by Henry James
“Excuse me for stopping you,” he said in a low tone, “but I must profit by the occasion. I have ten words to say to you. Will you listen to them?”
The marquis glared at him and then turned to his mother. “Can Mr. Newman possibly have anything to say that is worth our listening to?”
“I assure you I have something,” said Newman, “besides, it is my duty to say it. It’s a notification—a warning.”
“Your duty?” said old Madame de Bellegarde, her thin lips curving like scorched paper. “That is your affair, not ours.”
Madame Urbain meanwhile had seized her little girl by the hand, with a gesture of surprise and impatience which struck Newman, intent as he was upon his own words, with its dramatic effectiveness. “If Mr. Newman is going to make a scene in public,” she exclaimed, “I will take my poor child out of the melee. She is too young to see such naughtiness!” and she instantly resumed her walk.
“You had much better listen to me,” Newman went on. “Whether you do or not, things will be disagreeable for you; but at any rate you will be prepared.”
“We have already heard something of your threats,” said the marquis, “and you know what we think of them.”
“You think a good deal more than you admit. A moment,” Newman added in reply to an exclamation of the old lady. “I remember perfectly that we are in a public place, and you see I am very quiet. I am not going to tell your secret to the passers-by; I shall keep it, to begin with, for certain picked listeners. Any one who observes us will think that we are having a friendly chat, and that I am complimenting you, madam, on your venerable virtues.”
The marquis gave three short sharp raps on the ground with his stick. “I demand of you to step out of our path!” he hissed.
Newman instantly complied, and M. de Bellegarde stepped forward with his mother. Then Newman said, “Half an hour hence Madame de Bellegarde will regret that she didn’t learn exactly what I mean.”
The marquise had taken a few steps, but at these words she paused, looking at Newman with eyes like two scintillating globules of ice. “You are like a peddler with something to sell,” she said, with a little cold laugh which only partially concealed the tremor in her voice.
“Oh, no, not to sell,” Newman rejoined; “I give it to you for nothing.” And he approached nearer to her, looking her straight in the eyes. “You killed your husband,” he said, almost in a whisper. “That is, you tried once and failed, and then, without trying, you succeeded.”
Madame de Bellegarde closed her eyes and gave a little cough, which, as a piece of dissimulation, struck Newman as really heroic. “Dear mother,” said the marquis, “does this stuff amuse you so much?”
“The rest is more amusing,” said Newman. “You had better not lose it.”
Madame de Bellegarde opened her eyes; the scintillations had gone out of them; they were fixed and dead. But she smiled superbly with her narrow little lips, and repeated Newman’s word. “Amusing? Have I killed some one else?”
“I don’t count your daughter,” said Newman, “though I might! Your husband knew what you were doing. I have a proof of it whose existence you have never suspected.” And he turned to the marquis, who was terribly white—whiter than Newman had ever seen any one out of a picture. “A paper written by the hand, and signed with the name, of Henri-Urbain de Bellegarde. Written after you, madame, had left him for dead, and while you, sir, had gone—not very fast—for the doctor.”
The marquis looked at his mother; she turned away, looking vaguely round her. “I must sit down,” she said in a low tone, going toward the bench on which Newman had been sitting.
“Couldn’t you have spoken to me alone?” said the marquis to Newman, with a strange look.
“Well, yes, if I could have been sure of speaking to your mother alone, too,” Newman answered. “But I have had to take you as I could get you.”
Madame de Bellegarde, with a movement very eloquent of what he would have called her “grit,” her steel-cold pluck and her instinctive appeal to her own personal resources, drew her hand out of her son’s arm and went and seated herself upon the bench. There she remained, with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at Newman. The expression of her face was such that he fancied at first that she was smiling; but he went and stood in front of her and saw that her elegant features were distorted by agitation. He saw, however, equally, that she was resisting her agitation with all the rigor of her inflexible will, and there was nothing like either fear or submission in her stony stare. She had been startled, but she was not terrified. Newman had an exasperating feeling that she would get the better of him still; he would not have believed it possible that he could so utterly fail to be touched by the sight of a woman (criminal or other) in so tight a place. Madame de Bellegarde gave a glance at her son which seemed tantamount to an injunction to be silent and leave her to her own devices. The marquis stood beside her, with his hands behind him, looking at Newman.
“What paper is this you speak of?” asked the old lady, with an imitation of tranquillity which would have been applauded in a veteran actress.
“Exactly what I have told you,” said Newman. “A paper written by your husband after you had left him for dead, and during the couple of hours before you returned. You see he had the time; you shouldn’t have stayed away so long. It declares distinctly his wife’s murderous intent.”
“I should like to see it,” Madame de Bellegarde observed.
