The American (27 page)

“I take note of the promise,” said Valentin, “I register the vow.”

M. de Bellegarde began to gaze at the cornice again; he apparently had something more to say. “I must do my mother the justice,” he resumed, “I must do myself the justice, to say that our decision was not easy. Such an arrangement was not what we had expected. The idea that my sister should marry a gentleman—ah—in business, was something of a novelty.”

“So I told you, you know,” said Valentin, raising his finger at Newman.

“The novelty has not quite worn away, I confess,” the marquis went on; “perhaps it never will, entirely. But possibly that is not altogether to be regretted,” and he gave his thin smile again. “It may be that the time has come when we should make some concession to novelty. There had been no novelties in our house for a great many years. I made the observation to my mother, and she did me the honour to admit that it was worthy of attention.”

“My dear brother,” interrupted Valentin, “is not your memory just here leading you the least bit astray? Our mother is, I may say, distinguished for her small respect for abstract reasoning. Are you very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes. Didn’t she, rather, do you the honour to say: ‘A fiddlestick for your phrases! There are better reasons than that?’”

“Other reasons were discussed,” said the marquis,
without looking at Valentin, but with an audible tremor in his voice; “some of them possibly were better. We are conservative, Mr. Newman, but we are not also bigots. We judged the matter liberally. We have no doubt that everything will be comfortable.”

Newman had stood listening to these remarks with his arms folded and his eyes fastened upon M. de Bellegarde. “Comfortable?” he said, with a sort of grim flatness of intonation. “Why shouldn’t we be comfortable? If you are not, it will be your own fault; I have everything to make
me
so.”

“My brother means that with the lapse of time you may get used to the change,” and Valentin paused, to light another cigarette.

“What change?” asked Newman, in the same tone.

“Urbain,” said Valentin, very gravely, “I am afraid that Mr. Newman does not quite realise the change. We ought to insist upon that.”

“My brother goes too far,” said M. de Bellegarde. “It is his fatal want of tact again. It is my mother!? wish, and mine, that no such allusions should be made. Pray never make them yourself. We prefer to assume that the person accepted as the possible husband of my sister is one of ourselves, and that he should have no explanations to make. With a little discretion on both sides, everything, I think, will be easy. That is exactly what I wished to say—that we quite understand what we have undertaken, and that you may depend upon our adhering to our resolution.”

Valentin shook his hands in the air and then buried his face in them. “I have less tact than I might have, no doubt; but oh, my brother, if you knew what you yourself were saying!” And he went off into a long laugh.

M. de Bellegarde’s face flushed a little, but he held his head higher, as if to repudiate this concession to vulgar perturbability. “I am sure you understand me,” he said to Newman.

“Oh no, I don’t understand you at all,” said Newman. “But you needn’t mind that. I don’t care. In fact, I think I had better not understand you. I might not like it. That wouldn’t suit me at all, you know. I want to marry your sister, that’s all; to do it as quickly as possible, and to find fault with nothing. I don’t care how I do it. I am not marrying you, you know, sir. I have got my leave, and that is all I want.”

“You had better receive the last word from my mother,” said the marquis.

“Very good; I will go and get it,” said Newman; and he prepared to return to the drawing-room.

M. de Bellegarde made a motion for him to pass first, and when Newman had gone out he shut himself into the room with Valentin. Newman had been a trifle bewildered by the audacious irony of the younger brother, and he had not needed its aid to point the moral of M. de Bellegarde’s transcendent patronage. He had wit enough to appreciate the force of that civility which consists in calling your attention to the impertinences it spares you. But he had felt warmly the delicate sympathy with himself that underlay Valentin’s fraternal irreverence, and he was most unwilling that his friend should pay a tax upon it. He paused a moment in the corridor, after he had gone a few steps, expecting to hear the resonance of M. de Bellegarde’s displeasure; but he detected only a perfect stillness. The stillness itself seemed a trifle portentous; he reflected, however, that he had no right to stand listening, and he made his way back to the salon. In his absence several persons had come in. They were scattered about the room in groups, two or three of them having passed into a small boudoir,
³
next to the drawing-room, which had now been lighted and opened. Old Madame de Bellegarde was in her place by the fire, talking to a very old gentleman in a wig and a profuse white neckcloth of the fashion of 1820.
⁴
Madame de Cintré was bending a listening head to the historic
confidences of an old lady who was presumably the wife of the old gentleman in the neckcloth, an old lady in a red satin dress and an ermine cape, who wore across her forehead a band with a topaz set in it. Young Madame de Bellegarde, when Newman came in, left some people among whom she was sitting, and took the place that she had occupied before dinner. Then she gave a little push to the puff that stood near her, and by a glance at Newman seemed to indicate that she had placed it in position for him. He went and took possession of it; the marquis’s wife amused and puzzled him.

