THE long, hot, rushing hours had passed, for Damier, in
a sort of stupor, the anæsthesia of one fixed idea. In the stuffy
railway-carriage, his eyes on the dark square of the open window, where
one saw vaguely the starlit depths of a midsummer night, he thought,
with the odd detachment of a crisis, of the past day: the sunny morning
walk with Claire--green leaves, purple shadows; the afternoon's supreme
moment--a deep pulse of wonder in his heart, hardly to be seen in
images; Lady Surfex among the palms and monstrous gilded pottery of the
hotel salon; Monsieur Daunay's quiet, white face; the crowded Paris
railway-station, and the glimpse he had caught in it of Claire and Lord
Epsil. This most recent impression was also the most vivid, threw all
the others into a blurred background where, with a new look of woe, only
Madame Vicaud's face glimmered clearly.
The enforced pause at the height of his resolution made both the past
and the future half illusory. The present, with not its usual flashing
impermanence, had, for hours, been the same, had stopped, as it were, at
an instant of vigilant alertness, and held him in it rigidly. Until the
object of that vigilance, that alertness, were attained, he could not
look forward or make projects. The chance for seeing Claire alone could
not come, probably, until Dinard was reached. There, in the hurry of
arrival, he might snatch a word with her. It would only be necessary to
speak the word, to put the alternative before her. Entreaty would be
useless; all the argument possible was the chink of gold in two hands;
all the hope, that his chink might be the louder.
Shortly after ten o'clock the train drew up in the Rennes station.
Damier had let no such opportunity escape him, and he again stepped from
his compartment and stood looking toward the part of the train where he
knew were Claire and her cavalier. As he looked he saw the tall figure
of the Englishman stroll across the platform to the refreshment-buffet.
The light fell full on his long, smooth, pink face,--a papier-mâché
pink,--on his long, high nose and whity-brown mustache. Damier darted
forward. In an instant he was at the door, still ajar, of the
compartment that Lord Epsil had just left. He saw, under the yellow
glare of the lamp, a confusion of traveling-bags, rugs, bandboxes
(Claire had evidently shopped), newspapers and magazines; a large box of
bonbons lay on a seat, its contents half rifled, its papers strewing the
floor; and, settled back in a corner, her shoulders huddled together in
a graceful sleepiness, was Claire. A long silk traveling-cloak fell over
her white dress; the winged white hat of the morning was pushed a little
to one side as her head leaned against the cushioned carriage; a
drooping curve of loosened hair, shining in the light like molten brass,
fell over her cheek and neck; her profile, half hidden, was at once
petulant and relaxed with drowsiness.
Damier did not hesitate. He sprang into the carriage. Not touching the
girl, he leaned over her. "Claire," he said.
In an instant she had started into erectness, staring stupefied, too
stupefied for shame or anger.
"I have only a moment," said Damier, speaking with a clear-cut dryness
of utterance. "If you will come back with me, and marry Monsieur
Daunay,--he knows all and will marry you,--half of my income is yours
for life."
After the first stare she had blinked in opening her eyes to the light
and to the sudden apparition; the eyes were now fixed widely on him;
they looked like two deep, black holes.
"It is a bribe," she said.
"Call it so if you will."
"It shows your scorn for me."
"Comprehension of you, rather."
"And if I don't?"
"If you don't I will challenge this man--and fight him. I am an
excellent fencer, an excellent shot."
She looked at him, half scoffing, yet half believing. "Englishmen don't
fight duels."
"This one will."
"He might kill you."
"I might kill him; you would have to take the risk."
She shrugged her shoulders. "_Bien!_ I understand, too. I will fulfil
myself." She half rose, then sank again. "How much?" He mentioned the
sum--not a small one. "Make it two thirds," said Claire, keeping her
dilated eyes upon him with an effect of final and defiant revelation.
"Two thirds, then," he assented, in the steadied voice of one who does
not dare hurry indecision. Yet, even now, she did not rise.
"One more condition, please. I do not see my mother again. Let us say,
if you like, that I am ashamed to meet her."
"She has not been told--of this."
"Yes, she has," said Claire. "I wrote and told her." There was the
satisfaction of achievement in the way she said it. "Oh, yes; she
knows."
