The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 13

by Henry James

XIII

He kept his promise, or his menace, of presenting himself often in the Rue de l'Université, and during the next six weeks saw Madame de Cintré more times than he could have numbered. He flattered himself he had not fallen, and had n't needed to fall, after the fashion enjoined by him on Valentin, in love, but his biographer may be supposed to know better what, as he would have said, was the matter with him. He claimed certainly none of the exemptions and emoluments of the merely infatuated state. That state, he considered, was too consistent with asininity, and he had never had a firmer control of his reason or a higher opinion of his judgement. What he was conscious of, none the less, was an intense all-consuming tenderness, which had for its object an extraordinarily graceful and harmonious, yet at the same time insidiously agitating woman who lived in a grand grey house on the left bank of the Seine. His theory of his relation to her was that he had become conscious of how beautifully she might, for the question of his future, come to his aid; but this left unexplained the fact that his confidence had somehow turned to a strange, muffled heartache. He was in truth infinitely anxious, and, when he questioned his anxiety, knew it was not all for himself. If she might come to his aid he might come to hers; and he had the imagination—more than he had ever had in his life about anything—of fantastic straits or splendid miseries in the midst of which, standing before her with wide arms out, he would have seen her let herself, even if still just desperately and blindly, make for his close embrace as for a refuge.

He really would n't have minded if some harsh need for mere money had most driven her; the creak of that hinge would have been sweet to him had it meant the giving way of the door of separation. What he wanted was to take her, and that her feeling herself taken should come back to him for their common relief. The full surrender, so long as she did n't make it, left the full assurance an unrest and a yearning—from which all his own refuge was in the fine ingenuity, the almost grim extravagance, of the prospective provision he was allowing to accumulate. She gave him the sense of suiting him so, exactly as she was, that his desire to interpose for her and close about her had something of the quality of that solicitude with which a fond mother might watch from the window even the restricted garden-play of a child recovering from an accident. But he was above all simply charmed, and the more for feeling wonderstruck, as the days went on, at the proved rightness both of the instinct and of the calculation that had originally moved him. It was as if there took place for him, each day, such a revelation of the possible number of forms of the "personal" appeal as he could otherwise never have enjoyed, and as made him yet ask himself how, how, all unaided (save as Mrs. Tristram, subtle woman, had aided him!) he could have known. For he had, amazingly, known. And the impression must now thereby have been for him, he thought, very much that of the wistful critic or artist who studies "style" in some exquisite work or some quiet genius, and who sees it come and come and come, and still never fail, like the truth of a perfect voice or the safety of a perfect temper. Just as such a student might say to himself, "How could I have got on without this particular research?" so Christopher Newman could only say, "Fancy this being to be had and—with my general need—my not having it!"

He made no violent love and, as he would have said, no obvious statements; he just attended regularly, as he would also have said, in the manner of the "interested party" present at some great liquidation where he must keep his eye on what concerns him. He never trespassed on ground she had made him regard, ruefully enough, as forbidden; but he had none the less a sustaining sense that she knew better from day to day all the good he thought of her. Though in general no great talker, and almost incapable, on any occasion, of pitching his voice for the gallery, he now had his advances as well as his retreats, and felt that he often succeeded in bringing her, as he might again have called it, into the open. He determined early not to care if he should bore her, whether by speech or by silence—since he certainly meant she should so suffer, at need, before he had done; and he seemed at least to know that even if she actually suffered she liked him better, on the whole, with too few fears than with too many. Her visitors, coming in often while he sat there, found a tall, lean, slightly flushed and considerably silent man, with a lounging, permanent-looking seat, who laughed out sometimes when no one had meant to be droll, and yet remained grave in presence of those calculated witticisms and those initiated gaieties for the appreciation of which he apparently lacked the proper culture and the right acquaintances. It had to be confessed that the number of the subjects upon which he was without ideas was only equalled by the number of the families to which he was not allied; and it might have been added more gravely still that as regards those subjects upon which he was without ideas he was also quite without professions. He had little of the small change of conversation and rarely rose to reach down one of those ready-made forms and phrases that drape, whether fresh or frayed, the hooks and pegs of the general wardrobe of talk—that repository in which alone so many persons qualify for the discipline of society, as supernumerary actors prepare, amid a like provision, for the ordeal of the footlights. He was able on the other hand, at need, to make from where he sat one of the long arms that stretch quite out of the place—to the effect, as might mostly be felt, of coming back with some proposition as odd as a single shoe.

