The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 15
XV
Valentin's ironic forecast of the secession of Mademoiselle Nioche from her father's domicile and his irreverent reflexion on the attitude of this anxious parent in so grave a catastrophe received a practical commentary in the fact that M. Nioche was slow to seek another interview with his late pupil. It had cost Newman some disgust to be forced to assent to his friend's expert analysis of the old man's philosophy, and, though circumstances seemed to indicate that he had not given himself up to a noble despair, our hero thought it possible he might be suffering more keenly than he allowed to become flagrant. M. Nioche had been in the habit of paying him a respectful little visit every two or three weeks, and his absence might be a proof quite as much of extreme depression as of a desire to conceal the success with which he had patched up his sorrow. Newman presently gathered in the bright garden of Valentin's talk several of the flowers of the young woman's recent history.
"I told you she was remarkable," this consistent reasoner declared, "and it's proved by the way she has managed this most important of all her steps. She has had other chances, but she was resolved to take none but the best. She did you the honour to think for a while that you might be such a chance. You were not; so she gathered up her patience and waited a little longer. At last her occasion arrived, and she made her move with her eyes open. I'm very sure she had no innocence to lose, but she had all her respectability. Dubious little damsel as you thought her she had kept a firm hold of that; nothing could be proved against her, and she was determined not to let her reputation go till she had got her equivalent. About her equivalent she had high ideas. Apparently her requirements have been met. Well, they've been met in a superior form. The form's fifty years old, baldheaded and deaf, but he's very easy about money.
"And where in the world," asked Newman, "did you pick up this valuable information?"
"In animated conversation. Remember my frivolous habits. Conversation—and this time not criminal!—with a young woman engaged in the humble trade of glove-cleaner who keeps a small shop in the Rue Saint-Roch. M. Nioche lives in the same house, up six pairs of stairs, across the court in and out of whose ill-swept doorway Miss Noémie has been flitting for the last five years. The little glove-cleaner was an old acquaintance; she used to be the friend of a friend of mine—the foolish friend of a foolish friend—who has married and given up friendship. I often saw her in his society. As soon as I made her out behind her clear little window-pane I recollected her. I had on a spotlessly fresh pair of gloves, but I went in and held up my hands and said to her: 'Dear mademoiselle, what will you ask me for cleaning these?' 'Dear Count,' she answered immediately, 'I'll clean them for you for nothing.' She had instantly recognised me and I had to hear her history from ever so far back. But after that I put her on that of her neighbours. She knows and admires Noémie, and she told me what I've just repeated."
A month elapsed without any reappearance of M. Nioche, and Newman, who every morning read, for practice, about the suicides of the day in a newspaper, began to suspect that, mortification proving stubborn, he had sought a balm for his wounded pride in the waters of the Seine. He had a note of the poor gentleman's address in his pocket-book, and, finding himself one day in the quartier, determined, so far as he might, to clear up his doubts. He repaired to the house in the Rue Saint-Roch which bore the recorded number, and observed in a neighbouring basement, behind a dangling row of neatly inflated gloves, the unmistakeable face of Valentin's informant—a sallow person in a dressing-gown peering into the street as if in expectation that this amiable nobleman would pass again. But it was not to her that Newman applied; he simply enquired of the portress if M. Nioche were at home. The portress replied, as the portress invariably replies, that her lodger had gone out barely three minutes before, but then, through the little square hole of her lodge-window, taking the measure of Newman's resources and seeing them, by an unspecified process, refresh the dry places of servitude to occupants of fifth floors on courts, she added that M. Nioche would have had just time to reach the Café de la Patrie, round the second turning to the left, at which establishment he regularly spent his afternoons. Newman thanked her for the information, took the second turning to the left and arrived at the Café de la Patrie. He felt a momentary hesitation to go in; was it not rather mean to press so hard on humiliated dignity? There passed across his vision an image of a haggard little septuagenarian taking measured sips of a glass of sugar and water and finding them quite impotent to sweeten his desolation. But he opened the door and entered, perceiving nothing at first but a dense cloud of tobacco-smoke. Across this, however, in a corner, he presently descried the figure of M. Nioche, stirring the contents of a deep glass and with a lady seated in front of him. The lady's back was presented, but her companion promptly perceived and recognised his visitor. Newman had gone forward, and the old man rose slowly, gazing at him with a more blighted expression even than usual.
