The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “We expect of you to act like a clever man,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You have shown yourself that already, and what we have done is altogether based upon your being so. When one must submit, one must. Since my daughter absolutely withdraws, what will be the use of your making a noise?”

  “It remains to be seen whether your daughter absolutely withdraws. Your daughter and I are still very good friends; nothing is changed in that. As I say, I will talk it over with her.”

  “That will be of no use,” said the old lady. “I know my daughter well enough to know that words spoken as she just now spoke to you are final. Besides, she has promised me.”

  “I have no doubt her promise is worth a great deal more than your own,” said Newman; “nevertheless I don’t give her up.”

  “Just as you please! But if she won’t even see you,—and she won’t,—your constancy must remain purely Platonic.”

  Poor Newman was feigning a greater confidence than he felt. Madame de Cintre’s strange intensity had in fact struck a chill to his heart; her face, still impressed upon his vision, had been a terribly vivid image of renunciation. He felt sick, and suddenly helpless. He turned away and stood for a moment with his hand on the door; then he faced about and after the briefest hesitation broke out with a different accent. “Come, think of what this must be to me, and let her alone! Why should you object to me so—what’s the matter with me? I can’t hurt you. I wouldn’t if I could. I’m the most unobjectionable fellow in the world. What if I am a commercial person? What under the sun do you mean? A commercial person? I will be any sort of a person you want. I never talked to you about business. Let her go, and I will ask no questions. I will take her away, and you shall never see me or hear of me again. I will stay in America if you like. I’ll sign a paper promising never to come back to Europe! All I want is not to lose her!”

  Madame de Bellegarde and her son exchanged a glance of lucid irony, and Urbain said, “My dear sir, what you propose is hardly an improvement. We have not the slightest objection to seeing you, as an amiable foreigner, and we have every reason for not wishing to be eternally separated from my sister. We object to the marriage; and in that way,” and M. de Bellegarde gave a small, thin laugh, “she would be more married than ever.”

  “Well, then,” said Newman, “where is this place of yours—Fleurieres? I know it is near some old city on a hill.”

  “Precisely. Poitiers is on a hill,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I don’t know how old it is. We are not afraid to tell you.”

  “It is Poitiers, is it? Very good,” said Newman. “I shall immediately follow Madame de Cintre.”

  “The trains after this hour won’t serve you,” said Urbain.

  “I shall hire a special train!”

  “That will be a very silly waste of money,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

  “It will be time enough to talk about waste three days hence,” Newman answered; and clapping his hat on his head, he departed.

  He did not immediately start for Fleurieres; he was too stunned and wounded for consecutive action. He simply walked; he walked straight before him, following the river, till he got out of the enceinte of Paris. He had a burning, tingling sense of personal outrage. He had never in his life received so absolute a check; he had never been pulled up, or, as he would have said, “let down,” so short; and he found the sensation intolerable; he strode along, tapping the trees and lamp-posts fiercely with his stick and inwardly raging. To lose Madame de Cintre after he had taken such jubilant and triumphant possession of her was as great an affront to his pride as it was an injury to his happiness. And to lose her by the interference and the dictation of others, by an impudent old woman and a pretentious fop stepping in with their “authority”! It was too preposterous, it was too pitiful. Upon what he deemed the unblushing treachery of the Bellegardes Newman wasted little thought; he consigned it, once for all, to eternal perdition. But the treachery of Madame de Cintre herself amazed and confounded him; there was a key to the mystery, of course, but he groped for it in vain. Only three days had elapsed since she stood beside him in the starlight, beautiful and tranquil as the trust with which he had inspired her, and told him that she was happy in the prospect of their marriage. What was the meaning of the change? of what infernal potion had she tasted? Poor Newman had a terrible apprehension that she had really changed. His very admiration for her attached the idea of force and weight to her rupture. But he did not rail at her as false, for he was sure she was unhappy. In his walk he had crossed one of the bridges of the Seine, and he still followed, unheedingly, the long, unbroken quay. He had left Paris behind him, and he was almost in the country; he was in the pleasant suburb of Auteuil. He stopped at last, looked around him without seeing or caring for its pleasantness, and then slowly turned and at a slower pace retraced his steps. When he came abreast of the fantastic embankment known as the Trocadero, he reflected, through his throbbing pain, that he was near Mrs. Tristram’s dwelling, and that Mrs. Tristram, on particular occasions, had much of a woman’s kindness in her utterance. He felt that he needed to pour out his ire and he took the road to her house. Mrs. Tristram was at home and alone, and as soon as she had looked at him, on his entering the room, she told him that she knew what he had come for. Newman sat down heavily, in silence, looking at her.

