The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 26
XXVI
In that uninitiated observation of the great spectacle of English life on which I have touched, it might be supposed that he passed a great many dull days. But the dulness was as grateful as a warm, fragrant bath, and his melancholy, which was settling to a secondary stage, like a healing wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness. He had the company of his thoughts and for the present wanted none other. He had no desire to make acquaintances and left untouched a couple of notes of introduction sent him by Tom Tristram. He mused a great deal on Madame de Cintré—sometimes with a dull despair that might have seemed a near neighbour to detachment. He lived over again the happiest hours he had known—that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon visits, strained so sensibly to the ideal end, had come to figure for him a flight of firm marble steps where the ascent from one to the other was a momentous and distinct occasion, giving a nearer view of the chamber of confidence at the top, a white tower that flushed more and more as with a light of dawn. He had yet held in his cheated arms, he felt, the full experience, and when he closed them together round the void that was all they now possessed, he might have been some solitary spare athlete practising restlessly in the corridor of the circus. He came back to reality indeed, after such reveries, with a shock somewhat muffled; he had begun to know the need of accepting the absolute. At other times, however, the truth was again an infamy and the actual a lie, and he could only pace and rage and remember till he was weary. Passion, in him, by habit, nevertheless, burned clear rather than thick, and in the clearness he saw things, even things not gross and close—having never the excuse that anything could make him blind. Without quite knowing it at first, he began to read a moral into his strange adventure. He asked himself in his quieter hours whether he perhaps had been more commercial than was decent. We know that it was in reaction against questions of the cruder avidity that he had come out to pick up for a while an intellectual, or otherwise a critical, living in Europe; it may therefore be understood that he was able to conceive of a votary of the mere greasy market smelling too strong for true good company. He was willing to grant in a given case that unpleasant effect, but he could n't bring it home to himself that he had reeked. He believed there had been as few reflexions of his smugness caught during all those weeks in the high polish of surrounding surfaces as there were monuments of his meanness scattered about the world. No one had ever unprovokedly suffered by him—ah, provokedly was another matter: he liked to remember that, and to repeat it, and to defy himself to bring up a case.
If moreover there was any reason in the nature of things why his connexion with business should have cast a shadow on a connexion—even a connexion broken—with a woman justly proud, he was willing to sponge it out of his life for ever. The thing seemed a possibility; he could n't feel it doubtless as keenly as some people, and it scarce struck him as worth while to flap his wings very hard to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here he stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played strange shadows and confused signs. Was it a thinkable plan, that of carrying out his life as he would have directed had Madame de Cintré been left to him?—that of making it a religion to do nothing she would have disliked? In this certainly was no sacrifice; but there was a pale, oblique ray of inspiration. It would be lonely entertainment—a good deal like a man's talking to himself in the mirror for want of better company. Yet the idea yielded him several half-hours dumb exaltation as he sat, his hands in his pockets and his legs outstretched, over the relics of an expensively bad dinner, in the undying English twilight. If, however, his financial imagination was dead he felt no contempt for the surviving actualities begotten by it. He was glad he had been prosperous and had been a great operator rather than a small; he was extremely glad he was rich. He felt no impulse to sell all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into meditative economy and asceticism. He was glad he was rich and tolerably young; if it was possible to have inhaled too fondly the reek of the market, it was yet a gain still to have time for experiments in other air. Come then, what air should it now be? Ah, again and again, he could taste but one sweetness; that came back to him and back; and as this happened, with a force which seemed physically to express itself in a sudden upward choking, he would lean forward, when the waiter had left the room, and, resting his arms on the table, bury his troubled face. He remained in England till midsummer and spent a month in the country, wandering among cathedrals, hanging about castles and ruins. Several times, taking a walk from his inn across sweet field-paths and through ample parks, he stopped by a well-worn stile, looked across through the early evening at a grey church tower, with its dusky nimbus of thick-circling rooks, and remembered that such things might have been part of the intimacy of his honeymoon. He had never been so much alone nor indulged so little in chance talk. The period of recreation appointed by Mrs. Tristram had at last expired and he asked himself what he should next do. She had written to propose he should join her in the Pyrenees, but he was not in the humour to return to France. The simplest thing was to repair to Liverpool and embark on the first American steamer. He proceeded accordingly to that seaport and secured his berth; and the night before sailing he sat in his room at the hotel and stared down vacantly and wearily at an open portmanteau. A number of papers lay upon it, which he had been meaning to look over; some of them might conveniently be destroyed. But he at last shuffled them roughly together and pushed them into a corner of the bag; they were business papers and he was in no humour for sorting them. Then he drew forth his pocket-book and took out a leaf of smaller size than those he had dismissed. He did n't unfold it; he simply sat looking at the back of it. If he had momentarily entertained the idea of destroying it this possibility at least quickly dropped. What the thing suggested was the feeling that lay in his innermost heart and that no reviving cheerfulness could long quench—the feeling that, after all and above all, he was a good fellow wronged. With it came a hope, as intense as a pang, that the Bellegardes were enjoying their suspense as to what he would do yet. The more it was prolonged the more they would enjoy it. He had hung fire once, yes; perhaps in his present queer state of mind he might hang fire again. But he restored the safe scrap to his pocket-book very tenderly and felt better for thinking of the suspense of the Bellegardes. He felt better every time he thought of it while he sailed the summer seas. He landed in New York and journeyed across the continent to San Francisco, and nothing he observed by the way contributed to mitigate his sense of being a good fellow wronged.