"If you're drinking hot punch," Newman said, "I suppose you're not dead. That's all right. You need n't move to show it."
M. Nioche stood staring with a fallen jaw, not risking any confidence. The lady who faced him turned round in her place and glanced up with a spirited toss of her head, displaying the agreeable features of his daughter. She looked at Newman hard, to see how he was looking at her, then—I don't know what she discovered—she said graciously: "How d ye do, monsieur? won't you come into our little corner?"
"Did you come—did you come after me, monsieur? asked M. Nioche very softly.
"I went to your house to see what had become of you. I thought you might be sick," monsieur said mildly enough.
"It's very good of you, as always," the old man returned. "No, I'm not well. Yes, I'm seek."
"Ask monsieur to sit down," said Mademoiselle Nioche. "Garçon, bring a chair for monsieur."
"Will you do us the honour to seat?" M. Nioche enquired timorously and with a double foreignness of accent.
Newman said to himself that he had better see the thing out, and he took a place at the end of the table with the brilliant girl on his left and the dingy old man on the other side. "You 'll take something of course," said Miss Noémie, who was sipping a brown madère. Newman said he guessed not, and then she turned to her parent with a smile. "What an honour, eh?—he has only come for us." M. Nioche drained his pungent glass at a long draught and looked out from eyes more lachrymose in consequence. "But you did n't come for me, eh?" Noémie went on. "You did n't expect to find me here?"
He observed the change in her appearance and that she was very elegant, really prettier than before; she looked a year or two older, and it was noticeable that, to the eye, she had only added a sharp accent to her appearance of "propriety," only taken a longer step toward distinction. She was dressed in quiet colours and wore her expensively unobtrusive gear with a grace that might have come from years of practice. Her presence of mind, her perfect equilibrium, struck Newman as portentous, and he inclined to agree with Valentin that the young lady was very remarkable. "No, to tell the truth, I did n't come for you," he said, "and I did n't expect to find you. I was told," he added in a moment, "that you had left your good father."
"Quelle horreur!" she cried with the brightest of all her smiles. "Does one ever leave one's good father? You've the happy proof of the contrary."
"Yes, convincing proof," said Newman with his almost embarrassed eyes on M. Nioche. The old man caught his glance obliquely, with his faded deprecation, and then, lifting his empty glass, pretended to drink again.
"Who told you that?" Noémie demanded. "But I know very well. It was M. de Bellegarde. Why don't you say yes? You're not polite."
"I'm so shy and simple and stupid," Newman said with a certain fond good faith.
"I set you a better example. I know M. de Bellegarde told you. He knows a great deal about me—or he thinks he does. He has taken a great deal of trouble to find out, but half of it is n't true. In the first place I have n't left my father, any more than he has left me. I'm much too fond of him, and never so fond as now, when he has been gentil, mais gentil—! Is n't it so, little father? Have n't you been gentil, mais gentil? M. de Bellegarde's a charming young man; it's impossible to mieux causer. I know a good deal about him too; you can tell him that when you next see him."
"No," said Newman with a sturdy grin; "I won't carry any messages from you."
"Just as you please," his young friend placidly returned. "I don't depend on you, nor does M. de Bellegarde either. He's very much interested in me, he can be left to his own devices. He's a contrast to you, monsieur," Noémie went on with a fine little flight of dignity.
"Oh, he's a great contrast to me, I've no doubt," said Newman. "But I don't exactly know how you mean it."
"I mean it in this way. First of all he never offered to help me to a dot and a husband." And Mademoiselle Nioche expressively paused. "I won't say that's in his favour, for I do you justice. What led you, by the way, to make me such a monstrous offer? You did n't care for me."
