The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 11
XI
He had not, on his return to Paris, resumed the study of French conversation with M. Nioche; he had been conscious of too many other uses for his time. That amiable man, however, came to see him very promptly, having ascertained his whereabouts by some art of curiosity too subtle to be challenged. He repeated his visit more than once; he seemed oppressed by an humiliating sense of having been overpaid, and wished apparently to redeem his debt by the offer of grammatical and statistical information in small instalments. He exhaled the same decent melancholy as a few months before; a few months more or less of brushing could make little difference in the antique lustre of his coat and hat. But his spirit itself was a trifle more threadbare; it had clearly received some hard rubs during the summer. Newman asked with interest about Mademoiselle Noémie, and M. Nioche at first, for answer, simply looked at him in lachrymose silence.
"Don't press me on that subject, sir. I sit and watch her, but I can do nothing."
"Do you mean she gives you serious cause—?"
"I don't know, sir, what I mean! I can't follow her. I don't understand her. She has something in her head; who can say what's in the head of a little person so independent, so dreadful—and so pleasing? She's too deep for her poor papa."
"Does she continue to go to the Musée? Has she made any of those copies for me?" Newman continued.
"She goes to the Musée, but I see nothing of the copies. She has something on her easel; I suppose it's one of the pictures you ordered. Such a splendid commission ought to give her fairy fingers. But she's not in earnest. I can't say anything to her; I'm afraid of her, if you must know. One evening last summer when I took her to walk in the Champs Elysées she said to me things that made me turn cold."
"And what things?"
"Excuse an unhappy father from telling you," said M. Nioche while he unfolded his calico pocket-handkerchief.
Newman promised himself to pay Mademoiselle Noémie another visit at the Louvre. He was curious of the progress of his copies, but it must be added that he was still more curious of the personal progress of the copyist. He went one afternoon to the great museum, but wandered through several of the rooms without finding her; after which, on his way to the long hall of the Italian masters, he stopped face to face with Valentin de Bellegarde. The young Frenchman eagerly greeted him, assuring him he was a godsend. He himself was in the worst of humours and wanted some one to contradict. "In a bad humour among all these beautiful things? I thought you were so fond of pictures, especially the grand old black ones," Newman said. "There are two or three here that ought to keep you in spirits."
"Oh, to-day," Valentin returned, "I'm not in a mood for gimcracks, and the more remarkable they are the less I like them. The great staring eyes and fixed positions of all these dolls and mannikins irritate me. I feel as if I were at some big dull party, a roomful of people I should n't wish to speak to. What should I care for their beauty? It's a bore and, worse still, it's a reproach. I've a tas d'ennuis. I feel damnably vicious."
"If this grand sight works you up so why do you expose yourself?" Newman asked with his quiet play of reason.
"That's one of my worries. I came to meet my cousin-a dreadful English cousin, a member of my mother's family—who's in Paris for a week with her husband and who wishes me to point out the 'principal beauties.' Imagine a woman who wears a green crape bonnet in December and has straps sticking out of the ankles of her interminable boots! My mother begged I would do something to oblige them. I've undertaken to play valet de place this afternoon. They were to have met me here at two o'clock, and I've been waiting for them twenty minutes. Why does n't she arrive? She has at least a pair of feet to carry her. I don't know whether to be furious at their playing me false or to toss up my hat for the joy of escaping them."
"I think in your place I 'd be furious," said New man, "because they may arrive yet, and then your fury will still be of use to you. Whereas if you were delighted and they were afterwards to turn up, you might n't know what to do—well, with your hat."
"You give me excellent advice, and I already feel better. I 'll be furious; I 'll let them go to the deuce and I myself will go with you—unless by chance you too have a rendezvous."
"It's not exactly a rendezvous," Newman returned. "But I 've in fact come to see a person, not a picture."
"A woman, presumably?"
"A young lady."
"Well," said Valentin, "I hope for you, with all my heart, that she's not clothed in green tulle and that her feet are not too much out of focus."
"I don't know much about her feet, but she has very pretty hands."
The young man breathed all his sadness. "And on that assurance I must part with you?"
"I'm not certain of finding my young lady," said Newman, "and I'm not quite prepared to lose your company on the chance. It does n't strike me quite as good business to introduce you to her, and yet I should rather like to have your opinion of her."
"Is she formed to please?"
"Well, I guess you'll think so."
Valentin passed his arm into that of his companion. "Conduct me to her on the instant! I should be ashamed to make a pretty woman wait for my verdict."
