by Henry James
CHAPTER XXII
It was opened by the little waiting-maid whom he had seen at Blanquais, and who looked at him very hard before she answered his inquiry.
“You see I have found Mrs. Vivian’s dwelling, though you would n’t give me the address,” Bernard said to her, smiling.
“Monsieur has put some time to it!” the young woman answered dryly. And she informed him that Madame was at home, though Mademoiselle, for whom he had not asked, was not.
Mrs. Vivian occupied a diminutive apartment at the summit of one of the tall white houses which ornament the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. The early days of September had arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honorable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian’s little high-nestling drawing-room, and a patch of sunset tints, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded wall. Bernard had seen these ladies only in borrowed and provisional abodes; but here was a place where they were really living and which was stamped with their tastes, their habits, their charm. The little salon was very elegant; it contained a multitude of pretty things, and it appeared to Bernard to be arranged in perfection. The long windows—the ceiling being low, they were really very short— opened upon one of those solid balconies, occupying the width of the apartment, which are often in Paris a compensation for living up five flights of stairs, and this balcony was filled with flowers and cushions. Bernard stepped out upon it to await the coming of Mrs. Vivian, and, as she was not quick to appear, he had time to see that his friends enjoyed a magnificent view. They looked up at the triumphal Arch, which presented itself at a picturesque angle, and near the green tree-tops of the Champs Elysees, beyond which they caught a broad gleam of the Seine and a glimpse, blue in the distance, of the great towers of Notre Dame. The whole vast city lay before them and beneath them, with its ordered brilliancy and its mingled aspect of compression and expansion; and yet the huge Parisian murmur died away before it reached Mrs. Vivian’s sky-parlor, which seemed to Bernard the brightest and quietest little habitation he had ever known.
His hostess came rustling in at last; she seemed agitated; she knocked over with the skirt of her dress a little gilded chair which was reflected in the polished parquet as in a sheet of looking-glass. Mrs. Vivian had a fixed smile—she hardly knew what to say.
“I found your address at the banker’s,” said Bernard. “Your maid, at Blanquais, refused to give it to me.”
Mrs. Vivian gave him a little look—there was always more or less of it in her face—which seemed equivalent to an entreaty that her interlocutor should spare her.
“Maids are so strange,” she murmured; “especially the French!”
It pleased Bernard for the moment not to spare her, though he felt a sort of delight of kindness for her.
“Your going off from Blanquais so suddenly, without leaving me any explanation, any clue, any message of any sort—made me feel at first as if you did n’t wish that I should look you up. It reminded me of the way you left Baden—do you remember?— three years ago.”
“Baden was so charming—but one could n’t stay forever,” said Mrs. Vivian.
“I had a sort of theory one could. Our life was so pleasant that it seemed a shame to break the spell, and if no one had moved I am sure we might be sitting there now.”
Mrs. Vivian stared, still with her little fixed smile.
“I think we should have had bad weather.”
“Very likely,” said Bernard, laughing. “Nature would have grown jealous of our good-humor—of our tranquil happiness. And after all, here we are together again—that is, some of us. But I have only my own audacity to thank for it. I was quite free to believe that you were not at all pleased to see me re-appear— and it is only because I am not easy to discourage—am indeed probably a rather impudent fellow—that I have ventured to come here to-day.”
“I am very glad to see you re-appear, Mr. Longueville,” Mrs. Vivian declared with the accent of veracity.
“It was your daughter’s idea, then, running away from Blanquais?”
Mrs. Vivian lowered her eyes.
“We were obliged to go to Fontainebleau. We have but just come back. I thought of writing to you,” she softly added.
“Ah, what pleasure that would have given me!”
“I mean, to tell you where we were, and that we should have been so happy to see you.”
“I thank you for the intention. I suppose your daughter would n’t let you carry it out.”
“Angela is so peculiar,” Mrs. Vivian said, simply.
“You told me that the first time I saw you.”
“Yes, at Siena,” said Mrs. Vivian.
“I am glad to hear you speak frankly of that place!”
“Perhaps it ‘s better,” Mrs. Vivian murmured. She got up and went to the window; then stepping upon the balcony, she looked down a moment into the street. “She will come back in a moment,” she said, coming into the room again. “She has gone to see a friend who lives just beside us. We don’t mind about Siena now,” she added, softly.
Bernard understood her—understood this to be a retraction of the request she had made of him at Baden.
“Dear little woman,” he said to himself, “she wants to marry her daughter still—only now she wants to marry her to me!”
He wished to show her that he understood her, and he was on the point of seizing her hand, to do he did n’t know what— to hold it, to press it, to kiss it—when he heard the sharp twang of the bell at the door of the little apartment.
Mrs. Vivian fluttered away.
“It ‘s Angela,” she cried, and she stood there waiting and listening, smiling at Bernard, with her handkerchief pressed to her lips.
In a moment the girl came into the drawing-room, but on seeing Bernard she stopped, with her hand on the door-knob. Her mother went to her and kissed her.
“It ‘s Mr. Longueville, dearest—he has found us out.”
“Found us out?” repeated Angela, with a little laugh. “What a singular expression!”
She was blushing as she had blushed when she first saw him at Blanquais. She seemed to Bernard now to have a great and peculiar brightness— something she had never had before.
“I certainly have been looking for you,” he said. “I was greatly disappointed when I found you had taken flight from Blanquais.”
“Taken flight?” She repeated his words as she had repeated her mother’s. “That is also a strange way of speaking!”
