The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 9
IX
He called on Madame de Cintré the very next day, and learnt from the servant that she was at home. He passed as usual up the large cold staircase and through a spacious vestibule above, where the walls seemed all composed of small door-panels touched with long-faded gilding; whence he was ushered into the sitting-room in which he had already been received. It was empty, but the footman told him that Madame la Comtesse would presently appear. He had time, while he waited, to wonder if Bellegarde had seen his sister since the evening before and if in this case he had spoken to her of their talk. In that event Madame de Cintré's receiving him was not, as he would have said, a bucket of cold water. He felt a certain trepidation as he reflected that she might come in with the knowledge of his supreme admiration and of the project he had built on it in her eyes; but the apprehension conveyed no chill. Her face could wear no look that would make it less beautiful, and he was sure beforehand that, however she might take the proposal he had in reserve, she would n't make him pay for it in the least to his ruin. He had a belief that if she could only look at the bottom of his heart and see it all bared to the quick for her she would be entirely kind.
She came in at last, after so long an interval that he wondered if she had been hesitating. She smiled at him, as usual, without constraint, and her great mild eyes, while she held out her hand, seemed to shine at him perhaps even straighter than before. She then remarkably observed, without a tremor in her voice, that she was glad to see him and that she hoped he was well. He found in her what he had found before—that faint perfume of a personal diffidence worn away by contact with the world, but the more perceptible the more closely she was approached. This subtle shyness gave a peculiar value to what was definite and assured in her manner, making it an acquired accomplishment, a beautiful talent, something that one might compare to an exquisite touch in a pianist. It was, in fact, her "authority," as they say of artists, that especially impressed and fascinated him; he always came back to the feeling that, when he should have rounded out his "success" by the right big marriage, this was the way he should like his wife to express the size of it to the world. The only trouble indeed was that when the instrument was so perfect it seemed to interpose too much between the audience and the composer. She gave him, the charming woman, the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her having been fashioned and made flexible to certain deep social needs. All this, as I have noted, made her seem rare and precious—a very expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an ambition to have everything about him of the best would taste of triumph in possessing. Yet looking at the matter with an eye to private felicity he asked himself where, in so exquisite a compound, nature and art showed their dividing-line. Where did the special intention separate from the habit of good manners? Where did fine urbanity end and fine sincerity begin? He indulged in these questions even while he stood ready to accept the admired object in all its complexity; he felt indeed he could do so in profound security, examining its mechanism afterwards and at leisure. "I'm very glad to find you alone. You know I've never had such good luck before."
"But you've seemed before very well contented with your luck," said Madame de Cintré. "You've sat and watched my visitors as comfortably as from a box at the opera. What have you thought of our poor performance?"
"Oh, I've thought the ladies very bright and very graceful, wonderfully quick at repartee. But what I've chiefly thought has been that they only help me to admire you." This was not the habit of the pretty speech on Newman's part, the art of the pretty speech never having attained great perfection with him. It was simply the instinct of the practical man who had made up his mind to what he wanted and was now beginning to take active steps to obtain it.
She started slightly and raised her eyebrows; she had evidently not expected so straight an advance. "Oh, in that case," she none the less gaily said, "your finding me alone is n't good luck for me. I hope some one will come in quickly."
"I hope not," Newman returned. "I've something particular to say to you. Have you seen your brother Valentine?"
"Yes, I saw him an hour ago."
"Did he tell you that he had seen me last night?"
"I think he spoke of it."
"And did he tell you what we had talked about?"
She visibly hesitated. While Newman made these enquiries she had grown a little pale, as if taking what might impend for inevitable rather than convenient. "Did you give him a message to me?"
"It was not exactly a message. I asked him to render me a service."
"The service was to sing your praises, was it not?" She had been clearly careful to utter this question in the tone of trifling.
"Yes, that is what it really amounts to," said Newman. "Did he therefore sing my praises?"
"He spoke very well of you. But when I know that it was by special request I must of course take his eulogy with a grain of salt."
"Ah, that makes no difference," Newman went on. "Your brother wouldn't have spoken well of me unless he believed what he was saying. He's too honest for that."
"Are you a great diplomatist?" she answered. "Are you trying to please me by praising my brother? I confess it's a good way."
"For me any way that succeeds will be good. I 'll praise your brother all day if that will help me. I just love him, you know, and I regard him as perfectly straight. He has made me feel, in promising to do what he can to help me, that I can depend upon him."
"Don't make too much of that," said Madame de Cintré. "He can help you very little."
"Of course I must work my way myself. I know that very well; I only want a chance to. In consenting to see me, after what he told you, you almost seem to be giving me a chance."