He saw a great many other good fellows—his old friends—but he told none of them of the trick that had been played him. He said simply that the lady he was to have married had changed her mind, and when asked if he had changed his own inscrutably answered, "Suppose we change the subject." He told his friends he had brought home no "new ideas" from Europe, and his conduct probably struck them as an eloquent proof of failing invention. He took no interest in discussing business and showed no desire to go into anything whatever. He asked half a dozen questions which, like those of an eminent physician enquiring for particular symptoms, proved he was master of his subject; but he made no comments and gave no directions. He not only puzzled all the prominent men, but was himself surprised at the extent of his indifference. As it seemed only to increase he made an effort to combat it; he tried to take hold and to recover, as they said, his spring. But the ground was inelastic and the issues dead; do what he would he somehow could n't believe in them. Sometimes he began to fear there was something the matter with him, that he had suffered, unwitting, some small horrid cerebral lesion or nervous accident, and that the end of his strong activities had come. This idea for a while hung about him and haunted him. A hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to himself—this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him. In his anxious idleness he came back from San Francisco to New York, where he sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel and looked out through a huge wall of plate glass at the unceasing stream of pretty girls who wore their clothes as with the American accent and undulated past with little parcels nursed against their neat figures. At the end of three days he returned to San Francisco and, having arrived there, wished he had stayed away. He had nothing to do, his occupation had gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life. He had nothing to do here, he sometimes said to himself; but there was something beyond the ocean he was still to do; something he had left undone experimentally and speculatively, to see if it could content itself to remain undone. Well, clearly, it could n't content itself; it kept pulling at his heartstrings and thumping at his reason; it murmured in his ears and hovered perpetually before his eyes. It interposed between all new resolutions and their fulfilment; it was a stubborn ghost dumbly entreating to be laid. On the doing of that all other doing depended.
One day toward the end of the winter, after a long interval, he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, who appeared to have been moved by a charitable desire to amuse and distract her correspondent. She gave him much Paris gossip, talked of General Packard and Miss Kitty Upjohn, enumerated the new plays at the theatres and enclosed a note from her husband, who had gone down to spend a month at Nice. Then came her signature and after this her postscript. The latter consisted of these few lines: "I heard three days since from my friend the Abbé Aubert that Claire de Cintré last week received the veil at the Carmelites. It was on her twenty-ninth birthday, and she took the name of her patroness, Saint Veronica. Sœur Véronique has a lifetime before her!"
This letter reached him in the morning; in the evening he started for Paris. His wound began to ache with its first fierceness, and during his long bleak journey he had no company but the thought of the new Sister's "lifetime"—every one's sister but his!—passed within walls on whose outer side only he might stand. Well, for that station he would live, if it was to be spoken of as life; he would fix himself in Paris; he would wring a hard happiness from the knowledge that if she was not there at least the stony sepulchre that held her was. He descended, unannounced, on Mrs. Bread, whom he found keeping lonely watch in his great empty saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann. They were as neat as a Dutch village; Mrs. Bread's only occupation had been removing individual dust-particles. She made no complaint, however, of her solitude, for in her philosophy a servant was but a machine constructed for the benefit of some supreme patentee, and it would be as fantastic for a housekeeper to comment on a gentleman's absences as for a clock to remark on not being wound up. No particular clock, Mrs. Bread supposed, kept all the time, and no particular servant could enjoy all the sunshine diffused by the career of a universal master. She ventured nevertheless to express a modest hope that Newman meant to remain a while in Paris. He laid his hand on hers and shook it gently. "I mean to remain for ever."
He went after this to see Mrs. Tristram, to whom he had telegraphed and who expected him. She looked at him a moment and shook her head. "This won't do," she said; "you've come back too soon." He sat down and asked about her husband and her children, enquired even for news of Miss Dora Finch. In the midst of this, "Do you know where she is?" he abruptly demanded.
Mrs. Tristram hesitated; of course he could n't mean Miss Dora Finch. Then she answered properly: "She has gone to the other house—in the Rue d'Enfer." But after he had gloomed a little longer she went on: "You're not so good a man as I thought. You're more—you're more—"
"More what?"
