by Henry James
“Poor Claire!” murmured Valentin. “But they—but they”—and he paused again. “You saw them; they dismissed you, face to face?”
“Face to face. They were very explicit.”
“What did they say?”
“They said they couldn’t stand a commercial person.”
Valentin put out his hand and laid it upon Newman’s arm. “And about their promise—their engagement with you?”
“They made a distinction. They said it was to hold good only until Madame de Cintre accepted me.”
Valentin lay staring a while, and his flush died away. “Don’t tell me any more,” he said at last. “I’m ashamed.”
“You? You are the soul of honor,” said Newman simply.
Valentin groaned and turned away his head. For some time nothing more was said. Then Valentin turned back again and found a certain force to press Newman’s arm. “It’s very bad—very bad. When my people—when my race—come to that, it is time for me to withdraw. I believe in my sister; she will explain. Excuse her. If she can’t—if she can’t, forgive her. She has suffered. But for the others it is very bad—very bad. You take it very hard? No, it’s a shame to make you say so.” He closed his eyes and again there was a silence. Newman felt almost awed; he had evoked a more solemn spirit than he expected. Presently Valentin looked at him again, removing his hand from his arm. “I apologize,” he said. “Do you understand? Here on my death-bed. I apologize for my family. For my mother. For my brother. For the ancient house of Bellegarde. Voila!” he added, softly.
Newman for an answer took his hand and pressed it with a world of kindness. Valentin remained quiet, and at the end of half an hour the doctor softly came in. Behind him, through the half-open door, Newman saw the two questioning faces of MM. de Grosjoyaux and Ledoux. The doctor laid his hand on Valentin’s wrist and sat looking at him. He gave no sign and the two gentlemen came in, M. Ledoux having first beckoned to some one outside. This was M. le cure, who carried in his hand an object unknown to Newman, and covered with a white napkin. M. le cure was short, round, and red: he advanced, pulling off his little black cap to Newman, and deposited his burden on the table; and then he sat down in the best arm-chair, with his hands folded across his person. The other gentlemen had exchanged glances which expressed unanimity as to the timeliness of their presence. But for a long time Valentin neither spoke nor moved. It was Newman’s belief, afterwards, that M. le cure went to sleep. At last abruptly, Valentin pronounced Newman’s name. His friend went to him, and he said in French, “You are not alone. I want to speak to you alone.” Newman looked at the doctor, and the doctor looked at the cure, who looked back at him; and then the doctor and the cure, together, gave a shrug. “Alone—for five minutes,” Valentin repeated. “Please leave us.”
The cure took up his burden again and led the way out, followed by his companions. Newman closed the door behind them and came back to Valentin’s bedside. Bellegarde had watched all this intently.
“It’s very bad, it’s very bad,” he said, after Newman had seated himself close to him. “The more I think of it the worse it is.”
“Oh, don’t think of it,” said Newman.
But Valentin went on, without heeding him. “Even if they should come round again, the shame—the baseness—is there.”
“Oh, they won’t come round!” said Newman.
“Well, you can make them.”
“Make them?”
“I can tell you something—a great secret—an immense secret. You can use it against them—frighten them, force them.”
“A secret!” Newman repeated. The idea of letting Valentin, on his death-bed, confide him an “immense secret” shocked him, for the moment, and made him draw back. It seemed an illicit way of arriving at information, and even had a vague analogy with listening at a key-hole. Then, suddenly, the thought of “forcing” Madame de Bellegarde and her son became attractive, and Newman bent his head closer to Valentin’s lips. For some time, however, the dying man said nothing more. He only lay and looked at his friend with his kindled, expanded, troubled eye, and Newman began to believe that he had spoken in delirium. But at last he said,—
“There was something done—something done at Fleurieres. It was foul play. My father—something happened to him. I don’t know; I have been ashamed—afraid to know. But I know there is something. My mother knows—Urbain knows.”
