The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 24
XXIV
Sunday was as yet two days off; but meanwhile, to beguile his impatience, Newman took his way to the Avenue de Messine and got what comfort he could in staring at the blank outer wall of Madame de Cintré's present abode. The street in question, as some travellers will remember, adjoins the Pare Monceau, which is one of the finest quarters of reconstructed Paris. It has an air of modern opulence and convenience that sounds a false note for any temple of sacrifice, and the impression made on his gloomily-irritated gaze by the fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less exasperating than he had feared. The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be sufficiently placid. And yet he knew the case was other; only at present it was not a reality to him. It was too strange and too mocking to be real; it was like a page torn out of some superannuated unreadable book, with no context in his own experience.
On Sunday morning, at the hour Mrs. Tristram had indicated, he rang at the gate in the blank wall. It instantly opened and admitted him into a clean, cold-looking court, beyond which a dull, plain edifice met his view in the manner of some blank stiff party to a formal introduction. A robust lay sister with a cheerful complexion emerged from a porter's lodge and, on his stating his errand, pointed to the open door of the chapel, an edifice which occupied the right side of the court and was preceded by a high flight of steps. Newman ascended the steps and immediately entered the open door. Service had not yet begun; the interior was dimly lighted and it was some moments before he could distinguish features. Then he saw the scene divided by a large close iron screen into two unequal parts. The altar was on the hither side of the screen, and between it and the entrance were disposed several benches and chairs. Three or four of these were occupied by vague, motionless figures—figures he presently perceived to be women deeply absorbed in their devotion. The place seemed to Newman very cold; the smell of the incense itself was cold. Mixed with this impression was a twinkle of tapers and here and there a glow of coloured glass. He seated himself; the praying women kept still, kept their backs turned. He saw they were visitors like himself, and he would have liked to see their faces; for he believed that they were the mourning mothers and sisters of other women who had had the same pitiless courage as the person in whom he was interested. But they were better off than he, for they at least shared the faith to which the others had sacrificed themselves. Three or four persons came in, two of them gentlemen important and mature. Every one was very quiet, with a perverse effect of studied submission. He fastened his eyes on the screen behind the altar. That was the convent, the real convent, the place where she was. But he could see nothing; no light came through the crevices. He got up and approached the partition very gently, trying to look through. Behind it was darkness, with no sign even of despair. He went back to his place, and after that a priest and two altar-boys came in and began to say mass.
Newman watched their genuflexions and gyrations with a grim, still enmity; they seemed prompters and abettors of the wrong he had suffered; they were mouthing and droning out their triumph. The priest's long, dismal intonings acted upon his nerves and deepened his wrath; there was something defiant in his unintelligible drawl—as if it had been meant for his very own swindled self. Suddenly there arose from the depths of the chapel, from behind the inexorable grating, a sound that drew his attention from the altar—the sound of a strange, lugubrious chant uttered by women's voices. It began softly, but it presently grew louder, and as it increased it became more of a wail and a dirge. It was the chant of the Carmelite nuns, their only human utterance. It was their dirge over their buried affections and over the vanity of earthly desires. At first he was bewildered, almost stunned, by the monstrous manifestation; then, as he comprehended its meaning, he listened intently and his heart began to throb. He listened for Madame de Cintré's voice, and in the very heart of the tuneless harmony he imagined he made it out. We are obliged to believe that he was wrong, since she had obviously not yet had time to become a member of the invisible sisterhood; the chant, at any rate, kept on, mechanical and monotonous, with dismal repetitions and despairing cadences. It was hideous, it was horrible; as it continued he felt he needed all his self-control. He was growing more agitated, the tears were hot in his eyes. At last, as in its full force the thought came over him that this confused, impersonal wail was all that he or the world she had deserted were ever again to hear of the breath of those lips of which his own held still the pressure, he knew he could bear it no longer. He rose abruptly and made his way out. On the threshold he paused, listened again to the dreary strain, and then hastily descended into the court. As he did so he saw that the good sister with the high-coloured cheeks and the fan-like frill to her head-dress, who had admitted him, was in conference at the gate with two persons who had just come in. A second glance showed him that these visitors were Madame de Bellegarde and her son, and that they were about to avail themselves of that method of approach to their lost victim which he had found but a mockery of consolation. As he crossed the court the Marquis recognised him; he was on the way to the steps and was supporting his mother. From Madame de Bellegarde he also received a look, and it resembled that of Urbain. Both faces expressed a less guarded perturbation, something more akin to immediate dismay, than Newman had yet seen in them. Evidently he was disconcerting, and neither mother nor son had quite due presence of mind. Newman hurried past them, guided only by the desire to get out of the convent walls and into the street. The gate opened itself at his approach; he strode over the threshold and it closed behind him. A carriage which appeared to have been standing there was just turning away from the pavement. He looked at it for a moment blankly; then he became conscious, through the dusky mist that swam before his eyes, that a lady seated in it was bowing to him. The vehicle had got into motion before he recognised her; it was an ancient landau with one half the cover lowered. The lady's bow was very expressive and accompanied with a smile; a little girl was seated beside her. He raised his hat, and then the lady bade the coachman stop.