"Yet, even after that,--your vengeance, I suppose,--I hardly dare make
the promise for her,--she can forgive--even this."
"Ah," and the hoarse note was in Claire's voice, "but I can't take
forgiveness from her. I have left the world where such episodes as this
need forgiveness. Tolerance is now all that I will endure--and she will
never tolerate. No; I will not come with you; I will not return to
Monsieur Daunay and to respectability--unless you promise that I shall
never see her again."
"I promise it, then, if it is the condition."
"You accept? _Bien!_" Claire sprang up, and ripping an illustration from
a magazine, she scribbled on the blank back, "Have decided, after all,
that I won't come," transfixed it with a hat-pin to the cushioned back
of Lord Epsil's vacated seat, then, as rapidly, reached for two of the
bandboxes, pulled them, rattling, from the racks, stooped and jerked a
large pasteboard box from under a seat, and, encumbered as she already
was, caught up from among the rugs and bags several smaller packages,
dexterously holding them to her sides with her elbows.
Damier, who had stared, hardly comprehending, gripped her wrist. "Put
them down." She gazed round in sincere amazement; then, with quite a
humorous laugh, dropped the booty. "I really forgot! No, it wouldn't be
fair play, would it?--though, I confess, I should like to take a little
vengeance; he has irritated me, been too complacent, too assured. This,
too?" She touched the silk traveling-cloak. Damier, without speaking,
stripped it off her; then, catching her by the arm, he almost dragged
her from the carriage, for her feet stumbled among the dressing-cases
and the abandoned boxes.
He found, as they almost ran along the dim platform across to the one
opposite, and as he pushed her into a compartment of the Paris train
that stood there, that she was laughing. The adventure of it, the
excitement, Lord Epsil's discomfiture, appealed, evidently, to her sense
of mirth.
There were other occupants of the carriage, and Damier was thankful for
it. He did not want to talk to Claire. To reproach her would make him as
ridiculous as beating a tin pan in the expectation of response other
than a mocking cachinnation; not to reproach might seem to condone by
comprehension. Yet, as she sank back into a corner, settled her shoulder
in it, he saw that there was emotion under the laughter, that it was not
only the tin-pan rattle. He could interpret it as almost a regret--a
regret for something against which she had always rebelled, from which
she had now finally freed herself, a sudden realization that forever she
had lost the standing upon which he had found her. Yet, over this trace
of emotion and suffering, that, to Damier, was more piteous than
anything he had yet seen in her, she smiled at him, with half-dropped
lids. It was the look, with her a new one, of brazening a shame. Already
her nature had retaliated upon the wrong she had done it by fixing in
her face a more apparent ugliness of expression. She glanced round at
the sleepy, respectable occupants of the carriage, their sleepiness,
however, keeping an eye upon this startling young person in her white
dress.
"Before we relapse into an irrevocable silence," she said, "let me
inform you--it will complete your evil opinion of me--that I didn't
really care about him; I cared for his caring about me--though at
moments even that fatigued me, _il m'embêtait quelquefois_; but then, I
was glad to be revenged."
"Upon whom? For what?"
"Upon you both--for making me feel that I was not of your world."
"We did not make you feel it, Claire."
For some moments they were silent, as the train moved slowly from the
station, and then she said:
"Where will you take me?"
"To his cousin's, Mademoiselle Daunay's. I have arranged all with him."
A look, almost tremulous under its attempt at a light sneer, crossed her
face.
"What forgiveness! _Il est un peu lâche, vous savez._"
"Try, Claire, to deserve such touching _lâcheté_."
Again Claire was, for some moments, silent; then, yawning slightly, yet,
again his acuteness guessed, affectedly, she said, settling her shoulder
more decisively in her corner:
"There is the more hope for my deserving it since now I am rich. You may
make your mind easy about my future. I have got all that I ever really
wanted." It was the new and brazen note over the new shame; but as he
looked at the face that first pretended to sleep, and that eventually
did sleep, was not the brass the curious, anomalous shield that nature
put around something growing--around a soul that at last, with a faint,
half-conscious thrill, felt upon it the awakening breath of suffering?