Newman suffered himself to be gently propelled in the direction in which he had been walking, but his step was not rapid. He was turning something over in his mind. The two men passed into the long gallery of the Italian masters, and our friend, after having scanned for a moment its brilliant vista, turned aside into the smaller apartment devoted to the same school on the left. It contained very few persons, but at the further end of it Mademoiselle Nioche sat before her easel. She was not at work; her palette and brushes had been laid down beside her, her hands were folded in her lap and she had relapsed into her seat to look intently at two ladies on the other side of the hall, who, with their backs turned to her, had stopped before one of the pictures. These ladies were apparently persons of high fashion, they were dressed with great splendour and their long silken trains and furbelows were spread over the polished floor. It was on their dresses the young woman had fixed her eyes, though what she was thinking of I am unable to say. I hazard the hypothesis of her mutely remarking that to carry about such a mass of ponderable pleasure would surely be one of the highest uses of freedom. Her reflections, at any rate, were disturbed by the advent of her unannounced visitors, whom, as she rose and stood before her easel, she greeted with a precipitation of eye and lip that was like the glad clap of a pair of hands.
"I came here on purpose to see you—seulement vous, expray, expray," Newman said in his fairest, squarest, distinctest French. And then, like a good American, he introduced Valentin formally: "Allow me to make you acquainted with Comte Valentin de Bellegarde."
Valentin made a bow which must have seemed to her quite in harmony with the impressiveness of his title, but the graceful brevity of her response was a negation of underbred surprise. She turned to her generous patron, putting up her hands to her hair and smoothing its delicately-felt roughness. Then, rapidly, she turned the canvas that graced her easel over on its face. "You've not forgotten me?"
"I shall never forget you. You may be sure of that."
"Oh," she protested, "there are a great many different ways of remembering a person." And she looked straight at the Comte de Bellegarde, who was looking at her as a gentleman may when a verdict is expected of him.
"Have you painted me a pretty picture?" Newman went on. "Have you shown beaucoup d'industrie?"
"No, I've done nothing." And, taking up her palette, she began to mix her colours at random.
"But your father tells me your attendance has been regular."
"I've nowhere else to go! Where do you suppose, cher monsieur—? Here, all summer, one could breathe at least."
"Being here then," said Newman, "don't you think you might have tried something?"
"I told you before," she sweetly answered, "that I have n't the advantage of knowing how to paint."
"But you've something of interest on your easel now," Valentin gaily objected, "if you 'd only let me see it."
She spread out her two hands, with the fingers expanded, over the back of the canvas—those hands which Newman had called pretty and which, in spite of several little smudges of colour, Valentin could now admire. "My painting is n't of interest."
"It's the only thing about you that is not, then, mademoiselle," the young man gallantly returned.
She took up her shamefaced study and silently passed it to him. He looked at it, and in a moment she said: "I'm sure you're a great judge."
"Yes," he admitted; "I recognise merit."
"Only when it's there, I hope! I've given up," she bravely declared, "trying to have it."
He faced her, with a smile, over her demoralised little daub. "If one has n't one sort one can always have another."
She considered with downcast eyes—which, however, she presently raised. "We're talking of the sort of which you're a judge." Then, as to anticipate too obvious a rejoinder, she turned, for more urgent good manners, to Newman. "Where have you been all these months? You took those great journeys, you amused yourself well?"
"Oh yes," our hero returned—"always beaucoup, beaucoup!"
"Ah, so much the better." She spoke with charming unction and, having taken back her canvas from Valentin, who meanwhile had looked at his friend with eyes of rich meaning, began again to dabble in her colours. She was singularly pretty, with the look of serious sympathy she threw into her face. Tell me," she continued, "a little of all you've done."
"Oh, I went to Switzerland—to Geneva and Zermatt and Zürich and all those places, you know; and down to Venice, and all through Germany, and down the Rhine, and into Holland and Belgium—the regular round. How do you say that in French—the regular round?" Newman asked of Valentin. Mademoiselle Nioche fixed her eyes an instant on their companion, and then with all the candour of her appeal: "I don't understand monsieur when he says so much at once. Would you be so good as to translate?"
"I d rather talk to you out of my own head," Valentin boldly declared.
"No," said Newman gravely, still in his formal French, "you must n't talk to Mademoiselle Nioche, because you say discouraging things. You ought to tell her to work, to persevere."
"And we Parisians, mademoiselle," the young man exclaimed, "are accused of paying hollow compliments and of being false flatterers!"
"Ah, I don't want any compliments," the girl protested, "I want only the cruel truth. But if I did n't know it by this time—!"
"I utter no truth more cruel," Valentin returned, "than that there are probably many things you can do very well."
"Oh, I can at least do this!" And dipping a brush into a clot of red paint she drew a great horizontal daub across her unfinished picture.
"What are you making that mark for?" Newman asked with his impartial interest.
