The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 3
III
He performed that ceremony the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him. Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-coloured façades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues distributed by Baron Haussmann over the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor's attention to their principal household treasures, the thick-scattered gas-lamps and the frequent furnace-holes. Whenever you feel homesick," he said, "you must come right up here. We 'll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner, and—"
"And you'll soon get over your homesickness," said Mrs. Tristram.
Her husband stared; this lady often had a tone that defied any convenient test; he could n't tell for his life to whom her irony might be directed. The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram the need for any little intellectual luxury she could pick up by the way. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband; and though she made frequent concessions to the dull small fact that he had married her it must be confessed that her reserves were not always muffled in pink gauze. They were founded upon the vague project of her some day affirming herself in her totality; to which end she was in advance getting herself together, building herself high, enquiring, in short, into her dimensions.
It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that if she was thus saving herself up it was yet not to cover the expense of any foreseen outlay of that finest part of her substance that was known to her tacitly as her power of passion. She had a very plain face and was entirely without illusions as to her appearance. She had taken its measure to a hair's breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself. It had not been indeed without a struggle. As a mere mortified maiden she had spent hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out; and later she had, from desperation and bravado, adopted the habit of proclaiming herself the most ill-favoured of women, in order that she might—as in common politeness was inevitable—be contradicted and reassured. It was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the matter philosophically. Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman's social service resides not in what she is but in what she appears, and that in the labyrinth of appearances she may always make others lose their clue if she only keeps her own. She had encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to believe she had discovered her refuge. She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners. Mrs. Tristram then undertook to persuade by grace, and she brought to the task no small ingenuity.
How well she would have succeeded I am unable to say; unfortunately she broke off in the middle. Her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate circle. But she had presumably not a real genius for the charming art, or she would have pursued it for itself. The poor lady was after all incomplete. She fell back upon the harmonies of dress, which she thoroughly understood, and contented herself with playing in its lock that key to the making of impressions. She lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in Paris that one could find things to exactly suit one's complexion. Besides, out of Paris it was always more or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves. When she railed at this serviceable city and you asked her where she would prefer to reside she returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen or in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when known, a figure to place, in the great gallery of the wistful, somewhere apart. She was naturally timid, and if she had been born a beauty she would (content with it) probably have taken no risks. At present she was both reckless and diffident; extremely reserved sometimes with her friends and strangely expansive with strangers. She overlooked her husband; overlooked him too much, for she had been perfectly at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a clever man who had eventually slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that the keener personage, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had had no appreciation of his keenness and that he had flattered her in thinking her touched. Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was interesting from this sense she gave of her looking for her ideals by a lamp of strange and fitful flame. She was full—both for good and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.
Newman was fond, in all circumstances, of the society of women; and now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual interests he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to Mrs. Tristram; she frankly repaid it, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in her drawing-room. Two or three long talks had made them fast friends. Newman's manner with women was peculiar, and it required some diligence on a lady's part to discover that he admired her. He had no gallantry in the usual sense of the term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches. Fond enough of a large pleasantry in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a member of the softer sex without feeling that such situations appealed, like beautiful views, or celebrated operas, or fine portraits, or handsome "sets" of the classics, or even elegant "show" cemeteries, to his earnest side. He was not shy and, so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with shyness, was not awkward: grave, attentive, submissive, often silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of rapture of respect. This emotion was not at all theoretic, it was not even in a high degree romantic; he had thought very little about the "position" of women, and he was not familiar, either sympathetic ally or otherwise, with the image of a President in petticoats. His attitude was simply the flower of his general good-nature and a part of his instinctive and genuinely democratic assumption of every one's right to lead an easy life. If a shaggy pauper had a right to bed and board and wages and a vote, women, of course, who were weaker than paupers, and whose physical tissue was in itself an appeal, should be maintained, sentimentally, at the public expense. Newman was willing to be taxed for this purpose, largely, in proportion to his means. Moreover many of the common traditions with regard to women were with him fresh personal impressions. He had never read a page of printed romance.
