ON Damier’s return to his hotel early in the afternoon, he found a note from Madame Vicaud awaiting him. “Monsieur Daunay has just been here,” it said, “and destiny has strangely brought this matter to a crisis. His wife is dead, and he has asked me for Claire’s hand, feeling that his false position toward me demanded an immediate reparation. He hopes and believes that she loves him; but this, as both you and I must know, is impossible. I am saddened and confused by the whole situation. I do not blame them, but to me it is all displeasing, even shocking—this haste to profit by the wife’s opportune death most of all. Will you come and see me? Claire is lunching at his cousin’s, and he will find her there. I told him to speak to her himself, as I felt that to act the maternal part of intermediary between them would now be mere formalism and affectation; so I am alone. You will want to speak to me, I know.”

Damier, as he drove to the Rue B——, speculated on the rather mystifying significance of the last sentence. He always wanted to speak to her: that she must know; but why now in particular? Since his interview with Claire that morning he had felt almost too shaken by pity for the mother to trust himself with her. He would not be able to help her with counsel and consolation; he would not be able to think of Claire; and at this turning-point in Claire’s life it was for that that the mother needed him.

He found her standing in the salon, evidently pausing to meet him, in a restless pacing to and fro. Her eyes dwelt on him gently and very gravely while she took his hand.

“Who could have expected this swift dÉnouement? But it is best,” she said, “and I pitied him very deeply.”

“Pitied him—for the past, you mean?” Damier questioned.

“Oh, for the future more!”

Damier wondered over her eyes, over the something tremulous in her smile.

“I saw Claire this morning,” he said. “We talked over the matter; she wished to see me.”

Madame Vicaud showed no surprise at this piece of information. “Ah, yes; I understand,” she said.

“She certainly told me that she did not love him,” Damier went on, “and yet—“ He paused, not quite knowing how to put to her his hope that Claire now would reconsider the situation, his hope that she would marry Monsieur Daunay.

It would be the solution of all difficulties, the best solution possible, and the situation could then be defined anew in terms that he more and more deeply longed for. He hardly dared, even yet, before her unconsciousness, define it, and turning away from her, he walked down the room, urging himself to a courage great enough to enable him now to speak to her what was in his heart. Madame Vicaud was watching him thoughtfully when he faced her again at the end of the room, and with still that look of controlled emotion.

“I, also, have something to tell you,” he said.

“Yes,” she assented quietly, yet with the look evidently braced, steeled, in preparation for what she was to hear.

“Can you guess?” he asked.

She was standing now, strangely, in the attitude of the little photograph—leaning on the back of a high chair; and her eyes recalled yet more strangely the intentness of the picture’s eyes as she said: “You have come to tell me that you love my daughter?”

He was so deeply astonished, so completely thrown back upon himself, that for a long moment he could only gaze helplessly into the eyes’ insolubility.

“No,” he said at last; “I did not come to tell you that.”

“But you do love her?” Madame Vicaud inquired, with something of gentle urgency in her voice, as though she helped his shyness. “Be frank with me, my friend; I have guessed so much more, seen so much more, than you told me or showed me. Even with all that saddens you, that pains you, you do love her—enough to overlook the pain and sadness?”

“No,” said Damier, still facing her from his distance, “I do not love her. I have never needed to overlook anything.”

Plainly it was her turn to be astonished, thrown back upon herself.

“But, from the beginning, has that not been your meaning?”

“You, only, have been my meaning.”

He saw that her thought, in its disarray, could not pause upon his interpretation of these words. She had straightened herself, both hands on the chair-back, and her wide gaze, her parted lips, and the vivid wonder and surmise in her face made her look curiously young.

“You have, from the first, been so much with her—seemed to take so much interest in her—seemed so to understand her; she was so open—so intimate—“

“She is your daughter.”

“But that, I thought, added to the certainty: you must, I thought, love my daughter—“

He was forced to beat a retreat for a moment of disentanglement; and, suddenly, disentanglement seemed to demand a cutting sincerity.

“I don’t, in the very least, love Claire; I have never, in the very least, loved her; I have only been sorry for her.”

“Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been sorry, too?”

“But I not for that,” said Damier, “not for that; but because she made me so sorry for you; because”—and he looked at her—“because you do not love her.”

