Mrs. Mostyn’s reply came in a day, and inclosed a letter of introduction to Madame Vicaud, Rue B——, Paris. “Sir Molyneux knew nothing of his sister’s whereabouts,” Mrs. Mostyn wrote, “and it was from another source that I found out that Clara still lives, and at the inclosed address. Do find her, my Don Quixote, and I must make her come and visit me.”
The inclosed letter asked Madame Vicaud to recall an old friend, and to welcome Mr. Damier for her sake and his own. She had only recently had news of Madame Vicaud, and so was able, happily, to aid Mr. Damier in his great wish to make her acquaintance. She hoped, also, that she might see Madame Vicaud in England soon; would she not pay her a visit—a long one? It was a long letter, graceful, cordial, affectionate, a rope of flowers thrown to Damier for his guidance into the labyrinth.
IV
DEAR MR. DAMIER: I shall be very glad to see you to-morrow afternoon at four. I well remember Mrs. Mostyn; to hear of her from a friend of hers will be a double pleasure.
Yours sincerely,
CLARA VICAUD.
It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he had thought of her, the young girl leaning on the chair-back in her flowing dress of silk. She was alive, and he was to see her that afternoon. Damier felt a chill overtake his eagerness. Was he not about to shatter a charming experience—one of the sweetest, most tender, most dearly absurd of his life? Would he not find in the real, middle-aged Clara Vicaud a hard, uninteresting woman? He had a vision of stoutly corseted robustness in jetted black cashmere; of a curve of heavy throat under the chin; of cold eyes looking with wonder, with suspicion even, upon his romantic quest. He could almost have felt it in him to draw back at the eleventh hour were he not ashamed to face in himself such cowardice. He took out the photograph and looked at it, and the eyes of Clara Chanfrey seemed to smile at him with something of tender irony. “Do not be afraid of me; I will never disappoint you,” they said. After all, what could the mere passage of years mean to such a face as that? What could the bitter experiences of a sorrowful life hold in them to tarnish ever the spirit that looked from it? The reluctance was only superficial, a ripple of reaction upon the deep tide of his impulse.
At four that afternoon he drove to a long, narrow street near the Boulevard St. Germain—a street of large, bleak houses showing a sort of dismantled stateliness. At one of the largest, stateliest, bleakest of these the fiacre stopped, and Damier, after asking the way of a grimly respectable concierge with a small knitted shawl of black wool folded tightly about her shoulders, mounted a wide, uncarpeted stone staircase to the highest floor, feeling, as he stood outside the door, that, despite the long ascent, the thick beating of his heart was due more to emotional than to physical causes.
He rang, and as he stood waiting he heard suddenly within a woman’s voice singing. The voice was beautiful, and the song was Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.” Its pathos, its simplicity, its tenderness, mingled with Damier’s almost tremulous mood, and pierced his very soul. It was like an awakening in Paradise; there was the remembered sadness of a long, long past; the strange, melancholy rapture of something dawning, something unknown and wonderful. Could any music more fitly usher in the coming meeting?
A middle-aged servant came to the door, conventual in the demure quiet of her dress and demeanor, and ushered Damier into a bare and spacious room where the light from scantily curtained windows shone broadly across the polished floor. A woman rose and came forward from the piano. Damier’s first impression, after the breathless moment in which he saw that it was not she, was one of dazzling beauty.