“But I don’t fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject. He and his sister were never sympathetic.”
“I wish you would find out,” Damier repeated.
“I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever find her,” smiled Mrs. Mostyn.
III
He was amused now, amused and yet amazed, by the extraordinary impression that the old photograph had made upon him. More than once he had drawn back on the verge of a great passion,—drawn back he could hardly have said why,—feeling that the woman, or he himself, lacked something of the qualities that could make them lastingly need each other. And now it really seemed to him that he needed, and would need lastingly, this woman of thirty years ago; and surely she needed him. She called to him, and he answered. He understood her; he loved her.
It was whimsical, absurd, pathetic. He could smile over it, yet under the smile some deeper self seemed to smile another smile—the smile of a mystery speaking at last in words that he could not understand, but in a voice that he could hear.
Mrs. Mostyn had yielded the photograph to his determined claim,—laughing at his impudence,—and he kept it always beside him in the weeks that followed his departure from ——shire. During those weeks, that lengthened into months, no news came, and the eagerness of his feeling died away. The feeling was still there, but it was like an awakened and living memory of an old, dead love. He thought of her as dead; it was best so, for he could imagine with repulsion the degradation that a harried life in the slimier walks of bohemia might have wrought in her had she lived. The sense of half-humorous, half-tragic pathos remained with him. He smiled at the photograph every day. It represented just what a memory, deep and still, would have represented. It said to him, “We have found each other. Now we will never part.” And absurdly, deliciously, he felt—with an instinct that fluttered wings high above any net of reason, singing, almost invisible—that what he had missed was waiting for him somewhere.
ONE day in late autumn, when he had returned to London, something happened which changed the character of this unsubstantial romance. He met at his club another old friend, a contemporary of Mrs. Mostyn’s. Sir Henry Quarle was a writer of pleasant reminiscences, a garrulous and companionable man about town, who had kept careful pace with the times, who, indeed, flattered himself that he usually kept a step or two ahead of them: he was prophetic as well as reminiscent; had firm opinions and facile appreciations.
He and Damier spoke of Mrs. Mostyn,—Sir Henry, too, had seen her recently,—of Paris, and of her connection with it. “And by the way,” said Sir Henry, “she told me that you were tremendously interested in what she told you about Madame Vicaud—Clara Chanfrey that was. Now I know a good deal about that unhappy history, and can, indeed, carry it on to a further chapter; the first did interest you?”