“Let this cease now,” said Madame Vicaud, in a lifeless voice. “All has been said that it is necessary to say.”
“Indeed, no!” cried Claire. She sprang to her feet, braving Damier’s menacing look, and stood before them with folded arms, defiantly, “All has not been said! I am to marry the middle-aged, middle-class man of small fortune, and you are to marry the prince charmant! Ah, don’t think that I am in love with you, prince charmant, though I might have loved you had not my mother had such a keen eye for her own interests, and kept mine so dexterously in the background. I might have loved you had you been allowed to fall in love with me. Oh, I know what you would say!” Her voice rose to a shout as she interrupted his effort to speak. “How base, how vile, and how vulgar—n’est-ce pas? A girl clamoring over the loss of a husband! Shocking! Well, I own to my vulgarity. I did want to marry you. You have money, position—all the things I never hid from you that I liked; and you interested me, and I liked you, and I could be myself with you. My mother has always been too dainty to secure a husband for me—arrange my future: I have had to do all the ugly work myself; and I liked you because—just because I had to do no ugly work with you. And I clamor now—not because I have lost you—no, it’s not that; but because she—she has made her goodness serve her so!—has made it pay where my frankness failed. She is good, if you will; but I tell you that I prefer my vulgarity—my baseness—my vileness to her clever virtue; or is it an unconquerable passion with you, Mamma?—is it to be a mariage d’amour rather than a mariage de convenance?”
While Claire spoke, her mother, as if mesmerized by her fury, sat looking at her with dilated eyes and a fixed face—a face too fixed to show anguish. Rather it was as if, with an intense, spellbound interest, she hung upon her daughter’s words, hardly feeling, hardly flinching before her insults, hardly conscious of each whip-like lash that struck her face to a more death-like whiteness. Now, drawing a breath that was almost a gasp, she leaned forward over the table, stretching her arms upon it and clasping her hands. “Claire, Claire!” she said, with a hurried, staccato utterance, “I see it all with your eyes—I understand. You have had something really dear taken from you—not love, perhaps, but a true friendship; that is so, isn’t it? He seems to have turned against you,—isn’t it so?—and through me. There is in you an anger that seems righteous to you. How cruel to have our best turned against us! I see all that. Ah, no, no! Let me speak to her!” For, Claire keeping the hardened insolence of her stare upon her, Damier, full of a passionate, protecting resentment, put his arm around her shoulders, took her hand. She threw off the hand, the arm, almost cruelly. “Let me speak to my child! Don’t come between us now—now when we may come together, she and I. Yes, Claire, he loves me,—you see it,—too much, perhaps, to be just to you, though he has been so just—more just than I have been, perhaps; he has been so truly your friend. But now I am just. I am your mother. I can understand. I love him, Claire, yes, I love him; but I understand you. I will never do anything to part us further—understand me! I will never marry him against your will. Oh, Claire, try to understand me—try to trust me—try to love me!” She rose to her feet, her face ardent with the upsurging of all her longing motherhood, its sudden flaming into desperate hope through the deep driftings of ashen hopelessness; and as if swayed forward by this flame of hope, this longing of love, this ardor, she leaned toward her child, stretched out her arms toward her face of heavy impassivity. At the gesture, at her mother’s last words, Claire’s impassivity flickered into a half-ironic, half-pitying smile. But she did not advance to the outstretched arms. Merely looking at her with this searing pity, she said:
“You would marry him to me if you could, wouldn’t you?—you would, as usual, sacrifice yourself to me; as usual, your radiance would shine against my dark. Poor, magnanimous Mamma! No, no, no!” She turned and walked up and down the room. “No, no! I am tired of all this—tired of you; and you are tired of me. You will marry Mr. Damier. Why not, after all? Don’t let scruples of conscience interfere, especially none on my account. It would not separate us: we are separated; we have always been separated, and that we are gives me no pain. But don’t expect me either to live with you when you are married, or to marry my antique lover and settle down to the respectable, tepid joys he offers me. No, and no again. I will not marry him. I leave the respectability to you two excellent people.” The glance she shot at them now as they stood together was pure irony. Her mother’s pale and beautiful face still kept its look of frozen appeal, as though, while she made the appeal, she had been shot through the heart. Its beauty seemed to sting Claire where the appeal did not touch, and, too, Damier’s look, bent on her with a quiet that defied her and all she signified, stung her, perhaps, more deeply.
“My poor chances can’t compete with yours, Mamma,” she muttered. “Let me tell you that despair becomes you.” She took up her hat.
“Where are you going, Claire?” Madame Vicaud asked in her dead voice.
“Don’t be alarmed. Not to the Seine. I am going to a tea with Mrs. Wallingham. I shall be back to dinner. You will admit me?”
“I shall always admit you.”
“Good.” Claire was putting in her hat-pins before the mirror. “That is reassuring. Console her, Mr. Damier. Try to atone to her for me—bad as I am, I am sure that you can do so. Ah, I don’t harmonize with a love-scene!—it was one I interrupted, I suppose. Let me take my baseness—my vileness—from before you.” Her hand on the door, she paused, fixing a last look upon them; then, with a short laugh, she said, “Accept my blessing,” and was gone.