The carriage drew up again and she sat there and beckoned to Newman—beckoned with the demonstrative grace of the Marquise Urbain. Newman hesitated a moment before he obeyed her summons; during this moment he had time to curse his stupidity for letting the others escape him. He had been wondering how he could get at them; fool that he was for not stopping them then and there! What better place than beneath the very prison walls to which they had consigned the promise of his joy? He had been too bewildered publicly to fall on them, but now he felt ready to await them at the gate. Madame Urbain, with a certain attractive petulance, made a more emphatic sign, and this time he went over to the carriage. She leaned out and gave him her hand, looking at him kindly and smiling. "Ah, monsieur, you don't include me in your wrath? I had nothing to do with it."
"Oh, I don't suppose you could have prevented it!" he answered in a tone which was not that of studied gallantry.
"What you say is too true for me to resent the small account it makes of my influence. I forgive you, at any rate, because you look as if you had seen a ghost."
"I have seen a ghost," Newman darkly returned.
"I'm glad then I did n't go in with my belle-mère and my husband. You must have seen them, eh? Was the meeting affectionate? Did you hear the chanting? They say it's like the lamentations of the damned. I would n't go in: one's certain to hear that soon enough. Poor Claire—in a white shroud and a big brown cloak! That's the full dress of the Carmelites, you know. Well, she was always fond of long, loose things. But I must n't speak of her to you; I must only say I'm very sorry for you, that if I could have helped you I would, and that I think every one has behaved infernally. I was afraid of it, you know; I felt it in the air for a fortnight before it came. When I saw you, at my mother-in-law's ball, take it all in such good faith I felt as if you were dancing on your grave. But what could I do? I wish you all the good I can think of. You 'll say that is n't much! Yes; they've been abominable; I'm not a bit afraid to say it; I assure you every one thinks so. We're not all like that. I'm sorry I'm not going to see you again; you know I think you very good company. I 'd prove it by asking you to get into the carriage and drive with me for the quarter of an hour that I shall wait for my mother-in-law. Only if we were seen—considering what has passed, and every one knows you 've been joué—it might be thought I was going a little too far, even for me. But I shall see you sometimes—somewhere, eh? You know"—this was said in English—"we 've a plan for a little amusement."
Newman stood there with his hand on the carriage door, listening to this consolatory murmur with an unlighted eye. He hardly knew what Madame Urbain was saying; he was only conscious she was chattering ineffectively. But suddenly it occurred to him that, with her pretty professions, there was a way of making her effective; she might help him to get at the old woman and the Marquis. "They're coming back soon—your companions? You're hanging about for them?"
"They 'll hear the office out; there's nothing to keep them longer. Claire has refused to see them."
"I want to speak to them," Newman said; "and you can help me, you can do me a favour. Delay your return for five minutes and give me a chance at them. I 'll wait for them here."
The young woman clasped her hands in sharp deprecation. "My poor friend, what do you want to do to them? To beg them to come back to you? It will be wasted words. They'll never come back!"
"I want to speak to them all the same. Pray do what I ask you. Stay away and leave them to me for five minutes. You need n't be afraid; I shall not be violent; I'm very quiet."
