MADAME VICAUD said nothing. She drew her hand from
Damier's and sank again into the chair from which she had risen. Hope,
ardor, and love, forever perhaps, were dead within her. She had hated
her daughter, but under the hatred had been, always, the hidden flame,
not, perhaps, of love, but of longing to love. She hated no longer, and
the flame was quenched. Even in his nearness to her, Damier could not
look with her at that slain longing. Walking away from her, he stood for
a long time, gazing unseeingly over the garden, in silence. At last he
turned and came to her. Her arm leaned on the table and her head upon
her hand. With unutterable weariness she looked up at him.
"And now," she said, "you must go, my friend."
"Go?" Damier repeated.
Years of resolute endurance looked from her eyes; the weariness was not
a wavering. Her face seemed sinking back into the abyss from which he
had rescued it.
"Yes, you must go."
"And leave you with her!"
"And leave me with her," she assented monotonously.
"Never--never!"
She passed her hand over her brow, pressing her eyelids, as if in the
effort to dispel her deep fatigue and find words with which to answer
his harassing protest.
"Yet you must. I have the wonder, the treasure of your love for me. I
will keep it always. I will never forget you. But it is impossible, even
the friendship, now. We must not drag what is dear to us in the mire. I
could not keep you as my friend under her eyes. I must live with her,
and for her; that is the only life possible for me. I made it for
myself. Whatever her cruelty, whatever her baseness, I have only to
remember that I am responsible for her, that I am her only chance. And
after this her presence in my life makes yours wrong. She knows now that
you are not a friend only, and as a husband you could not remain. Such a
_ménage à trois_ would be as detestable as it would be grotesque."
"She will marry!" cried Damier. "She must marry Monsieur Daunay."
"I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could
not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but
as friend, as friend only."
Damier burst out into a smothered invective:
"And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that
creature--who has no love for you--whom you cannot love! What can you do
for her? You can never change or soften her."
He felt that the vehemence of his despair and rebellion dashed itself
against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her
hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on
with the same monotonous patience:
"I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a
sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time
for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age
and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never
soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her
the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can
pity her, most piteous creature--whose mother has no love for her."
"Ah, you do not love me!" cried Damier, and all his youth was in the
cry. "You sacrifice _me_ with such composure! You give yourself to have
your life sucked out of you by this vampire shape of the past. And it is
me you rob! It is my life you immolate, as well as your own! What of my
claim on life--my claim on you? You have no conception of what you are
to me, or you could not speak of shutting me out from you; you could not
think of sending me away! You could not speak so--think so--if you loved
me!"
From her chair she now looked up at him, not with weariness, with a look
curiously vivid and tender. "You speak like a boy," she said.
Damier flung himself on his knees beside her. "And you think that I can
leave you when you can look at me like that--love me like that!"
"Because I do." She let him take her hands, and went on, almost smiling
at him: "Because I love you like that, and because you love me like
that, and because I am so much older than you--can't you feel it? how
like a little boy--passionate, unruly in his grief--you seem to me! And
because, in spite of my age and your boyishness, we do yet love each
other so greatly that the very greatness of our love makes the question
of our being together or apart really of not such significance."
"Of not such significance!" poor Damier cried. "I am to find you in
heaven, then!"
"Probably." She did smile now, but he guessed that it was the brave
smile she could summon over anguish. He guessed that her feeling of his
boyishness was less apparent to her than her feeling of his power over
her, his right to her. She might never yield to the power, never own to
the right, but to guess that she felt them was assurance enough for the
moment, and the pallor of the face that smiled at him was a reproach to
him.
"No, no," he said; "I shall keep you there--and I shall keep you here,
too. I will rescue you. I will find out the way. And I will leave you
now and give you peace for a little while. You are terribly tired."
"Terribly," she assented. "It is kind and generous of you to go now."
"But my going is to be taken as no token of submission. I will return."
"To say good-by."
"So you say."
"So you will do." And she still smiled, all tenderness, all
inflexibility.
"Never, never, never!" said Damier.