Bent, at any rate, on possession, he had at his command treasures of attention and never measured the possibilities of interest in a topic by his own power of contribution to it: he liked topics to grow at least big enough for him to walk round them and see. This made, for his advantage, to his being little acquainted with satiety either of sound or of sense; he was not himself more often bored than he was often alarmed, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake than to take his intermissions always for absences or his absences always for holidays. What it was that entertained or that occupied him during some of his speechless sessions I shall not, however, undertake fully to say. The Marquise Urbain had once found occasion to declare to him that he reminded her, in company, of a swimming-master she had once had who would never himself go into the water and who yet, at the baths, en costume de ville, managed to control and direct the floundering scene without so much as getting splashed. He had so made her angry, she professed, when he turned her awkwardness to ridicule. Newman affected her in like manner as keeping much too dry: it was urgent for her that he should be splashed—otherwise what was he doing at the baths?—and she even hoped to get him into the water. We know in a general way that many things which were old stories to those about him had for him the sharp high note, but we should probably find a complete list of his new impressions surprising enough. He told Madame de Cintré stories, sometimes not brief, from his own repertory; he was full of reference to his own great country, over the greatness of which it seldom occurred to him that every one might n't, on occasion offered, more or less insatiably yearn; and he explained to her, in so discoursing, the play of a hundred of its institutions and the ingenuity of almost all its arrangements. Judging by the sequel, judging even by the manner in which she suffered his good faith to lay an apparent spell upon her attitude, she was mildly—oh mildly and inscrutably!—beguiled; but one would n't have been sure beforehand of the shade of her submission. As regards any communication she herself meanwhile made him he could n't nevertheless but guess that on the whole she "wanted" to make it. This was in so far an amendment to the portrait Mrs. Tristram had drawn of her.

He had been right at first in feeling her a little—or more than a little—proudly shy; her shyness, in a woman whose circumstances and tranquil beauty afforded every facility for sublime self-possession, was only a charm the more. For Newman it had lasted some time and had, even when it went, left something behind it that for a while performed the same office. Was this the uneasy 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 marked by outlines perhaps rather too emphatic? He supposed so, yet to find himself, as a result, wondering rather less what Madame de Cintré's secrets might consist of, and convinced rather more that secrets would be in themselves hateful and inconvenient things, things as depressing and detestable as inferior securities, for such a woman to have to lug, as he inwardly put it, round with her. She was a creature for the sun and the air, for no sort of hereditary shade or equivocal gloom; and her natural line was neither imposed reserve nor mysterious melancholy, but positive life, the life of the great world—his great world, not the grand monde as there understood if he was n't mistaken, which seemed squeezeable into a couple of rooms of that inconvenient and ill-warmed house: all with nothing worse to brood about, when necessary, than the mystery perhaps of the happiness that would so queerly have come to her. To some perception of his view and his judgement, and of the patience with which he was prepared to insist on them, he fondly believed himself to be day by day bringing her round. She might n't, she could n't yet, no doubt, wholly fall in with them, but she saw, he made out, that he had built a bridge which would bear the very greatest weight she should throw on it, and it was for him often, all charmingly, as if she were admiring from this side and that the bold span of arch and the high line of the parapet—as if indeed on occasion she stood straight there at the spring, just watching him at his extremity and with nothing, when the hour should strike, to prevent her crossing with a rush.

He often spent an evening's end, when she had so appointed—her motives and her method and her logic being meanwhile something of her own, though something thus beautifully between them, even if never named, and which he would n't for the world have asked her to name—he often passed a stiff succession of minutes at the somewhat chill fireside of Madame de Bellegarde; contenting himself there for the most part with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to some one else. Her mother, on that scene, would sit by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with whomsoever approached her and yet detaching for his own especial benefit a glance that seemed to say: "See how completely I'm interested, how agreeably I'm occupied, how deeply I'm absorbed." He often wondered what those supposedly honoured by this intensity of participation thought of her at such moments, and he sometimes answered her look by looking at them; but no one, for all the fine community of taste, that air in the place as of bitter convictions dissolved in iced indifference and partaken of for refreshment with small rare old family spoons, appeared to meet him on any such particular question any more intimately than on any other—and all by direct default of ability; which would have made him again ask himself, but for his constant anxious ache, what he was doing in so deadly a hole at all. To ache very hard at one point, he found, was practically to be unconscious of punctures at any other. When he at all events made his bow to the old lady by the fire 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. Talking of her once to Mrs. Tristram he had remarked 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 that you designate the Marquise?"