"Oh yes—I did," said Newman.
"Well, how much?"
"It would have given me real pleasure to see you married to a respectable young fellow."
"With six thousand francs of income!" Noémie cried. "Do you call that caring for me? I'm afraid you know little about women. You were not galant; you were not what you might have been."
Newman flushed a trifle fiercely. "I say!" he exclaimed, "that's rather strong. I had no idea I had been so shabby."
She laughed out as she took up her muff—it was almost her only hint of vulgarity. "It's something at any rate to have made you angry."
Her father had leaned both his elbows on the table, and his head, bent forward, was supported on his hands, the thin white fingers of which were pressed over his ears. In this position he stared fixedly at the bottom of his empty glass, and Newman supposed he was not hearing. Noémie buttoned her furred jacket and pushed back her chair, casting a glance charged with the consciousness of an expensive appearance first down over her flounces and then up at Newman.
"You had better have remained an honest girl," his obstinate sense of his old friend's painful situation prompted him at last to remark.
M. Nioche continued to stare at the bottom of his glass, and his daughter got up, still bravely smiling. "You mean that I look so much like one? That's more than most women do nowadays. Don't judge me yet a while," she added. "I mean to succeed; that's what I mean to do. I leave you; I don't mean to be seen in such places as this, for one thing. I can't think what you want of my poor father; he's very comfortable now. It is n't his fault either. Au revoir, little father." And she tapped the old man on the head with her muff. Then she stopped a minute, looking again at their visitor. "Tell M. de Bellegarde, when he wants news of me, to come and get it from me!" And she turned and departed, the white-aproned waiter, with a bow, holding the door wide open for her.
M. Nioche sat motionless, and Newman hardly knew what to say to him. The old man looked dismally foolish. "So you determined not to shoot her, after all," Newman said presently.
M. Nioche, without moving, raised his eyes and let all their confession quite dismally and abjectly come. They did n't somehow presume to ask for pity, yet they doubtless pretended even less to a rugged ability to do without it. They might have expressed the state of mind of an innocuous insect, flat in shape, conscious of the impending pressure of a boot-sole and reflecting that he was perhaps too flat to be crushed. M. Nioche's gaze was a profession of moral flatness. "You despise me terribly," he said in the weakest possible voice.
"Oh no; it's not your own affair. And hanged if I understand your institutions anyway!"
"I made you too many fine speeches," M. Nioche added. "I meant them at the time."
"I'm sure I'm very glad you did n't shoot her," Newman went on. "I was afraid you might have shot yourself. That's why I came to look you up." And he began to button his coat.
"Neither, hélas! You despise me and I can't explain to you. I hoped I should n't see you again."
"Why, that's pretty mean," said Newman. "You should n't drop your friends that way. Besides, the last time you came to see me I thought you felt rather fine."
"Yes, I remember"—M. Nioche musingly recalled it. I must have been, I was, in a fever. I did n't know what I said, what I did. I spoke, no doubt, wild words."
"Ah well, you're quieter now."
M. Nioche bethought himself. "As quiet as the grave," he then struck off.
"Are you very unhappy?" Newman more ingenuously asked.
M. Nioche rubbed his forehead slowly and even pushed back his wig a little, looking askance at his empty glass. "Yes—yes. But that's an old story. I've always been unhappy. My daughter does what she will with me. I take what she gives me—I make a face, but I take it. I 've no pluck, and when you've no pluck you must keep quiet: you can't go about telling people. I shan't trouble you any more."
"Well," said Newman, rather disgusted at the smooth operation of the old man's philosophy, "that's as you please."
M. Nioche seemed to have been prepared to be despised, but he nevertheless appealed feebly from his patron's faint praise. "After all she's my daughter and I can still look after her. If she has her bad idea, why she has it and she won't let go of it. And then now," he pointed out—"it's fine talking! But there are many different paths, there are degrees. I can place at her disposal the benefit, the benefit"—and he paused, staring vaguely at his friend, who began to suspect his mind of really giving way—"the benefit of my experience."