"More unreconciled."
"Good God!" he cried; "do you expect me to forgive?"
"No, not that. I've not forgiven, so of course you can't. But you might magnificently forget. You've a worse temper about it than I should have expected. You look wicked—you look dangerous."
"I may be dangerous," he said; "but I'm not wicked. No, I'm not wicked." And he got up to go. She asked him to come back to dinner, but he answered that he could n't face a convivial occasion, even as a solitary guest. Later in the evening, if he should be able, he would look in.
He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took the direction of the Rue d'Enfer. The day had the softness of early spring, but the weather was grey and humid. He found himself in a part of Paris that he little knew—a region of convents and prisons, of streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by few frequenters. At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the Carmelites—a dull, plain edifice with a blank, high-shouldered defence all round. From without he could see its upper windows, its steep roof and its chimneys. But these things revealed no symptoms of human life; the place looked dumb, deaf, inanimate. The pale, dead, discoloured wall stretched beneath it far down the empty side-street—a vista without a human figure. He stood there a long time; there were no passers; he was free to gaze his fill. This seemed the goal of his journey; it was all he had come for. It was a strange satisfaction too, and yet it was a satisfaction; the barren stillness of the place represented somehow his own release from ineffectual desire. It told him the woman within was lost beyond recall, and that the days and years of the future would pile themselves above her like the huge immoveable slab of a tomb. These days and years, on this spot, would always be just so grey and silent. Suddenly from the thought of their seeing him stand there again the charm utterly departed. He would never stand there again; it was a sacrifice as sterile as her own. He turned away with a heavy heart, yet more disburdened than he had come.
Everything was over and he too at last could rest. He walked back through narrow, winding streets to the edge of the Seine and there he saw, close above him, high and mild and grey, the twin towers of Notre Dame. He crossed one of the bridges and paused in the voided space that makes the great front clear; then he went in beneath the grossly-imaged portals. He wandered some distance up the nave and sat down in the splendid dimness. He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word. He was very tired, but such a place was a kingdom of rest. He said no prayers; he had no prayers to say. He had nothing to be thankful for and he had nothing to ask; nothing to ask because now he must take care of himself. But a great church offers a very various hospitality, and he kept his place because while he was there he was out of the world. The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal conclusion; he had learnt his lesson—not indeed that he the least understood it—and could put away the book. He leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him; when he took it up he felt he was himself again. Somewhere in his soul a tight constriction had loosened. He thought of the Bellegardes; he had almost forgotten them. He remembered them as people he had meant to do something to. He gave a groan as he remembered what he had meant to do; he was annoyed, and yet partly incredulous, at his having meant to do it: the bottom suddenly had fallen out of his revenge. Whether it was Christian charity or mere human weakness of will—what it was, in the background of his spirit—I don't pretend to say; but Newman's last thought was that of course he would let the Bellegardes go. If he had spoken it aloud he would have said he did n't want to hurt them. He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them. He quite failed, of a sudden, to recognise the fact of his having cultivated any such link with them. It was a link for themselves perhaps, their having so hurt him; but that side of it was now not his affair. At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who has won a victory or taken a resolve—rather to the quiet measure of a discreet escape, of a retreat with appearances preserved.
Going home, he said to Mrs. Bread that he must trouble her to put back his things into the portmanteau she had unpacked the evening before. It was therefore as if she had looked at him on this, through bedimmed eyes, with the consciousness of a value, so far as she could see, quite extravagantly wasted. "Dear me, sir, I thought you said you were going to stay forever."
"Well, I guess I omitted a word. I meant I'm going to stay away for ever," he was obliged a little awkwardly to explain. And since his departure from Paris on the following day he has certainly not returned. The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of stand ready to receive him, but they serve only as a spacious setting for Mrs. Bread's solitary straightness, which wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the tassels of the curtains, and keeps its wages, which are regularly brought in by a banker's clerk, in a great pink Sèvres vase on the drawing-room mantel-shelf.
Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram's and found the more jovial member of the pair by the domestic fireside. "I'm glad to see you back in Paris," this gentleman declared, "for, you know, it's really the only place for a white man to live." Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome according to his own rosy light, and repaired in five minutes, with a free tongue, the too visible and too innocent deficiencies in Newman's acquaintance with current history. Then, having caused him to gape with strange information—all as to what had been going on in "notre monde à nous, you know"—Tristram got up to go and renew his budget at the club.
To this Newman replied that Mrs. Tristram was his club and that he had never wanted a better: a statement he felt the truth of when he was presently alone with her and even—or perhaps all the more—when she asked him what he had done on leaving her in the afternoon. "Well," he then replied, "I worked it off."