"Yes, you look very quiet! If they had le cœuir tendre you 'd move them. But don't count on them—you've had enough of that. However, I'll do better for you than what you propose. The understanding is not that I shall come back for them. I'm going into the Pare Monceau to give my little girl a walk, and my mother-in-law, who comes so rarely into this quarter, is to profit by the same opportunity to take the air. We're to wait for her in the park, where my husband is to join us with her. Follow me now; just within the gates I shall get out of my carriage. Sit down on a chair in some quiet corner and I'll bring them near you. There's devotion for you! Le reste vous regard."
This proposal Newman eagerly caught at; it revived his drooping spirit and he reflected that Madame Urbain was not quite the featherhead she seemed. He promised immediately to overtake her, and the carriage drove away.
The Pare Monceau is a very pretty piece of landscape-gardening, but Newman, passing into it, had little care for its elegant vegetation, which was full of the freshness of spring. He found the young Marquise promptly, seated in one of the quiet corners of which she had spoken, while before her in the alley her little girl, attended by the footman and the lapdog, walked up and down as if to take a lesson in deportment. Newman seated himself by his friend, who began to chatter afresh, apparently with the design of convincing him that—if he would only see it—poor dear Claire did n't belong to the most pleasing type of woman. She was too long, too lean, too flat, too stiff, too cold; her mouth was too wide and her nose too narrow. She had n't such a thing as a dimple, or even as a pretty curve—or call it really an obtuse angle—anywhere. And then she was eccentric, eccentric in cold blood; she was a furious Anglaise after all. Newman was very impatient; he was counting the minutes until his victims should reappear. He sat silent, leaning upon his cane, looking absently and insensibly at Madame Urbain. At last she said she would walk toward the gate of the park and meet her companions; but before she went she dropped her eyes and, after playing a moment with the lace of her sleeve, looked up again at her visitor.
"Do you remember the promise you made me three weeks ago?" And then as Newman, vainly consulting his memory, was obliged to confess that this vow had escaped it, she mentioned that he had made her at the time a very queer answer—an answer at which, viewing it in the light of the sequel, she had fair ground for taking offence. "You promised to take me to Bullier's after your marriage. After your marriage—you made a great point of that. Three days after that your marriage was broken off. Do you know, when I heard the news, the first thing I said to myself? 'Ah, par exemple, now he won't go with me to Bullier's!' And I really began to wonder if you had n't been expecting the rupture."
"Oh, my dear lady—!" he merely murmured, while he looked down the path to see if the others were n't coming.
"I shall be good-natured," said his friend. "One must n't ask too much of a gentleman who's in love with a cloistered nun. Besides, I can't go to Bullier's while we're in mourning. But I have n't given it up for that. The partie is arranged; I have my cavalier—Lord Deepmere, if you please! He has gone back to his dear Dublin; but a few months hence I'm to name any evening, and he'll come over from Ireland on purpose. That's what I call really feeling for a woman."
Shortly after this Madame Urbain walked away with her little girl. Newman sat in his place; the time seemed terribly long. He felt how fiercely his quarter of an hour in the chapel had raked over the glowing coals of his resentment. His accessory kept him waiting, but she proved as good as her word. Finally she reappeared at the end of the path with her little girl and her footman; beside her slowly walked her husband with his mother on his arm. They were a long time advancing, during which Newman sat unmoved. Aching as he fairly did now with his passion—the passion of his wrath at the impudence, on the part of such a pair, of an objection to him in the name of clean hands—it was extremely characteristic of him that he was able to moderate his expression of it very much as he would have turned down a flaring gas-jet. His native shrewdness, coolness, clearness, his lifelong submission to the sense that words were acts and acts were steps in life, and that in this matter of taking steps curveting and prancing were exclusively reserved for quadrupeds and foreigners—all this admonished him that rightful wrath had no connexion with being a fool and indulging in spectacular violence. So as he rose, when the elder lady and her son were close to him, he only felt very tall and unencumbered and alert. He had been sitting beside some shrubbery in such a way as not to be noticeable at a distance; but the Marquis, at hand, had quickly enough perceived him. The couple were then for holding their course; at sight of which Newman stepped so straight in front of them that they were obliged to pause. He lifted his hat slightly and looked at them hard; they were pale with amazement and disgust.
"Pardon my stopping you," he dryly said; "but I must profit by the occasion. I've ten words to say to you. Will you listen to them?"
The Marquis blinked, then turned to his mother. "Can Mr. Newman possibly have anything to say that is worth our listening to?"
