“Yet you do not hate her,” she said, after a pause of some moments, speaking without moving or turning her head.
Damier paused too. “I have not your reasons,” he said at last.
“Ah, my reasons! Yes.” She turned to him now, as though she saw in him an accusing world, and faced it in an attitude of desperate self-justification.
“They began with her father,” said Damier.
“I hated him,” she said. Her eyes looked through him, fixed on the abyss of the past. “I hated him. He was abhorrent to me. I lived with him for fifteen years—fifteen long, long years. I bore his brutality, his wickedness—I am not the woman to use the word prudishly—I can make allowances—wide ones—for temperament, environment, all the mitigating causes: but my husband’s wickedness was unimaginably vile; to see it stained one’s thoughts.” The memory of it, as she spoke, had chilled her to a drawn and frozen pallor; it was as though the blighting breath of the past went across her face, aging it, emptying it of life.
“I bore the ruin he brought; that was nothing—a spur to love, had love been possible. I bore his serene, inflexible selfishness. The only thing I would not bear”—and she still looked full at Damier, but with the same unseeing largeness of gaze—“was his love. His love!” She turned and walked across the room. Damier felt his own flesh shudder as he looked behind the curtain her words lifted, felt his own heart freeze in the aching sympathy of its comprehension. He could not speak to her. It seemed to him that she stood at a great distance from him and would not hear him. Her voice, when she spoke again, had less of its haunting terror, but it still thrilled with a deep and tragic note: “All this, as thousands of women have done, because it was my duty—to help him—to uphold him—to stand by him unflinchingly, and—because he was her father. You said that my reasons for hating her began with him. Ah, but he was my reason for loving her so desperately—with such a longing to atone to her for him. I gave her all the love he had crushed out of me. You see his picture there; I have schooled myself, so that she may not feel the smirch of him through my horror, to bear the sight of him, to say to myself every day, ‘That is the face I loved.’ Oh, what madness!—what madness!” She pressed her hands hard upon her eyes. “Some day, perhaps,—since I tell you everything,—I will tell you that story, too—my love-story. The memory of it is like a block of lead upon my heart.” Her hands fell, but the memory made her silent, and for a long moment she stood looking down. “But all was hidden from her: the dread,—that soon passed—I was the stronger, he came to feel it, dread fell from me,—the hate that followed it, and the final, the terrible pity,—for I came to pity him when he hung about my life, helpless, like a torn and dirty rag,—all that was hidden from her. I kept her lifted out of the mud he dragged us down to; she never saw its depths. While he lived, and while he was dying,—and horrible to see and hear,—she was at a school. Those days!” She paused and turned away, and then went on: “It was in the winter. Lessons fell away; there was the school, the doctor, all the expenses of an illness to be met. I went into the streets of nights, a man carrying my harp, and sang for money; I had a voice till then, and I braved more than the snow and the night to do it: I was still beautiful. This that you may see how I loved her, how I struggled for her, how like any mother, though now I seem so hard—so hideously unnatural. Ah, I fought—I cannot tell you, you cannot guess, how I fought for her. And then, he died, and then there was for me peace and the blossoming of delicious hope. She and I together, saved from the wreck. It seemed to me that I had battled through waves, past rocks and whirlpools, holding her to my breast, and had reached the shore at last—she alive for me, and I for her. And then—ah, then! The shipwreck, the years of struggle, were crude tragedy to my gradual realizing of the subtle disaster that was to poison my life forever. Year by year I saw it coming—I saw him creeping into her. I saw the grave purpose settle round her lips—the steady greed for self. I saw his smile in her eyes; his eyes were beautiful like hers: when I first looked at them, I thought them full of splendid dreams, noble strength. She was not cruel, or brutal, or vicious, as he had been. She submitted placidly; she submitted, and I hoped for happiness. I could not make her happy or unhappy. I meant nothing to her except the thing that fed and clothed her. She took what I could give, and waited for what I could not give. She lied only when the truth would not serve her purpose better; so, often, she was frank with me. Her grave laugh maddened me, and her indifferent adapting of herself to me—for expediency, not for love. If only she had become a gentle and beautiful animal, to guard from its own instincts! but she is an animal of such hideous intelligence; she knows when I try to guard her, and evades me. Like him, she is corrupt to the core of her; not—do not misunderstand me—that she would do wrong in a conventional sense—and that it is conventional wrong-doing that I dread she has always pretended to read into my horror of evil, making a plaster saint of me so that she may more easily evade the deeply understanding woman of flesh and blood. Hers is the worse corruption, that calculates chances, chooses and manages. It is there in her, I know, though, in its worst forms, latent still—I think.”
Damier, white already, felt himself blanch before the rapid glance, like a sword-stroke across his face, that she cast upon him. She guessed at all his knowledge.
Again she turned away and walked up and down the room.
“Hideous, hideous that I should speak so to you, and to you I hoped, yet dreaded—You will wonder how I could have hoped it; how, knowing this, I should not have warned you. But at first I did not think it possible, though I knew her charm; at first I did not understand you, and, not understanding, I guarded you. And then I saw your generous, your pitiful heart, and I saw that it understood Claire, that perhaps you understood her better than I did. With you she was her best self; she trusted you, it seemed, so utterly. I hoped that yours was the clearer vision, that I was warped, no longer capable of true seeing. Yet, when the friendship that I rejoiced in grew, as I thought, into love, there was a terrible struggle in me. My strong attachment to you—you who had opened the prison gates that shut me into my misery, who brought me out of a loneliness so long, so bitter—ah! my friend, do not think that I have not seen and felt it all; but I could not speak to you as I might have spoken had it not been for that struggle in me between the justice owed to you—yet that you did not seem to need—and the duty to her—not to withhold, for your sake, a possibility that might redeem her. My mind was fixed in that struggle; of our friendship, yours and mine, I could not think clearly. If you had been ignorant, if she had hidden herself from you, I should have sacrificed her unflinchingly to you; I should have interposed and shown her to you. But she showed herself to you. I knew, from my knowledge of you, that she would not attract you as she attracts most men, not nobly. I saw from her looks with you, her words, that she would make no efforts so to attract you. I must say all to you, since you must understand all. Claire does not love you, but you attract what is best in her. She relies, I have guessed it, upon the very pathos of her moral ugliness to enchant you, to arouse in you the chivalrous, redemptive qualities she sees in you. And I grew to hope that you saw something that I could not see. I even began to feel a blind, groping tenderness for her through your fancied tenderness; and as I allowed myself to hope that you loved her, I allowed myself to have faith in the redeeming power of your love.”
She stood before him now, looking at him with saddest eyes; and Damier, answering them, shook his head.