"I 'm seeing you," she slowly and gravely pronounced, "because I promised my brother I would."
"Blessings on your brother's head then!" Newman cried. "What I told him last evening was this: that I admired you more than any woman I had ever seen and that I should like extraordinarily to make you my wife." He spoke these words with great directness and firmness and without any sense of confusion. He was full of his idea, he had completely mastered it, and he seemed to look down on the woman he addressed, and on all her gathered graces, from the height of his bracing good conscience. It is probable that this particular tone and manner were the very best he could have adopted; yet the light, just visibly forced smile with which she had listened to him died away and she sat looking at him with her lips parted and her face almost as portentous as a tragic mask. There was evidently an inconvenience amounting to pain for her in this extravagant issue; her impatience of it, however, found no angry voice. Newman wondered if he were hurting her; he could n't imagine why the liberal devotion he meant to express should be offensive. He got up and stood before her, leaning one hand on the chimney-piece. "I know I've seen you very little to say this, so little that it may make what I say seem disrespectful. But that's my misfortune. I could have said it at the first time I saw you. Really I had seen you before; I had seen you in imagination; you seemed almost an old friend. So what I say, you can at least believe, is not mere grand talk in the air, an exaggerated compliment. I can't talk for any effect but one I want very much to bring about, and I would n't to you if I could. What I say is as serious as such words can be. I feel as if I knew you and knew how fine and rare and true you are. I shall know better perhaps some day, but I have a general notion now. You're just the woman I've been looking for, except that you're far more perfect. I won't make any protestations and vows, but you can trust me. It's very soon, I know, to say all this; it may almost shock you. But why not gain time if one can? And if you want time to reflect—as of course you 'd do—the sooner you begin the better for me. I don't know what you think of me; but there's no great mystery, nor anything at all difficult to tell, about me—nor difficult to understand. Your brother told me that my antecedents and occupations will be against me; that your family has a social standing so high that I can't be taken as coming up to it. Well, I don't know about coming 'up'—I don't think you can very well keep me down, anywhere. You can't make a man feel low unless you can make him feel base; and if you may fit yourself into any class you see your way to, you can't fit him where he won't go. But I don't believe you care anything about that. I can assure you there's quite enough of me to last, and that if I give my mind to it I can arrange things so that in a very few years I shall not need to waste time in explaining who I am and how much I matter. You 'll decide for yourself if you like me or not. I honestly believe I've no hidden vices nor nasty tricks. I'm kind, kind, kind! Everything that a man can give a woman I'll give you. I've a large fortune, a very large fortune; some day, if you'll allow me, I'll go into details. If you want grandeur, everything in the way of grandeur that money can give you, why you shall have it. And as regards anything you may give up, don't take for granted too much that its place can't be filled. Leave that to me—I 've filled some places. I 'll take care of you; I shall know what you need. I would n't talk if I did n't believe I knew how. I want you to feel I'm strong, because if you do that will be enough. There; I have said what I had on my heart. It was better to get it off. I'm very sorry if it worries you; but the air's clearer—don't you already see? If I've made a mistake we had better not have met at all; and I can't think that, Madame de Cintré, can you?" Newman asked. "Don't answer me now, if you don't wish it. Think about it; think about it only a little at a time, if you want. Of course I have n't said, I can't say, half I mean, especially about my admiration for you. But take a favourable view of me; it will only be just."
During this speech, the longest personal plea, of any kind, that he had ever uttered in his life, she kept her gaze fixed on him, and it expanded at the last into a sort of fascinated stare. When he ceased speaking she lowered it and sat for some moments looking down and straight before her. Then she slowly rose to her feet, and a pair of exceptionally keen eyes would have made out in her an extraordinarily fine tremor. She still looked extremely serious. "I'm very much obliged to you for your offer. It seems to me very strange, but I'm glad you spoke without waiting any longer. It's better the subject should be dismissed between us. I appreciate immensely all you say; you do me great honour. But I've decided not to marry."
"Oh, don't say that!" cried Newman with the very innocence of pleading desire. She had turned away, and it made her stop a moment with her back to him. "Think better of that. You're too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you're afraid of losing your freedom I can assure you that this freedom here, the life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I 'll offer you. You shall do things that I don't think you've ever thought of. I 'll take you to live anywhere in the wide world you may want. Are you unhappy? You give me a feeling that you are unhappy. You 've no right to be, or to be made so. Let me come in and put an end to it."