He spent a great deal of time in listening to advice from Mrs. Tristram; advice, it must be added, for which he had never asked. He would have been incapable of asking for it, inasmuch as he had no perception of difficulties and consequently no curiosity about remedies. The complex Parisian world about him seemed a very simple affair; it was an immense, surprising spectacle, but it neither inflamed his imagination nor irritated his curiosity. He kept his hands in his pockets, looked on good-humouredly, desired to miss nothing important, observed a great many things in detail, and never reverted to himself. Mrs. Tristram's "advice" was a part of the show and a more entertaining element of her free criticism than any other. He enjoyed her talking about him—it seemed a part of her beautiful culture; but he never made an application of anything she said or remembered it when he was away from her. For herself, she appropriated him: he was the most interesting thing she had had to think about for many a month. She wished to do something with him—she hardly knew what. There was so much of him; he was so rich and robust, so easy, friendly, well-disposed, that he kept her imagination constantly on the alert. For the present the only thing she could do was to like him. She told him he was beyond everything a child of nature, but she repeated it so often that it could have been but a term of endearment. She led him about with her, introduced him to fifty people, took extreme satisfaction in her conquest. Newman accepted every proposal, shook hands universally and promiscuously, and seemed equally unversed in trepidation and in "cheek." Tom Tristram complained of his wife's rapacity, declaring he could never have a clear five minutes with his friend. If he had known how things were going to turn out he never would have brought him to the Avenue d'Iéna.
The two men had formerly not been intimate, but Newman recalled his earlier impression of his host and did Mrs. Tristram, who had by no means taken him into her confidence, but whose secret he presently discovered, the justice to admit that her husband had somehow found means to be degenerate without the iridescence of decay. People said he was very sociable, but this was as much a matter of course as for a dipped sponge to expand; and it was a sociability affirmed, on its anecdotic side, too much at the expense of those possible partakers who were not there to guard their interest in it. He was patient at poker; he was infallible upon the names and the other attributes of all the cocottes; his criticism of cookery, his comparative view of the great "years" of champagne, enjoyed the authority of the last word. And then he was idle, spiritless, sensual, snobbish. He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand wherein such a country, as a whole, could fall short of Mr. Tristram's stomach. He had never been a very systematic patriot, but it vexed him to see the United States treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend's nostril, and he finally spoke up for them quite as if it had been Fourth of July, proclaiming that any American who ran them down ought to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston—which for Newman was putting it very vindictively. Tristram was a comfortable man to snub; he bore no malice and he continued to insist on Newman's finishing his evenings at the Occidental Club. The latter dined several times in the Avenue d'Iéna, and his host always proposed an early adjournment to this institution. Mrs. Tristram protested, declaring as promptly that her husband exhausted a low cunning in trying to displease her.
"Oh no, I never try, my love," he answered; "I know you loathe me quite enough when I take my chance." But their visitor hated to see a married couple on these terms, and he was sure one or other of them must be very unhappy. Yet he knew it was not Tristram. The lady had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the June evenings, she was fond of sitting, and Newman used frankly to say that he preferred the balcony to the club. It had a fringe of perfumed plants in tubs and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer starlight. Sometimes he kept his promise of following Mr. Tristram in half an hour to the Occidental and sometimes forgot it. His companion asked him a great many questions about himself, but on this subject he was an indifferent talker. He was not "subjective," though when he felt her interest sincere he made a real effort to meet it. He told her many things he had done, and regaled her with pictures of that "nature" as the child of which he figured for her; she herself was from Philadelphia and, with her eight years in Paris, talked of herself as a languid Oriental. But some other person was always the hero of the tale, though by no means always to his advantage; and the states of Newman's own spirit were but scantily chronicled. She had an especial wish to know whether he had ever been in love—seriously, passionately—and, failing to gather any satisfaction from his allusions, at last closely pressed him. He hesitated a while, but finally said "Hang it then, no!" She declared that she was delighted to hear it, as it confirmed her private conviction that he was a man of no real feeling.
"Is that so?" he asked very gravely. "But how do you recognise a man of real feeling?"
"I can't make out," said Mrs. Tristram, "whether you're very simple or very deep."
"I'm very deep. That's a fact."
"I believe that if I were to tell you with a certain air that you're as cold as a fish you would implicitly believe me."