“Something happened to your father?” said Newman, urgently.
Valentin looked at him, still more wide-eyed. “He didn’t get well.”
“Get well of what?”
But the immense effort which Valentin had made, first to decide to utter these words and then to bring them out, appeared to have taken his last strength. He lapsed again into silence, and Newman sat watching him. “Do you understand?” he began again, presently. “At Fleurieres. You can find out. Mrs. Bread knows. Tell her I begged you to ask her. Then tell them that, and see. It may help you. If not, tell, every one. It will—it will”—here Valentin’s voice sank to the feeblest murmur—”it will avenge you!”
The words died away in a long, soft groan. Newman stood up, deeply impressed, not knowing what to say; his heart was beating violently. “Thank you,” he said at last. “I am much obliged.” But Valentin seemed not to hear him, he remained silent, and his silence continued. At last Newman went and opened the door. M. le cure reentered, bearing his sacred vessel and followed by the three gentlemen and by Valentin’s servant. It was almost processional.
CHAPTER XX
Valentin de Bellegarde died, tranquilly, just as the cold, faint March dawn began to illumine the faces of the little knot of friends gathered about his bedside. An hour afterwards Newman left the inn and drove to Geneva; he was naturally unwilling to be present at the arrival of Madame de Bellegarde and her first-born. At Geneva, for the moment, he remained. He was like a man who has had a fall and wants to sit still and count his bruises. He instantly wrote to Madame de Cintre, relating to her the circumstances of her brother’s death—with certain exceptions—and asking her what was the earliest moment at which he might hope that she would consent to see him. M. Ledoux had told him that he had reason to know that Valentin’s will—Bellegarde had a great deal of elegant personal property to dispose of—contained a request that he should be buried near his father in the church-yard of Fleurieres, and Newman intended that the state of his own relations with the family should not deprive him of the satisfaction of helping to pay the last earthly honors to the best fellow in the world. He reflected that Valentin’s friendship was older than Urbain’s enmity, and that at a funeral it was easy to escape notice. Madame de Cintre’s answer to his letter enabled him to time his arrival at Fleurieres. This answer was very brief; it ran as follows:—
“I thank you for your letter, and for your being with Valentin. It is a most inexpressible sorrow to me that I was not. To see you will be nothing but a distress to me; there is no need, therefore, to wait for what you call brighter days. It is all one now, and I shall have no brighter days. Come when you please; only notify me first. My brother is to be buried here on Friday, and my family is to remain here. C. de C.”
As soon as he received this letter Newman went straight to Paris and to Poitiers. The journey took him far southward, through green Touraine and across the far-shining Loire, into a country where the early spring deepened about him as he went. But he had never made a journey during which he heeded less what he would have called the lay of the land. He obtained lodging at the inn at Poitiers, and the next morning drove in a couple of hours to the village of Fleurieres. But here, preoccupied though he was, he could not fail to notice the picturesqueness of the place. It was what the French call a petit bourg; it lay at the base of a sort of huge mound on the summit of which stood the crumbling ruins of a feudal castle, much of whose sturdy material, as well as that of the wall which dropped along the hill to inclose the clustered houses defensively, had been absorbed into the very substance of the village. The
church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass; the patient elbow of the rampart held them together on one side, and in front, far beneath their mossy lids, the green plains and blue distances stretched away. The way to church, up the hill, was impracticable to vehicles. It was lined with peasants, two or three rows deep, who stood watching old Madame de Bellegarde slowly ascend it, on the arm of her elder son, behind the pall-bearers of the other. Newman chose to lurk among the common mourners who murmured “Madame la Comtesse” as a tall figure veiled in black passed before them. He stood in the dusky little church while the service was going forward, but at the dismal tomb-side he turned away and walked down the hill. He went back to Poitiers, and spent two days in which patience and impatience were singularly commingled. On the third day he sent Madame de Cintre a note, saying that he would call upon her in the afternoon, and in accordance with this he again took his way to Fleurieres. He left his vehicle at the tavern in the village street, and obeyed the simple instructions which were given him for finding the chateau.
