The Rescue

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm, fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural to see there his mother’s gentle, thoughtful face—first of a round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair; natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face was not that of a French-woman. One’s first impression—not too superficial, either—was of a finished little mondaine; but finished, poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty—indeed, as Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long. Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen, and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped in this sensation—of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from the past, of something mysterious and urgent—when Mrs. Mostyn came in.

II

“Ah, yes. Is she not charming?”

“She has charmed me. She is wonderful.”

“Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me, too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time. I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss Chanfrey—Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know. Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her, and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to Paris, where Clara’s beauty made a furor—she was thought lovelier than the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries—she wore a white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was, report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk pour passer le temps—to make the something that was coming come more quickly. Poor child! it came.”

“She married Lord Pemleigh?” Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her eyes vague with memories.

“No; don’t you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan—but only after years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing—a dreadful thing. She eloped—ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted Clara’s portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of Manet; a full-length portrait—I saw it—of Clara in a white lawn dress with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant, dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible story;—a violet dragged in the mud.”

Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, “I cannot associate her with the gutter,” he said, “nor can I understand this violet stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment dazzled by a shoddy bohemian.”

“Oh,” sighed Mrs. Mostyn, “has delicacy ever been a certificate of safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional; but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant—far more ignorant than a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least, more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,—I well remember him,—an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the match had already embittered her relations with her mother—Lady Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then—and then—she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only final explanation of these stories.”