"I assure you I've something," Newman went on; "besides, it's my duty to say it. It concerns you ever so closely."
"Your duty?" said the Marquise, her small fine mouth contracting in its odd way as for a whistle. "That's your affair, not ours."
Madame Urbain meanwhile had seized her little girl by the hand, with a gesture of surprise and impatience which struck Newman, intent as he was on his own words, with its plausible extravagance. "If Mr. Newman's going to make a scene in public," she exclaimed, "I shall take my poor child out of the mêlée. She's too young to see such naughtiness!"—and she instantly resumed her walk.
"You had much better listen to me," he persisted with his difficult ease. "Whether you do or not your gain will be small; but at least perhaps you'll be prepared."
"If you mean prepared for your preposterous threats," the Marquis replied, "there's nothing grotesque from you, certainly, for which we're not prepared, and of the idea of which you don't perfectly know what we think."
"You think a great deal more than you yet admit. A moment," Newman added in reply to a sharp exclamation from Madame de Bellegarde. "I don't at all forget that we're in a public place, and you see I'm very quiet. I'm not going to tell your secret to the passers-by; I shall keep it, to begin with, for certain picked listeners. Any one who observes us will think we're having a friendly chat and that I'm complimenting you, madam, on your venerable virtues."
The Marquis gave a hiss that fairly evoked for our friend some vision of a hunched back, an erect tail and a pair of shining evil eyes. "I demand of you to step out of our path!"
Newman instantly complied and his interlocutors proceeded. But he was still beside them and was still distinct. "Half an hour hence Madame de Bellegarde will regret that she did n't learn exactly what I mean."
The Marquise had taken a few steps, but at these words she pulled up again, as if not to have the appearance of not facing even monstrous possibilities—as monstrous, that is, as a monster of rudeness might make them. "You're like a pedlar with something trumpery to sell," she said; and she accompanied it with a strange, small, cold laugh—a demonstration so inconsequent that it meant nothing, Newman quickly felt, if it did n't mean a "lovely" nervousness.
"Oh no, not to sell; I give it to you for nothing." And he had never in his life, no matter under what occasion for it, spoken so completely and so gratefully to the point as now. "You cruelly killed your helpless husband, you know; and I'm in possession of all the facts. That is you did your best, first, and failed; and then succeeded—by which I mean finished him—at a stroke and almost without trying."
The Marquise closed her eyes and gave a small dry cough which, as a piece of dissimulation and of self-possession, seemed to her adversary consummate.
"Dear mother," said Urbain as if she had been moved to hilarity, "does this stuff amuse you so much?"
"The rest is more amusing," Newman went on. "You had better not lose it."
The eyes she fixed on him might well have been, he recognised, those with which, according to Mrs. Bread, she had done her husband to death; and they had somehow no connexion with the stifled shrillness of her spoken retort. "Amusing? Have I killed some one else?"
"I don't count your daughter," said Newman, "though of course I might. Your husband knew what you were doing. I've a proof of it the existence of which you've never suspected." And he turned to the Marquis, whose face was beyond any he had ever seen discomposed, decomposed—what did they call it? "A paper written by the hand, and signed with the name of Henri-Urbain de Bellegarde. Written and dated after you, madam, had left him for dead, and while you, sir, had gone—not very fast—for the doctor."
The Marquis turned to his mother; she moved a little at random, averting herself and looking vaguely round her. But her answer to his appeal fell, after an instant, rather short. "I must sit down," she simply said, and went back to the bench on which Newman had been posted.
"Could n't you have spoken to me alone?" her companion then asked, all remarkably, of their pursuer, who wondered if it meant that there was suddenly, quite amazingly, a basis for discussion.
"Well, yes, if I could have been sure of speaking to your mother alone too," Newman answered. "But I've had to take you as I could get you, don't you see?"