He was still at a distance from her, and across it her look met his in a long silence.

Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with her hands.

“Forgive me!” Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication, and all the others—ah, the others?—the years and years of them that rolled between them!—in a full and final confession. “Forgive me for seeing—it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness—“

She made no reply.

“You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every fiber of you. There is nothing in her that does not hurt you,” Damier said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had come for it.

Madame Vicaud lifted her head.

“I do understand her,” she said. She did not look at him. Straightening her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced from her as it had been from him, “And I hate her.”

Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the light, he was able to say: “I even guessed that—almost.”

“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.

“Alas, no. It would have been my story over again, the positions reversed, and you without my illusions, had you loved her, married her; and yet, it was because you had no illusions that I hoped.”

But Damier could not think of dead hopes.

“What you have suffered!” he said.

“Yes,” Madame Vicaud answered, “I have suffered; but do not, in your kindness, your tenderness, exaggerate. I have suffered, but all has not been black. There have been flowers on the uphill road. I don’t believe in a woe that is blind to them, or to the sky overhead.”

But she still stood looking at dead hopes, not thinking of him.

“Clara,” said Damier.

She was a woman of deep understanding, yet even now,—and hardly was it to be wondered at, so lifted through its very intensity was his love for her above love’s ordinary manifestations,—even now her name so gravely spoken by him had no further meaning for her than the one openly, proudly, joyously accepted, the meaning of the strange tie that had united them; but, while she accepted it, his look startled her. It showed nothing new, but seemed to interpret newly something she had not recognized before. Smiling faintly, she said:

“You have a right.”

“Not the right I would have.” He felt no excitement, only the enraptured solemnity that a soul might feel in some quiet dawn of heaven on finding another soul parted from years ago on earth—long sought for, long loved.

She said nothing, her dark eyes fixing him with a wonder that was already a recognition.

“I love you,” said Damier. He had not moved toward her, nor had she moved away. A little distance separated them, and they stood silently looking at each other.

“You mean—“ she said at last.

“I mean in every way in which it is possible for a man to love the woman he worships.”

The whirl of her mind mirrored itself in the stricken stupefaction of her wan, beautiful features. She caught at one flashing thought. “And I—her mother! You might have been my son!”

“No; I might not,” Damier affirmed.

“By age; I am old enough.”

“I know your age; you are forty-seven,” said Damier, able to smile at her, “and I am thirty. If you were seventy-seven, the only difference would be that I could have fewer years to spend with you; I should wish to spend them just the same. As it is, your age does not make us ludicrous before the world, if we were to consider that.”

At this she turned from him as if in impatience at this quibbling, and her own endurance of it, at such a moment.

“My friend! That this should have happened to you!”

“Can it never happen to you?” he asked.

“I would never allow it to happen to me.”

“It would not be to look up at the sky—it would not even be to stoop to a flower?”

“I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black.”

He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the worshiper’s than the lover’s, Eustace said:

“But would you—would you stoop?”

“I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest meadows.” Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. “I should be culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool’s paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall be an old woman while you are still a young man.”

“Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same to me? I have not fallen in love with you—I have found you. When I saw your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine.”

“The face of a girl. I was nineteen then.”

“Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the girl’s face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?”

Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said, “Perhaps.”

“And if this were our last moment—if there were no question of age or of going on—then—then would you tell me that you have felt something of my feeling—the finding—the recognition—the rapture—own to it with joy?”

She turned to him now and looked at him, at his eager, solemn face, the supplication and worship of his clasped hands, looked for a long time, without speaking. But her face, though she was so white and so grave, seemed, as she looked, to reflect, with a growing radiance, the youth in his.

“I have felt it,” she said at last, “but I have hardly known that I felt it.”

“You know now?”

“Yes, I know now.”

“You could own to it—with joy?”

“If this were our last moment.—Ah, my friend!” He had taken her into his arms.

The long years drifted away like illusions before an awakening. Her girl-hood—but weighted with such dreams of sorrow and loneliness!—seemed with her again. She was helpless, though her heart reproached him and herself, yet could not wholly reproach—helpless in a happiness poignant and exquisite. They kissed each other gently, and, his arms around her, they looked earnestly at each other. Speechlessly they looked the finding, the recognition, the rapture.

The meeting in heaven had come; but there was still the earth to be counted with.