  “They have backed out!” she said. “Well, you may think it strange, but I felt something the other night in the air.” Presently he told her his story; she listened, with her eyes fixed on him. When he had finished she said quietly, “They want her to marry Lord Deepmere.” Newman stared. He did not know that she knew anything about Lord Deepmere. “But I don’t think she will,” Mrs. Tristram added.

  “SHE marry that poor little cub!” cried Newman. “Oh, Lord! And yet, why did she refuse me?”

  “But that isn’t the only thing,” said Mrs. Tristram. “They really couldn’t endure you any longer. They had overrated their courage. I must say, to give the devil his due, that there is something rather fine in that. It was your commercial quality in the abstract they couldn’t swallow. That is really aristocratic. They wanted your money, but they have given you up for an idea.”

  Newman frowned most ruefully, and took up his hat again. “I thought you would encourage me!” he said, with almost childlike sadness.

  “Excuse me,” she answered very gently. “I feel none the less sorry for you, especially as I am at the bottom of your troubles. I have not forgotten that I suggested the marriage to you. I don’t believe that Madame de Cintre has any intention of marrying Lord Deepmere. It is true he is not younger than she, as he looks. He is thirty-three years old; I looked in the Peerage. But no—I can’t believe her so horribly, cruelly false.”

  “Please say nothing against her,” said Newman.

  “Poor woman, she IS cruel. But of course you will go after her and you will plead powerfully. Do you know that as you are now,” Mrs. Tristram pursued, with characteristic audacity of comment, “you are extremely eloquent, even without speaking? To resist you a woman must have a very fixed idea in her head. I wish I had done you a wrong, that you might come to me in that fine fashion! But go to Madame de Cintre at any rate, and tell her that she is a puzzle even to me. I am very curious to see how far family discipline will go.”

  Newman sat a while longer, leaning his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and Mrs. Tristram continued to temper charity with philosophy and compassion with criticism. At last she inquired, “And what does the Count Valentin say to it?” Newman started; he had not thought of Valentin and his errand on the Swiss frontier since the morning. The reflection made him restless again, and he took his leave. He went straight to his apartment, where, upon the table of the vestibule, he found a telegram. It ran (with the date and place) as follows: “I am seriously ill; please to come to me as soon as possible. V. B.” Newman groaned at this miserable news, and at the necessity of deferring his journey to the Chateau de Fleurieres. But he wrote to Madame de Cintr
e these few lines; they were all he had time for:—

  “I don’t give you up, and I don’t really believe you give me up. I don’t understand it, but we shall clear it up together. I can’t follow you to-day, as I am called to see a friend at a distance who is very ill, perhaps dying. But I shall come to you as soon as I can leave my friend. Why shouldn’t I say that he is your brother? C. N.”

  After this he had only time to catch the night express to Geneva.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Newman possessed a remarkable talent for sitting still when it was necessary, and he had an opportunity to use it on his journey to Switzerland. The successive hours of the night brought him no sleep, but he sat motionless in his corner of the railway-carriage, with his eyes closed, and the most observant of his fellow-travelers might have envied him his apparent slumber. Toward morning slumber really came, as an effect of mental rather than of physical fatigue. He slept for a couple of hours, and at last, waking, found his eyes resting upon one of the snow-powdered peaks of the Jura, behind which the sky was just reddening with the dawn. But he saw neither the cold mountain nor the warm sky; his consciousness began to throb again, on the very instant, with a sense of his wrong. He got out of the train half an hour before it reached Geneva, in the cold morning twilight, at the station indicated in Valentin’s telegram. A drowsy station-master was on the platform with a lantern, and the hood of his overcoat over his head, and near him stood a gentleman who advanced to meet Newman. This personage was a man of forty, with a tall lean figure, a sallow face, a dark eye, a neat mustache, and a pair of fresh gloves. He took off his hat, looking very grave, and pronounced Newman’s name. Our hero assented and said, “You are M. de Bellegarde’s friend?”