"Your experience?" Newman inquired, both amused and amazed.
"My experience of business," said M. Nioche gravely.
"Ah yes," Newman laughed, "that will be a great advantage to her!" And then he said good-bye and offered the poor foolish old man his hand.
M. Nioche took it and leaned back against the wall, holding it a moment and looking up at him. "I suppose you think my wits are going. Very likely; I've always a pain in my head. That's why I can't explain, I can't present the case. And she's so strong, she makes me walk as she will—anywhere! But there's this—there's this." And he stopped, still staring up at his visitor. His little white eyes expanded and glittered for a moment like those of a cat in the dark. "It's not as it seems. I haven't forgiven her. Oh, par exemple, no!"
"That's right, don't let up on it. If you should, you don't know what she still might do!"
"It's horrible, it's terrible," said M. Nioche; "but do you want to know the truth? I hate her! I take what she gives me, and I hate her more. To-day she brought me three hundred francs; they're here in my waistcoat-pocket. Now I hate her almost cruelly. No, I have n't forgiven her."
Newman had a return of his candour. "Why then did you accept the money?"
"If I hadn't I should have hated her still more. That, you see, is the nature of misery. No, I have n't forgiven her."
"Well, take care you don't hurt her!" Newman laughed again. And with this he took his leave. As he passed along the glazed side of the café, on reaching the street, he saw the old man motion the waiter, with a melancholy gesture, to replenish his glass.
A week after his visit to the Café de la Patrie he called one morning on Valentin de Bellegarde and by good fortune found him at home. He spoke of his interview with M. Nioche and his daughter, and said he was afraid Valentin had judged the old man correctly. He had found the couple hobnobbing together in amity; the old gentleman's rigour was purely theoretic. Newman confessed he was disappointed; he should have expected to see his venerable friend take high ground.
"High ground, my dear fellow!" Valentin returned; "there's no high ground for him to take. The only perceptible eminence in M. Nioche's horizon is Montmartre, which is n't an edifying quarter. You can't go mountaineering in a flat country."
"He remarked indeed," said Newman, "that he had not forgiven her. But she'll never find it out."
"We must do him the justice to suppose he intensely disapproves. His gifted child," Valentin added, "is like one of the great artists whose biographies we read, those who at the beginning of their career suffered opposition in the domestic circle. Their vocation was not recognised by their families, but the world has done it justice. Noémie has a vocation."
"Damn her vocation! Oh," added Newman impatiently, "you're a cold-blooded crew!"
Valentin sounded him a moment with curious eyes. "You must be very fond of boiled beef and cabbage to have such a suspicion of ripe peaches and plums."
But Newman sturdily met his look. "I should n't think I 'd have to tell you what fruit I gather!"
The young man, at this, closed his eyes an instant and then, with a motion of his hand, shook his head. After which he gravely said: "I back you more than ever!"
"Let me then," his companion returned, "do what I suppose you 'd call the fair thing by you. Miss Noémie desired me to tell you—but hanged if I know what!"
"Bless your quiet imagination," said Valentin, "do you suppose I've been waiting for you? I've been to see her for myself—no less than three times these five days. She's a charming hostess; we attack the noblest subjects of discussion. She's really very clever and a rare and remarkable type; not at all low nor wanting to be low—determined not to be. She means to take very good care of herself. She's as perfect as you please, and as hard and clear-cut as some little figure of a sea-nymph on an antique intaglio; and I warrant she has n't a grain more true sensibility than if she were scooped out of a big amethyst. You can't scratch her even with a diamond. Extremely pretty—really, when you know her, she's wonderfully pretty—intelligent, determined, ambitious, unscrupulous, capable of seeing a man strangled without changing colour, she's, upon my honour, remarkably agreeable."