"Well, she's a bad, bold woman. She's a wicked old sinner."

"What then has been her sin?"

He thought a little. "I should n't wonder if she had done some one to death—all of course from a high sense of duty."

"How can you be so dreadful?" Mrs. Tristram had luxuriously sighed.

"I'm not dreadful. I am speaking of her favourably."

"Pray what will you say then when you want to be severe?"

"I shall keep my severity for some one else—say for that prize donkey of a 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, but it's something very nice of its kind—I mean of a kind elegantly sneaking and fastidiously base; not redeemed as in his mother's case by a fine little rage of passion at some part of the business. If he has never committed murder he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while some one else was committing it."

In spite of this free fancy, which indeed struck his friend as, for a specimen of American humour, exceptionally sardonic, 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 was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the working of the relation) to assume them to be of a human substance and a social elasticity not alien to his own. He did his best to treat the Marquis as practically akin to him; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could n't in reason be such a confounded fool as he seemed. Newman's assumptions, none the less, were never importunate; his habit of sinking differences and supposing equalities was not an aggressive taste nor an æsthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scant allowance and had consequently never turned rabid. His air as of not having to account for his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to Urbain, for whom it could but represent a failure to conceive of other places either, and who thus saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colourless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image thrown upon his own intellectual mirror. He never forgot himself an instant, and replied with mechanical politeness to the large bright vaguenesses that he was apparently justified in regarding as this visitor's wanton advances. Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible enquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by these obscure abysses of criticism. What in the world M. de Bellegarde was falling back either from or on he was at a loss to divine. M. de Bellegarde's general orderly retreat may meanwhile be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions. So long as he ambiguously smiled—and what could make more for order?—he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile moreover committed him to nothing more than politeness; it left the degree of politeness agreeably vague. Civil ambiguity too—and it was perfectly civil— was neither dissent, which was too serious, nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications. And then it covered his own personal dignity, which at such a crisis 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, there could be no interchange of opinion; he could but hold his breath so as not to inhale the strong smell—since who liked such very strong smells?—of a democracy so gregarious as to be unable not to engender heat and perspiration.

Newman was far from being versed in "European" issues, as he liked to call them; but he was now on the very basis of aspiring to light, and it had more than once occurred to him that he might here both arrive at it and give this acquaintance the pleasure of his treating him as an oracle. Interrogated, however, as to what he thought of public affairs, M. de Bellegarde answered on each occasion, and quite indeed as if thanking him for the opportunity, that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, though there was always at least the comfort of their being too dreadful to touch. This gave our friend, momentarily, almost an indulgence for a spirit so depressed; he pitied the man who had to look at him in such a fashion when he ventured to insist, particularly about their great shining France, "Why, don't you see anything anywhere?"—and he was brought by it to an attempt, possibly indiscreet, to call attention to some of the great features of the world's progress. This had presently led the Marquis to observe, once for all, that he entertained but a single political conviction—dearer to him, however, than all the others, put together, that other people might entertain: he believed, namely, in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France. This had in truth, upon Newman, as many successive distinct effects as the speaker could conceivably have desired. It made him in the first place look at the latter very hard, harder than he had ever done before; which had the appearance somehow of affording M. de Bellegarde another of the occasions he personally appreciated. It was as if he had never yet shown how he could return such a look; whereby, producing that weapon of his armoury, he made the demonstration brilliant. Then he reduced his guest, further, just to staring with a conscious, foolish failure of every resource, at one of the old portraits on the wall, out of which some dim light for him might in fact have presently glimmered. Lastly it determined on Newman's part a wise silence as to matters he did n't understand. He relapsed, to his own sense, into silence very much as he would have laid down, on consulting it by mistake, some flat-looking back-number or some superseded time-table. It might do for the "collection" craze but would n't do for use.

