"By age; I am old enough."

"I know your age; you are forty-seven," said Damier, able to smile at

her, "and I am thirty. If you were seventy-seven, the only difference

would be that I could have fewer years to spend with you; I should wish

to spend them just the same. As it is, your age does not make us

ludicrous before the world, if we were to consider that."

At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and

her own endurance of it, at such a moment.

"My friend! That this should have happened to you!"

"Can it never happen to you?" he asked.

"I would never allow it to happen to me."

"It would not be to look up at the sky--it would not even be to stoop to

a flower?"

"I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had

looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black."

He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through

tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the

worshiper's than the lover's, Eustace said:

"But would you--would you stoop?"

"I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has

led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest

meadows." Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran

down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. "I should be

culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool's

paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall

be an old woman while you are still a young man."

"Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same

to me? I have not fallen in love with you--I have found you. When I saw

your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine."

"The face of a girl. I was nineteen then."

"Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the

girl's face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That

struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in

part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you

thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?"

Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said,

"Perhaps."

"And if this were our last moment--if there were no question of age or

of going on--then--then would you tell me that you have felt something

of my feeling--the finding--the recognition--the rapture--own to it with

joy?"

She turned to him now and looked at him, at his eager, solemn face, the

supplication and worship of his clasped hands, looked for a long time,

without speaking. But her face, though she was so white and so grave,

seemed, as she looked, to reflect, with a growing radiance, the youth in

his.

"I have felt it," she said at last, "but I have hardly known that I felt

it."

"You know now?"

"Yes, I know now."

"You could own to it--with joy?"

"If this were our last moment.--Ah, my friend!" He had taken her into

his arms.

The long years drifted away like illusions before an awakening. Her

girl-hood--but weighted with such dreams of sorrow and loneliness!--seemed

with her again. She was helpless, though her heart reproached him and

herself, yet could not wholly reproach--helpless in a happiness poignant

and exquisite. They kissed each other gently, and, his arms around her,

they looked earnestly at each other. Speechlessly they looked the

finding, the recognition, the rapture.

The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be

counted with.