“I have been too great a coward ever to get further than thinking of it. My love-affairs have rarely passed the speculative stage. My ideals of marriage are of a most exacting nature.”
“Ah, that is well,” she said. “Never lower them to fit some reality that, for the moment, appeals. I hope,” she added, “that you will some day find the woman who realizes them.”
No, the silly accident oi the years too much blinded her, Damier felt, for her to see, yet, that she was the woman. He himself was too much dazzled to see beyond the fact itself. Any question of love or marriage seemed irrelevant, did not enter at all into this wonderful and happy place where her harp rippled, her eyes smiled, where she understood that he had found her.
VIII
The nearer intimacy with the mother did not bring Damier into nearer intimacy with the daughter, for the simple reason that he was already so intimate. From the first Damier had felt that he understood Claire Vicaud. He could not yet clearly define what he understood, but she could have no revelations for him. Her father explained her, and her mother reclaimed her. That was her history, and he imagined that neither she nor her mother was aware of the history, but the mother less than she. Indeed, he fancied, at times, that he saw her far more clearly than did the mother—hoped that the mother had not his direct vision.
He was rather fond of Claire, with a fondness tolerant, humorous, and pitying. What he saw in her were thwarted energies, well thwarted, yet pathetic in their enforced composure; he saw voiceless rebellion, and the dumb discomfort of a creature reared in an environment not its own. This simile might have cast a reproach upon the mother had it conjured up the vision of an unkindly caged pantheress; but the simile so seen was too poetical for Claire. It was not the wild, fine, free thing of nature that circumstance had caged, but the product of over-civilized senses—senses only, and corrupt senses. There was the point that made her piteous and repellent.
Claire’s claim on life was not a high one. Hers was not even an esthetic fastidiousness of sense nor a romantic coloring of emotion; there was nothing delicate or warm or eager about her. Her wishes were not yearnings; they were steadfast inclinations toward all the evident, the palpable, perhaps the baser pleasures of life, pleasures that would most certainly have been hers had not fate—in the shape of a mother to whom these pleasures were non-existent rather than despicable—lifted her above the possible grasp at them: jewels, clothes, magnificent establishments, riotous living. She was cold, but she would welcome passively the warmth of admiration about her. She had not her father’s genius to transmute the tawdry cravings of her inheritance from him. She had his quick, clear intelligence, and it seemed only to make harder, more decisive, her centering in self.
Damier could see her as the painted prima donna (never as the sincere and serious artist), bowing her languorous triumph before the curtain; could see her laughing in ugly mirth at Gallic jests among a crowd of clever rapins; could horribly image her—most horribly when one remembered who was her mother—rolling in a lightly swung carriage down the Avenue des Acacias, a modern Cleopatra in her barge, alluring in indifference under her parasol, and dressed with the consummate and conscious art that does not flower in the sound soil of respectability. These were, indeed, horrid thoughts, and as absurd as horrid when the mother stood beside them. Even to think them seemed to put a dagger into a heart already many times stabbed. Yet separate mother and daughter,—it was ominously easy so to separate them,—and nothing in Claire reproached and contradicted such images. Inevitably they arose, and, as inevitably, the companion picture of the mother, like a transfixed Mater Dolorosa.
To the mother he felt that in giving interest and attention to Claire he rendered a service more grateful to her than any homage. He proposed that he should take Claire for walks sometimes, and he felt something of the staidness of the girl’s upbringing in Madame Vicaud’s acquiescence, in its implied trust—a trust that waived a custom in his favor. It expressed the mother’s attitude against all that was lax or undignified in life. Claire could go with him, their friend, but, Claire told him with a light laugh, she seldom went out alone. “Only sometimes with Monsieur Daunay—but he is like a father, almost; and to the dressmaker’s; and almost always Mamma is with me—we are such companions, you know.” Damier could not quite determine as to possible irony in her placid tones. He looked upon these walks with Claire—they would cross the Seine, looking up at Carpeaux’s jocund group on the Pavillon de Flore, and pace sedately in the Tuileries Gardens or up the Champs-Elysées—as expressions of his identification of himself with Madame Vicaud’s interests, for he always felt that it pleased her that he should ask Claire to go; yet, after each one of them, he could not defend himself from the strange sensation that he had been in an atmosphere disloyal to his friend. The atmosphere was so different, yet so subtly different, when Claire was alone with him, or with him and her mother. So subtle was the difference that any remonstrance on his part might constitute a stupid rebuff to her unconsciousness; yet so different were her tones, her look, her laugh, so different the quality of her frankness, its gaillardise, as it were, and its familiarity, almost insolent in its assurance—so different were all these that he could hardly believe her unconscious of the change. He did understand her; that was the trouble: for she acted as if he did, and as if all pretenses were unnecessary between them, and free breathing a relief to both after a burdensome atmosphere. Damier, while they walked, showed a grave kindliness, listened to her, assented or dissented with a careful accuracy that amused himself. He was not quite sure why, with Claire, he seldom felt it safe to be flexible or flippant; some dim instinct of self-protection before this embryotic soul and quick intelligence made him guard himself against all misinterpretations, made him scrupulous in defining the differences between them. Claire referred little to her mother, and then, at least in the beginnings of their intercourse, in the tones of commonplace respect, with something of the effect, he more and more realized, of shuffling aside an excellence that they both took for granted but hardly cared to linger over—she certainly did not, though he might have odd, pretty tastes for the past and done with.