The American (28 page)

“If you stick to your own side of the contract we shall not quarrel; that is all I ask of you,” said Newman.
“Keep your hands off, and give me an open field. I am very much in earnest, and there is not the slightest danger of my getting discouraged or backing out. You will have me constantly before your eyes; if you don’t like it, I am sorry for you. I will do for your daughter, if she will accept me, everything that a man can do for a woman. I am happy to tell you that, as a promise—a pledge. I consider that on your side you make me an equal pledge. You will not back out, eh?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘backing out,’” said the marquise. “It suggests a movement of which I think no Bellegarde has ever been guilty.”

“Our word is our word,” said Urbain. “We have given it.”

“Well, now,” said Newman, “I am very glad you are so proud; it makes me believe you will keep it.”

The marquise was silent a moment, and then, suddenly, “I shall always be polite to you, Mr. Newman,” she declared, “but, decidedly, I shall never like you.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Newman, laughing.

“I am so sure that I will ask you to take me back to my armchair without the least fear of having my sentiments modified by the service you render me.” And Madame de Bellegarde took his arm, and returned to the salon and to her customary place.

M. de la Rochefidèle and his wife were preparing to take their leave, and Madame de Cintré’s interview with the mumbling old lady was at an end. She stood looking about her, asking herself, apparently, to whom she should next speak, when Newman came up to her.

“Your mother has given me leave—very solemnly—to come here often,” he said. “I mean to come often.”

“I shall be glad to see you,” she answered simply. And then, in a moment: “You probably think it very strange that there should be such a solemnity—as you say—about your coming.”

“Well, yes; I do, rather.”

“Do you remember what my brother Valentin said, the first time you came to see me—that we were a strange, strange family?”

“It was not the first time I came, but the second,” said Newman.

“Very true. Valentin annoyed me at the time; but now I know you better, I may tell you he was right. If you come often, you will see!” and Madame de Cintré turned away.

Newman watched her awhile, talking with other people, and then he took his leave. He shook hands last with Valentin de Bellegarde, who came out with him to the top of the staircase. “Well, you have got your permit,” said Valentin. “I hope you liked the process.”

“I like your sister more than ever. But don’t worry your brother any more, for my sake,” Newman added. “I don’t mind him. I am afraid he came down on you in the smoking-room, after I went out.”

“When my brother comes down on me,” said Valentin, “he falls hard. I have a peculiar way of receiving him. I must say,” he continued, “that they came up to the mark much sooner than I expected. I don’t understand it; they must have had to turn the screw pretty tight. It’s a tribute to your millions.”

“Well, it’s the most precious one they have ever received,” said Newman.

He was turning away when Valentin stopped him, looking at him with a brilliant softly-cynical glance. “I should like to know whether, within a few days, you have seen your venerable friend M. Nioche.”

“He was yesterday at my rooms,” Newman answered.

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing particular.”

“You didn’t see the muzzle of a pistol sticking out of his pocket?”

“What are you driving at?” Newman demanded. “I thought he seemed rather cheerful, for him.”

Valentin broke into a laugh. “I am delighted to hear it! I win my bet. Mademoiselle Noémie has thrown her cap over the mill,
¹²
as we say. She has left the paternal domicile. She is launched! And M. Nioche is rather cheerful—
for him!
Don’t brandish your tomahawk at that rate; I have not seen her nor communicated with her since that day at the Louvre. Andromeda has found another Perseus
¹³
than I. My information is exact; on such matters it always is. I suppose that now you will raise your protest?”

“My protest be hanged!” murmured Newman, disgustedly.

But his tone found no echo in that in which Valentin, with his hand on the door, to return to his mother’s apartment, exclaimed: “But I shall see her now! She is very remarkable—she is very remarkable!”

N
ewman kept his promise, or his menace, of going often to the Rue de l’Université, and during the next six weeks he saw Madame de Cintré more times than he could have numbered. He flattered himself that he was not in love, but his biographer may be supposed to know better. He claimed, at least, none of the exemptions and emoluments of the romantic passion. Love, he believed, made a fool of a man, and his present emotion was not folly but wisdom—wisdom sound, serene, well-directed. What he felt was an intense all-consuming tenderness, which had for its object an extraordinarily graceful and delicate, and at the same time impressive woman, who lived in a large gray house on the left bank of the Seine. This tenderness turned very often into a positive heartache; a sign in which, certainly, Newman ought to have read the appellation which science has conferred upon his sentiment. When the heart has a heavy weight upon it, it hardly matters whether the weight be of gold or of lead; when, at any rate, happiness passes into that place in which it becomes identical with pain, a man may admit that the reign of wisdom is temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintré so well that nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose to the high standard which his present mood had set itself. She seemed to
him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance, that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman’s tenderness: Madame de Cintré pleased him so, exactly as she was, that his desire to interpose between her and the troubles of life had the quality of a young mother’s eagerness to protect the sleep of her first-born child. Newman was simply charmed, and he handled his charm as if it were a music-box which would stop if one shook it. There can be no better proof of the hankering epicure that is hidden in every man’s temperament, waiting for a signal from some divine confederate that he may safely peep out. Newman at last was enjoying, purely, freely, deeply. Certain of Madame de Cintré’s personal qualities—the luminous sweetness of her eyes, the delicate mobility of her face, the deep liquidity of her voice—filled all his consciousness. A rose-crowned Greek of old, gazing at a marble goddess with his whole bright intellect resting satisfied in the act, could not have been a more complete embodiment of the wisdom that loses itself in the enjoyment of quiet harmonies.