One afternoon, on his presenting himself, he was requested by the servant to be so good as to wait, a very few minutes, till Madame la Comtesse should be at liberty. He moved about the room a little, taking up a book here and there as with a vibration of tact in his long and strong fingers; he hovered, with a bent head, before flowers that he recognised as of a "lot" he himself must have sent; he raised his eyes to old framed prints and grouped miniatures and disposed photographs, ten times as many of which she should some day possess; and at last he heard the opening of a door to which his back was turned. On the threshold stood an old woman whom he remembered to have met more than once in entering and leaving the house. She was tall and straight and dressed in black, and she wore a cap which, if Newman had been initiated into such mysteries, would have sufficiently assured him she was not a Frenchwoman; a cap of pure British composition. She had a pale, decent, depressed-looking face and a clear, dull English eye. She looked at Newman a moment, both intently and timidly, and then she dropped a short, straight English curtsey. "The Countess begs you'll kindly wait, sir. She has just come in; she'll soon have finished dressing."

"Oh, I 'll wait as long as she wants," said Newman. "Pray tell her not to hurry."

"Thank you, sir," said the woman softly, and then instead of retiring with the message advanced into the room. She looked about her a moment and presently went to a table and began to dispose again several small articles. Newman was struck with the high respectability of her appearance; he was afraid to address her as a servant. She busied herself with ordering various trifles, with patting out cushions and pulling curtains straight, while our hero rather attentively hovered. He perceived at last, from her reflexion in the mirror as he was passing, that her hands were idle and her eyes fixed on him. She evidently wished to say something, and, now aware of it, he helped her to begin.

"I guess you're English, ain't you?"

"Oh dear, yes," she answered, quickly and softly. "I was born in Wiltshire, sir."

"And what do you think of Paris?"

"Oh, I don't think of Paris, sir," she said in the same tone. "It's so long that I 've been here."

"Ah, you have been here very long?"

"More than forty years, sir. I came over with Lady Emmeline."

"You mean with old Madame de Bellegarde?"

"Yes, sir. I came with her when she married. I was my lady's own woman."

"And you've been with her ever since?"

"I've been in the house ever since. My lady has taken a younger person. You see I'm very old. I do nothing regular now. But I keep about."

"You keep about remarkably well," said Newman, observing the erectness of her figure and a certain venerable pink in her cheek. I like," he genially added, "to see you about."

"Very good of you, sir. Thank God I'm not ill. I hope I know my duty too well to go panting and coughing over the house. But I'm an old woman, sir, and it's as an old woman that I venture to speak to you."

"Oh, speak, if you like, as you never spoke!" said Newman curiously. "You need n't be afraid of me."

"Yes, sir, I think you're kind. I've seen you before."

"On the stairs, you mean?"

"Yes, sir. When you've been coming to see the Countess. I've taken the liberty of noticing that you come often."

"Oh yes; I come very often," he laughed. "You need n't have been very much emancipated to notice that."

"I've noticed it with pleasure, sir," said this interesting member of the family. And she stood looking at him with a strange expression of face. The old instinct of deference and humility was there; the habit of decent self-effacement and the knowledge of her appointed orbit. But there mingled with it an impulse born of the occasion and of a sense, probably, of this free stranger's unprecedented affability; and, beyond this, a vague indifference to the old proprieties, as if my lady's own woman had at last begun to reflect that, since my lady had taken another person, she had a slight reversionary property in herself.

"You take a great interest in our friends?" he asked.

She looked at him as if she admired that expression and had never heard anything quite like it. "A deep interest, sir. Especially in the Countess."

"I'm glad of that," said Newman. And he smilingly followed it up. "You can't take more than I do!"

"So I supposed, sir. We can't help noticing these things and having our ideas; can we, sir?"

"You mean as an old employee?"

"Ah, there it is, sir. I'm afraid that when I let my thoughts meddle with such matters I rather step out of my place. But I'm so devoted to the Countess; if she were my own child I could n't love her more. That's how I come to be so bold, sir." Her boldness failed her a moment, but she brought it round with a turn." They say in the house, sir, that you want to marry her."