“I don’t care what I say,” said Bernard, “so long as I make you understand that I have wanted very much to see you again, and that I have wondered every day whether I might venture—”
“I don’t know why you should n’t venture!” she interrupted, giving her little laugh again. “We are not so terrible, are we, mamma?—that is, when once you have climbed our five flights of stairs.”
“I came up very fast,” said Bernard, “and I find your apartment magnificent.”
“Mr. Longueville must come again, must he not, dear?” asked mamma.
“I shall come very often, with your leave,” Bernard declared.
“It will be immensely kind,” said Angela, looking away.
“I am not sure that you will think it that.”
“I don’t know what you are trying to prove,” said Angela; “first that we ran away from you, and then that we are not nice to our visitors.”
“Oh no, not that!” Bernard exclaimed; “for I assure you I shall not care how cold you are with me.”
She walked away toward another door, which was masked with a curtain that she lifted.
“I am glad to hear that, for it gives me courage to say that I am very tired, and that I beg you will excuse me.”
She glanced at him a moment over her shoulder; then she passed out, dropping the curtain.
Bernard stood there face to face with Mrs. Vivian, whose eyes seemed to plead with him more than ever. In his own there was an excited smile.
“Please don’t mind that,” she murmured. “I know it ‘s true that she is tired.”
“Mind it, dear lady?” cried the young man. “I delight in it. It ‘s just what I like.”
“Ah, she ‘s very peculiar!” sighed Mrs. Vivian.
“She is strange—yes. But I think I understand her a little.”
“You must come back to-morrow, then.”
“I hope to have many to-morrows!” cried Bernard as he took his departure.
CHAPTER XXIII
And he had them in fact. He called the next day at the same hour, and he found the mother and the daughter together in their pretty salon. Angela was very gentle and gracious; he suspected Mrs. Vivian had given her a tender little lecture upon the manner in which she had received him the day before. After he had been there five minutes, Mrs. Vivian took a decanter of water that was standing upon a table and went out on the balcony to irrigate her flowers. Bernard watched her a while from his place in the room; then she moved along the balcony and out of sight. Some ten minutes elapsed without her re-appearing, and then Bernard stepped to the threshold of the window and looked for her. She was not there, and as he came and took his seat near Angela again, he announced, rather formally, that Mrs. Vivian had passed back into one of the other windows.
Angela was silent a moment—then she said—
“Should you like me to call her?”
She was very peculiar—that was very true; yet Bernard held to his declaration of the day before that he now understood her a little.
“No, I don’t desire it,” he said. “I wish to see you alone; I have something particular to say to you.”
She turned her face toward him, and there was something in its expression that showed him that he looked to her more serious than he had ever looked. He sat down again; for some moments he hesitated to go on.
“You frighten me,” she said laughing; and in spite of her laugh this was obviously true.
“I assure you my state of mind is anything but formidable. I am afraid of you, on the contrary; I am humble and apologetic.”
“I am sorry for that,” said Angela. “I particularly dislike receiving apologies, even when I know what they are for. What yours are for, I can’t imagine.”
“You don’t dislike me—you don’t hate me?” Bernard suddenly broke out.
“You don’t ask me that humbly. Excuse me therefore if I say I have other, and more practical, things to do.”
“You despise me,” said Bernard.
“That is not humble either, for you seem to insist upon it.”
“It would be after all a way of thinking of me, and I have a reason for wishing you to do that.”
“I remember very well that you used to have a reason for everything. It was not always a good one.”
“This one is excellent,” said Bernard, gravely. “I have been in love with you for three years.”
She got up slowly, turning away.
“Is that what you wished to say to me?”
She went toward the open window, and he followed her.
“I hope it does n’t offend you. I don’t say it lightly— it ‘s not a piece of gallantry. It ‘s the very truth of my being. I did n’t know it till lately—strange as that may seem. I loved you long before I knew it—before I ventured or presumed to know it. I was thinking of you when I seemed to myself to be thinking of other things. It is very strange—there are things in it I don’t understand. I travelled over the world, I tried to interest, to divert myself; but at bottom it was a perfect failure. To see you again—that was what I wanted. When I saw you last month at Blanquais I knew it; then everything became clear. It was the answer to the riddle. I wished to read it very clearly—I wished to be sure; therefore I did n’t follow you immediately. I questioned my heart— I cross-questioned it. It has borne the examination, and now I am sure. I am very sure. I love you as my life—I beg you to listen to me!”
She had listened—she had listened intently, looking straight out of the window and without moving.
“You have seen very little of me,” she said, presently, turning her illuminated eye on him.
“I have seen enough,” Bernard added, smiling. “You must remember that at Baden I saw a good deal of you.”
“Yes, but that did n’t make you like me. I don’t understand.”
Bernard stood there a moment, frowning, with his eyes lowered.
“I can imagine that. But I think I can explain.”
“Don’t explain now,” said Angela. “You have said enough; explain some other time.” And she went out on the balcony.
Bernard, of course, in a moment was beside her, and, disregarding her injunction, he began to explain.
“I thought I disliked you—but I have come to the conclusion it was just the contrary. In reality I was in love with you. I had been so from the first time I saw you—when I made that sketch of you at Siena.”
“That in itself needs an explanation. I was not at all nice then— I was very rude, very perverse. I was horrid!”
“Ah, you admit it!” cried Bernard, with a sort of quick elation.
She had been pale, but she suddenly blushed.
“Your own conduct was singular, as I remember it. It was not exactly agreeable.”
“Perhaps not; but at least it was meant to be. I did n’t know how to please you then, and I am far from supposing that I have learned now. But I entreat you to give me a chance.”