“I know your secret,” she said, in her bad but charming English; “you need make no mystery of it. You wish to marry my sister-in-law.
C’est un beau choix.
⁵
A man like you ought to marry a tall thin woman. You must know that I have spoken in your favour; you owe me a famous taper!”
⁶

“You have spoken to Madame de Cintré?” said Newman.

“Oh no, not that. You may think it strange, but my sister-in-law and I are not so intimate as that. No; I spoke to my husband and my mother-in-law; I said I was sure we could do what we chose with you.”

“I am much obliged to you,” said Newman, laughing; “but you can’t.”

“I know that very well; I didn’t believe a word of it. But I wanted you to come into the house; I thought we should be friends.”

“I am very sure of it,” said Newman.

“Don’t be too sure. If you like Madame de Cintré so much, perhaps you will not like me. We are as different as blue and pink. But you and I have something in common. I have come into this family by marriage; you want to come into it in the same way.”

“Oh no, I don’t!” interrupted Newman. “I only want to take Madame de Cintré out of it.”

“Well, to cast your nets you have to go into the water.
Our positions are alike; we shall be able to compare notes. What do you think of my husband? It’s a strange question, isn’t it? But I shall ask you some stranger ones yet.”

“Perhaps a stranger one will be easier to answer,” said Newman. “You might try me.”

“Oh, you get off very well; the old Comte de la Rochefidèle, yonder, couldn’t do it better. I told them that if we only gave you a chance you would be a perfect
talon rouge.
⁷
I know something about men. Besides, you and I belong to the same camp. I am a ferocious democrat. By birth I am
vieille roche
;
⁸
a good little bit of the history of France is the history of my family. Oh, you never heard of us, of course!
Ce que c’est que la gloire!
⁹
We are much better than the Bellegardes, at any rate. But I don’t care a pin for my pedigree; I want to belong to my time. I’m a revolutionist, a radical, a child of the age! I am sure I go beyond you. I like clever people, wherever they come from, and I take my amusement wherever I find it. I don’t pout at the Empire;
¹⁰
here all the world pouts at the Empire. Of course I have to mind what I say; but I expect to take my revenge with you.” Madame de Bellegarde discoursed for some time longer in this sympathetic strain, with an eager abundance which seemed to indicate that her opportunities for revealing her esoteric philosophy were indeed rare. She hoped that Newman would never be afraid of her, however he might be with the others, for, really, she went very far indeed. “Strong people”—
les gens forts—
were in her opinion equal, all the world over. Newman listened to her with an attention at once beguiled and irritated. He wondered what the deuce she, too, was driving at, with her hope that he would not be afraid of her and her protestations of equality. In so far as he could understand her, she was wrong; a silly rattling woman was certainly not the equal of a sensible man, preoccupied with an ambitious passion. Madame de
Bellegarde stopped suddenly, and looked at him sharply, shaking her fan. “I see you don’t believe me,” she said, “you are too much on your guard. You will not form an alliance, offensive or defensive? You are very wrong; I could help you.”

Newman answered that he was very grateful and that he would certainly ask for help; she should see. “But first of all,” he said, “I must help myself.” And he went to join Madame de Cintré.

