AS they heard the tinkle of the entrance-bell, Claire's
voice, her step outside, Madame Vicaud moved away from Damier. She was
seated in a chair near the table, and the young man stood beside her,
when Claire entered.
Claire paused in the doorway and looked sullenly, yet hardly
suspiciously, at them. She had never worn a mask for Damier, yet he saw
in her flushed and somber face something new to him, saw that she lacked
some quality--was it confidence, indifference, placidity?--that he had
always found in her. He guessed in a moment that her interview with
Monsieur Daunay had not been a propitious one.
"I did not expect to see you so soon again, and under such suddenly
changed circumstances," she said to him. "What are you talking about?
Me?" She took off her hat,--the day was sultry,--pushed up her thick
hair, and dropped her length of ruffled, clinging white into a chair.
"So; I have seen Monsieur Daunay. He lost no time, it seems. He asked my
hand of you first, I hear, Mamma, in proper form--_très
convenablement_."
"Yes," Madame Vicaud assented with composure.
"It seems that you discouraged him."
"I could not encourage him from what you had told me, but from what he
told me it seems that you did not discourage him," the mother answered.
"I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility,"
said Claire.
Madame Vicaud, in silence, and with something of a lion-tamer's calm
intentness of eye, looked at her daughter; and Claire, after meeting the
look with one frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.
"And it seems that you, last night, did not discourage Monsieur Daunay's
hopes; he spoke of you with gratitude. What have you to say to it all
now?"
"I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair--yours and
his."
"You made it yours, it seems to me!"
"Unwillingly."
"Oh--unwillingly!" Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. "I don't understand
you, Mr. Damier--I began not to understand you this morning"; and, as he
made no reply:
"Your present silence doesn't accord with your past interference."
"My silence? What do you expect me to say?" Damier asked, with real
wonder, forgetting the mother's intimations.
"Can you deny that--apart from your feelings of angered propriety--you
were pitifully jealous last night and this morning? I had to assure you
again and again that I did not love him--the truth, as it happens."
This speech now opened such vistas of interpretation to the past--of
interrogation to the future--that Damier could only, speechlessly, look
his wonder at her.
"Were you not jealous?" she demanded.
"Not in the faintest degree."
Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.
"And what, then, was your motive for prying, meddling, cross-questioning
as you did? You had a motive?"
"I have always had an interest in your welfare, Claire, but your mother
was my motive for meddling and cross-questioning, as you put it."
"Oh--my mother!" Claire tossed her a look where she sat, her arms
folded, near the table. "You were afraid for my honor since hers was
involved in it? Was that it?"
"Perhaps that was it--and for the same reason I beg you to spare your
mother now."
Claire leaned back in her chair and fixed upon him a heavy stare above
her heavy flush. "Come," she said, "I have never had pretenses with
you--I have always been frank. Do you intend to marry me? There it is
clearly; I have no false delicacy, and, bon Dieu! you have given me
every right to ask the question."
Madame Vicaud, soundless at the table, now leaned her elbows upon it and
covered her face with her hands. "Come," Claire repeated, casting
another look upon her; "for Mamma's sake, you owe me an answer. Spare
her the shame--she feels it bitterly, you observe--of seeing my
outrageous uncertainty prolonged. Haven't you spent all your time with
me? Haven't you taken upon yourself a position of authority toward
me--made my affairs your own? Aren't you going to--how would Mamma put
it?--redeem me--lift me? Or are you going to let my soul suffer a little
longer?"
"You could hardly speak so, Claire, if you spoke sincerely," said
Damier; "you may once have misinterpreted my friendship for you, but you
no longer misinterpret it. I have never intended to marry you. It is
you, remember, who force me into this ugly attitude. I could not face
you in it, were I not sure that your feeling for me has always been as
free from anything amorous as mine for you."
"I don't speak of my feeling for you!" Claire cried in a voice suddenly
loud, leaning forward with her elbows on the arms of her chair, "but of
yours for me! It is not there now--I see it plainly, and I see plainly
why! She--_she_--has been talking to you against me!--telling you about
some childish follies in my life!--making you believe that I would not
be a fit wife for you! Ah, yes!--I know her!" Claire pointed a shaking
finger at her mother. "She would think it her duty to protect you
against me--I know her!"
"Be still," said Damier in his voice of steel.
Claire, for a moment, sank back, panting, defiant, but silent before it.
"You are conscious of your own falsehood, but you can scarcely be
conscious of how base and vile you are. Your mother, when I came to-day,
was hoping that I had come to ask her for your hand; she believed that I
loved you, and hoped it."
Claire, in her sullen recoil, still remained sunken and panting in her
chair.
"Well, then! And what have you got to say to us both, then, if you gave
us both cause for such a supposition? What have you meant by it all?"
"What I meant from the beginning I can best define by telling you that
to-day I asked your mother to marry me."
Claire sat speechless and motionless. The words seemed to have arrested
thought, and to have nailed her to her chair. Damier looked at Madame
Vicaud. Her hands had dropped from her face, and she met his eyes.
"The truth was allowed me?" he said.
"It is always allowed," she answered.
Her face was so stricken, so ghastly, that Damier, almost forgetting in
his great solicitude the hateful presence in the room, leaned over her,
taking her hand.
"Bear it. It is better to have it all over. And, in a sense, it is my
own fault. I should have spoken to you sooner--defined what I meant from
the first."
