Генри Джеймс
The American
CHAPTER XXIV
Sunday was as yet two days off; but meanwhile, to beguile his impatience, Newman took his way to the Avenue de Messine and got what comfort he could in staring at the blank outer wall of Madame de Cintré’s present residence. The street in question, as some travelers will remember, adjoins the Parc Monceau, which is one of the prettiest corners of Paris. The quarter has an air of modern opulence and convenience which seems at variance with the ascetic institution, and the impression made upon Newman’s gloomily-irritated gaze by the fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less exasperating than he had feared. The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast. And yet he knew the case was otherwise; only at present it was not a reality to him. It was too strange and too mocking to be real; it was like a page torn out of a romance, with no context in his own experience.
On Sunday morning, at the hour which Mrs. Tristram had indicated, he rang at the gate in the blank wall. It instantly opened and admitted him into a clean, cold-looking court, from beyond which a dull, plain edifice looked down upon him. A robust lay sister with a cheerful complexion emerged from a porter’s lodge, and, on his stating his errand, pointed to the open door of the chapel, an edifice which occupied the right side of the court and was preceded by the high flight of steps. Newman ascended the steps and immediately entered the open door. Service had not yet begun; the place was dimly lighted, and it was some moments before he could distinguish its features. Then he saw it was divided by a large close iron screen into two unequal portions. The altar was on the hither side of the screen, and between it and the entrance were disposed several benches and chairs. Three or four of these were occupied by vague, motionless figures—figures that he presently perceived to be women, deeply absorbed in their devotion. The place seemed to Newman very cold; the smell of the incense itself was cold. Besides this there was a twinkle of tapers and here and there a glow of colored glass. Newman seated himself; the praying women kept still, with their backs turned. He saw they were visitors like himself and he would have liked to see their faces; for he believed that they were the mourning mothers and sisters of other women who had had the same pitiless courage as Madame de Cintré. But they were better off than he, for they at least shared the faith to which the others had sacrificed themselves. Three or four persons came in; two of them were elderly gentlemen. Everyone was very quiet. Newman fastened his eyes upon the screen behind the altar. That was the convent, the real convent, the place where she was. But he could see nothing; no light came through the crevices. He got up and approached the partition very gently, trying to look through. But behind it there was darkness, with nothing stirring. He went back to his place, and after that a priest and two altar boys came in and began to say mass.
Newman watched their genuflections and gyrations with a grim, still enmity; they seemed aids and abettors of Madame de Cintré’s desertion; they were mouthing and droning out their triumph. The priest’s long, dismal intonings acted upon his nerves and deepened his wrath; there was something defiant in his unintelligible drawl; it seemed meant for Newman himself. Suddenly there arose from the depths of the chapel, from behind the inexorable grating, a sound which drew his attention from the altar—the sound of a strange, lugubrious chant, uttered by women’s voices. It began softly, but it presently grew louder, and as it increased it became more of a wail and a dirge. It was the chant of the Carmelite nuns, their only human utterance. It was their dirge over their buried affections and over the vanity of earthly desires. At first Newman was bewildered—almost stunned—by the strangeness of the sound; then, as he comprehended its meaning, he listened intently and his heart began to throb. He listened for Madame de Cintré’s voice, and in the very heart of the tuneless harmony he imagined he made it out. (We are obliged to believe that he was wrong, inasmuch as she had obviously not yet had time to become a member of the invisible sisterhood.) The chant kept on, mechanical and monotonous, with dismal repetitions and despairing cadences. It was hideous, it was horrible; as it continued, Newman felt that he needed all his self-control. He was growing more agitated; he felt tears in his eyes. At last, as in its full force the thought came over him that this confused, impersonal wail was all that either he or the world she had deserted should ever hear of the voice he had found so sweet, he felt that he could bear it no longer. He rose abruptly and made his way out. On the threshold he paused, listened again to the dreary strain, and then hastily descended into the court. As he did so he saw the good sister with the high-colored cheeks and the fanlike frill to her coiffure, who had admitted him, was in conference at the gate with two persons who had just come in. A second glance informed him that these