"Well," said Newman after reflexion, I once saw in a needle-factory a gentleman from the city, who had stopped too near a machine that struck him as curious, picked up as clean as if he had been removed by a silver fork from a china plate, and swallowed down and ground to small pieces!"
Re-entering his rooms late in the evening, three days after Madame de Bellegarde had struck her bargain with him, as he might feel, over the entertainment at which she was to present him to the world, he found on his table a goodly card of announcement to the effect that she would be at home on the twenty-seventh of the month and at ten o'clock in the evening. He stuck it into the frame of his mirror and eyed it with some complacency; it seemed to him a document of importance and an emblem of triumph. Stretched out in a chair he looked at it lovingly, and while he so revelled Valentin was shown into the place. The young man's glance presently followed the direction of Newman's and he perceived his mother's invitation.
"And what have they put into the corner? Not the customary 'music,' 'dancing,' or 'tableaux vivants'? They ought at least to put 'An American of Americans.'"
"Oh, there are to be several of us," Newman said. "Mrs. Tristram told me to-day she had received a card and sent an acceptance."
"Ah then, with Mrs. Tristram and her husband you'll have support. My mother might have put on her card 'Three Americans in a Row'—which you can pronounce in either way you like, though I know the way I should suppose most American. I dare say at least you 'll not lack amusement. You 'll see a great many of the best people in France—I mean of the long pedigrees, and the beaux noms, and the great fidelities, and the rare stupidities, and the faces and figures that, after all, sometimes, I suppose God did make. We've already shown you specimens in numbers—you know by which end to take them."
"Oh, they haven't hurt me yet," said Newman, "and I guess they would, by this time, if they were going to. I seem to want to like people, these days—seem regularly to like liking them, and almost any one will do. I feel so good that if I was n't sure I'm going to be married I might think I'm going to die."
"Do you make," the young man enquired, "so much of a distinction?" But he dropped rather wearily into a chair and went on before his host could answer. "Happy man, only remember that there are poor devils whom the flaunted happiness of others sometimes irritates."
"Do you call a person a poor devil," demanded Newman, "who's as good as my brother-in-law?"
"Your brother-in-law?" his friend a trifle musingly echoed.
"Say then my brother," Newman kindly returned—"and leave the other description for yours."
It made Valentin after an instant rise to him. "You're really very charming. You have your own way for it—which must have been your way of making love. Well," he sighed with a dimmer smile than usual, "I don't wonder and I don't question! Only you are, I understand"—he immediately took himself up—"really and truly in love?"
"Yes, sir!" said Newman after a pause.
"And do you hold that she is?"
"You had better ask her," Newman answered. "Not for me, but for yourself."
"I never ask anything for myself. Have n't you noticed that? Besides, she would n't tell me, and it's after all none of my business."
Newman hesitated, but "She doesn't know!" he the next thing brought out. "However, she will know."
"Ah then, you will—which I see you don't yet. But what you'll know will be what you want, for that's the way things turn out for you." And Valentin's grave fine eyes, as if under some impression oddly quickened, measured him again a moment up and down. "The way you cover the ground! However, being as you are a giant, you move naturally in seven-league boots." With which again he turned restlessly off.
Newman's attention, from before the fire, followed him a little. "There's something the matter with you to-night: you're kind of perverse—you're almost kind of vicious. But wait till I'm through with my business—to which I wish to give just now my undivided attention—and then we'll talk. By which I mean I 'll fix you somehow."
"Ah, there will be plenty of me for you, such as I am—for you always. Only when, then," Valentin asked, "is the event?"
"About five weeks hence—on a day not quite yet settled."
He accepted this answer with interest, in spite of which, however, "You feel very confident of the future?" he next attentively demanded.
"Confident," said Newman with the large accent from which semitones were more than ever absent. "I knew what I wanted exactly, and now I know what I've got."
"You're sure then you're going to be happy?"
"Sure?"—Newman competently weighed it. "So foolish a question deserves a foolish answer. Yes—"I 'll be hanged if I ain't sure!"