"So," Claire said suddenly. Her smoldering eyes, while they spoke, had
gone from one to the other. "So; this is what it all meant! Indeed, I
cannot blame myself for not having guessed it. You in love with my
mother! Or, shall we not more truthfully say, she in love with you?--the
explanation, as a rule, you know, of these odd amorous episodes. I begin
to understand. I did not suspect a rival in my own mother. Clever
Mamma!"
"Let this cease now," said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. "All has
been said that it is necessary to say."
"Indeed, no!" cried Claire. She sprang to her feet, braving Damier's
menacing look, and stood before them with folded arms, defiantly, "All
has not been said! I am to marry the middle-aged, middle-class man of
small fortune, and you are to marry the _prince charmant_! Ah, don't
think that I am in love with you, _prince charmant_, though I might have
loved you had not my mother had such a keen eye for her own interests,
and kept mine so dexterously in the background. I might have loved you
had you been allowed to fall in love with me. Oh, I know what you would
say!" Her voice rose to a shout as she interrupted his effort to speak.
"How base, how vile, and how vulgar--_n'est-ce pas_? A girl clamoring
over the loss of a husband! Shocking! Well, I own to my vulgarity. I did
want to marry you. You have money, position--all the things I never hid
from you that I liked; and you interested me, and I liked you, and I
could be myself with you. My mother has always been too dainty to secure
a husband for me--arrange my future: I have had to do all the ugly work
myself; and I liked you because--just because I had to do no ugly work
with you. And I clamor now--not because I have lost you--no, it's not
that; but because she--_she_ has made her goodness serve her so!--has
made it pay where my frankness failed. She is good, if you will; but I
tell you that I prefer my vulgarity--my baseness--my vileness to her
clever virtue; or is it an unconquerable passion with you, Mamma?--is it
to be a _mariage d'amour_ rather than a _mariage de convenance_?"
While Claire spoke, her mother, as if mesmerized by her fury, sat
looking at her with dilated eyes and a fixed face--a face too fixed to
show anguish. Rather it was as if, with an intense, spellbound interest,
she hung upon her daughter's words, hardly feeling, hardly flinching
before her insults, hardly conscious of each whip-like lash that struck
her face to a more death-like whiteness. Now, drawing a breath that was
almost a gasp, she leaned forward over the table, stretching her arms
upon it and clasping her hands. "Claire, Claire!" she said, with a
hurried, staccato utterance, "I see it all with your eyes--I understand.
You have had something really dear taken from you--not love, perhaps,
but a true friendship; that is so, isn't it? He seems to have turned
against you,--isn't it so?--and through me. There is in you an anger
that seems righteous to you. How cruel to have our best turned against
us! I see all that. Ah, no, no! Let me speak to her!" For, Claire
keeping the hardened insolence of her stare upon her, Damier, full of a
passionate, protecting resentment, put his arm around her shoulders,
took her hand. She threw off the hand, the arm, almost cruelly. "Let me
speak to my child! Don't come between us now--now when we may come
together, she and I. Yes, Claire, he loves me,--you see it,--too much,
perhaps, to be just to you, though he has been so just--more just than I
have been, perhaps; he has been so truly your friend. But now I am
just. I am your mother. I can understand. I love him, Claire, yes, I
love him; but I understand you. I will never do anything to part us
further--understand me! I will never marry him against your will. Oh,
Claire, try to understand me--try to trust me--try to love me!" She rose
to her feet, her face ardent with the upsurging of all her longing
motherhood, its sudden flaming into desperate hope through the deep
driftings of ashen hopelessness; and as if swayed forward by this flame
of hope, this longing of love, this ardor, she leaned toward her child,
stretched out her arms toward her face of heavy impassivity. At the
gesture, at her mother's last words, Claire's impassivity flickered into
a half-ironic, half-pitying smile. But she did not advance to the
outstretched arms. Merely looking at her with this searing pity, she
said:
"You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn't you?--you would, as
usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual, your radiance would shine
against my dark. Poor, magnanimous Mamma! No, no, no!" She turned and
walked up and down the room. "No, no! I am tired of all this--tired of
you; and you are tired of me. You will marry Mr. Damier. Why not, after
all? Don't let scruples of conscience interfere, especially none on my
account. It would not separate us: we are separated; we have always been
separated, and that we are gives me no pain. But don't expect me either
to live with you when you are married, or to marry my antique lover and
settle down to the respectable, tepid joys he offers me. No, and no
again. I will not marry him. I leave the respectability to you two
excellent people." The glance she shot at them now as they stood
together was pure irony. Her mother's pale and beautiful face still kept
its look of frozen appeal, as though, while she made the appeal, she had
been shot through the heart. Its beauty seemed to sting Claire where the
appeal did not touch, and, too, Damier's look, bent on her with a quiet
that defied her and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.
"My poor chances can't compete with yours, Mamma," she muttered. "Let me
tell you that despair becomes you." She took up her hat.
"Where are you going, Claire?" Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.
"Don't be alarmed. Not to the Seine. I am going to a tea with Mrs.
Wallingham. I shall be back to dinner. You will admit me?"
"I shall always admit you."
"Good." Claire was putting in her hat-pins before the mirror. "That is
reassuring. Console her, Mr. Damier. Try to atone to her for me--bad as
I am, I am sure that you can do so. Ah, I don't harmonize with a
love-scene!--it was one I interrupted, I suppose. Let me take my
baseness--my vileness--from before you." Her hand on the door, she
paused, fixing a last look upon them; then, with a short laugh, she
said, "Accept my blessing," and was gone.