Newman eyed his interlocutress, and, as if something had suddenly begun to depend on it, made up his mind about her. Something at least passed between them with his exchange of distinct truths, and at the end of a minute he felt almost like a lost child kindly taken by the hand. He gave the hand a responsive grasp. He looked quite up into the deep mild face. "I want to marry Madame de Cintré more than I ever wanted anything in my life."

"And to take her away to America?"

"I'll take her wherever she wants to go."

"The further away the better, sir!" exclaimed the old woman with sudden intensity. But she checked herself and, taking up a paper-weight in mosaic, began to polish it with her black apron. "I don't mean anything about the house or the family, sir. But I think a great change would do the poor Countess good. There's no very grand life here."

"Oh, grand life—!" he quite sarcastically sighed. "But Madame de Cintré," he added, "has great courage in her heart."

"She has everything in her heart that's good. You 'll not be vexed to hear that she has been more her natural self these two months past than she had been for many a day before."

Newman was delighted to gather this testimony to the progress of his suit, but he kept his expression within bounds. "Had she been very long as you did n't want to see her?"

"Well, sir, she had good reason not to be gay. The Count was no natural husband for a young lady like that. And it is n't as if, in this house, there were other great pleasures—to make up, I mean, for anything so sad. It's better, in my humble opinion, that she should leave it altogether. So if you 'll pardon my saying such a thing, I hope very much she'll see her blessed way—!"

"You can't hope it as much as I do!" Newman returned.

"But you must n't lose courage, sir, if she does n't make up her mind at once. That's what I wanted to beg of you," his friend proceeded. "Don't give it up, sir. You 'll not take it ill if I say it's a great risk for any lady at any time; all the more when she has got rid of one bad bargain. But if she can take advantage of a good, kind, respectable gentleman I think she had better make up her mind. They speak very well of you, sir, in the house—I mean in my part of it; and, if you 'll allow me to say so, there's everything in your appearance—! You've a very different one to the late Count; he was n't, really sir, much more than five feet high. And they say your fortune's beyond everything. There's no harm in that. So I entreat you to be patient, sir, and to bide your time. If I don't say it to you perhaps no one will. Of course it's not for me to make any promises. I can answer for nothing. But I believe in your chance because I believe in your spirit. I'm nothing but a weary old woman in my quiet corner, but one of us poor things here may understand another, and I don't think I could ever mistake the Countess. I received her in my arms when she came into the world, and her first wedding-day was the saddest of my life. She owes it to me to show me another and a brighter. If you 'll but hold on fast, sir—and you look as if you would—I think we may see it."

Newman had listened to this slow, plain, deliberate speech, the first evidently of much waiting and wishing, with as hushed and grateful a pleasure as he had ever had for some grand passage at the opera. "Why, my dear madam, I just love you for your encouragement. One can't have too much, and I mean to hold on fast—you may bet your life on that. And if Madame de Cintré does see her way you must just come and live with her."

The old woman looked at him with grave lifeless eyes. "It may seem a heartless thing to say, sir, when one has been forty years in a house, but I promise you I should like to leave this place."

"Why, it's just the time to promise," said Newman with ingenuity. "After forty years one wants a big change. That's what I'm going in for," he smiled.

"You're very kind indeed, sir,"—and this faithful servant dropped another curtsey and seemed disposed to retire. She moved slowly, however, and gave while she lingered a dim joyless smile. Newman was disappointed, and his fingers stole so impatiently to his waistcoat-pocket that his informant noticed the gesture. "Ah, thank God I'm not a mercenary French person! If I were I would tell you with a brazen simper, old as I am, that if you please, monsieur, my information is worth something. Yet let me tell you so after all in my own decent English way. It is worth something."

"How much, please?"

"Simply this, sir: your solemn promise not to hint by a single word to the Countess that I've gone so far."

"Oh, I promise all right," said Newman. "And when I promise—!"

"I do believe you keep, sir! That's all, sir. Thank you, sir. Good-day, sir." And having once more slid down telescope-wise into her scant petticoats, his visitor departed. At the same moment Madame de Cintré came in by an opposite door. She noticed the movement of the other portière and asked Newman who had been entertaining him.

"The British female—in her most venerable form. An old lady in a black dress and a cap, who bobs up and down and expresses herself ever so well."