Well, if Valentin was to pass for perverse it would not be, he seemed to wish to show, for nothing. "You're not afraid of anything?"
"What should I be afraid of? You can't hurt me unless you kill me by some violent means. That I should indeed regard as a tremendous sell. I want to live and I mean to live: I mean to have a good time. I can't die of sickness, because I'm naturally healthy, and the time for dying of old age won't come round yet a while. I can't lose my wife, I shall take too good care of her. I can't lose my money, or much of it—I 've fixed it so on purpose. So what have I to be afraid of?"
"You're not afraid it may be rather a mistake for such an infuriated modern to marry—well, such an old-fashioned rococo product; a daughter, as one may say, of the Crusaders, almost of the Patriarchs?"
Newman, who had been moving about as they talked, stopped before his visitor. "Does that mean you're worried for her?"
Valentin met his eyes. "I'm worried for everything."
"Ah, if that's all—!" And then: "Trust me—because I'm modern and can compare all round—to know where I stand!" With which, as from the impulse to celebrate his happy certitude by a bonfire, he turned to throw a couple of logs on the already blazing hearth. Valentin watched a few moments the quickened flame; after which, with his elbow supported on the chimney and his head on his hand, he gave an expressive sigh. "Got a headache?" Newman asked.
"Je suis triste," he answered with Gallic simplicity.
Newman stared at the remark as if it had been scrawled on a slate by a school-boy—a weakling whom he would n't wish, however, too harshly to snub. "You 've got a sentimental stomach-ache, eh? Have you caught it from the lady you told me the other night you adored and could n't marry?"
"Did I really speak of her?" Valentin asked as if a little struck. "I was afraid afterwards I had made some low allusion—for I don't as a general thing (and it's a rare scruple I have!) drag in ces dames before Claire. But I was feeling the bitterness of life, as who should say, when I spoke; and—yes, if you want to know—I 've my mouth full of it still. Why did you ever introduce me to that girl?"
"Oh, it's Noémie, is it? Lord deliver us! You don't mean to say you're lovesick about her?"
"Lovesick, no; it's not a grand passion. But the cold-blooded little demon sticks in my thoughts; she has bitten me with those even little teeth of hers; I feel as if I might turn rabid and do something crazy in consequence. It's very low, it's disgustingly low. She's the most mercenary little jade in Europe. Yet she really affects my peace of mind; she's always running in my head. It's a striking and a vile contrast to your noble and virtuous attachment. It's rather pitiful that it should be the best I'm able to do for myself at my present respectable age. I'm a nice young man, eh, en somme? You can't warrant my future as you do your own."
"Drop the creature right here," said Newman; "don't go near her again, and your future will be all right. Come over to America and I 'll get you a place in a bank."
"It's easy to say drop her"—Valentin spoke with a certain gravity in his lucidity. "You might as well drop a pretty panther who has every one of her claws in your flesh and who's in the act of biting your heart out. One has to keep up the acquaintance, if only to show one is n't afraid."
"You 've better things to keep up, it seems to me, than such acquaintances. Remember too," Newman went on, "that I did n't want to introduce you to her; you insisted. I had a sort of creepy feeling about it even at the time."
"Oh, I no more reproach you with misleading my innocence than I reproach myself with practising on hers. She's really extraordinary. The way she has already spread her wings is amazing. I don't know when a woman has amused me more. But pardon me," he added in an instant; "she does n't amuse you, at second-hand; your interest appears to flag just where that of many men would wake up. Let us talk of something else." Valentin introduced another topic, but he had within five minutes reverted by a bold transition to Mademoiselle Nioche and was throwing off pictures of her "home" and quoting specimens of her mots. These latter were very droll and, for a young woman who six months before had been dabbling in sacred subjects, remarkably profane. But at last, abruptly, he stopped, became thoughtful and for some time afterwards said nothing When he rose to go it was evident that his thoughts were still running on his rare young friend. "Yes," he wound up, "she's a beautiful little monster!"