Madame de Bellegarde, in a manner very eloquent of what he would have called her "grit," her steel-cold pluck and her instinctive appeal to her own personal resources, seated herself on the bench with her head erect and her hands folded in her lap. The expression of her face was such that he fancied her at first inconceivably smiling, but on his drawing nearer felt this display to be strange and convulsive. He saw, however, equally, that she was resisting her agitation with all the rigour of her inflexible will, and there was nothing like either fear or submission in the fine front she presented. She had been upset, but she could intensely think. He felt the pang of a conviction that she would get the better of him still, and he would n't have been himself if he could wholly fail to be touched by the sight of a woman (criminal or other) in so tight a place. She gave a glance at her son which seemed tantamount to an injunction to be silent and leave her to her own devices. He stood beside her with his hands behind him, quite making up in attitude, as our observer noted, for what he failed of in utterance. It was to remain really a burden on Newman's mind to the end, this irritating, this perplexing illustration he afforded of the positive virtue and the incalculable force, even in the unholy, of attitude "as such." "What paper is this you speak of?" the Marquise asked as if confessing to an interest in any possible contribution to the family archives.
"Exactly what I've told you. A paper written by your husband after you had left him that evening, for dead—written during the couple of hours before you returned. You see he had the time; you should n't have stayed away so long. It declares in the most convincing way his wife's murderous intent.
"I should like to see it," she observed as with the most natural concern for a manifesto so compromising to the—already in his day, alas, so painfully compromised—author of it.
"I thought you might," said Newman, "and I've taken a copy." He drew from his waistcoat pocket a small folded sheet.
"Give it to my son," she returned with decision; on which Newman handed it to the Marquis while she simply added "Look at the thing." M. de Bellegarde's eyes had a pale irrepressible eagerness; he took the paper in his light-gloved fingers and opened it. There was a silence during which he took it in. He had more than time to read it, but still he said nothing; he stood looking at it hard. "Where's the original?" his mother meantime asked in a voice of the most disinterested curiosity.
"In a very safe place. Of course I can't show you that," Newman went on—"a treasure the value of which makes it sacred to me. You might want to grab it," he added with conscious quaintness, "and I've too much other use for it. But this is a very correct copy—except of course the handwriting: I'll get it properly certified for you if you wish. That ought to suit you—its being properly certified."
The Marquis at last raised a countenance deeply and undisguisedly flushed. "It will require," he nevertheless lightly remarked, "a vast deal of certification!"
"Well," Newman returned, "we can always fall back on the original."
"I'm speaking," said the Marquis, "of the original."
"Ah, that, I think, will speak for itself. Still, we can easily get as many persons as possible—as many of those who knew the writer's hand—to speak for it. Think of the number it will interest—if I begin, myself, say, with the Duchess, that amiable, very stout lady whose name I forget, but who was pleasant to me at your party. She asked me to come to see her, and I've been thinking that in that case I should n't have much to say to her. But such a matter as this gives me plenty!"
"You had better, at this rate, keep what you have there, my son," the old woman quavered with a strained irony.
"By all means," Newman said—"keep it and show it to your mother when you get home."
"And after enlisting the Duchess?" asked the Marquis, who folded the paper and put it away.
"Well, there are all the other people you had the cruelty to introduce me to in a character of which you were capable, at the next turn, of rudely divesting me. Many of them immediately afterwards left cards on me, so that I have their names correctly and shall know how to find them."
For a moment, on this, neither of Newman's friends spoke; the Marquise sat looking down very hard, while her son's blanched pupils were fixed on her face. "Is that all you have to say?" she finally asked.
"No, I want to say a few words more. I want to say that I hope you quite understand what I'm about. This is my vindication, you know, of my claim that I've been cruelly wronged. You've treated me before the world, convened for the express purpose, as if I were not good enough for you. I mean to show the world that, however bad I may be, you're not quite the people to say it."
Madame de Bellegarde was silent again, and then, with a return of her power to face him, she dealt with his point. Her coolness continued to affect him as consummate; he wondered of what alarms, what effronteries, what suspicions and what precautions she had not had, from far back, to make her life. "I need n't ask you who has been your accomplice in this clumsy fraud. Catherine Bread told me you had purchased her services."
"Don't accuse Mrs. Bread of venality," Newman returned. "She has kept your secret all these years. She has given you a long respite. It was beneath her eyes your husband wrote that paper; he put it into her hands with a solemn injunction that she was to make it public. You've had the benefit of her merciful delay."
The Marquise appeared for an instant to hesitate, and then, "My husband, for years, did what he—most remarkably!—liked with her," she declared dryly enough. "She was perhaps the meanest of his many mistresses." This was the only concession to self-defence that she condescended to make.
"I very much doubt that," said Newman. "I believe in her decency."