"A certain air?" Newman echoed. "Well, try your air and see."
"You 'd believe me, but you would n't care," said Mrs. Tristram.
"You've got it all wrong. I should care immensely, but I should n't believe you. The fact is I have never had time to feel things so very beautifully. I've had to do them, had to make myself felt."
"Oh, I can imagine indeed that you may have sometimes done that tremendously."
"Yes, there's no mistake about that.
"When you're in one of your furies it can't be pleasant."
"Ah, I don't have to get into a fury to do it."
"I don't, nevertheless, see you always as you are now. You've something or other behind, beneath. You get harder or you get softer. You're more displeased—or you're more pleased."
"Well, a man of any sense does n't lay his plans to be angry," said Newman, "and it's in fact so long since I've been displeased that I've quite forgotten it."
"I don't believe," she returned "that you're never angry. A man ought to be angry sometimes, and you're neither good enough nor bad enough always to keep your temper."
"I lose it perhaps every five years."
"The time's coming round then," said his hostess. "Before I've known you six months I shall see you in a magnificent rage."
"Do you mean to put me into one?"
"I should n't be sorry. You take things too coolly. It quite exasperates me. And then you're too happy. You've what must be the most agreeable thing in the world—the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand, having paid for it in advance. You've not a day of reckoning staring you in the face. Your reckonings are over."
"Well, I suppose I'm happy," said Newman almost pensively.
"You've been odiously successful."
"Successful in copper," he recalled, "but very mixed in other mining ventures. And I've had to take quite a back seat on oil."
"It's very disagreeable to know how Americans have come by their money," his companion sighed. "Now, at all events, you've the world before you. You've only to enjoy."
"Oh, I suppose I'm all right," said Newman. "Only I'm tired of having it thrown up at me. Besides, there are several drawbacks. I don't come up to my own standard of culture."
"One doesn't expect it of you," Mrs. Tristram answered. Then in a moment: "Besides, you do come up. You are up!"
"Well, I mean to have a good time, wherever I am," said Newman. "I find I take notice as I go, and I guess I shan't have missed much by the time I've done. I feel something under my ribs here," he added in a moment, "that I can't explain—a sort of strong yearning, a desire to stretch out and haul in."
"Bravo!" Mrs. Tristram cried; "that's what I want to hear you say. You're the great Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor corrupt old world and then swooping down on it."
"Oh come," Newman protested; "I'm not an honest barbarian either, by a good deal. I'm a great fall-off from him. I've seen honest barbarians, I know what they are."
I don't mean you're a Comanche chief or that you wear a blanket and feathers. There are different shades."
"I have the instincts—have them deeply—if I have n't the forms of a high old civilisation," Newman went on. "I stick to that. If you don't believe it I should like to prove it to you."
Mrs. Tristram was silent a while. "I should like to make you prove it," she said at last. "I should like to put you in a difficult place."
"Well, put me!" said Newman.
"Vous ne doutez de rien!" his companion rejoined.
"Oh," he insisted, "I've a very good opinion of myself."
"I wish I could put it to the test. Give me time and I will." And Mrs. Tristram remained silent a minute, as if trying to keep her pledge. It did n't appear that evening that she succeeded; but as he was rising to take his leave she passed suddenly, as she was very apt to do, from the tone of ingenious banter to that of almost tremulous sympathy. "Speaking seriously," she said, "I believe in you, Mr. Newman. You flatter my latent patriotism."
"Your latent—?"
"Deep within me the eagle shrieks, and I've known my heart at times to bristle with more feathers than my head. It would take too long to explain, and you probably would n't understand. Besides, you might take it—really you might take it—for a declaration. Yet it has nothing to do with you personally; the question is of what you almost unconsciously represent. Fortunately you don't know all that, or your conceit would increase insufferably." And then as Newman stood wondering what this great quantity might be: "Forgive all my meddlesome chatter and forget my advice. It's very silly in me to undertake to tell you what to do. When you're embarrassed do as you think best, and you'll do very well. When you're in a difficulty judge for yourself. Only let it then be all you."
"I shall remember everything you've told me," he made answer. "There are so many twists and turns over here, so many forms and ceremonies—"
"Forms and ceremonies are what I mean of course."
