“I should say certainly not,”—Damier waited with a cold patience until she had finished,—“but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him.”
At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.
“Ah!—c’est trop fort! You can’t make me believe that you want me to love him.”
“I don’t want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be more to your credit if you did.”
Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.
“Ah, it is the money, then—that I should accept it!”
“Can I make no appeal to you for your mother’s sake—for the sake of your own dignity?”
“I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier.” The relief was showing in her quieter voice, her fading flush. “I see how angry you are—and only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a pittance left to her, a year or so after my father’s death, by some relations, and that, since then, has been our only pied-à-terre. She would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her family wished to make her. I don’t want to blame her; I know how you feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish of her; she should have thought more of me—the luckless result of her mésalliance—and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always at school during my father’s life—she avoided that soil for me, you may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she did not pay the debt.” Claire had been looking before her as she talked, but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring, in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not serving her. “Don’t imagine, now, that I am complaining—ungrateful,” she said a little petulantly. “I know—as well as you do—what a good mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not altogether blameless—that she is responsible, in more ways than one, for me—for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty, labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to enjoy work, shabby clothes, grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking—that was her idea of happiness for me!” Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in her voice. “I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people in horrid places—expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one should wish to devote one’s self to bonnes-œuvres; but for me, ah, par exemple!” Claire gave a coarse laugh. “I had not quite come to that! She gave me the best she had—all she had, you will say; I own it: but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me to enjoy—should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only endured. Again,—I am not unjust,—it was not all high thinking; she had her schemes for my amusement—d’une simplicité! Really, for such a clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a right—you know it—to le vrai grand monde. You know it, and you are trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little management she might have regained her place in it; but no—her pride again! She seemed to think that she was le grand monde, and that I ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it strange—disgusting—that when I saw that Daunay—le pauvre!—was in love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is dull—though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money, she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value; she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and stockings—as I understand shoes and stockings!” Claire laughed. “This dress that I have on—Mamma imagines it is made by a little dressmaker whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet.” There was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire’s voice. “And I have always considered myself amply excusable,” she went on, “in accepting the small pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much that I have been able to accept—though he would willingly—and he is not rich—give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared attempt—nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I can see her face!”
So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to Claire, physically brutal—to strike her to the dust where she dragged the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice quiet enough: “You must tell her now; you must tell her everything.”
Claire stopped short in the path. “Tell her!”