Madame de Bellegarde got up from her bench. "It was n't to your beliefs—however interesting in themselves—I undertook to listen; so that, if you've nothing left but them to tell me, this charming interview may terminate." And turning to the Marquis she took his arm again. "My son," she then oddly resumed, "say something!"
He looked down at her, passing his hand over his forehead to the positive displacement of his hat; with which, tenderly, caressingly, "What shall I say?" he too uncertainly enquired.
"There's only one thing to say—that it was really not worth while, on such a showing, to have pulled us up in the street like a pair of pickpockets."
But the Marquis thought he could surpass this. "Your paper's of course the crudest of forgeries," he said to Newman.
Newman shook his head all amusedly. "M. de Bellegarde, your mother does better. She has done better all along, from the first of my knowing you. You're a mighty plucky woman, madam," he continued. "It's a great pity you've made me your enemy. I should have been one of your greatest admirers."
"Mon pauvre ami," she proceeded to her son, and as if she had not heard these words, "you must take me immediately to my carriage."
Newman stepped back and let them leave him; he watched them a moment and saw Madame Urbain, with her little girl, wander out of a by-path to meet them. The Marquise stooped and kissed her grandchild. "Damn it, she is plucky!" he sighed; and he walked home with a sense of having been almost worsted. She was so quite heroically impenetrable. But on reflexion he decided that what he had witnessed was no real sense of security, still less a real innocence. It was only a very superior style of brazen assurance, of what M. Nioche called l'usage du monde and Mrs. Tristram called the grand manner. "Wait till she has seen how he puts it!" he said to himself; and he concluded that he should hear from her soon.
He heard sooner than he expected. The next morning, before midday, when he was about to give orders for his breakfast to be served, M. de Bellegarde's card was brought him. "She has seen how he puts it and she has passed a bad night," he promptly inferred. He instantly admitted his visitor, who came in with the air of the ambassador of a great powder meeting the delegate of a barbarous tribe whom an absurd accident had enabled for the moment to be abominably annoying. The ambassador, at any rate, had also passed a bad night, and his faultlessly careful array only threw into relief the sick rancour of his eyes and those mottled spots on his fine skin that resembled, to his host's imagination, the hard finger-prints of fear. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly and painfully and shaking his forefinger curtly as Newman pointed to a chair.
"What I've come to say is soon said and can only be said without ceremony."
"I'm good for as much or for as little as you desire."
The Marquis looked round the room and then: "On what terms will you part with what you call your original?"
"Ah, on none!" And while, with his head on one side and his hands behind him, he sounded his visitor's depth of detestation, Newman added: "Certainly that's not worth sitting down about."
M. de Bellegarde went on, however, as without having heard him. "My mother and I, last evening, talked over your story. You'll be surprised to learn that we think your little document is—a—"—and he held back his word a moment—"characteristic."
Newman laughed out as it came. "Of your mother and you, you mean?"
"Of my deplorable father.
"You forget that with you I'm used to surprises!" Newman gaily pursued.
"The very scantest consideration we owe his memory," the Marquis continued, "makes us desire he should n't he held up to the world as the author of an elaborately malignant attack on the reputation of a wife whose only fault was that she had been submissive to repeated outrage."
"Oh, I see! It's for your father's sake!" And Newman laughed the laugh in which he indulged when he was, if not most amused, at any rate most pleased—an intimate noiseless laugh with closed lips.
But M. de Bellegarde's gravity held good. "There are a few of his particular friends for whom the knowledge of so unfortunate an inspiration would be a real grief. Even say we firmly established by medical evidence the presumption of a mind disordered by fever, il en resterait quelque chose. At the best it would look ill in him. Very ill!"
"Don't try medical evidence," said Newman. "Don't touch the doctors and they won't touch you. I don't mind your knowing that I've not written to either of the gentlemen present at the event."
He flattered himself he saw signs in his visitor's discoloured mask that this information was extremely pertinent. The Marquis remained, however, irreducibly argumentative. "For instance Madame d'Outreville, of whom you spoke yesterday. I can imagine nothing that would shock her more."
"Oh, I'm quite prepared to shock Madame d'Outreville. That's just what's the matter with me. I regularly want to shock people."