"An old lady who bobs and expresses herself? Ah, you mean poor Mrs. Bread. I happen to know you've made a conquest of her."

"Mrs. Cake, she ought to be called," Newman declared. "She's very sweet. She's a delicious old woman."

His friend looked at him a moment. "What can she have said to you? She's an excellent creature, but we think her rather dismal."

"I suppose," he presently answered, "that I like her so much because she has lived near you so long. Since your birth, she told me."

"Yes—such an age as that makes! She's very faithful," Madame de Cintré went on simply. "I can absolutely trust her."

Newman, however that might be, had never made a reflexion to this lady on her mother and her brother Urbain—he had given no hint of the impression they made on him. But, as if she could perfectly guess his feeling and subtly spare his nerves, she had markedly avoided any occasion for making him speak of them. She never alluded to her mother's domestic decrees; she never quoted the opinions of the Marquis. They had talked, it was true, of Valentin, and she had made no secret of her extreme affection for her younger brother. Newman listened sometimes with a vague, irrepressible pang; if he could only have caught in his own cup a few drops of that overflow! She once spoke to him with candid elation of something Valentin had done which she thought very much to his honour. It was a service he had rendered to an old friend of the family—something more "serious" and useful than he was usually supposed capable of achieving. Newman said he was glad to hear of it, and then began to talk of a matter more personal to himself. His companion listened, but after a while she said: "I don't like the way you speak of poor Valentin." At which, rather surprised, he protested he had never spoken of him save in kindness.

"Well, it's just the sort of kindness," she smiled, "the kindness that costs nothing, the kindness you show to a child. It's as if you rather looked down on him. It's as if you did n't respect him."

"Respect him? Why, respect's a big feeling. But I guess I do."

"You guess? If you're not sure, it's no respect."

"Do you respect him?" Newman asked. "If you do then I do."

"If one loves a person, that's a question one's not bound to answer," said Madame de Cintré.

"You shouldn't have asked it of me then. I'm very fond of your brother."

"He amuses you. But you would n't like to resemble him."

"I should n't like to resemble any one. It's hard enough work resembling one's self."

"What do you mean," she demanded, "by resembling one's self?"

"Why, doing what's expected of one. Doing one's duty."

"But that's hard—or at any rate it's urgent—only when one's very good."

"Well, a great many people are good enough—so long as they insist on being so!" he optimistically laughed. "Valentine, at all events, is good enough for me."

She was silent a little, and then, with inconsequence, "Ah, I could wish him rather better!" she declared. "I could wish he would do something."

Her companion considered: after which, candidly: "What in the world can Valentine 'do'?"

"Well, he's very clever."

"But I guess it's a proof of power," Newman reasoned, "to be so happy without doing anything."

"Ah, but I don't think Valentin's really so happy. He's intelligent, generous, brave—but what is there to show for it? To me there's something sad in his life, and sometimes I have a sort of foreboding about him. I don't know why, but it seems to come to me that he may have some great trouble—perhaps a really unhappy end."

"Oh, leave him to me," Newman cheerfully returned. "I guess I can keep him all right."

One evening, however, in spite of such passages as these, the conversation in Madame de Bellegarde's own apartment had flagged most sensibly. The Marquis walked up and down in silence, like a sentinel at the door of some menaced citadel of the proprieties; his mother sat staring at the fire; his wife worked at an enormous band of tapestry. Usually there were three or four visitors, but on this occasion a violent storm sufficiently accounted for the absence even of the most assiduous. In the long silences the howling of the wind and the beating of the rain were distinctly audible. Newman sat perfectly still, watching the clock, determined to stay till the stroke of eleven and not a moment longer. Madame de Cintré had turned her back to the circle and had been standing for some time within the uplifted curtain of a window, her forehead against the pane and her eyes reaching out to the deluged darkness. Suddenly she turned round to her sister-in-law. "For heaven's sake," she said with peculiar eagerness, "go to the piano and play something."

The young Marquise held up her tapestry and pointed to a little white flower. "Don't ask me to leave this. I'm in the midst of a masterpiece. My little flower's going to smell very sweet; I'm putting in the smell with this gold-coloured silk. I'm holding my breath; I can't leave off. Play something yourself."