"Worked off the afternoon?"
"Yes, and a lot of other troublesome stuff."
"You struck me," she confessed, "as a man filled with some rather uncanny idea. I wondered if I were right to leave you so the prey of it, and whether I ought n't to have had you followed and watched."
This appeared to strike him with surprise. "Surely I did n't look as if I wanted to take life."
"I might have feared, if I had let myself go a little, that you were thinking of taking your own."
He breathed a long sigh of such apparent indifference to his own as would have ruled that out. "Well," he none the less after a moment went on, "I have got rid of about nine tenths of something that had become the biggest part of me. But I did that only by walking over to the Rue d'Enfer."
"You 've been then," she stared, "at the Carmelites?" And as he only met her eyes: "Trying to scale the wall?"
"Well, I thought of that—I measured the wall. I looked at it a long time. But it's too high—it's beyond me."
"That's right," she said. "Give it up."
"I have given it up. But on the spot there I took it all in."
She rested now her kindest eyes on him. "On the spot then you did n't happen to meet M. de Bellegarde—also taking it all in? I'm told his sister's course does n't suit him the least little bit."
Newman had a moment's gravity of silence. No, luckily—I did n't meet either of them. In that case I might have fired.
"Ah, it is n't that they've not been keeping quiet," she said; "I mean in the country, at—what's the name of the place?—Fleurières. They returned there at the time you left Paris, and have been spending the year far from human eye. The little Marquise must enjoy it; I expect to hear she has eloped with her daughter's music-master!"
Newman had gazed at the light wood-fire, and he listened to this with an apparent admission of its relevance; but he spoke in another sense. I mean never to mention the name of those people again and I don't want to hear anything more about them." Then he took out his pocket-book and drew forth a scrap of paper. He looked at it an instant, after which he got up and stood by the fire. "I'm going to burn them up. I'm glad to have you as a witness. There they go!" And he tossed the paper into the flame.
Mrs. Tristram sat with her embroidery-needle suspended. "What in the world is that?"
Leaning against the chimney-piece he seemed to grasp its ledge with force and to draw his breath awhile in pain. But presently he said: "I can tell you now. It was a proof of a great infamy on the part of the Bellegardes—something that would damn them if ever known."
She dropped her work with a reproachful moan. "Ah, why did n't you show it to me?"
"I thought of showing it to you—I thought of showing it to every one. I thought of paying my debt to them that way. So I told them, and I guess I made them squirm. If they've been lying low it's because they have n't known what may happen. But, as I say, I've given up my idea."
Mrs. Tristram began to take slow stitches again. "Wholly renounced it?"
"Wholly renounced it."
"But your 'proof,'" she went on after a moment, "what was it a proof of?"
"Oh, of an abomination not otherwise known."
"An abomination?"
"An abomination."
She hesitated but briefly. "Something too bad to tell me?"
He considered. "Yes, not good enough now."
"Well," she said, "I'm sorry to have lost it. Your document," she smiled, "did n't look like much, but I should have liked immensely to see it. They've wronged me too, you know, as your sponsor and guarantee, and it would have served my revenge as well! How did you come," she then asked, "into possession of your knowledge?"
"It's a long story. But honestly at any rate."
"And they knew you were master of it?"
"Oh, but rather!"
"Dear me, how interesting!" cried Mrs. Tristram. "And you humbled them at your feet?"
Newman was silent a little. "No, not at all. They pretended not to care—not to be afraid. But I know they did care—they were afraid."
"Are you very sure?"
He looked at her hard. "Why, they fairly turned blue."
She resumed her slow stitches. "They defied you, eh?"
"They took the only tone they could. But I did n't think they took it very well."
"You tried by the threat of exposure to make them come round?" Mrs. Tristram pursued.
"Yes, but they would n't. I gave them their choice, and they chose to take their chance of bluffing off the charge and convicting me of fraud, that is of having procured and paid for a forgery. Forgery was of course their easy word—but words did n't, and don't, matter. They're as sick as a pair of poisoned cats—and I don't want any more 'revenge.'"
"It's most provoking," she returned, "to hear you talk of the charge when the charge is burned up. Is it quite consumed?" she asked, glancing at the fire. He assured her there was nothing left of it, and at this, dropping her embroidery, she got up and came near him. "I need n't tell you at this hour how I've felt for you. But I like you as you are," she said.
"As I am—?"
"As you are." She stood before him and put out her hand as for his own, which he a little blankly let her take. "Just exactly as you are," she repeated. With which, bending her head, she raised his hand and very tenderly and beautifully kissed it. Then, "Ah, poor Claire!" she sighed as she went back to her place. It drew from him, while his flushed face followed her, a strange inarticulate sound, and this made her but say again: "Yes, a thousand times—poor, poor Claire!
THE END