  “I unite with you in claiming that sad honor,” said the gentleman. “I had placed myself at M. de Bellegarde’s service in this melancholy affair, together with M. de Grosjoyaux, who is now at his bedside. M. de Grosjoyaux, I believe, has had the honor of meeting you in Paris, but as he is a better nurse than I he remained with our poor friend. Bellegarde has been eagerly expecting you.”

  “And how is Bellegarde?” said Newman. “He was badly hit?”

  “The doctor has condemned him; we brought a surgeon with us. But he will die in the best sentiments. I sent last evening for the cure of the nearest French village, who spent an hour with him. The cure was quite satisfied.”

  “Heaven forgive us!” groaned Newman. “I would rather the doctor were satisfied! And can he see me—shall he know me?”

  “When I left him, half an hour ago, he had fallen asleep after a feverish, wakeful night. But we shall see.” And Newman’s companion proceeded to lead the way out of the station to the village, explaining as he went that the little party was lodged in the humblest of Swiss inns, where, however, they had succeeded in making M. de Bellegarde much more comfortable than could at first have been expected. “We are old companions in arms,” said Valentin’s second; “it is not the first time that one of us has helped the other to lie easily. It is a very nasty wound, and the nastiest thing about it is that Bellegarde’s adversary was not shot. He put his bullet where he could. It took it into its head to walk straight into Bellegarde’s left side, just below the heart.”

  As they picked their way in the gray, deceptive dawn, between the manure-heaps of the village street, Newman’s new acquaintance narrated the particulars of the duel. The conditions of the meeting had been that if the first exchange of shots should fail to satisfy one of the two gentlemen, a second should take place. Valentin’s first bullet had done exactly what Newman’s companion was convinced he had intended it to do; it had grazed the arm of M. Stanislas Kapp, just scratching the flesh. M. Kapp’s own projectile, meanwhile, had passed at ten good inches from the person of Valentin. The representatives of M. Stanislas had demanded another shot, which was granted. Valentin had then fired aside and the young Alsatian had done effective execution. “I saw, when we met him on the ground,” said Newman’s informant, “that he was not going to be commode. It is a kind of bovine temperament.” Valentin had immediately been installed at the inn, and M. Stanislas and his friends had withdrawn to regions unknown. The police authorities of the canton had waited upon the party at the inn, had been extremely majestic, and had drawn up a long proces-verbal; but it was probable that they would wink at so very gentlemanly a bit of bloodshed. Newman asked whether a message had not been sent to Valentin’s family, and learned that up to a late hour on the preceding evening Valentin had opposed it. He had refused to believe his wound was dangerous. But after his interview with the cure he had consented, and a telegram had been dispatched to his mother. “But the marquise had better hurry!” said Newman’s conductor.

  “Well, it’s an abominable affair!” said Newman. “That’s all I have to say!” To say this, at least, in a tone of infinite disgust was an irresistible need.

  “Ah, you don’t approve?” questioned his conductor, with curious urbanity.

  “Approve?” cried Newman. “I wish that when I had him there, night before last, I had locked him up in my cabinet de toilette!”

