“She may not realize it, she may be indifferent to it; but her mother realizes and is not indifferent.”
“And we wanted to spare her such watchfulness!” sighed Lady Surfex.
“It seems that we can spare her nothing,” Damier replied. At the same time he felt that Claire could be accused of nothing worse than too great a tolerance. Once or twice she spoke to him of Lord Epsil with half-mocking insight. “He is not like you,” she said; “the difference amuses me.” Claire’s intelligence was, after all, her best safeguard in all that did not touch matters of delicate taste, and Damier’s only way of helping her mother was to watch with her—to constitute himself a sort of elder brother in his attitude toward Claire, and to try, by being much with Claire himself, to make Lord Epsil’s wish to be with her less able to manifest itself.
The faint yet significant hint of what Madame Vicaud’s real feelings toward her daughter were came to him one evening at a dance, when she sat beside Lady Surfex, more beautiful, with her white face, her thick gray hair, in the dignity of her black dress, than any other woman there. He then saw on her face, as, fanning herself slowly, her head a little bent, she watched Claire dance, a concentration of the somberness it sometimes showed. It was a moment only of unconscious revelation; in another she had turned, with her quiet and facile gaiety, to a laughing comment of her companion’s. But Damier, following that momentary brooding look, saw in a flash its interpretation on the daughter’s face. Claire was dancing, exquisitely dressed, calm, competent, complacent, as noticeable and as graceful a figure as any in the room. And yet—he had felt it from the first, but never so clearly, so tragically, as through that somber maternal gaze—Claire was ill-bred. It was that her mother should see her so that made the revelation.
The somberness was not a fear of what others thought; she was, he knew, almost arrogantly indifferent to what people thought: it was what she herself thought that had gloomed her brow. And that she should see, should recognize, that affection should not mercifully have blinded her, filled Damier with a sort of consternation. Again all the ugly visions of Claire crossed his mind, and now, indeed, the mother stood transfixed beside them, for she, too, saw such visions. Ill-bred was a trivial, mitigating word.
He realized that this very quality—call it what one would—in Claire was the cause of her effectiveness, the reason, too, that his hopes for her would probably remain unfulfilled.
She was a woman upon whom, when she entered a room, all men’s eyes turned. Her beauty was like the deep, half-triumphant, half-ominous note of brazen instruments. But she was not a woman that men of Madame Vicaud’s world, of Lady Surfex’s world, would care to marry. Had she been an heiress,—and she was of the type that one associates with unfragrant and recent wealth,—had it not been for her poverty, her essential obscurity, she would no doubt have been enrolled among the powerful young women who are watched with admiring envy as they advance toward a luminous match. Claire had quite the manner of placid advance, quite the manner (and how detestable to her mother the manner must be!) of a young woman bent upon “getting on.” But though her indolent self-assurance made people give way before her, made her talked of and something of a personage, she was, as a result of her launching, far more likely to become notorious than eminent. Any success of Claire’s must, like herself, be ill-bred, tainted.
That Claire felt this, he doubted, or even that, if felt, she would mind; but that Madame Vicaud felt it he now agonized in knowing. And she had asked for her daughter neither eminence nor a luminous match; she had, he now saw, been glad to shield her with obscurity. That she might become notorious, fulfil herself completely in so becoming, would be the bitterest drop in her cup that fate could reserve for her.
If she dreaded it, she kept, at all events, a stoic’s calm above the dread. And her restrictions, delicate, subtle, unemphasized, were about Claire on every side; her unobtrusive watchfulness was constantly upon her. With a cheerful firmness she held Claire to her duty of earning, as Claire had said, “the butter for her bread,” and thwarted, without seeming to thwart, many of her social opportunities. Damier saw, though only faintly, under the surface of appearance her dexterity kept smooth, the constant drama of the conflict, a conflict that never became open or avowed. He saw that Madame Vicaud’s cleverness was so great that even Claire hardly knew that there was a conflict; but after what he had seen in the mother’s eyes on the night of the dance, he understood, at least, for what she was fighting.
Damier still felt the subtle change in his relations with Claire and Madame Vicaud, and he had by this time adapted himself to it—adapted himself to seeing Claire more constantly, seeing Madame Vicaud more rarely alone, encouraged as he was in this sacrifice by the strong impression that in so doing he was pleasing her, and was emphasizing that silent, yet growing, nearness and intimacy.