"It's absurd for me to play when you're present," Claire returned; yet the next moment she had plunged, as it were, into the source of music, had begun to strike the keys with vehemence. She sounded them for some time, to a great, and almost startling effect; when she stopped Newman went over and asked her to begin again. She shook her head and, on his insisting, said: "I've not been playing for you, I've been playing for myself." She went back to the window again and looked out, and shortly afterwards she left the room.

When he took leave Urbain de Bellegarde accompanied him, as always, just three steps down the staircase. At the bottom stood a servant with his overcoat. He had just put it on when he saw Madame de Cintré come to him across the vestibule. "Shall you be at home on Friday?" he asked.

She looked at him a moment before answering, and the servant moved away to the great house-door. "You don't like my mother and my brother. Ah, but not the least little bit!"

He hesitated a moment and then said ever so mildly: "Well, since you mention it—!"

She laid her hand on the balustrade and prepared to ascend the stairs, fixing her eyes on the first step. "I shall be at home on Friday," she brought out; and she passed up while he watched her. But on the Friday, as soon as he came in, she asked him to be so good as to tell her why he had such an aversion to her family.

"Such an aversion? Did I call it that? Don't think I make too much of it. See how easily I work it."

"I wish you would tell me what you think of them," she simply said.

"I don't think of any of them but you."

"That's because you dislike them too much. Speak the truth; you can't offend me."

"Well, I could live at a pinch without the Marquis," Newman confessed. "It comes to me now, if you mention it. But what's the use of our bringing it up? I don't think of him."

"You're too good-natured," Madame de Cintré gravely said. Then, as if to avoid the appearance of inviting him to speak ill of her brother, she turned away, motioning him to sit down.

But he remained there before her. "What's of much more importance is that they can scarcely stand me."

"Scarcely," she said with the gentlest, oddest distinctness.

"And don't you think they're wrong? I don't strike myself as a man to hate."

"I suppose a man who may inspire strong feelings," she thoughtfully opined, "must take his chance of what they are. But have my brother and my mother made you hate them?"

"Oh, I don't sling my passions about—I've put all my capital into one good thing," he smiled. "Yet I may have spent about ten cents on the luxury of rage."

"You've never then let me see you doing it."

"Ah, I don't do it here," he still sturdily smiled.

She dropped her eyes, and it somehow held him a minute in suspense. But "They think they 've treated you rather handsomely" was, however, all she said at last.

"Well, I 've no doubt they could have been much worse. They must have let me off pretty easily," he went on; "for see how little I feel damaged. And I think I show you everything. Honestly."

She faced him again, at this, as if really to take the measure, more than she had done yet, of what he showed her. "You're very generous. It's a painful position."

"For them, you mean. Not for me."

"For me," said Madame de Cintré.

"Not when their sins are forgiven!" Newman laughed. "They don't think I'm as good as themselves. I do, you see. What should I be—well, even for you—if I did n't? But we shan't quarrel about it."

"I can't even agree with you without saying something that has a sound I dislike. The presumption, if I may put it so, was against you. That you probably don't understand."

He sat down before her, all carefully and considerately, as he might have placed himself at the feet of a teacher. "I don't think I really understand it. But when you say it I believe it."

She gave, still with her charming eyes on him, the slowest, gentlest headshake. "That's a poor reason."

"No, it's a very good one. I believe everything you say, and I know why—if you'll let me tell you. You've a high spirit, a high standard; but with you it's all natural and unaffected: you don't seem to have stuck your head into a vise, as if you were sitting for the photograph of propriety. Yet you do also think of me, I guess, as a sort of animal that has had no idea in life but to make money and drive sharp bargains. Well, that's a fair description," he pursued, "but it's not the whole. A man ought to care for something else—I'm alive to that and always was, even if I don't know exactly for what. I cared for money-making, but I never cared so very terribly for the money. There was nothing else to do, and I take it you don't see me always on the loaf. I've been very easy to others, and I've tried always to know where I was myself. I've done most of the things that people have asked me—I don't mean scoundrels. I guess no one has suffered by me very badly. As regards your mother and your brother," he added, "there's only one point on which I feel that I might quarrel with them. I don't ask them to sing my praises to you, but I ask them to let you alone. If I thought they talked against me to you at all badly"—and he just paused—"why I 'd have to come in somewhere on that."

