“Oh, yes; I will tell you,” she answered, still with the lightness that contrasted with the tremor of Damier’s voice.
Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire’s singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung Orféo’s song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire’s interpretation of the song. Claire’s voice had thrown an enchantment around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.
“Her voice is glorious,” he said.
“The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera,” said Madame Vicaud; “that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through horror.”
“Ah,” was on Damier’s lips, “you have said what she could not sing”; but he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp with its plain green shade: “Do you think Claire’s life very gray—very dreary?”
The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter’s upbringing, seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was, perhaps, Claire’s gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious, dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed the mitigating supposition. Claire’s life was really neither gray nor dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: “From her point of view it probably is.”
“I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as she does. Not that Claire complains.”
“You have given her your best. How could she complain?” Damier was not able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire complaining.
“Ah, I could not blame her if she did,” said Madame Vicaud, her quiet eyes on her work, “for mothers personify circumstance to children; we are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very naturally, we are fate’s whipping-boys: and when one is a young and talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons, in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem to deserve blows.”
Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,—of which she must be so ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,—longed to throw himself at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he had—not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her superiority—thought her unconscious of Claire’s pathos.