“It is just beyond there,” said the landlord, and pointed to the tree-tops of the park, above the opposite houses. Newman followed the first cross-road to the right—it was bordered with mouldy cottages—and in a few moments saw before him the peaked roofs of the towers. Advancing farther, he found himself before a vast iron gate, rusty and closed; here he paused a moment, looking through the bars. The chateau was near the road; this was at once its merit and its defect; but its aspect was extremely impressive. Newman learned afterwards, from a guide-book of the province, that it dated from the time of Henry IV. It presented to the wide, paved area which preceded it and which was edged with shabby farm-buildings an immense facade of dark time-stained brick, flanked by two low wings, each of which terminated in a little Dutch-looking pavilion capped with a fantastic roof. Two towers rose behind, and behind the towers was a mass of elms and beeches, now just faintly green. But the great feature was a wide, green river which washed the foundations of the chateau. The building rose from an island in the circling stream, so that this formed a perfect moat spanned by a two-arched bridge without a parapet. The dull brick walls, which here and there made a grand, straight sweep; the ugly little cupolas of the wings, the deep-set windows, the long, steep pinnacles of mossy slate, all mirrored themselves in the tranquil river. Newman rang at the gate, and was almost frightened at the tone with which a big rusty bell above his head replied to him. An old woman came out from the gate-house and opened the creaking portal just wide enough for him to pass, and he went in, across the dry, bare court and the little cracked white slabs of the causeway on the moat. At the door of the chateau he waited for some moments, and this gave him a chance to observe that Fleurieres was not “kept up,” and to reflect that it was a melancholy place of residence. “It looks,” said Newman to himself—and I give the comparison for what it is worth—”like a Chinese penitentiary.” At last the door was opened by a servant whom he remembered to have seen in the Rue de l’Universite. The man’s dull face brightened as he perceived our hero, for Newman, for indefinable reasons, enjoyed the confidence of the liveried gentry. The footman led the way across a great central vestibule, with a pyramid of plants in tubs in the middle of glass doors all around, to what appeared to be the principal drawing-room of the chateau. Newman crossed the threshold of a room of superb proportions, which made him feel at first like a tourist with a guide-book and a cicerone awaiting a fee. But when his guide had left him alone, with the observation that he would call Madame la Comtesse, Newman perceived that the salon contained little that was remarkable save a dark ceiling with curiously carved rafters, some curtains of elaborate, antiquated tapestry, and a dark oaken floor, polished like a mirror. He waited some minutes, walking up and down; but at length, as he turned at the end of the room, he saw that Madame de Cintre had come in by a distant door. She wore a black dress, and she stood looking at him. As the length of the immense room lay between them he had time to look at her before they met in the middle of it.
He was dismayed at the change in her appearance. Pale, heavy-browed, almost haggard with a sort of monastic rigidity in her dress, she had little but her pure features in common with the woman whose radiant good grace he had hitherto admired. She let her eyes rest on his own, and she let him take her hand; but her eyes looked like two rainy autumn moons, and her touch was portentously lifeless.
“I was at your brother’s funeral,” Newman said. “Then I waited three days. But I could wait no longer.”
“Nothing can be lost or gained by waiting,” said Madame de Cintre. “But it was very considerate of you to wait, wronged as you have been.”
“I’m glad you think I have been wronged,” said Newman, with that oddly humorous accent with which he often uttered words of the gravest meaning.
“Do I need to say so?” she asked. “I don’t think I have wronged, seriously, many persons; certainly not consciously. To you, to whom I have done this hard and cruel thing, the only reparation I can make is to say, ‘I know it, I feel it!’ The reparation is pitifully small!”