persons were Madame de Bellegarde and her son, and that they were about to avail themselves of that method of approach to Madame de Cintré which Newman had found but a mockery of consolation. As he crossed the court M. de Bellegarde recognized him; the marquis was coming to the steps, leading his mother. The old lady also gave Newman a look, and it resembled that of her son. Both faces expressed a franker perturbation, something more akin to the humbleness of dismay, than Newman had yet seen in them. Evidently he startled the Bellegardes, and they had not their grand behavior immediately in hand. Newman hurried past them, guided only by the desire to get out of the convent walls and into the street. The gate opened itself at his approach; he strode over the threshold and it closed behind him. A carriage which appeared to have been standing there, was just turning away from the sidewalk. Newman looked at it for a moment, blankly; then he became conscious, through the dusky mist that swam before his eyes, that a lady seated in it was bowing to him. The vehicle had turned away before he recognized her; it was an ancient landau with one half the cover lowered. The lady’s bow was very positive and accompanied with a smile; a little girl was seated beside her. He raised his hat, and then the lady bade the coachman stop. The carriage halted again beside the pavement, and she sat there and beckoned to Newman—beckoned with the demonstrative grace of Madame Urbain de Bellegarde. Newman hesitated a moment before he obeyed her summons, during this moment he had time to curse his stupidity for letting the others escape him. He had been wondering how he could get at them; fool that he was for not stopping them then and there! What better place than beneath the very prison walls to which they had consigned the promise of his joy? He had been too bewildered to stop them, but now he felt ready to wait for them at the gate. Madame Urbain, with a certain attractive petulance, beckoned to him again, and this time he went over to the carriage. She leaned out and gave him her hand, looking at him kindly, and smiling.
“Ah, monsieur,” she said, “you don’t include me in your wrath? I had nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, I don’t suppose you could have prevented it!” Newman answered in a tone which was not that of studied gallantry.
“What you say is too true for me to resent the small account it makes of my influence. I forgive you, at any rate, because you look as if you had seen a ghost.”
“I have!” said Newman.
“I am glad, then, I didn’t go in with Madame de Bellegarde and my husband. You must have seen them, eh? Was the meeting affectionate? Did you hear the chanting? They say it’s like the lamentations of the damned. I wouldn’t go in: one is certain to hear that soon enough. Poor Claire—in a white shroud and a big brown cloak! That’s the toilette of the Carmelites, you know. Well, she was always fond of long, loose things. But I must not speak of her to you; only I must say that I am very sorry for you, that if I could have helped you I would, and that I think everyone has been very shabby. I was afraid of it, you know; I felt it in the air for a fortnight before it came. When I saw you at my mother-in-law’s ball, taking it all so easily, I felt as if you were dancing on your grave. But what could I do? I wish you all the good I can think of. You will say that isn’t much! Yes; they have been very shabby; I am not a bit afraid to say it; I assure you everyone thinks so. We are not all like that. I am sorry I am not going to see you again; you know I think you very good company. I would prove it by asking you to get into the carriage and drive with me for a quarter of an hour, while I wait for my mother-in-law. Only if we were seen—considering what has passed, and everyone knows you have been turned away—it might be thought I was going a little too far, even for me. But I shall see you sometimes—somewhere, eh? You know”—this was said in English—“we have a plan for a little amusement.”
Newman stood there with his hand on the carriage-door listening to this consolatory murmur with an unlighted eye. He hardly knew what Madame de Bellegarde was saying; he was only conscious that she was chattering ineffectively. But suddenly it occurred to him that, with her pretty professions, there was a way of making her effective; she might help him to get at the old woman and the marquis. “They are coming back soon—your companions?” he said. “You are waiting for them?”
“They will hear the mass out; there is nothing to keep them longer. Claire has refused to see them.”
“I want to speak to them,” said Newman; “and you can help me, you can do me a favor. Delay your return for five minutes and give me a chance at them. I will wait for them here.”
Madame de Bellegarde clasped her hands with a tender grimace. “My poor friend, what do you want to do to them? To beg them to come back to you? It will be wasted words. They will never come back!”
“I want to speak to them, all the same. Pray do what I ask you. Stay away and leave them to me for five minutes; you needn’t be afraid; I shall not be violent; I am very quiet.”
