The Ambassadors (28 page)

But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn't so bad. "Be
perfectly honest. Tell her all."

"All?" he oddly echoed.

"Tell her the simple truth," Madame de Vionnet again
pleaded.

"But what is the simple truth? The simple truth is exactly what
I'm trying to discover."

She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him.
"Tell her, fully and clearly, about US."

Strether meanwhile had been staring. "You and your
daughter?"

"Yes—little Jeanne and me. Tell her," she just slightly
quavered, "you like us."

"And what good will that do me? Or rather"—he caught himself
up—"what good will it do YOU?"

She looked graver. "None, you believe, really?"

Strether debated. "She didn't send me out to 'like' you."

"Oh," she charmingly contended, "she sent you out to face the
facts."

He admitted after an instant that there was something in that.
"But how can I face them till I know what they are? Do you want
him," he then braced himself to ask, "to marry your daughter?"

She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt. "No—not
that."

"And he really doesn't want to himself?"

She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her
face. "He likes her too much."

Strether wondered. "To be willing to consider, you mean, the
question of taking her to America?"

"To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and
nice—really tender of her. We watch over her, and you must help us.
You must see her again."

Strether felt awkward. "Ah with pleasure—she's so remarkably
attractive."

The mother's eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at
this was to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace. "The
dear thing DID please you?" Then as he met it with the largest
"Oh!" of enthusiasm: "She's perfect. She's my joy."

"Well, I'm sure that—if one were near her and saw more of
her—she'd be mine."

"Then," said Madame de Vionnet, "tell Mrs. Newsome that!"

He wondered the more. "What good will that do you?" As she
appeared unable at once to say, however, he brought out something
else. "Is your daughter in love with our friend?"

"Ah," she rather startlingly answered, "I wish you'd find
out!"

He showed his surprise. "I? A stranger?"

"Oh you won't be a stranger—presently. You shall see her quite,
I assure you, as if you weren't."

It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. "It
seems to me surely that if her mother can't—"

"Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!" she rather
inconsequently broke in. But she checked herself with something she
seemed to give out as after all more to the point. "Tell her I've
been good for him. Don't you think I have?"

It had its effect on him—more than at the moment he quite
measured. Yet he was consciously enough touched. "Oh if it's all
you—!"

"Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but it's to a
great extent. Really and truly," she added in a tone that was to
take its place with him among things remembered.

"Then it's very wonderful." He smiled at her from a face that he
felt as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At
last she also got up. "Well, don't you think that for that—"

"I ought to save you?" So it was that the way to meet her—and
the way, as well, in a manner, to get off—came over him. He heard
himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to
determine his flight. "I'll save you if I can."

In Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he
felt himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de
Vionnet's shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of
that young lady and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he
had gone into the petit salon, at Chad's request, on purpose to
talk with her. The young man had put this to him as a favour—"I
should like so awfully to know what you think of her. It will
really be a chance for you," he had said, "to see the jeune fille—I
mean the type—as she actually is, and I don't think that, as an
observer of manners, it's a thing you ought to miss. It will be an
impression that—whatever else you take—you can carry home with you,
where you'll find again so much to compare it with."

Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare
it, and though he entirely assented he hadn't yet somehow been so
deeply reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely
expressed it, used. He was as far as ever from making out exactly
to what end; but he was none the less constantly accompanied by a
sense of the service he rendered. He conceived only that this
service was highly agreeable to those who profited by it; and he
was indeed still waiting for the moment at which he should catch it
in the act of proving disagreeable, proving in some degree
intolerable, to himself. He failed quite to see how his situation
could clear up at all logically except by some turn of events that
would give him the pretext of disgust. He was building from day to
day on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought forth
meanwhile a new and more engaging bend of the road. That
possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on the eve
of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all,
it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He struck
himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what
service, in such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs.
Newsome. When he wished to help himself to believe that he was
still all right he reflected—and in fact with wonder—on the
unimpaired frequency of their correspondence; in relation to which
what was after all more natural than that it should become more
frequent just in proportion as their problem became more
complicated?

Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm
by the question, with the rich consciousness of yesterday's letter,
"Well, what can I do more than that—what can I do more than tell
her everything?" To persuade himself that he did tell her, had told
her, everything, he used to try to think of particular things he
hadn't told her. When at rare moments and in the watches of the
night he pounced on one it generally showed itself to be—to a
deeper scrutiny—not quite truly of the essence. When anything new
struck him as coming up, or anything already noted as reappearing,
he always immediately wrote, as if for fear that if he didn't he
would miss something; and also that he might be able to say to
himself from time to time "She knows it NOW—even while I worry." It
was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past things
to be dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so
late a stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled and
attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was what he said
to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of Chad's
acquaintance with the two ladies—not to speak of the fresher one of
his own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at
Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had
conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her
remarkably attractive and that there would probably be a good deal
more to tell. But she further knew, or would know very soon, that,
again conscientiously, he hadn't repeated his visit; and that when
Chad had asked him on the Countess's behalf—Strether made her out
vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countess—if he
wouldn't name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly:
"Thank you very much—impossible." He had begged the young man would
present his excuses and had trusted him to understand that it
couldn't really strike one as quite the straight thing. He hadn't
reported to Mrs. Newsome that he had promised to "save" Madame de
Vionnet; but, so far as he was concerned with that reminiscence, he
hadn't at any rate promised to haunt her house. What Chad had
understood could only, in truth, be inferred from Chad's behaviour,
which had been in this connexion as easy as in every other. He was
easy, always, when he understood; he was easier still, if possible,
when he didn't; he had replied that he would make it all right; and
he had proceeded to do this by substituting the present occasion—as
he was ready to substitute others—for any, for every occasion as to
which his old friend should have a funny scruple.