“I have been telling Madame de la Rochefidèle that you are an American,” she said, as he came up. “It interests her greatly. Her father went over with the French troops to help you in your battles in the last century,
¹¹
and she has always, in consequence, wanted greatly to see an American. But she has never succeeded till to-night. You are the first—to her knowledge—that she has ever looked at.”

Madame de la Rochefidèle had an aged cadaverous face, with a falling of the lower jaw which prevented her from bringing her lips together, and reduced her conversation to a series of impressive but inarticulate gutturals. She raised an antique eyeglass, elaborately mounted in chased silver, and looked at Newman from head to foot. Then she said something to which he listened deferentially, but which he completely failed to understand.

“Madame de la Rochefidèle says that she is convinced that she must have seen Americans without knowing it,” Madame de Cintré explained. Newman thought it probable she had seen a great many things without knowing it; and the old lady, again addressing herself to utterance, declared—as interpreted by Madame de Cintré—that she wished she had known it.

At this moment the old gentleman who had been talking to the elder Madame de Bellegarde drew near, leading the marquise on his arm. His wife pointed out Newman to him, apparently explaining his remarkable
origin. M. de la Rochefidèle, whose old age was rosy and rotund, spoke very neatly and clearly; almost as prettily, Newman thought, as M. Nioche. When he had been enlightened, he turned to Newman with an inimitable elderly grace.

“Monsieur is by no means the first American that I have seen,” he said. “Almost the first person I ever saw—to notice him—was an American.”

“Ah!” said Newman, sympathetically.

“The great Dr. Franklin,” said M. de la Rochefidèle. “Of course I was very young. He was received very well in our
monde.”

“Not better than Mr. Newman,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I beg he will offer me his arm into the other room. I could have offered no higher privilege to Dr. Franklin.”

Newman, complying with Madame de Bellegarde’s request, perceived that her two sons had returned to the drawing-room. He scanned their faces an instant for traces of the scene that had followed his separation from them, but the marquis seemed neither more nor less frigidly grand than usual, and Valentin was kissing ladies’ hands with at least his habitual air of self-abandonment to the act. Madame de Bellegarde gave a glance at her eldest son, and by the time she had crossed the threshold of her boudoir he was at her side. The room was now empty and offered a sufficient degree of privacy. The old lady disengaged herself from Newman’s arm and rested her hand on the arm of the marquis; and in this position she stood a moment, holding her head high and biting her small under-lip. I am afraid the picture was lost upon Newman, but Madame de Bellegarde was, in fact, at this moment a striking image of the dignity which—even in the case of a little time-shrunken old lady—may reside in the habit of unquestioned authority and the absoluteness of a social theory favourable to yourself.

“My son has spoken to you as I desired,” she said, “and you understand that we shall not interfere. The rest will lie with yourself.”

“M. de Bellegarde told me several things I didn’t understand,” said Newman, “but I made out that. You will leave me an open field. I am much obliged.”

“I wish to add a word that my son probably did not feel at liberty to say,” the marquise rejoined. “I must say it for my own peace of mind. We are stretching a point; we are doing you a great favour.”

“Oh, your son said it very well; didn’t you?” said Newman.

“Not so well as my mother,” declared the marquis.

“I can only repeat—I am much obliged.”

“It is proper I should tell you,” Madame de Bellegarde went on, “that I am very proud, and that I hold my head very high. I may be wrong, but I am too old to change. At least I know it, and I don’t pretend to anything else. Don’t flatter yourself that my daughter is not proud. She is proud in her own way—a somewhat different way from mine. You will have to make your terms with that. Even Valentin is proud, if you touch the right spot—or the wrong one. Urbain is proud—that you see for yourself. Sometimes I think he is a little too proud; but I wouldn’t change him. He is the best of my children; he cleaves to his old mother. But I have said enough to show you that we are all proud together. It is well that you should know the sort of people you have come among.”

“Well,” said Newman, “I can only say, in return, that I am
not
proud; I shan’t mind you! But you speak as if you intended to be very disagreeable.”

“I shall not enjoy having my daughter marry you, and I shall not pretend to enjoy it. If you don’t mind that, so much the better.”