Without answering, she drew another long crimson daub, in a vertical direction, down the middle of her canvas and so in a moment completed the rough indication of a cross. "It's the sign of the cruel truth."
The two men looked at each other, Valentin as with vivid intelligence. "You've spoiled my picture," said his friend.
"I know that very well. It was the only thing to do with it. I had sat looking at it all day without touching it. I had begun to hate it. It seemed to me something was going to happen."
"I like it better that way than as it was before," said Valentin. "Now it's more interesting. It tells a little story now. Is it for sale, mademoiselle?"
"Everything I have is for sale," she promptly replied.
"How much then is this object?"
"Ten thousand francs—and very cheap!"
"Everything mademoiselle may do at present is mine in advance," Newman interposed. "It makes part of an order I gave her some months ago. So you can't have that!"
"Monsieur will lose nothing by it," said mademoiselle with her charming eyes on Valentin. And she began to put up her utensils.
"I shall have gained an ineffaceable memory," Valentin smiled. "You're going away? your day's over?"
"My father comes to fetch me," the young lady replied.
She had hardly spoken when, through the door behind her, which opens on one of the great white stone staircases of the Louvre, M. Nioche made his appearance. He came in with his usual patient shuffle, indulging in a low salute to the gentlemen who had done him the honour to gather about his daughter. Newman shook his hand with muscular friendliness and Valentin returned his greeting with high consideration. While the old man stood waiting for Noémie to make a parcel of her implements he let his mild oblique gaze play over this new acquaintance, who was watching her put on her bonnet and mantle. Valentin was at no pains to disguise the benevolence of his own interest. He looked at a pretty person as he would have listened to a good piece of music. Intelligent participation was in such a case simple good manners. M. Nioche at last took his daughter's paint box in one hand and the bedaubed canvas, after giving it a solemn puzzled stare, in the other, and led the way to the door. Noémie followed him after making her late interlocutors the formal obeisance of the perfectly-educated female young.
"Well," said Newman, "what do you think of her?"
"She's very remarkable. Diable, diable, diable! his friend reflectively repeated; "she's the perfection of the type."
"I'm afraid she's a sad little trifler," Newman conscientiously remarked.
"Not a little one—rather an immense one. She has all the material." And Valentin began to walk slowly off, looking vaguely, though with eyes now so opened, at the pictures on the walls. Nothing could have appealed to his imagination more than the possible futility of a young lady so equipped for futility. "She's very interesting," he went on. "Yes, the type shines out in her."
"The type? The type of what?"
"Well, of soaring, of almost sublime ambition! She's a very bad little copyist, but, endowed with the artistic sense in another line, I suspect her none the less of a strong feeling for her great originals."
Newman wondered, but presently followed. "Surely her great originals will have had more beauty."
"Not always. She has enough to look as if she had more, and that's always plenty. It's a face and figure in which everything tells. If she were prettier she would be less intelligent, and her intelligence is half her charm."
"In what way does her intelligence strike you as so remarkable?" asked Newman, at once puzzled, impressed and vaguely scandalised by his friend's investment of such a subject with so much of the dignity of demonstration.
She has taken the measure of life, and she has determined to be something—to succeed at any cost. Her smearing of colours is of course a mere trick to gain time. She's waiting for her chance; she wishes to launch herself, and to do it right. Nobody, my dear man, can ever have had such a love of the right. She knows her Paris. She 's one of fifty thousand, so far as her impatiences and appetites go, but I'm sure she has an exceptional number of ideas."
Newman raised his strong eyebrows. "Are you also sure they're really good ones?"
"Ah, 'good, good'!" cried Valentin: "you people are too wonderful with your goodness. Good for what, please—? They 'll be excellent, I warrant, for some things! They'll be much better than the hopeless game she has just given up. They'll be good enough to make her, I dare say, one of the celebrities of the future."
"Lord o' mercy, you have sized her up! But don't—I must really ask it of you—let her quite run away with you," Newman went on. "I shall owe it to her good old father not to have upset her balance. For he's a real nice man."
"Oh, oh, oh, her good old father!" Valentin incorrigibly mocked. And then as his companion looked grave: "He expects her to assure his future."
"I thought he rather expected me! And don't you judge him, as a friend of mine," Newman asked, "too cruelly? He's as poor as a rat, but very high-toned."
"Why, mon cher, I should adore his tone, and you're right to do the same: it's much better than mine, and he'll do you more good as a companion, he 'll protect your innocence better, than ever I shall. I don't mean," Valentin explained, "that he would n't much rather his daughter were a good girl, that she remained as 'nice'-as worthy, that is, say, of your particular use—as he may himself remain. But all the same he won't, if the worst comes to the worst—well, he won't do what Virginius did. He does n't want her to be a failure—as why should he?—and if she is n't a failure it's plain she 'll be a success. On the whole he has confidence."