M. de Bellegarde examined for a moment the fine white stitching on one of his black gloves. Then without looking up, "We don't offer you money," he said. "That we suppose to be useless."
Newman, turning away, took a few turns about the room and then came back. "What do you offer me? By what I can make out the generosity is all to be on my side."
The Marquis dropped his arms at his flanks and held his head a little higher. "What we offer you is a chance—a chance a gentleman should appreciate. A chance to abstain from inflicting a terrible blot upon the memory of a man who certainly had his faults, but who, personally, had done you no wrong."
"There are two things to say to that," Newman returned. "The first is, as regards appreciating your 'chance', that you don't consider me a gentleman. That's your great point, you know. It's a poor rule that won't work both ways. The second is that—well, in a word, you're talking sad nonsense."
In the midst of his bitterness he had kept well before his eyes, as I have noted, a certain ideal of saying nothing rude, and he felt a quick scruple for the too easy impatience of these words. But the Marquis took them more quietly than might have been expected. Sublime ambassador that he was, he continued the policy of ignoring what was disagreeable in his adversary's replies. He gazed at the gilded arabesques on the opposite wall and then transferred his glance to his host as if he too had been a large grotesque in a vulgar system of chamber-decoration. "I suppose you know that, as regards yourself, a course so confessedly vindictive—vindictive in respect to your discomfiture—won't do at all."
"How do you mean it won't do?"
"Why, of course you utterly damn yourself. But I suppose that's in your programme. You propose to throw at us this horrible ordure that you've raked together, and you believe, you hope, that some of it may stick. We know naturally it can't," explained the Marquis in a tone of conscious lucidity; "but you take the chance and are willing at any rate to show that you yourself have dirty hands."
"That's a good comparison; at least half of it is," said Newman. "I take the chance of something sticking. But as regards my hands, they're clean. I've taken the awful thing up with my finger-tips."
M. de Bellegarde looked a moment into his hat. "All our friends are quite with us. They would have done exactly as we've done."
"I shall believe that when I hear them say it. Meanwhile I shall think better of human nature."
The Marquis looked into his hat again. "My poor perverse sister was extremely fond of her father. If she knew of the existence of the few base words—at once mad and base—of which you propose to make this scandalous use, she would require of you, proudly, for his sake, to give them up to her, and she would destroy them on the spot."
"Very possibly," Newman rejoined. "But it's exactly what she won't know. I was in that hideous place yesterday, and I know what she 's doing. Lord of mercy! You can guess whether it made me feel forgiving!"
M. de Bellegarde appeared to have nothing more to suggest; but he continued to stand there, rigid and elegant, as a man who had believed his mere personal presence would have had an argumentative value. Newman watched him and, without yielding an inch on the main issue, felt an incongruously good-natured impulse to help him to retreat in good order. "Your idea, you see—though ingenious in its way—does n't work. You offer too little."
"Propose something yourself," the Marquis at last brought out.
"Give me back Madame de Cintré relieved of the blight and free of the poison that are all of your producing."
M. de Bellegarde threw up his head and his flush darkly spread. "Never!"
"You can't!"
"We would n't if we could! In the sentiment which led us to deprecate her marriage to you nothing is changed."
"'Deprecate' is lovely!" cried Newman. "It was hardly worth while to come here only to tell me that you're not ashamed of yourselves. I should have come to think of you perhaps as in your guilt-burdened hearts almost pitifully miserable."
The Marquis slowly walked toward the door, and Newman, following, opened it for him. "Your hawking that tatter about will be, on your part, the vulgarest proceeding conceivable, and, as having admitted you to our intimité, we shall proportionately wince for it. That we quite feel. But it won't otherwise incommode us."
"Well," said Newman after reflexion, "I don't know that I want to do anything worse than make you regret your connexion with me. Only don't be sure you know yet," he added, "how very much you may regret it."
M. de Bellegarde stood a moment looking on the ground, as if ransacking his brain to see what else he could do to save his father's reputation. Then, with a small cold sigh, he seemed to signify that he regretfully surrendered the late Marquis to the penalty of his turpitude. He gave a scant shrug, took his neat umbrella from the servant in the vestibule and, with his gentlemanly walk, passed out. Newman stood listening till he heard the door close; then for some minutes he moved to and fro with his hands in his pockets and a sound like the low hum of a jig proceeding from the back of his mouth.