“I thought you might,” said Newman, “and I have taken a copy.” And he drew from his waistcoat pocket a small, folded sheet.
“Give it to my son,” said Madame de Bellegarde. Newman handed it to the marquis, whose mother, glancing at him, said simply, “Look at it.” M. de Bellegarde’s eyes had a pale eagerness which it was useless for him to try to dissimulate; he took the paper in his light-gloved fingers and opened it. There was a silence, during which he read it. He had more than time to read it, but still he said nothing; he stood staring at it. “Where is the original?” asked Madame de Bellegarde, in a voice which was really a consummate negation of impatience.
“In a very safe place. Of course I can’t show you that,” said Newman. “You might want to take hold of it,” he added with conscious quaintness. “But that’s a very correct copy—except, of course, the handwriting. I am keeping the original to show some one else.”
M. de Bellegarde at last looked up, and his eyes were still very eager. “To whom do you mean to show it?”
“Well, I’m thinking of beginning with the duchess,” said Newman; “that stout lady I saw at your ball. She asked me to come and see her, you know. I thought at the moment I shouldn’t have much to say to her; but my little document will give us something to talk about.”
“You had better keep it, my son,” said Madame de Bellegarde.
“By all means,” said Newman; “keep it and show it to your mother when you get home.”
“And after showing it to the duchess?”—asked the marquis, folding the paper and putting it away.
“Well, I’ll take up the dukes,” said Newman. “Then the counts and the barons—all the people you had the cruelty to introduce me to in a character of which you meant immediately to deprive me. I have made out a list.”
For a moment neither Madame de Bellegarde nor her son said a word; the old lady sat with her eyes upon the ground; M. de Bellegarde’s blanched pupils were fixed upon her face. Then, looking at Newman, “Is that all you have to say?” she asked.
“No, I want to say a few words more. I want to say that I hope you quite understand what I’m about. This is my revenge, you know. You have treated me before the world—convened for the express purpose—as if I were not good enough for you. I mean to show the world that, however bad I may be, you are not quite the people to say it.”
Madame de Bellegarde was silent again, and then she broke her silence. Her self-possession continued to be extraordinary. “I needn’t ask you who has been your accomplice. Mrs. Bre
ad told me that you had purchased her services.”
“Don’t accuse Mrs. Bread of venality,” said Newman. “She has kept your secret all these years. She has given you a long respite. It was beneath her eyes your husband wrote that paper; he put it into her hands with a solemn injunction that she was to make it public. She was too good-hearted to make use of it.”
The old lady appeared for an instant to hesitate, and then, “She was my husband’s mistress,” she said, softly. This was the only concession to self-defense that she condescended to make.
“I doubt that,” said Newman.
Madame de Bellegarde got up from her bench. “It was not to your opinions I undertook to listen, and if you have nothing left but them to tell me I think this remarkable interview may terminate.” And turning to the marquis she took his arm again. “My son,” she said, “say something!”
M. de Bellegarde looked down at his mother, passing his hand over his forehead, and then, tenderly, caressingly, “What shall I say?” he asked.
“There is only one thing to say,” said the Marquise. “That it was really not worth while to have interrupted our walk.”
But the marquis thought he could improve this. “Your paper’s a forgery,” he said to Newman.
Newman shook his head a little, with a tranquil smile. “M. de Bellegarde,” he said, “your mother does better. She has done better all along, from the first of my knowing you. You’re a mighty plucky woman, madam,” he continued. “It’s a great pity you have made me your enemy. I should have been one of your greatest admirers.”
“Mon pauvre ami,” said Madame de Bellegarde to her son in French, and as if she had not heard these words, “you must take me immediately to my carriage.”
Newman stepped back and let them leave him; he watched them a moment and saw Madame Urbain, with her little girl, come out of a by-path to meet them. The old lady stooped and kissed her grandchild. “Damn it, she is plucky!” said Newman, and he walked home with a slight sense of being balked. She was so inexpressively defiant! But on reflection he decided that what he had witnessed was no real sense of security, still less a real innocence. It was only a very superior style of brazen assurance. “Wait till she reads the paper!” he said to himself; and he concluded that he should hear from her soon.
He heard sooner than he expected. The next morning, before midday, when he was about to give orders for his breakfast to be served, M. de Bellegarde’s card was brought to him. “She has read the paper and she has passed a bad night,” said Newman. He instantly admitted his visitor, who came in with the air of the ambassador of a great power meeting the delegate of a barbarous tribe whom an absurd accident had enabled for the moment to be abominably annoying. The ambassador, at all events, had passed a bad night, and his faultlessly careful toilet only threw into relief the frigid rancor in his eyes and the mottled tones of his refined complexion. He stood before Newman a moment, breathing quickly and softly, and shaking his forefinger curtly as his host pointed to a chair.