"He has touching fears, sir—I admit he has betrayed them to me." Newman felt himself loyally concerned to defend a character that had struck him as pleasingly complete—though completeness was, after all, what Valentin also claimed for it. The difference was in their view of that picturesque grace, and Newman would, to an appreciable degree, have sentimentally suffered from not being able to keep Monsieur Nioche before him as he had first seen him. He was, to an extent he never fully revealed, a collector of impressions as romantically concrete, even when profane, as the blest images and sanctified relics of one of the systematically devout, and he at bottom liked as little to hear anything he had picked up with the hand of the spirit pronounced unauthentic. I don't quite remember what Virginius did," he presently pursued, "and I don't say for certain that my old friend would shoot. He does n't affect me—no—as a shooting man. But I guess he would n't want to make very much out of anything."
"Then he'll be very different," Valentin laughed, "from any of the rest of his species! Why, my dear fellow, we all here in Paris want to make as much as possible out of everything. That's how we differ, I conceive, from the people of your country: the objects of your exploitation appear to be fewer, and above all of fewer kinds. I don't mind telling you," he declared in the same tone, "that I don't see the end of what I might be capable of making out of this."
"Of 'this'—?"
"Of the relation of Monsieur Nioche to his daughter, and of the relation of his daughter to—well, to as many other persons as you like!"
"I shan't at all like you to be one of them," Newman still gravely returned. "I did n't ask you to come round with me just to set you after her."
The young man appeared for an instant embarrassed. "Do you object then to her having engaged my enlightened curiosity?"
Newman considered. "Well, no—since, from the moment I recognise she 'll never deliver my goods I don't quite see where I stand or how I can improve her."
"Oh, you certainly can't improve her!" Valentin gaily cried.
Newman looked at him a moment. "I should like then to improve you. I guess at any rate you had better leave her alone."
"Oh, oh, oh!" his companion exclaimed, at this, with an accent that made him pull up. "Do you mean, my dear fellow, that you warn me off?"
They had stopped a minute before, and he stood there staring. "Hanged if I don't believe you suppose I'm afraid of you!"
Valentin had given a cock to his moustache, and he stroked it an instant, meeting this exclamation with a glance of some ambiguity and a smile just slightly strained. "Oh, I should n't put it that way: you don't even yet know me enough to fear me! Which gives you the advantage—for you've yourself attitudes that, I confess, make me tremble. I think you're afraid, at most," he continued, "of my bad example."
Newman had again—for he had had it before—a strange fine sense of something he would have called, in relation to this brilliant friend, the waste of animadversion. It was somehow one with the accepted economic need of keeping him pleasantly in view. Even to argue with him was somehow to misuse a luxury, and to think of him as perverse was somehow to miss an occasion. No one had ever given him that impression, which he might have compared to the absolute pleasure, for the palate, of wine of the highest savour. One didn't put anything "into" such a vintage and there was a way of handling the very bottle. The grace of him, of Valentin, was all precious, the growth of him all fortunate, the quantity of him elsewhere all doubtless limited. "I might perhaps have been a factor in that young lady's moral future," Newman presently said—but I don't come in now. And evidently," he added "you've no room for me in yours."
The young man gave a laugh, and the next moment, arm in arm, they had resumed their walk. "Oh, on the contrary," Valentin then replied; "since what I want, precisely, is to keep it spacious and capacious—at least on the scale, if you please, of my moral past; which indeed seems to me, when I look back on it, as boundless as the desert. It's a prospect that, at all events, such figures as you and your wonderful friends help to people. And I may say about them," he went on, "that I should like really—in the interest of the impression that I confess the young lady makes on me—to propose to you a fair agreement."
On which, amusedly enough, Newman debated as they went. "That I shall shut my eyes to what you want to do?"
"Well, yes—say I may expect you'll shut them to me as soon as I shall find you've opened them to the grand manner in which your old gentleman is a man of the world. You 'll be obliged, I'm convinced, to recognise it, and I only ask you to let me know, in all honesty, when you've done so."
"So that you, in all honesty—?"
"Well, call it in all delicacy!" Valentin suggested.
Newman continued to wonder. "May have a free hand?"
"Without your being shocked," the young man gracefully said.
But it only made our friend rather quaintly groan. "I think it's your delicacies, all round, that shock me most!"
"Ah, don't say," Valentin pleaded, "that I'm not at the worst a man of duty! See for yourself!" His English cousins had come into view, and he advanced gallantly to meet the lady in the green crape bonnet.