"Oh but I'm not a little foreign girl; I'm just as English as I
can be," Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit
salon, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near
her vacated by Madame Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani,
who was in black velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and
whose somewhat massive majesty melted, at any contact, into the
graciousness of some incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make
room for the vague gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him
which embodied, as he believed, in baffling accents, some
recognition of his face from a couple of Sundays before. Then he
had remarked—making the most of the advantage of his years—that it
frightened him quite enough to find himself dedicated to the
entertainment of a little foreign girl. There were girls he wasn't
afraid of—he was quite bold with little Americans. Thus it was that
she had defended herself to the end—"Oh but I'm almost American
too. That's what mamma has wanted me to be—I mean LIKE that; for
she has wanted me to have lots of freedom. She has known such good
results from it."

She was fairly beautiful to him—a faint pastel in an oval frame:
he thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long
gallery, the portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing
was known but that she had died young. Little Jeanne wasn't,
doubtless, to die young, but one couldn't, all the same, bear on
her lightly enough. It was bearing hard, it was bearing as HE, in
any case, wouldn't bear, to concern himself, in relation to her,
with the question of a young man. Odious really the question of a
young man; one didn't treat such a person as a maid-servant
suspected of a "follower." And then young men, young men—well, the
thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers. She was
fluttered, fairly fevered—to the point of a little glitter that
came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in
her cheeks—with the great adventure of dining out and with the
greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must
think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles,
a long grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest English, our
friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had
believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest
French. He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre
didn't react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact,
before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider that he finally
found himself, absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a
friendly silence. Only by this time he felt her flutter to have
fortunately dropped and that she was more at her ease. She trusted
him, liked him, and it was to come back to him afterwards that she
had told him things. She had dipped into the waiting medium at last
and found neither surge nor chill—nothing but the small splash she
could herself make in the pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety
of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten minutes he was
to spend with her his impression—with all it had thrown off and all
it had taken in—was complete. She had been free, as she knew
freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she
knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She was delightfully quaint about
herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was what most held
him. It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just one
great little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature, she was
thoroughly—he had to cast about for the word, but it came—bred. He
couldn't of course on so short an acquaintance speak for her
nature, but the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped
into his mind. He had never yet known it so sharply presented. Her
mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother, to make that less
sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of the two
previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything
like what she was giving tonight. Little Jeanne was a case, an
exquisite case of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so
amused him to think of by that denomination, was a case, also
exquisite, of—well, he didn't know what.

"He has wonderful taste, notre jeune homme": this was what
Gloriani said to him on turning away from the inspection of a small
picture suspended near the door of the room. The high celebrity in
question had just come in, apparently in search of Mademoiselle de
Vionnet, but while Strether had got up from beside her their fellow
guest, with his eye sharply caught, had paused for a long look. The
thing was a landscape, of no size, but of the French school, as our
friend was glad to feel he knew, and also of a quality—which he
liked to think he should also have guessed; its frame was large out
of proportion to the canvas, and he had never seen a person look at
anything, he thought, just as Gloriani, with his nose very near and
quick movements of the head from side to side and bottom to top,
examined this feature of Chad's collection. The artist used that
word the next moment smiling courteously, wiping his nippers and
looking round him further—paying the place in short by the very
manner of his presence and by something Strether fancied he could
make out in this particular glance, such a tribute as, to the
latter's sense, settled many things once for all. Strether was
conscious at this instant, for that matter, as he hadn't yet been,
of how, round about him, quite without him, they WERE consistently
settled. Gloriani's smile, deeply Italian, he considered, and
finely inscrutable, had had for him, during dinner, at which they
were not neighbours, an indefinite greeting; but the quality in it
was gone that had appeared on the other occasion to turn him inside
out; it was as if even the momentary link supplied by the doubt
between them had snapped. He was conscious now of the final
reality, which was that there wasn't so much a doubt as a
difference altogether; all the more that over the difference the
famous sculptor seemed to signal almost condolingly, yet oh how
vacantly! as across some great flat sheet of water. He threw out
the bridge of a charming hollow civility on which Strether wouldn't
have trusted his own full weight a moment. That idea, even though
but transient and perhaps belated, had performed the office of
putting Strether more at his ease, and the blurred picture had
already dropped—dropped with the sound of something else said and
with his becoming aware, by another quick turn, that Gloriani was
now on the sofa talking with Jeanne, while he himself had in his
ears again the familiar friendliness and the elusive meaning of the
"Oh, oh, oh!" that had made him, a fortnight before, challenge Miss
Barrace in vain. She had always the air, this picturesque and
original lady, who struck him, so oddly, as both antique and
modern—she had always the air of taking up some joke that one had
already had out with her. The point itself, no doubt, was what was
antique, and the use she made of it what was modern. He felt just
now that her good-natured irony did bear on something, and it
troubled him a little that she wouldn't be more explicit only
assuring him, with the pleasure of observation so visible in her,
that she wouldn't tell him more for the world. He could take refuge
but in asking her what she had done with Waymarsh, though it must
be added that he felt himself a little on the way to a clue after
she had answered that this personage was, in the other room,
engaged in conversation with Madame de Vionnet. He stared a moment
at the image of such a conjunction; then, for Miss Barrace's
benefit, he wondered. "Is she too then under the charm—?"