“What I have come to say is soon said,” he declared “and can only be said without ceremony.”
“I am good for as much or for as little as you desire,” said Newman.
The marquis looked round the room a moment, and then, “On what terms will you part with your scrap of paper?”
“On none!” And while Newman, with his head on one side and his hands behind him sounded the marquis’s turbid gaze with his own, he added, “Certainly, that is not worth sitting down about.”
M. de Bellegarde meditated a moment, as if he had not heard Newman’s refusal. “My mother and I, last evening,” he said, “talked over your story. You will be surprised to learn that we think your little document is—a”—and he held back his word a moment—”is genuine.”
“You forget that with you I am used to surprises!” exclaimed Newman, with a laugh.
“The very smallest amount of respect that we owe to my father’s memory,” the marquis continued, “makes us desire that he should not be held up to the world as the author of so—so infernal an attack upon the reputation of a wife whose only fault was that she had been submissive to accumulated injury.”
“Oh, I see,” said Newman. “It’s for your father’s sake.” And he laughed the laugh in which he indulged when he was most amused—a noiseless laugh, with his lips closed.
But M. de Bellegarde’s gravity held good. “There are a few of my father’s particular friends for whom the knowledge of so—so unfortunate an—inspiration—would be a real grief. Even say we firmly established by medical evidence the presumption of a mind disordered by fever, il en resterait quelque chose. At the best it would look ill in him. Very ill!”
“Don’t try medical evidence,” said Newman. “Don’t touch the doctors and they won’t touch you. I don’t mind your knowing that I have not written to them.”
Newman fancied that he saw signs in M. de Bellegarde’s discolored mask that this information was extremely pertinent. But it may have been merely fancy; for the marquis remained majestically argumentative. “For instance, Madame d’Outreville,” he said, “of whom you spoke yesterday. I can imagine nothing that would shock her more.”
“Oh, I am quite prepared to shock Madame d’Outreville, you know. That’s on the cards. I expect to shock a great many people.”
M. de Bellegarde examined for a moment the stitching on the back of one of his gloves. Then, without looking up, “We don’t offer you money,” he said. “That we supposed to be useless.”
Newman, turning away, took a few turns about the room and then came back. “What DO you offer me? By what I can make out, the generosity is all to be on my side.”
The marquis dropped his arms at his side and held his head a little higher. “What we offer you is a chance—a chance that a gentleman should appreciate. A chance to abstain from inflicting a terrible blot upon the memory of a man who certainly had his faults, but who, personally, had done you no wrong.”
“There are two things to say to that,” said Newman. “The first is, as regards appreciating your ‘chance,’ that you don’t consider me a gentleman. That’s your great point you know. It’s a poor rule that won’t work both ways. The second is that—well, in a word, you are talking great nonsense!”
Newman, who in the midst of his bitterness had, as I have said, kept well before his eyes a certain ideal of saying nothing rude, was immediately somewhat regretfully conscious of the sharpness of these words. But he speedily observed that the marquis took them more quietly than might have been expected. M. de Bellegarde, like the stately ambassador that he was, continued the policy of ignoring what was disagreeable in his adversary’s replies. He gazed at the gilded arabesques on the opposite wall, and then presently transferred his glance to Newman, as if he too were a large grotesque in a rather vulgar system of chamber-decoration. “I suppose you know that as regards yourself it won’t do at all.”
“How do you mean it won’t do?”
“Why, of course you damn yourself. But I suppose that’s in your programme. You propose to throw mud at us; you believe, you hope, that some of it may stick. We know, of course, it can’t,” explained the marquis in a tone of conscious lucidity; “but you take the chance, and are willing at any rate to show that you yourself have dirty hands.”
“That’s a good comparison; at least half of it is,” said Newman. “I take the chance of something sticking. But as regards my hands, they are clean. I have taken the matter up with my finger-tips.”
M. de Bellegarde looked a moment into his hat. “All our friends are quite with us,” he said. “They would have done exactly as we have done.”
“I shall believe that when I hear them say it. Meanwhile I shall think better of human nature.”
The marquis looked into his hat again. “Madame de Cintre was extremely fond of her father. If she knew of the existence of the few written words of which you propose to make this scandalous use, she would demand of you proudly for his sake to give it up to her, a
nd she would destroy it without reading it.”
“Very possibly,” Newman rejoined. “But she will not know. I was in that convent yesterday and I know what SHE is doing. Lord deliver us! You can guess whether it made me feel forgiving!”
M. de Bellegarde appeared to have nothing more to suggest; but he continued to stand there, rigid and elegant, as a man who believed that his mere personal presence had an argumentative value. Newman watched him, and, without yielding an inch on the main issue, felt an incongruously good-natured impulse to help him to retreat in good order.