The young woman waited, but looking again all away from him. If she was touched by the way he spoke the thing was conceivable. His voice, always very mild, almost flatly soft and candidly interrogative for so full an organ, had become as edgeless and as tenderly argumentative as if he had been talking to a much-loved child. He stood watching her, and she presently turned again, but with her face not really meeting his own; and she spoke with a quietness in which there was a visible trace of effort. "There are a great many reasons why I should n't marry—more, I beg you to believe, than I can explain to you. As for my happiness, I'm perfectly content. If I call your proposal 'strange' it 's also for more reasons than I can say. Of course you've a perfect right to make it. But I can't accept it—that's impossible. Please never speak of the matter again. If you can't promise me this I must ask you not to come back."
"Why is it impossible?" he demanded with an insistence that came easily to him now. "You may think it is at first without its really being so. I did n't expect you to be pleased at first, but I do believe that if you 'll think of it a good while you may finally be satisfied."
"I don't know you," she returned after a moment. "Think how little I know you!"
"Very little of course, and therefore I don't ask for your ultimatum on the spot. I only ask you not simply to put me off. I only ask you to let me 'stay round,' and by so doing to let me hope. I 'll wait as long as ever you want. Meanwhile you can see more of me and know me better, look at me in the light—well, of my presumption, yes, but of other things too. You can make up your mind."
Something was going on, rapidly, in her spirit; she was weighing a question there beneath his eyes, weighing it and deciding it. "From the moment I don't very respectfully beg you to leave the house and never return I listen to you—I seem to give you hope. I have listened to you—against my judgement. It's because, you see, you're eloquent. Yes," she almost panted, "you touch me. If I had been told this morning that I should consent to consider you as a person wishing to come so very near me I should have thought my informant a little crazy. I am listening to you, you see!" And she threw her arms up for a moment and let them drop with a gesture in which there was just an expression of surrendering weakness.
"Well, as far as saying goes, I've said everything," Newman replied. "I believe in you without restriction, and I think all the good of you it's possible to think of a human creature. I firmly believe that in marrying me you'll be safe. As I said just now," he went on with his smile as of hard experience, "I've no bad ways. I can really do so much for you! And if you're afraid that I'm not what you've been accustomed to, not as refined and cultivated, or even as pleasant all round, as your standard requires, you may easily carry that too far. I am refined—I am pleasant. Just you try me!"
Claire de Cintré got still further away and paused before a great plant, an azalea, which flourished in a porcelain tub before her window. She plucked off one of the flowers and, twisting it in her fingers, retraced her steps. Then she sat down in silence, and her attitude seemed a consent that he should say more. She might almost be liking it.
"Why should you say it's impossible you should marry?" he therefore continued. "The only thing that could make it really impossible would be your being already subject to that tie!—which must be awful, I admit, when it's only a grind. Is it because you've been unhappy in marriage? That 's all the more reason. Is it because your family exert a pressure on you, interfere with you or worry you? That's still another reason: you ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so. I don't say anything against your family—understand that!" added Newman with an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious witness smile. "Whatever way you feel about them is the right way, and anything you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I 'll do as well as I know how. They may put me through what they like—I guess I shall hold out!"
She rose again and came to the fire near which he had hovered. The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it had submitted itself with a kind of grace in which there might have been indeed a kind of art. She had the air of a woman who had stepped across the frontier of friendship and looks round her a little bewildered to find the spaces larger than those marked in her customary chart. A certain checked and controlled exaltation played through the charm of her dignity. "I won't refuse to see you again, because much of what you've said has given me pleasure. But I will see you only on this condition: that you say nothing more in the same way for a long long time."
"What do you mean by 'long long'—?"
"Well, I mean six months. It must be a solemn promise."
"Very good; I promise."
"Good-bye then." And she put out her hand.
He held it a moment as if to say more. But he only looked at her—"long, long"; then he took his departure.
That evening, on the Boulevard, he met Valentin de Bellegarde. After they had exchanged greetings he told him he had seen his sister a few hours before.
"I know it, pardieu! said Valentin. I dined là-bas." With which, for some moments, both men were silent. Newman wished to ask what visible impression his visit had made, but the Count had a question of his own and he ended by speaking first. "It's none of my business, but what the deuce did you say to Claire?"
"I'm quite willing to tell you I made her an offer of marriage."
"Already!" And the young man gave a whistle. "'Time is money!' Is that what you say in America? And my sister—?" he discreetly added.
"She did n't close with me."
"She could n't, you know, in that way."
"But I'm to see her again," said Newman.
"Oh, the strangeness of ces dames!" Then he stopped and held Newman off at arm's length. "I look at you with respect! You've achieved what we call a personal success! Immediately, now, I must present you to my brother."
"Whenever you like!" said Newman.