"Ah, but I don't want not to take account of them," he declared. "Haven't I as good a right as another? They don't scare me, and you need n't give me leave to ignore them. I want to know all about 'em."
"That's not what I mean. I mean that you're to deal with them in your own way. Settle delicate questions by your own light. Cut the knot or untie it, as you choose."
"Oh, if there's ever a big knot," he returned—"and they all seem knots of ribbon over here—I shall simply pull it off and wear it!"
The next time he dined in the Avenue d'Iéna was a Sunday, a day on which Mr. Tristram left the cards unshuffled, so that there was a trio in the evening on the balcony. The talk was of many things, and at last Mrs. Tristram suddenly observed to their visitor that it was high time that he should take a wife.
"Listen to her: she has the toupet! said Tristram, who on Sunday evenings was always a little peevish.
"I don't suppose you've made up your mind not to marry?" Mrs. Tristram continued.
"Heaven forbid!" cried Newman. "I'm quite viciously bent on it."
"It's a very easy mistake," said Tristram; "and when it's made it's made."
"Well then," his wife went on, "I suppose you don't mean to wait till you're fifty."
"On the contrary, I'm in an almost indecent hurry."
"One would never guess it. Do you expect a lady to come and propose to you?"
"No; I'm willing to put the case before her myself. I think a great deal about it."
"Tell me some of your thoughts."
"Well," said Newman slowly, "I want to marry about as well as you can."
"'Well' in what sense?"
"In every sense. I shall be hard to suit."
"You must remember that, as the French proverb puts it, the finest girl in the world can give but what she has."
"Since you ask me," said Newman, let me be frank about it—I want quite awfully to marry. It's time, to begin with; before I know it I shall be forty-five. And then I'm lonely, and I really kind of pine for a mate. There are things for which I want help. But if I marry now, so long as I did n't do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must do it, you see, with my eyes open. I want to set about it rather grandly. I not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I want to take my pick. My wife must be a pure pearl. I've thought an immense deal about it."
"Perhaps you think too much. The best thing's simply to fall in love."
"When I find the woman who satisfies me I shall rise to the occasion. My wife shall be as satisfied as I shall."
"You begin grandly enough," said Mrs. Tristram. "There's a chance for the pure pearls!"
"You're not fair," Newman presently broke out. "You draw a fellow on and put him off his guard and then you gibe at him."
"I assure you," she answered, "that I'm very serious. To prove it I make you a proposal. Should you like me, as they say here, to marry you?"
"To hunt up a wife for me?"
"She's already found. I'll bring you together."
"Oh come," said Tristram, "we don't keep a bureau de placement. He 'll think you want your commission."
"Present me to a woman who comes up to my notion," Newman declared, "and I'll marry her to-morrow."
"You've a strange tone about it, and I don't quite understand you. I did n't suppose you could be so cold-blooded."
Newman was silent a while. "Well, I want a great woman. I stick to that. That's one thing I can treat myself to, and if it's to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for all these years? I've succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a lovely being perched on the pile like some shining statue crowning some high monument. She must be as good as she's beautiful and as clever as she's good. I can give my wife many things, so I'm not afraid to ask certain others myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me. She may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want, in a word, the best article in the market."
"Why did n't you tell a fellow all this at the outset?" Tristram demanded. "I've been trying so to make you fond of me!"
"It's remarkably interesting," said Mrs. Tristram. "I like to see a man know his own mind."
"I've known mine for a long time," Newman went on. "I made up my mind tolerably early in life that some rare creature all one's own is the best kind of property to hold. It's the greatest victory over circumstances. When I say rare I mean rare all through—grown as a rarity and recognised as one. It's a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can get it. He does n't have to be born with certain faculties on purpose; he needs only to be—well, whatever he really is. Then he need only use his will, and such wits as he can muster, and go in."
"It strikes me," said Mrs. Tristram, "that your marriage is to be rather a matter of heartless pomp."
"Well, it's certain," Newman granted, "that if people notice my wife and admire her I shall count it as part of my success."
"After this," cried Mrs. Tristram, "speak of any man's modesty!"
"But none of them will admire her so much as I."