  Valentin’s late second opened his eyes, and shook his head up and down two or three times, gravely, with a little flute-like whistle. But they had reached the inn, and a stout maid-servant in a night-cap was at the door with a lantern, to take Newman’s traveling-bag from the porter who trudged behind him. Valentin was lodged on the ground-floor at the back of the house, and Newman’s companion went along a stone-faced passage and softly opened a door. Then he beckoned to Newman, who advanced and looked into the room, which was lighted by a single shaded candle. Beside the fire sat M. de Grosjoyaux asleep in his dressing-gown—a little plump, fair man whom Newman had seen several times in Valentin’s company. On the bed lay Valentin, pale and still, with his eyes closed—a figure very shocking to Newman, who had seen it hitherto awake to its finger tips. M. de Grosjoyaux’s colleague pointed to an open door beyond, and whispered that the doctor was within, keeping guard. So long as Valentin slept, or seemed to sleep, of course Newman could not approach him; so our hero withdrew for the present, committing himself to the care of the half-waked bonne. She took him to a room above-stairs, and introduced him to a bed on which a magnified bolster, in yellow calico, figured as a counterpane. Newman lay down, and, in spite of his counterpane, slept for three or four hours. When he awoke, the morning was advanced and the sun was filling his window, and he heard, outside of it, the clucking of hens. While he was dressing there came to his door a messenger from M. de Grosjoyaux and his companion proposing that he should breakfast with them. Presently he went down-stairs to the little stone-paved dining-room, where the maid-servant, who had taken off her night-cap, was serving the repast. M. de Grosjoyaux was there, surprisingly fresh for a gentleman who had been playing sick-nurse half the night, rubbing his hands and watching the breakfast table attentively. Newman renewed acquaintance with him, and learned that Valentin was still sleeping; the surgeon, who had had a fairly tranquil night, was at present sitting with him. Before M. de Grosjoyaux’s associate reappeared, Newman learned that his name was M. Ledoux, and that Bellegarde’s acquaintance with him dated from the days when they served together in the Pontifical Zouaves. M. Ledoux was the nephew of a distinguished Ultramontane bishop. At last the bishop’s nephew came in with a toilet in which an ingenious attempt at harmony with the peculiar situation was visible, and with a gravity tempered by a decent deference to the best breakfast that the Croix Helvetique had ever set forth. Valentin’s servant, who was allowed only in scanty measure the honor of watching with his master, had been lending a light Parisian hand in the kitchen. The two Frenchmen did their best to prove that if circumstances might overshadow, they could not really obscure, the national talent for conversation, and M. Ledoux delivered a neat little eulogy on poor Bellegarde, whom he pronounced the most charming Englishman he had ever known.

  “Do you call him an Englishman?” Newman asked.

  M. Ledoux smiled a moment and
then made an epigram. “C’est plus qu’un Anglais—c’est un Anglomane!” Newman said soberly that he had never noticed it; and M. de Grosjoyaux remarked that it was really too soon to deliver a funeral oration upon poor Bellegarde. “Evidently,” said M. Ledoux. “But I couldn’t help observing this morning to Mr. Newman that when a man has taken such excellent measures for his salvation as our dear friend did last evening, it seems almost a pity he should put it in peril again by returning to the world.” M. Ledoux was a great Catholic, and Newman thought him a queer mixture. His countenance, by daylight, had a sort of amiably saturnine cast; he had a very large thin nose, and looked like a Spanish picture. He appeared to think dueling a very perfect arrangement, provided, if one should get hit, one could promptly see the priest. He seemed to take a great satisfaction in Valentin’s interview with the cure, and yet his conversation did not at all indicate a sanctimonious habit of mind. M. Ledoux had evidently a high sense of the becoming, and was prepared to be urbane and tasteful on all points. He was always furnished with a smile (which pushed his mustache up under his nose) and an explanation. Savoir-vivre—knowing how to live—was his specialty, in which he included knowing how to die; but, as Newman reflected, with a good deal of dumb irritation, he seemed disposed to delegate to others the application of his learning on this latter point. M. de Grosjoyaux was of quite another complexion, and appeared to regard his friend’s theological unction as the sign of an inaccessibly superior mind. He was evidently doing his utmost, with a kind of jovial tenderness, to make life agreeable to Valentin to the last, and help him as little as possible to miss the Boulevard des Italiens; but what chiefly occupied his mind was the mystery of a bungling brewer’s son making so neat a shot. He himself could snuff a candle, etc., and yet he confessed that he could not have done better than this. He hastened to add that on the present occasion he would have made a point of not doing so well. It was not an occasion for that sort of murderous work, que diable! He would have picked out some quiet fleshy spot and just tapped it with a harmless ball. M. Stanislas Kapp had been deplorably heavy-handed; but really, when the world had come to that pass that one granted a meeting to a brewer’s son!… This was M. de Grosjoyaux’s nearest approach to a generalization. He kept looking through the window, over the shoulder of M. Ledoux, at a slender tree which stood at the end of a lane, opposite to the inn, and seemed to be measuring its distance from his extended arm and secretly wishing that, since the subject had been introduced, propriety did not forbid a little speculative pistol-practice.