“Yes, you look very quiet! If they had le cœur tendre you would move them. But they haven’t! However, I will do better for you than what you propose. The understanding is not that I shall come back for them. I am going into the Parc Monceau with my little girl to give her a walk, and my mother-in-law, who comes so rarely into this quarter, is to profit by the same opportunity to take the air. We are to wait for her in the park, where my husband is to bring her to us. Follow me now; just within the gates I shall get out of my carriage. Sit down on a chair in some quiet corner and I will bring them near you. There’s devotion for you! Le reste vous regarde.”
This proposal seemed to Newman extremely felicitous; it revived his drooping spirit, and he reflected that Madame Urbain was not such a goose as she seemed. He promised immediately to overtake her, and the carriage drove away.
The Parc Monceau is a very pretty piece of landscape-gardening, but Newman, passing into it, bestowed little attention upon its elegant vegetation, which was full of the freshness of spring. He found Madame de Bellegarde promptly, seated in one of the quiet corners of which she had spoken, while before her, in the alley, her little girl, attended by the footman and the lap-dog, walked up and down as if she were taking a lesson in deportment. Newman sat down beside the mamma, and she talked a great deal, apparently with the design of convincing him that—if he would only see it—poor dear Claire did not belong to the most fascinating type of woman. She was too tall and thin, too stiff and cold; her mouth was too wide and her nose too narrow. She had no dimples anywhere. And then she was eccentric, eccentric in cold blood; she was an Anglaise, after all. Newman was very impatient; he was counting the minutes until his victims should reappear. He sat silent, leaning upon his cane, looking absently and insensibly at the little marquise. At length Madame de Bellegarde said she would walk toward the gate of the park and meet her companions; but before she went she dropped her eyes, and, after playing a moment with the lace of her sleeve, looked up again at Newman.
“Do you remember,” she asked, “the promise you made me three weeks ago?” And then, as Newman, vainly consulting his memory, was obliged to confess that the promise had escaped it, she declared that he had made her, at the time, a very queer answer—an answer at which, viewing it in the light of the sequel, she had fair ground for taking offense. “You promised to take me to Bullier’s after your marriage. After your marriage—you made a great point of that. Three days after that your marriage was broken off. Do you know, when I heard the news, the first thing I said to myself? ‘Oh heaven, now he won’t go with me to Bullier’s!’ And I really began to wonder if you had not been expecting the rupture.”
“Oh, my dear lady,” murmured Newman, looking down the path to see if the others were not coming.
“I shall be good-natured,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “One must not ask too much of a gentleman who is in love with a cloistered nun. Besides, I can’t go to Bullier’s while we are in mourning. But I haven’t given it up for that. The partie is arranged; I have my cavalier. Lord Deepmere, if you please! He has gone back to his dear Dublin; but a few months hence I am to name any evening and he will come over from Ireland, on purpose. That’s what I call gallantry!”
Shortly after this Madame de Bellegarde walked away with her little girl. Newman sat in his place; the time seemed terribly long. He felt how fiercely his quarter of an hour in the convent chapel had raked over the glowing coals of his resentment. Madame de Bellegarde kept him waiting, but she proved as good as her word. At last she reappeared at the end of the path, with her little girl and her footman; beside her slowly walked her husband, with his mother on his arm. They were a long time advancing, during which Newman sat unmoved. Tingling as he was with passion, it was extremely characteristic of him that he was able to moderate his expression of it, as he would have turned down a flaring gas-burner. His native coolness, shrewdness, and deliberateness, his life-long submissiveness to the sentiment that words were acts and acts were steps in life, and that in this matter of taking steps curveting and prancing were exclusively reserved for quadrupeds and foreigners—all this admonished him that rightful wrath had no connection with being a fool and indulging in spectacular violence. So as he rose, when old Madame de Bellegarde and her son were close to him, he only felt very tall and light. He had been sitting beside some shrubbery, in such a way as not to be noticeable at a distance; but M. de Bellegarde had evidently already perceived him. His mother and he were holding their course, but Newman stepped in front of them, and they were obliged to pause. He lifted his hat slightly, and looked at them for a moment; they were pale with amazement and disgust.
“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 mêlée. 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. Anyone 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 someone 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 anyone out of a picture. “A paper written by the hand, and signed with the name, of Henri-Urbain de Bellegarde. Written after you, madam, 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 someone 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. Bread 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.”