"You really have the imagination of greatness."
He hesitated as if in fear of her mockery, but he kept it up, repeating his dry formula: "I want the best thing going."
"And I suppose you've already looked about you a good deal."
"More or less, according to opportunity."
"And you've seen nothing that has tempted you?"
"No," said Newman half reluctantly, "I'm bound to say in honesty that I've seen nothing that has come up to my idea."
"You remind me of the heroes of the French romantic poets, Rolla and Fortunio and all those other insatiable gentlemen for whom nothing in this world was handsome enough. But I see you're in earnest, and I should like to help you," Mrs. Tristram wound up.
"Who the deuce is it, darling, that you're going to palm off upon him?" her husband asked. "We know a good many pretty girls, thank goodness, but nobody to be mentioned in that blazing light."
"Have you any objections to a foreigner?" Mrs. Tristram continued, addressing their friend, who had tilted back his chair and, with his feet on a bar of the balcony railing and his hands in his pockets, sat looking at the stars.
"No Irish need apply," said Tristram.
Newman remained pensive. "Just as a foreigner, no. I've no prejudices."
"My dear fellow, you've no suspicions!" Tristram cried. "You don't know what terrible customers these foreign women are; especially those grown, as you call it, for the use of millionaires. How should you like an expensive Circassian with a dagger in her baggy trousers?"
Newman administered a vigorous slap to his knee. "I 'd marry a Patagonian if she pleased me."
"We had better confine ourselves to Europe," said Mrs. Tristram. "The only thing is then that the young person herself should square with your tremendous standard?"
"She's going to offer you an unappreciated governess!" Tristram groaned.
"Of course I won't deny that, other things being equal, I should like one of my own countrywomen best," Newman pursued. "We should speak the same language, and that would be a comfort. But I'm not afraid of any foreigner who's the best thing in her own country. Besides, I rather like the idea of taking in Europe too. It enlarges the field of selection. When you choose from a greater number you can bring your choice to a finer point."
"Sardanapalus!" Tristram sighed.
"Well, you've come to the right market," Newman's hostess brought out after a pause. "I happen to number among my friends the finest creature in the world. Neither more nor less. I don't say a very charming person or a very estimable woman or a very great beauty: I say simply the finest creature in the world."
"I'm bound to say then," cried Tristram, "that you've kept very quiet about her. Were you afraid of me?"
"You've seen her," said his wife, "but you've no perception of such quality as Claire's."
"Ah, her name's Claire? I give it up."
"Does your friend wish to marry?" Newman asked.
"Not in the least. It's for you to make her change her mind. It won't be easy; she has had one husband and he gave her a low opinion of the species."
"Oh, she's a widow then?"
"Are you already afraid? She was married at eighteen, by her parents, in the French fashion, to a man with advantages of fortune, but objectionable, detestable, on other grounds, and many years too old. He had, however, the discretion to die a couple of years afterwards, and she's now twenty-eight."
"So she's French?"
"French by her father, English by her mother. She's really more English than French, and she speaks English as well as you or I—or rather much better. She belongs, as they say here, to the very top of the basket. Her family, on each side, is of fabulous antiquity; her mother's the daughter of an English Catholic peer. Her father's dead, and since her widowhood she has lived with her mother and a married brother. There's another brother, younger, who I believe is rather amusing but quite impossible. They have an old hôtel in the Rue de l'Université, but their fortune's small and they make, for economy's sake, a common household. When I was a girl of less than fifteen I was put into a convent here for my education while my father made the tour of Europe. It was a fatuous thing to do with me, but it had the advantage that it made me acquainted with Claire de Bellegarde. She was younger than I, yet we became fast friends. I took a tremendous fancy to her, and she returned my adoration so far as she could. They kept such a tight rein on her that she could do very little, and when I left the convent she had to give me up. I was not of her monde; I'm not now either, but we sometimes meet. They're terrible people—her monde; all mounted upon stilts a mile high and with pedigrees long in proportion. It's the skim of the milk of the old noblesse. Did you ever hear of such a prehistoric monster as a Legitimist or an Ultramontane? Go into Madame de Cintré's drawing-room some afternoon at five o'clock and you'll see the best-preserved specimens. I say go, but no one is admitted—to intimacy—who can't show good cause in the form of a family tree."