He made no violent love to her—no sentimental speeches. He never trespassed on what she had made him understand was for the present forbidden ground. But he had, nevertheless, a comfortable sense that she knew better from day to day how much he admired her. Though in general he was no great talker, he talked much, and he succeeded perfectly in making her say many things. He was not afraid of boring her, either by his discourse or by his silence; and whether or no he did occasionally bore her, it is probable that on the whole she liked him only the better for his absence of embarrassed scruples. Her visitors, coming in often while Newman sat there, found a tall, lean, silent man, in a
half-lounging attitude, who laughed out sometimes when no one had meant to be droll, and remained grave in the presence of calculated witticisms, for the appreciation of which he had apparently not the proper culture.

It must be confessed that the number of subjects upon which Newman had no ideas was extremely large, and it must be added that as regards those subjects upon which he was without ideas he was also perfectly without words. He had little of the small change of conversation, and his stock of ready-made formulas and phrases was the scantiest. On the other hand he had plenty of attention to bestow, and his estimate of the importance of a topic did not depend upon the number of clever things he could say about it. He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure. What it was that entertained him during some of his speechless sessions I must, however, confess myself unable to determine. We know in a general way that a great many things which were old stories to a great many people had the charm of novelty to him, but a complete list of his new impressions would probably contain a number of surprises for us. He told Madame de Cintré a hundred long stories; he explained to her, in talking of the United States, the working of various local institutions and mercantile customs. Judging by the sequel, she was interested, but one would not have been sure of it beforehand. As regards her own talk, Newman was very sure himself that she herself enjoyed it: this was as a sort of amendment to the portrait that Mrs. Tristram had drawn of her. He discovered that she had naturally an abundance of gaiety. He had been right at first in saying she was shy; her shyness, in a woman whose circumstances and tranquil beauty afforded every facility for well-mannered hardihood, was only a charm the more. For Newman it had lasted some time, and even when it went it left something behind it which for awhile performed the same office. Was this the tearful secret
of which Mrs. Tristram had had a glimpse, and of which, as of her friend’s reserve, her high-breeding, and her profundity, she had given a sketch of which the outlines were, perhaps, rather too heavy? Newman supposed so, but he found himself wondering less every day what Madame de Cintré’s secrets might be, and more convinced that secrets were, in themselves, hateful things to her. She was a woman for the light, not for the shade; and her natural line was not picturesque reserve and mysterious melancholy, but frank, joyous, brilliant action, with just so much meditation as was necessary, and not a grain more. To this, apparently, he had succeeded in bringing her back. He felt, himself, that he was an antidote to oppressive secrets; what he offered her was, in fact, above all things a vast sunny immunity from the need of having any. He often passed his evenings, when Madame de Cintré had so appointed it, at the chilly fireside of Madame de Bellegarde, contenting himself with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to someone else. Madame de Bellegarde sat by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with whomsoever approached her, and glancing round the room with her slowly-restless eye, the effect of which, when it lighted upon him, was to Newman’s sense identical with that of a sudden spurt of damp air. When he shook hands with her he always asked her with a laugh whether she could “stand him” another evening, and she replied, without a laugh, that, thank God, she had always been able to do her duty. Newman, talking once of the marquise to Mrs. Tristram, said that after all it was very easy to get on with her; it always was easy to get on with out-and-out rascals.

“And is it by that elegant term,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that you designate the Marquise de Bellegarde?”

“Well,” said Newman, “she is wicked, she is an old sinner.”

“What is her crime?” asked Mrs. Tristram.

“I shouldn’t wonder if she had murdered some one—all from a sense of duty, of course.”

“How can you be so dreadful?” sighed Mrs. Tristram.

“I am not dreadful. I am speaking of her favourably.”

“Pray what will you say when you want to be severe?”

“I shall keep my severity for someone else—for the marquis. There’s a man I can’t swallow, mix the drink as I will.”

“And what has
he
done?”

“I can’t quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, something mean and underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as his mother’s misdemeanours may have been. If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while someone else was committing it.”

In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing more than an example of the capricious play of “American humour,” Newman did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de Bellegarde. So long as he was in personal contact with people, he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and he was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the sake of his own personal comfort) to assume for the time that they were good fellows. He did his best to treat the marquis as one; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a confounded fool as he seemed. Newman’s familiarity was never importunate; his sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance, and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness. His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colourless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the
impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror. He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have considered Newman’s “advances” with mechanical politeness. Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by the conscious ironical smile of his host. What the deuce M. de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine. M. de Bellegarde’s smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions. So long as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile, moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of politeness agreeably vague. A smile, too, was neither dissent—which was too serious—nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications. And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse. Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare that there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odour of democracy. Newman was far from being versed in European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core. This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was
enough for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name,
¹
to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor scandalised, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells. Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.