EUSTACE DAMIER was susceptible and fastidious, idealistic and skeptical. He was not weak, for he rarely yielded to his impressions; but his strength, since nothing had come into his life that called for decisive action, was mainly negative. Perfection haunted him, and seen beside that inner standard, most experience was tawdry. He was quite incapable of loving what he had if he could not have what he loved. The vacancy had once been filled, but since his mother’s, his sister’s death, it had yawned, oppressive, unresponsive, about him. He was no cynic, but he was melancholy. He had gone through life alternating between ardor and despondency. He was amused now, amused and yet 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, 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. 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?” “Tremendously,” Damier assented, feeling, with a beating heart, that daylight was about to flood his mystic temple. “Is she alive?” he added. “That I don’t know. But I saw the second chapter at close quarters. I went to Vicaud’s studio one day. They had been “In what way?” Damier’s heart now beat with a strange self-reproach. “Oh—not describable. It was the evident hiding of misery that one felt most, the controlled fear in her face. She was lovelier than ever, but white, wasted, her delicate hands worn with work. The place was already poverty-stricken, but clean—grimly clean; I have no doubt she scrubbed the floor herself. Four or five artists were there—clever, well-known men, but not of the best type: the kind of men who wrote brutally realistic feuilletons for papers of the baser order, who painted pictures pour Épater le bourgeois; grossly materialistic, cynically skeptical of all that was not so. One felt that, though utterly alien to it by taste, she could have adapted herself, in a sense, to the best bohemianism. She was broadly intelligent; she would have recognized all that was fine, vital, inspiring in it, all that it implies of antagonism “Just heavens!” Damier exclaimed, after a silence filled for him with a bewildering aching and despair. “Why did she not leave him?” “Well,” said Sir Henry, looking at the tip of his cigar, and crossing his knees for the greater comfort of impersonal reflection, “there was the child—they had a child, a girl; I never saw it; and there was her pride—she had been cast off by all her people; and there was his need of her. A few years after their marriage “I saw her once again; I was in Paris for a few days—it must have been more than ten years after that first meeting. I met her leading her husband in an allÉe in the Bois. He was a wreck then, his talent gone, his noble face a pallid, bloated mask. He leaned on her arm, draped in his defiant black cloak. I sha’n’t forget them as they walked under the October trees. She was changed, immensely changed. Her stately head was still beautiful, but with a beauty stony, frozen, as it were. There was no longer any touch of fear or softness. When she saw me she smiled with all her own gracious courtesy—but graciousness a little exaggerated; she had become, I saw, by long opposition to the “I walked on with them, and, perhaps as a result of my evident wish to see more of her, she asked me to go back to dinner with them. I did, realizing when I got to their apartment what it must have cost her to ask me, and what the pride must be that could do it and seem indifferent in the midst of that tawdry, poverty-stricken, vicious existence. Up flights of soiled and shabby stairs, in a mean house, to a miserable room—its bareness the best thing that could be said of it—at the top of the house, overlooking a squalid quarter of Paris. There was a harp in one corner, and Madame Vicaud, in answer to my inquiry about her music, said that she gave lessons. The young daughter was at school in England, and Vicaud’s old mother lived with them, a spiteful, suspicious-looking bourgeoise with a handsome, flinty eye. Clara Vicaud gave her all the quiet deference “When she and I talked together after the supper—one could hardly call the meal a dinner—she did not make an apologetic reference to the ribaldry we had listened to. She did not refer, either, to any of the friends she no longer knew. We spoke chiefly of her daughter, and of books. The daughter was evidently the one ray of light in her existence; she told Damier asked no further questions, and the talk drifted away from the subject of 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 |