"And this is the lady you propose to me to marry?" asked Newman. "A lady I can't even approach?"
"But you said just now that you recognised no reasons against you."
Newman looked at Mrs. Tristram a while, stroking his moustache. "Is she a very great beauty?" he demanded.
She hung fire a little. "No."
"Oh then it's no use—!"
"She's not a very great beauty, but she's very, very beautiful; two quite different things. A beauty has no faults in her face; the face of a beautiful woman may have faults that only deepen its charm."
"I remember Madame de Cintré now," said Tristram. "She's as plain as a copy in a copy-book—all round o's and uprights a little slanting. She just slants toward us. A man of your large appetite would swallow her down without tasting her."
"In telling how little use he has for her my husband sufficiently describes her," Mrs. Tristram pursued.
"Is she good, is she clever?" Newman asked.
"She's perfect! I won't say more than that. When you're praising a person to another who's to know her, it's bad policy to go into details. I won't exaggerate, I simply recommend her. Among all the women I've known she stands alone; she's of a different clay."
"I should like to see her," said Newman simply.
"I'll try to manage it. The only way will be to invite her to dinner. I've never invited her before, and I'm not sure she'll be able to come. Her old feudal countess of a mother rules the family with an iron hand and allows her to have no friends but of her own choosing and to visit only in a certain sacred circle. But I can at least invite her."
At this moment Mrs. Tristram was interrupted; a servant stepped out upon the balcony and announced that there were visitors in the drawing-room. When she had gone in to receive her friends Tom Tristram approached his guest.
"Don't put your foot into this, my boy," he said, puffing the last whiffs of his cigar. "There's nothing in it!"
Newman eyed him with oblique penetration. "You tell another story, eh?"
"I say simply that Madame de Cintré's a great white doll of a woman and that she cultivates quiet haughtiness."
"Ah, she's really haughty, eh?"
"She looks at you as if you were so much thin air, and blows you away as easily."
"She's really proud, eh?" Newman pursued with interest.
"Proud? As proud as they make em over here."
"And not good-looking?"
Tristram shrugged his shoulders. "She leaves me cold. She's as cold herself as a porcelain stove, and has about as much expression. But I must go in and amuse the company."
Some time elapsed before Newman followed his friends into the drawing-room. When he at last joined them there he remained but a short time, and during this period sat perfectly silent, listening to a lady to whom Mrs. Tristram had straightway introduced him and who treated him, without drawing breath, to the full force of an extraordinarily high-pitched voice. He could but gaze and attend. Presently he came to bid his hostess good-night. "Who is that lady?"
"Miss Dora Finch. How do you like her?"
"Well, as I like the gong that sounds for dinner. She's good for a warning."
"She's thought so sweet! Certainly you have ideas," said Mrs. Tristram.
He hung about, but at last, "Don't forget about your friend," he said, "the lady of the proud people. Do make her come, and give me good notice." And with this he departed.
Some days later he came back; it was in the afternoon. He found Mrs. Tristram in her drawing-room and entertaining a visitor, a woman young and pretty and dressed in white. The two had risen and the visitor was apparently taking leave. After Newman had approached he received from Mrs. Tristram, who had turned to her companion, a glance of the most vivid significance, which he was yet not immediately able to interpret. "This is a good friend of ours, Mr. Christopher Newman. I've spoken of you to him, and he has an extreme desire to make your acquaintance. If you had consented to come and dine I should have offered him an opportunity."
The stranger presented her face with a still brightness of kindness. He was not embarrassed, for his unconscious equanimity was boundless; but as he became aware that this was the proud and beautiful Madame de Cintré, the finest creature in the world, the promised perfection, the proposed ideal, he made an instinctive movement to gather his wits together. Through the slight preoccupation it produced he had a sense of a longish fair face and of the look of a pair of eyes that were both intense and mild.
"I should have been most happy," said Madame de Cintré. "Unfortunately, as I have been telling Mrs. Tristram, I go next week to the country."
Newman had made a solemn bow. "I'm very very sorry."
