“Not so much to find one—she is enchanting in appearance, I hear—as to keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you, Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?”
He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.
X
It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon, sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window—opened on the warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture, the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could love—even—even—he had wondered over it more and more of late—her mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an inner shrine of sorrow.
His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or hear.
That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little Sophie; and Claire’s gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor Sophie’s ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet, sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from dim tree-tops outside to Claire’s white form and splendid head, he felt that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her beauty to his eye.
“The chief thing,” said Claire,—they had been talking in a desultory fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look, adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,—“the chief thing is to know what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what they want, you know—unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic.” (Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very pregnant.) “You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted; therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint well—you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?—though Mamma, you see, has his photograph conspicuously en évidence up there, lest I should think too ill of him—or guess how ill she thinks of him herself. I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he did. You know his pictures. I don’t care about pictures, but I suppose there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices—the prejudices of the jeune fille anglaise. I”—she smiled a little at him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had evoked in his expression—“I have a very restricted field for choice; but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma—yes, I am coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too; but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked—the latter, probably, for she has a strong will.”
“Perhaps,” said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms folded and knees crossed, listening to her—“perhaps you underestimate her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own nature.”