She reassured him. "They've let me alone, as you say. They have n't talked against you to me at all badly."

It gave him, and for the first time, the exquisite pleasure of her apparently liking to use and adopt his words. "Well then I'm ready to declare them only too good for this world!"

This brought something into her face that—as it seemingly was n't relief—he did n't quite understand, and she might have spoken in a sense to explain it if the door at the moment had not been thrown open and Urbain de Bellegarde had not stepped across the threshold. He appeared surprised at finding Newman; but his surprise was but a momentary shadow across the surface of an unwonted cheer. His guest had never seen him so exhilarated; he produced the effect of an old faded portrait that had suddenly undergone restoration. He held open the door for some one else to enter, and was presently followed by the old Marquise, supported on the arm of a gentleman whom Newman saw for the first time. He was already on his feet, and Madame de Cintré rose, as she always did before her mother. The Marquis, who had greeted him almost genially, stood apart and slowly rubbed his hands; his mother came forward with her companion. She gave Newman a majestic little nod and then released the other visitor, that he might make his bow to her daughter. "I've brought you an unknown relative, Lord Deepmere, Lord Deepmere who's our cousin, but who has done only to-day what he ought to have done long ago, come to make our acquaintance."

Madame de Cintré dropped her soft but steady light on this personage, who had advanced to take her hand. "It's very extraordinary," he ingenuously remarked, "but this is the first time in my life I've been in Paris for more than three or four weeks."

"And how long have you been here now?" she enquired with a certain detachment.

"Oh, for the last two months." The young man—he was still a young man—showed no hesitation. His artless observations might have constituted an impertinence; but a glance at his face would have satisfied you, as it apparently satisfied Madame de Cintré, that nothing about him could well be explained save in the light of his simplicity. When their group was seated Newman, who was out of the conversation, reflected, observing him, that unless he had the benefit of that he had n't the benefit of very much. His other advantages—beyond his three or four and thirty years—were a scant stature and an odd figure, a bald head, a short nose, round clear blue eyes and a frank and natural smile, which made the loss of a couple of front teeth by some rude misadventure constantly conspicuous. Perceptibly embarrassed, by more than one sign, he laughed as if he were bold and free, catching his breath with a loud startling sound. He admitted that Paris was charming, but pleaded that he was a wild, bog-trotting Paddy who preferred his Dublin even to his London and who would never be caught where they had caught him save for his taste for light music. He came over for the new Offenbach things, since, though they always brought them out in Dublin, it was perhaps with a whiff too much of the brogue. He had been nine times to hear "La Pomme de Paris." Had Madame de Cintré ever been to Dublin? They must all come over some day and he 'd show them some grand old Irish sport. His younger kinswoman, leaning back with her arms folded and her eyes set in a certain dimness of wonder, might have been drifting away from him, conveniently and resignedly, on some deep slow current. Her mother's face, on the other hand, was lighted as if in honour of the hour, and Newman felt himself make out in it a queer prehistoric prettiness. The Marquis noted that among light operas his favourite was "La Gazza Ladra." The Marquise, however, began a series of enquiries about the duke and the cardinal, the old duchess and Lady Barbara, after listening to which and to Lord Deepmere's somewhat irreverent responses for a quarter of an hour, our friend rose to take his leave. The Marquis went with him their three usual steps into the hall.

"He is a real Paddy!"—and Newman nodded in the direction of the visitor.

His companion took it coldly. "His mother was the daughter of Lord Finucane; he has great Irish estates. Lady Bridget, in the complete absence of male heirs, either direct or collateral—a most extraordinary circumstance—came in for no end of things. Lord Deepmere takes his principal title, however, from his English property, which is immense. He's a charming young man."

Newman answered nothing, but he detained the Marquis as the latter was beginning gracefully to recede. "It's a good time for me to thank you for sticking so punctiliously to our bargain—for doing so much to help me with your sister."

The Marquis stared. "Really, I've done nothing that I can boast of."

"Oh, don't be modest," Newman genially urged. "I can't flatter myself I'm doing so well—so well, that is, as I hope and pray—simply by my own merit. Please tell your mother too, won't you? how thoroughly I feel it." And, turning away with a sense of the fair thing done now, after all, all round, he left M. de Bellegarde looking after him more ambiguously than he knew.