"Paris is really getting too hot," Madame de Cintré added, taking her friend's hand again in farewell.
Mrs. Tristram seemed to have formed a sudden and somewhat venturesome resolution, and she smiled more gaily, as women do when they become more earnest. "I want Mr. Newman to know you," she said, dropping her head on one side and looking at Madame de Cintré's bonnet-ribbons.
Christopher Newman stood gravely silent, and his native penetration admonished him. Mrs. Tristram was determined to force her friend to address him a word of encouragement which should be more than one of the common formulas of politeness; and if she was prompted by charity it was by the charity that begins at home. Madame de Cintré was her dearest Claire and her especial admiration; but Madame de Cintré had found it impossible to dine with her and Madame de Cintré should for once be forced gently to render tribute to Mrs. Tristram. "It would give me great pleasure," she said, looking at Mrs. Tristram.
"That's a great deal," cried the latter, "for Madame de Cintré to say!"
"I'm very much obliged to you," said Newman. "Mrs. Tristram can speak better for me than I can speak for myself."
Madame de Cintré turned on him again her soft lustre. "Are you for long in Paris?"
"We shall keep him," said Mrs. Tristram.
"But you're keeping me!" And Madame de Cintré disengaged her hand.
"A moment longer," said Mrs. Tristram.
Madame de Cintré looked at Newman again; this time without her smile. Her eyes lingered a little. "Will you come and see me?"
Mrs. Tristram kissed her at this; Newman acknowledged it more formally, and she took her departure. Her hostess went with her to the door, leaving Newman briefly alone. Presently she returned, clasping her hands together and shaking them at him. "It was a fortunate chance. She had come to decline my invitation. You triumphed on the spot, making her ask you, at the end of three minutes, to her house."
"It was you who triumphed," said Newman. "You must n't see too much in her."
Mrs. Tristram stared. "What do you mean?"
"She did n't strike me as so very proud. I should call her quite timid."
"I should call you quite deep! And what do you think of her face?"
"Well, I guess I like her face," said Newman.
"I should think you might! May I guess, on my side, that you'll go and see her?"
"To-morrow!" cried Newman.
"No, not to-morrow; next day. That will be Sunday; she leaves Paris on Monday. If you don't see her it will at least be a beginning." And she gave him Madame de Cintré's address.
He walked across the Seine late in the summer afternoon and made his way through those grey and silent streets of the Faubourg Saint Germain whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a perverse, verily a "mean" way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade, diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, gravelled court, surrounded on three sides with closed windows; here was a doorway facing the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tent-like canopy. The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman's conception of a convent. The portress couldn't say if Madame de Cintré were visible; he would please to apply at the further door. He crossed the court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of the portico, in play with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman approached, and, as he laid his hand on the bell, said, almost sociably, in English, that he was ashamed a visitor should be kept waiting: the servants were scattered; he himself had been ringing; he did n't know what the deuce was in them. This gentleman was young; his English was excellent, his expression easy. Newman pronounced the name of Madame de Cintré.
"I dare say," said the young man, "that my sister will be visible. Come in, and if you 'll give me your card I'll carry it to her myself."
Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a sentiment I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or for defence, as either might prove needful—but rather of meditative, though quite undaunted and good-humoured suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which, under his name, he had written the words "San Francisco," and while he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor. His glance found quick reassurance; he liked the young man's face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré, whose brother he would clearly be. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid inspection of Newman's person. He had taken the card and was about to enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, habited in evening-dress. He looked hard at Newman and Newman met his examination. "Madame de Cintré," the younger man repeated as an introduction of the visitor. The other took the card from his hand, read it in a sustained stare, looked again at Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment and then said, gravely but urbanely: "Madame de Cintré is not at home."
The younger man made a gesture and turned to Newman. "I'm very sorry, sir."
Newman gave a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and retraced his steps. At the porter's lodge he stopped; the two men were still standing on the portico. "Who may the gentleman with the dog be?" he asked of the old woman who reappeared. He had begun to learn French.
"That's Monsieur le Comte."
"And the other?"
"That's Monsieur le Marquis."
"A marquis?" said Christopher in English, which the old woman fortunately did not understand. "Oh then he's not the major-domo!"