“Oh, it’s a great step forward!” said Newman, with a gracious smile of encouragement. He pushed a chair towards her and held it, looking at her urgently. She sat down, mechanically, and he seated himself near her; but in a moment he got up, restlessly, and stood before her. She remained seated, like a troubled creature who had passed through the stage of restlessness.
“I say nothing is to be gained by my seeing you,” she went on, “and yet I am very glad you came. Now I can tell you what I feel. It is a selfish pleasure, but it is one of the last I shall have.” And she paused, with her great misty eyes fixed upon him. “I know how I have deceived and injured you; I know how cruel and cowardly I have been. I see it as vividly as you do—I feel it to the ends of my fingers.” And she unclasped her hands, which were locked together in her lap, lifted them, and dropped them at her side. “Anything that you may have said of me in your angriest passion is nothing to what I have said to myself.”
“In my angriest passion,” said Newman, “I have said nothing hard of you. The very worst thing I have said of you yet is that you are the loveliest of women.” And he seated himself before her again, abruptly.
She flushed a little, but even her flush was pale. “That is because you think I will come back. But I will not come back. It is in that hope you have come here, I know; I am very sorry for you. I would do almost anything for you. To say that, after what I have done, seems simply impudent; but what can I say that will not seem impudent? To wrong you and apologize—that is easy enough. I should not have wronged you.” She stopped a moment, looking at him, and motioned him to let her go on. “I ought never to have listened to you at first; that was the wrong. No good could come of it. I felt it, and yet I listened; that was your fault. I liked you too much; I believed in you.”
“And don’t you believe in me now?”
“More than ever. But now it doesn’t matter. I have given you up.”
Newman gave a powerful thump with his clenched fist upon his knee. “Why, why, why?” he cried. “Give me a reason—a decent reason. You are not a child—you are not a minor, nor an idiot. You are not obliged to drop me because your mother told you to. Such a reason isn’t worthy of you.”
“I know that; it’s not worthy of me. But it’s the only one I have to give. After all,” said Madame de Cintre, throwing out her hands, “think me an idiot and forget me! That will be the simplest way.”
Newman got up and walked away with a crushing sense that his cause was lost, and yet with an equal inability to give up fighting. He went to one of the great windows, and looked out at the stiffly embanked river and the formal gardens which lay beyond it. When he turned round, Madame de Cintre had risen; she stood there silent and passive. “You
are not frank,” said Newman; “you are not honest. Instead of saying that you are imbecile, you should say that other people are wicked. Your mother and your brother have been false and cruel; they have been so to me, and I am sure they have been so to you. Why do you try to shield them? Why do you sacrifice me to them? I’m not false; I’m not cruel. You don’t know what you give up; I can tell you that—you don’t. They bully you and plot about you; and I—I”—And he paused, holding out his hands. She turned away and began to leave him. “You told me the other day that you were afraid of your mother,” he said, following her. “What did you mean?”
Madame de Cintre shook her head. “I remember; I was sorry afterwards.”
“You were sorry when she came down and put on the thumb-screws. In God’s name what IS it she does to you?”
“Nothing. Nothing that you can understand. And now that I have given you up, I must not complain of her to you.”
“That’s no reasoning!” cried Newman. “Complain of her, on the contrary. Tell me all about it, frankly and trustfully, as you ought, and we will talk it over so satisfactorily that you won’t give me up.”
Madame de Cintre looked down some moments, fixedly; and then, raising her eyes, she said, “One good at least has come of this: I have made you judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that did me great honor; I don’t know why you had taken it into your head. But it left me no loophole for escape—no chance to be the common, weak creature I am. It was not my fault; I warned you from the first. But I ought to have warned you more. I ought to have convinced you that I was doomed to disappoint you. But I WAS, in a way, too proud. You see what my superiority amounts to, I hope!” she went on, raising her voice with a tremor which even then and there Newman thought beautiful. “I am too proud to be honest, I am not too proud to be faithless. I am timid and cold and selfish. I am afraid of being uncomfortable.”